Is There a Golden Age of Teaching? Ruminations on Moving and Great Students

It's a busy week to say the least. There was the hectic rush through finals and the posting of grades, and the deadline, only three days later, of having an entire Science Building packed and ready to move to another building. That's happening tomorrow. I am happy to say I had a lot of help from more than a dozen students who helped us get everything into the moving boxes.

Sifting through the detritus of twenty-five years of community college teaching is bound to reveal a few surprises, and I wasn't disappointed. Forgive me if I ruminate a little on what's gone on through those many years. To start with, I have a messy office. Not the messiest, it only achieved honorary mention the last time anyone judged. But more than messy enough.

I'll leave the reasons to the psychologists, about whether this is revealing something chaotic in the organization of my mind, but I can say that as messy as it always has been, I've always known where to find the items I was looking for (I only found two misplaced ungraded papers, for instance). I prefer to think that my office is messy because I subscribe to a corollary to the Peter Principle. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the principle states that in a hierarchical organization, people rise to the level of their own incompetence. This means that as long as you are successful at what you do, you get promoted, until you reach a position where you are incapable of successfully executing your duties. Since you are no longer successful, you receive no more promotions, and everyone above you and below is unhappy and dissatisfied with you.
There are only a few ways to escape the trap of the Peter Principle, and one of them is to get to a position where you are happy and don't want further promotions, so you find a way to be incompetent in insignificant ways so you can't be promoted, but can remain happy and successful at what you are doing. Hence, I maintain an office that would be unacceptable as a dean's office, but is tolerable in a professor.  And no one has ever asked me to be a dean (probably for many reasons).

Join me on a tour through the office that is soon to be stripped clean of twenty-five years of memories and experiences. The new office is very nice, with a view out the windows and clean walls, and directives about how and where we are to put our personal items on the walls. It will never be quite the cubbyhole I finished cleaning up today....

For me, a desk was never a place where work was accomplished, except for the writing that took place on the computer. For a geologist, a desk is a collecting place for the specimens of significant events and localities, much like the point bar on the inside of a river meander. What deskcrops are found up there? Beautiful crystals of azurite, topaz, quartz, calcite, rhodochrosite, and garnet. Fossils of ammonites, trilobites, eurypterids, and Green River fish. Samples of serpentinite, orbicular granite, xenoliths, and Mariposa slate. Some of them I found. Some were given to me. A few were in the school collection long before I came here.

The walls are covered with drawings by my son (the ammonites), a 40 year old painting of the Sierra Nevada done by a dear family friend when I graduated from high school, pictures of the family, and some of my accomplished students, and a Murphy's Law poster that I found when I started here in 1988. It went onto the wall back then and has always been a cherished message to meditate on (the favorites: "If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what's going on" and "Nature always sides with the hidden flaw"). There is a sign of my Star Trek geekiness (hanging over the monitor). There's a shot of me standing next to a lava flow on the Big Island.

 On the wall by the door is a tsunami warning poster from Washington, a 1912 vintage geologic map of the Owens Valley and southern Sierra Nevada, some political stuff, and a couple of those certificates of appreciation that sometimes come one's way.

My office and adjacent lab preparation area were always a little cramped because the building's reinforcement columns had to go right through them. They made great bulletin boards and memory walls. For instance, in my office, the column supports pictures, signs from field trip vans (the "Chicks of Death"), drawings by associates (that beautiful chalk rendition of Half Dome), pictures of my kids (at all stages of their lives from childhood to their current business cards), the most outrageous of the creation science papers that crossed my desk, and a torn up picture of George Bush composed of the pixels of soldiers who died in Iraq. I had that picture on the outside of my door for the duration of the war, and it prompted a great many angry responses, including the vandalism that hung there until this week. And comics. Lots of comics with a geological theme.

The column in the lab prep area was reserved for pictures of favorite moments with my students. There is a shot of me trying to lecture while a deer was making faces behind me, a fist pump after something good happened at a gas station in Grand Tetons (I don't remember what), and the incredible Walter's Wiggles on the way up Angels Landing in Zion Canyon.

The other side has pics of sunsets, cool rock discoveries, makeshift comics, and antics with a fake hand that we enjoyed putting under boulders and the like. Pictures of shrines that developed in the back seat of vans during particularly long trips (the plastic rats were kind of creepy).

