About Teaching Writing. And Writing About Teaching.

Preamble: This is my final post to my last college writing class, marking the end of a sometimes haphazard career that started in 1979 at the University of Minnesota. As I recall and reread this, my adios to my Sp2016 Utah State University feature-writing students really was a little stream-on-consciousness. But “The Huddle” was our online class’s discussion, so the give-and-take — including the professor’s — was meant to be a little spontaneous. Spontaneity works better face-to-face than online, but I posted it, the students endured (or deleted) it, so I’ll stand by it.

TP

The Final Huddle

Apr 19 at 1:30pm

2 2 replies.

There is no formal Final Huddle assignment this week, but if you want, please do take this opportunity to put your own final -30- on this class.

Frankly, I would be the first to say that online is not the optimum way to do a feature-writing class. Of course, I also think that online is not the optimum way to teach *any* class, although it can work OK for some things. 

In writing classes, ironically, writing back and forth to each other is probably not as effective as you’d think. It is true, however, that — as in throwing kids into the pool as a swimming lesson — just giving writers good stuff to read can go a long way toward helping them develop their own writing. In some ways, there are no original thoughts left, just adaptation (or appropriation) of other people’s stuff. So reading John McPhee or E.B. White or whomever should be all it takes.

If that were true, however, then everything could be learned from The Google: Just do a search for thermodynamics and you’re a scientist. There are cases of people teaching themselves brain surgery and aviation construction that way, and they almost never end well. Although they do make good stories to tell. By that theory, I could simply have assigned you a bunch of books, the URL of Longreads.com and an extended Morgue file (the class stock of Great Writing), and you’d be great writers.

Truthfully, I’m not sure that anything I did here online over the past 15 weeks actually added much to the reading list. Ask any writer for advice on how to become a writer, and they’ll all pretty much say just, “Writewritewrite.” It’s the same for swimming or getting to Carnegie Hall: Paddle as hard as you can. 

I’m not sure that taking this class f2f instead of online would change that assessment much, although it would have been easier and more efficient to meet you in person and talk about writing, instead of writing about writing. How ironic is that? Being in the same room and having the in-person give-and-take on writing and sources and stories and strategies is more fun, anyway. Does it work better? Dunno.

Anyway, I have enjoyed our time together. As I said in the Final Opener, your job this week is simply to finish your profiles, and revise anything else you’d like another shot at. Everything is due for the grade on Friday, but I will be glad to work with you on any of your stuff after the semester is over.

This is my last USU class of any kind. 22 years at USU (and since 1979 overall), more than 100 JCOM classes and thousands of Aggies. That doesn’t make this class special in any way, except to me in its position in the arc of my teaching career. I’m not done, as you know: I’m still writing and editing, and likely will until the final -30-. But this *is* a milestone: I spent more than one-third of my life teaching at USU, which is a little weird to think about considering my intentions, hopes and dreams 22 years ago.

Still, it has been a good run, with plenty to look back on with pride, including this semester. You have been a pleasure to work with. Keep at it, and I fully expect that you will make it to Carnegie Hall, or wherever you’re going.

This will be the end-of-season WORD this year, but as my last writing students, you especially deserve a sneak peek:

 

“Why do we love our writing teachers so much? Why, years later, do we think of them with such gratitude? I think it’s because they come along when we need them most, when we are young and vulnerable and are tentatively approaching this craft that our culture doesn’t have much respect for, but which we are beginning to love. They have so much power. They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But our teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost holy, which we never forget: they take us seriously. They accept us as new members of the guild. They tolerate the under-wonderful stories we write, the dopy things we say, our shaky-legged aesthetic theories, our posturing, because they have been there themselves.

“We say: I think I might be a writer.

“They say: Good for you. Proceed.”

—George Saunders, writer, “My Writing Education: A Timeline,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2015 

Go forth, young writers.

Ted Pease

Professor of Interesting Stuff Emeritus 
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Confessions of a paperback junkie

By Ted Pease

©1998

I know I’m a junkie. I don’t make any excuses about it anymore.

I’ve always had the habit — my parents gave it to me. Always pushing stuff on me — Try this! What about this one? This is sooooo good. You’ll like this . . . . I was hooked early. Let me run a few names by you: Alistair MacLean. Ngaio Marsh. Ian Fleming. John D. MacDonald. Helen MacInnes. John LeCarré. Agatha Christie. If you know them, you’re a junkie, too.

I took the habit with me when I went away to college. My freshman roommate at the University of Washington was a dorky Engineering major named Bruce, already engaged to his high school sweetheart, Sharon — neither of them got it at all.

