The Impact of Effective Teaching: A Personal Reflection

Picture it. 1974.

A young cowboy is trying to figure out what to do with himself for the rest of his life now that he’s graduated from high school.

So, like so many of his peers he goes to college.

That young cowboy, of course, was me. I enrolled in then Adams State College (now Adams State University). I wanted to take a degree in astronomy and physics. So went through it and I did.

But the best classes I took were the ones that had nothing to with my degree.

I took tons of psychology and sociology classes to help keep the old GPA up there. Those classes taught me about how to deal with people and the institutions we’ve built.

I took speech and acting classes. Those, believe it or not, taught me about team work and how to get a point across.

I took singing. What the heck, I enjoyed it. And as the guys from Straight, no Chaser can tell you, it’s a great way to bleed off stress.

I took TV Production and was a radio DJ for a year. It taught me how to organize big projects. deal with failures, and think outside the box.

And most importantly, I took a bunch of course from Dr. Lynn Weldon. Of all my college profs, he’s the one who was the most instrumental in making me, me. Lynn used something called a “contract system” in his class. He passed out a form, and you got to select the grade you wanted. But if say you wanted an A, you had to put so many hours into whatever the project was. You had to annotate what you did, give references, and so on.

Everyone thought his courses would be an easy A. They weren’t. They meant you deciding what you wanted to do in the class, and then making it happen. It involved thought, sometimes a lot of soul searching, research, and presenting an end result that you were proud of.

I always thought his courses involved a lot of learning how to do things. I’d always been good at research. I was better when I finished the classes he offered. I was a good writer before. I was better when finished. What I learned was to put my heart and soul into a project and try to make the best product I could.

One thing it did do was stretch you and make you think about things you’d taken for granted, or pushed you to always want to try.

For a course titled Spaceship Earth (very much geared towards fostering peace, ecology, and social awareness), I decided to do a small film. I always wanted to do something like that and I wanted an A of course. I wrote a script, got permission to film at locations on campus and off campus. The hardest to get was the old rail yards and an old refinery in town. Some of the rails and stock hadn’t moved in years, and the refinery was a pile of rust. They gave a geat end of the world vibe. Then I got some actors and actresses together, borrowed and made costumes and props. Using a handheld video camera (if can call something that needed a backpack and the strength of weight lifter to move around handheld) owned by the college, I shot and directed “If I forget the stars.”

Fade in to a birthday party. There’s the traditional blowing out of candles, singing of the song, and so on. I first hint that this isn’t normal is when dad has to turn off the smoke detectors. The big gift, the girl is thirteen and she’s “Going out.” Going out involves putting on a set of coveralls, wearing a tank, mask, and hood. They had to exit through an airlock (one of the elevators doors on campus). The next scene showed them coming up a ramp from below ground level and into a place of rusting machinery. It’s near sunset and then the father tells her they can only stay above ground for an hour. He goes on to tell her about the war that was fought, how the Earth was poisoned by the radiation and how it’s slowly coming back. Before they go back inside down, they go to look at small, stunted tree that’s growing. They give it some water in hopes that it will continue to grow. As they get ready to go back below ground where the remainder of humanity lives, the sun sets, and the stars come out. For a long minute, they stand in awe looking at what could have been our inheritance. Roll credits.

It was less that a ten-minute film and the only copy was the one I turned in. Since the tape was borrowed from the school, I’m sure it was reused somewhere, so I doubt it even exists anymore. Maybe I’ll reshoot it someday just for fun.

Believe it or not, Dr. Weldon was once the hardest grader on campus. He’d start a semester with say fifty students and would say, “There’s fifty of you in here. forty seven of you will fail the course. One will get a D. One will get a C. One will get a B. There will be no “A’s” in this class.”

I asked him about it and he admitted it was true. I asked why he changed, and he said it was because he realized no one was learning anything. He wanted them to figure things out for themselves and running his classes like they were basic training wasn’t working.

And that led to the biggest lesson I learned from the man. He used to say, “Education shouldn’t teach you the answers. It should teach you how to ask the question and then find the answers.”

He’s right you know.

Dr. Weldon passed in October of 2003. His legacy lives on in a scholarship and people like me.

Dr. Lynn Weldon, without knowing it, gave me the gift to reinvent myself time and again. Thanks, Doc, for one of the greatest gifts possible. I’m proud to have known you as both a teacher and a friend.

I’ll see you on the flip side.

Link to Dr. Weldon’s Obit.