And then there is the chalkboard. I'm not sure how a chalkboard ended up in the lab prep area, but inscriptions soon appeared and were never erased. The "cake is a lie" was a relatively recent addition, but some of those lines are 15 years old.

The flood of memories got me thinking. Is there a golden age in the arc of one's teaching career? Is there a time when you've got just enough experience to be half decent at teaching, and still energetic enough to keep up with the demands? I could still recall some of my very first students, one of whom actually came back to help pack this week, and another who commented on my facebook page about watching my job interview lecture 25 years ago (she now teaches earth science in Nevada). I thought about our two year internment in a warehouse just off-campus while our building was seismically retrofitted. The students from those years formed the Geology Club, many became geologists, and some of them organized a dino-dig that resulted in the discovery of a rare Zephyrosaur in Montana in the late 1990s. There was a bunker mentality in that group that was marvelous to behold.

But thinking it through, I realized there are always some incredible students, there are always enthusiastic ones, and there are always those who you can't forget. There have been tough periods when budgets were slashed, and recessions caused big cutbacks. But the students have always been there, and they have always inspired me to do whatever I could to assist them in achieving their goals. I've had no end of frustrations with inconsistent and ever changing regulations sent to us from above, but I have never become tired of dealing with students, even the ones that I wanted to shake  and say "this is your big chance in life, and you are screwing it up for sheer laziness?".

This almost sounds like the ruminations of someone on the verge of retirement, but that isn't the case. This week I am literally beginning a new career, that of a professor teaching geology in a new building on a different campus in another part of the city. Everything will be different, but no less exciting. As long as I can come to school in the morning and teach with enthusiasm, I'll be here.

But it ain't gonna happen until all this crap gets moved from this building to the new Science Community Center on west campus...

Tomorrow will be an interesting day...

10 Reasons I Love Teaching Geology at a Community College

Oh, I cannot resist a meme involving top ten lists! Eric Klemetti at Eruptions started it on the topic of liking volcanoes. He was followed by Callan at Mountain Beltway on geologic structures, Siim Sepp at Sandatlas on sand,  Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment (on detachment faults, of course), and Hollis at In The Company of Plants and Rocks (on Wyoming). I teach geology at a community college, and I can't imagine a greater career. My list isn't on a specific geologic topic, it's about the joy of teaching about the Earth...

What happens when you teach geology at a community college?

We get to study anything we want
When I was in the master's program at Reno back in a different century, I had trouble settling on a geological discipline. I finally pursued a project in neotectonics, but I was constantly distracted by other stuff that was going on. Being at a community college means I have few opportunities for directed research, seeing as how I teach a large number of classes and labs. If a student asks a question on some area of the earth sciences, I get to track it down. Some years it's dinosaurs and paleontology. Other years it's seismology, or metamorphic rocks of the Sierra Mother Lode. I love learning about all of it.

We get to travel a lot to interesting places
I take my students a great many places around California, the American West, and the world. If you are are regular reader of my blog you already suspected this...

We get to meet interesting people
There seems to me to be no truer melting pot in our society than the campus of a community college. In a classroom you have people from all kinds of backgrounds thrown together: conservative and liberal (and "don't care"), rich and poor, young and old, people of faith and atheists, and people of many different cultures. The college lecture hall and especially the college laboratory is a place where people meet as true equals, and some actual communication can take place between people who would otherwise never interact. And I get to meet and learn from them all! I figure that in my 23 years of teaching, I have met something like 10,000 people. I obviously can't remember every single one of them, but it is kind of neat to be in some public place and have a stranger walk up and say "Hi, Mr. Hayes! You were my teacher years ago!"

We get to achieve goals:
Sometimes I sit in a restaurant or wander slowly through a store and I think about how the business has been there for whatever total of years, and the employees put in their shifts and look forward to their breaks. There is always a lot of hustle and bustle, there is always routine. The faces change, and sometimes the owners change, and at the end of the day, what has changed? A few more people have been fed, some more items have been sold, and for what purpose? Making money, and staying in business for another day. That is all well and good for a capitalist system, but what a mind-killing bore. There is nothing to work towards. There are no goals, at least not for the drones who do all the work (I imagine the owners have a goal of dominating their particular business; I learned that from the game of Monopoly). As a teacher, I and my students have a challenge, one that has a beginning and an ending. It may be that a student's goal is to pass the course somehow and move on, so they can start a career and...make money like a good capitalist. But I have the challenge of guiding students to know something more than they did when they started (what we call student learning outcomes). And the information is something that enriches their lives (and in the odd case, maybe even saving their lives; think earthquake preparedness).