It got really bad later, after I moved to the Big Apple. I just couldn’t get enough.

It was the commute that did it, really. I mean, when you spend that much time — three hours on a good day — you pretty much need it. I did, anyway. All I could get.

John Grisham. Sue Grafton. Pat Conroy. Michael Crichton. Robert B. Parker. Patricia Cornwell. Dick Francis. Even, I’m embarrassed to admit, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. A regular at every corner used book store, I’d make my furtive exchanges after hours, scrounging spare change from the car upholstery to score a brown paper grocery bag fix of limp, sometimes yellowing paperbacks.

My name is Pease, and I’m a pulp fiction junkie. Is there a 12-step program for me?

It’s a shameful confession for a former English lit major, but I had the monkey on my back. I had it bad. Not that I’m recovered, but my habit is under control. Now when I read recreationally, I almost always remember it afterward. For a while.

Since I’m packing up for a trip to my summer sanitarium, and loading some really good stuff in my bag, I thought I might be able to, um, turn some of you on to some of the best of my paperback pulp fiction habit.

My wife says I’m a paperback whore. It is true that there is almost nothing I won’t read. After years on the bus-subway circuit, commuting with the rest of the dull-eyed hordes, I’ll prop anything up in front of what passes for my brain. And because I rarely actually pay attention, I can read the same thing again a year later and derive the same benefits.

For optimum mindless, aimless passing of time, I tend toward detective/mystery stuff, plus the lawyer/crime category, espionage and private eyes (I was weaned on Bond, James Bond, after all), and have been passionate about a small number of sci-fi/fantasy people — Arthur C. Clark, Frank Herbert, Ursula LeGuin, C.S. Lewis, Robert A. Heinlein.

My vacation sanitarium destination this week is the family house on an island off the coast of Maine, where we have been hoarding books, the great and the less-so, for more than 40 years. Being there will be an orgy of rediscovery and rereading. Jumbled among the nautical and maritime (A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast, for example, Peter Freuchen’s classic Book of the Seven Seas, and a 1937 edition of H.A. Calahan’s Learning to Sail) is an archeological dig of my literary lifetime, from childhood Hardy Boys to adolescent submarine and WWII fixations to the remnants of high school and college lit classes to a veritable treasure trove of trash.

For what it’s worth, since everyone else seems to be dishing out their top-100 lists, here are some of my top picks to satisfy your reading urges, noble and otherwise.

Since it’s Maine, E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, first published in 1938, remains on my best-ever list. Continuing in the maritime theme, one of the best new books I’ve read this year is Sebastian Junger’s true story of fishermen and the sea, The Perfect Storm. For more nautica, add Annie E. Proulx’s Pulitzer-winner, The Shipping News, and, from the opposite coast, David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. Inland, I liked Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer, at least until Robert Redford got ahold of it, and Howard Frank Moser’s stuff from northern Vermont, starting with A Stranger in the Kingdom, is excellent. I’m looking forward to John Irving’s reemergence with A Widow for One Year, touted as his best since Garp and Owen Meany, both of which fit somewhere up there. And high among my perennial rereadable Top 10 is always J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m not sure it’s on my favorites list, but I just read Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it.

But let’s leave the literature and talk about some serious pulp.

In the courtroom/lawyer category, there are the obvious names — John Grisham, Scott Turow, etc. — to which I would add the names Richard North Patterson, Steve Martini, John T. Lescroart and William J. Coughlin.

In the detective/crime category, I like classic Dick Francis, of course, and there’s only one Elmore Leonard. For quirky, there’s no one like Carl Hiaasen. Leonard, Hiaasen and humor columnist Dave Barry combined with a dozen other mystery novelists recently, each contributing a chapter of the really silly Naked Came the Manatee.

Nelson DeMille is good — try his latest Plum Island. And for the title more than anything else, I recently picked up something called Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca?, about a Pacific Northwest PI, which was worth the 80 cents I paid for the title alone. But for my money, the best, smartest, most convoluted thriller writer is Thomas Gifford, beginning with The Wind Chill Factor and, especially, The Assassini.

Other names to check out in the mystery/thriller area: John Sandford (his “Prey” series), John Kellerman, Tony Hillerman, and Patricia Cornwell. For pure mindless but entertaining private-eye popcorn, there’s Sue Grafton, whose alphabet series is up to M; Robert B. Parker’s glib private eye, Spenser; and John D. MacDonald’s lovable sexist hunk Travis McGee.