We get to be creative
The art of teaching constantly requires thinking up new ways to enable learning on the part of the student. I have to challenge myself to break out of a mold when something isn't working. And I love drawing; by the end of the day I am usually covered with colored chalk. I've also grown to love photography, too.


Geology is fascinating
I can't speak for others, but I taught business math for a few semesters early in my career. If I had been teaching business math or accounting or economics for the last two decades, I think I would be nuts by now. I just can't imagine making certain subjects interesting. But there isn't a day that goes by when something fascinating isn't going on somewhere in the world. The stories are sometimes tragic, and sometimes awe-inspiring, but never boring. Even the most pedestrian subjects can be made interesting in some way (if you work at it)...even soils. We always have something strange and bizarre to talk about in class.

We help people discover a world outside their own
This isn't the same as the note above about traveling. Not all my students can go on field trips, but we get to open their eyes to the existence of strange and wonderful places beyond the confines of their normal everyday lives and hometowns. Every geological process involves examples from all over the planet; we use multimedia examples from our own lives or those of others to illustrate these incredible earth systems.

We get to contribute to the health of planet Earth
The decisions about how best to keep the planet liveable for 7 billion people are being made for the most part by those with a financial stake in outcomes and the politicians they lobby. Their priorities are not always correlated with everyone else's best interests. Without money, our best hope for just outcomes in environmental issues are the votes of an educated population. The community college system is on the front lines of providing that education.

We get to make a real and lasting difference
I am proud of what many of my former students have accomplished. A decent number of them went into geology, but more satisfying to me is how many of them are teachers now. There is a cascading effect of positive outcomes when students become teachers

Let's see, that's nine. What was the tenth? Oh yeah...

We're gonna get rich
Because teachers are held in the highest regard by society and especially by politicians. The politicians think that the people who are responsible for educating our children and teenagers deserve the highest possible compensation for their many years of academic preparation and daily challenges in the classroom. Now, if you actually believe in the accuracy of this last item, I recommend maybe not going into the field of education for a career. But if you want to look back on your life and say I changed things for the better, give a thought to teaching. And it's not too late to start no matter how old you are, or what career you are in now.

My God, It's Full of Stars (or will be eventually; and children too)

No, this is not really a post about the last line from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's about the planetarium that is beginning to emerge in the center of the photograph. It will be full of stars in a manner of speaking very soon, and there will be lots of children inside who will be learning about the wonders of the Universe.

This is exciting news for those of us who live in the Modesto area. For all the time I spend on this blog talking about the wonders of California, well, sometimes Modesto and the surrounding area comes up a bit short. We have been declared 99th out of 100 on the best places to live in the US by some compilers, and that is because we have some of the worst air quality of any place in the nation, and are kind of famous for having the highest, or near highest rate of stolen cars. Our economy is in a shambles. You think that the national unemployment rate of 9% is bad? Ours is around 18%, and many of the rest are underemployed, working part-time. Benefits? Hardly. I'm not sure I can recall any time in the last twenty years that the unemployment rate has fallen below 10%. It is truly a depression here. Part of our problem is that we have one of the most uneducated populations anywhere.

It's actually so bad that a local pundit suggested that instead of trying to educate our children for a better future, that we concentrate on bringing in more employers who specialize in unskilled laborers, because that's the only "short-term" solution that he can think of. The problem has always been that those kind of short term ideas become permanent. I can't accept this. It's a hopeless attitude, and it is poisonous. Education has to be the ticket to a better community. That's the reason I've been in the trenches here for twenty years, along with many primary and secondary school teachers who work without resources and with poor institutional support. They're good people trying to make a difference for their kids.

That's what makes the picture above so exciting. Several years ago, the community decided to invest in a better future, and voted for a huge bond act to finance the renovation of our college, almost from the ground up. One of the centerpiece projects is the Science Community Center.

Our center may very well open for classes in the fall of 2012. For the first time, our college students and children from area schools will finally have access to a state-of-the-art planetarium, an observatory, and a natural history museum that until now has been housed, well, in an old house. There will (probably) be an outdoor learning environment with a large pond and native vegetation.There will be a modern facility for the chemistry, physics, biology, and astronomy laboratories, and more to the point: new classrooms and labs for earth science and geology!

Our local community decided to fight for a better future. 99th? We've got our problems and we'll probably never be a swanky chic city that vies for number 1. But we'll make sure our kids have a decent chance to learn about the fascinating world that exists out there, and the cosmos beyond. They deserve that much from us. They certainly don't deserve the kind of thinking that says build another sweatshop, and pay them minimum wage. 

That's my office on the third floor. It actually has a floor, sort of, but still lacks walls.

A Convergence of Wonders: Journeys in the Pacific Northwest

Geology field trips through the auspices of community colleges occupy an odd universe somewhere between a ranger-led experience at a national park and the academic training of upper-division geology departments. On the one hand, the field is where the geology major is tested against the elements, to learn the use of GPS, mapping, field identification of rocks and sediments, and other skills they will need in their eventual careers. Students will spend many days on one site, getting to know it in great detail. On the other hand, tourists arrive on their own at a national park, expecting a good time, perhaps knowing very little about geology, biology, and environmental science, and rangers try to facilitate a bit of learning. They are trained, however, to stop trying to teach at the first sign of boredom or disinterest. Tourists get their immediate questions answered, but there is little opportunity to learn much of anything in depth. I don't think I've ever seen a tourist taking notes in the presences of an interpretive ranger (Rangers? Tell me if your experience is different; I haven't had the privilege of trying your job yet!).

What I have on a community college field trip is an eclectic collection of people, some of whom have had a geology class or two, and others who have had no background at all. They are a captive audience, unlike those of a park ranger. They have to demonstrate new knowledge by the end of the course. They are attending for personal enrichment, and sometimes because they need academic units (believe me, this is a tough way to get those units, folks). I often find teachers in the mix, working on their knowledge base and building their photograph and specimen collections for use in the classroom. On our recent journey, we were mixing things up by taking two classes in the field together, geology students and anthropology/archaeology students. It made for an interesting synergy.

When designing a course set in the field, I am torn between the desire to take things slow and learn a place in depth, or to go whole hog with the time I have and hope to show our students as many sights and wonders as possible. There are arguments for both approaches...I tend to explore our local parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, Death Valley) more completely. We can revisit on a different weekend and explore the less-known corners of these parks. On a longer, more ambitious trip, I push hard to see as much as possible. My thinking, quite literally, is that this may be the one chance that these students will ever have to see these remote places, like Glacier National Park, or Nine-Mile Canyon in Utah (see near-future blog entries). The drives are long and exhausting, and it is hard for the students to take it all in at first. This is where the value of notes and picture-taking becomes supreme. They may not get the big picture right away, but using their notes and pictures to fill in the worksheets we provide them, the students start to construct a model in their heads of the geological framework of a particular region. Even though our visits to specific sites may be fairly brief, the students are still able to say "I was there, I saw that place, and I can tell you something interesting about it".

Field trips are messy, exhausting, frustrating, and chaotic (but believe me, a good crew of volunteers is a godsend that keeps problems to a minimum!). There are biting bugs, marauding bears, freezing nights, hot days, sunburn, intense wind and dust, road construction delays, and personality conflicts. There are idiots out there who have no business driving trucks, motorcycles and giant RVs. There are grumpy community college professors to contend with (oh, my poor students!). Experiences in the field aren't for everyone.

But this blog is! For the next few posts, I would like to share our recent journey across the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains, and you don't have to put up with the bugs and the dirt! The geology and natural history, like our class, will be survey-style, not in-depth. We saw many incredible stories written in the stone and sediment, and I am anxious to share them with you, the reader, as I shared them with my students. I have been struggling to come up with a name for the series, because "Fire and Ice", as appropriate as it is, has been used many times. After some discussion with Mrs. Geotripper, I realized that apart from the Pleistocene glaciations, almost all the landscape we saw formed under the influence of the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California (and off the rest of California as recently as 29 million years ago). Subduction zones are one form of convergent boundaries, and thus the name of our exploration: A Convergence of Wonders: Journeys in the Pacific Northwest.

PS: By the way, Modesto Junior College does offer some in-depth field studies for geology/earth science majors. Later this month, some of our students will be learning some basic mapping and GPS skills at our field station near Sonora Pass in the Sierra Nevada. Contact me if you are interested.