Many of my friends and colleagues tend toward biography and history to while away the idle hour, but my addictions are more low-brow — the kind touted on back covers as “pot-boilers,” “page-turners,” “midnight oil-burners,” “hair-raising,” “un-put-downable” “taut legal thrillers” told “with panache and a sardonic sense of humor” that “race at breakneck speed” to “stunning and catastrophic denouement.”

So I’m heading for the hammock with a couple of page-turners for a rollicking good read. And maybe a nap. Enjoy.

This column appeared in the Logan Herald-Journal on July 17, 1998.

Interviewing: Mike Wallace Was Here

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Today’s WORD on Journalism, April 9, 2012

Mike Wallace, Super Hero, 1918-2012

“It’s hard to believe, but when Wallace was born in 1918 there wasn’t even a radio in most American homes, much less a TV. As a youth, Wallace said, he was ‘an overachiever. I worked pretty hard. Played a hell of a fiddle.’

“At the University of Michigan, where his parents hoped he’d become a doctor or lawyer, he got hooked instead on radio. And by 1941, Mike was the announcer on ‘The Green Hornet."” . . .

“It was 65 years from Mike’s first appearance on camera—a World War II film for the Navy—to his last television appearance, a ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Roger Clemens, the baseball star trying to fight off accusations of steroid use.

“65 years!

“It’s strange, but for such a tough guy, Mike’s all-time favorite interview was the one with another legend, pianist Vladimir Horowitz. The two of them, forces of nature both: Sly, manic, egos rampant. For Mike—a red, white and blue kind of guy—Horowitz played ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“It almost brought tears to the toughest guy on television.

“‘It’s astonishing what you learn and feel and see along the way,’ Wallace said. ‘That’s why a reporter’s job, as you know, is such a joy.’”

—Morley Safer, newsman and longtime Wallace colleague,
“Remembering Mike Wallace, 1918-2012,”
CBS News Sunday, April 5, 2012
Image: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

• Editorial Comment: Green Hornet, hunh? Evil-doers everywhere are breathing easier today. RIP, bulldog.

More on Mike Wallace
• The Associated Press obit: “NEW YORK (AP) — ‘Mike Wallace is here to see you.’”
• The “60 Minutes” obit
• Video: Best of Mike on “60 Minutes”
• NPR’s Scott Simon with Wallace on tough interviewing, 2005
• New York Times obit
• Video: “Last Word: Mike Wallace,” New York Times
• TIME: “Mike Wallace and the legacy of 60 Minutes”
• In Memoriam, ABC News video
• Wallace Reaction.
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‘Go, unlearn the lies we taught you’

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Professors have got to be nuts

By Ted Pease
© 1998
Updated 4/29/11

As has been my custom ever since I started teaching, every year about this time, as my students froth and gambol their way through final exams toward summer break, as seniors suddenly start smiling again (some for the first time in my experience), I am drawn to revisit an old theologian.

Confronted by the end-of-year angst of both students and faculty, Jake sometimes sounds like one seriously burned-out, cantankerous old crank.

Back in the 1980s, when he was a professor of religious studies at Brown University, Neusner sent an article to the student newspaper. It was a commencement address he knew would never be delivered, but which he believed needed saying anyway. I reread it every Spring as a way to reflect on the school year just completed, and on what I have chosen to do with my life.

Neusner, a noted scholar and the kind of no-nonsense professor that most students avoid like the plague, lamented the erosion of standards in higher education, not only among students but in the ranks of faculty, who he said could restore academic excellence, but won’t. Or anyway don’t. It is the kind of complaint that simultaneously offends and resonates with professors.

“We the faculty take no pride in our educational achievements with you,” Neusner told his phantom graduating class. “We have prepared you for a world that does not exist, indeed, that cannot exist. You have spent four years supposing that failure leaves no record. You have learned at Brown that when your work goes poorly, the painless solution is to drop out.

“But starting now, in the world in which you go, failure marks you,” he said. “Outside Brown, quitters are no heroes.”

I think a bit sheepishly of crusty old Professor Jake every year at commencement time, when we the faculty bless our students, help them shift their tassels from the left to the right (or is it the other way around?), and send them on their way from their cloistered academic careers into the real world. I wonder if I’ve really prepared them for the “Outside,” or if I’ve just helped them get by. Some will set the real world on fire, but others (we know) will crash and burn.

One of the reasons I dug through my files to find Jacob Neusner this year is that I have received messages from several students that call him forth. One came from a senior, who gave the university a C after her four years here — perhaps a more honest grade than we professors are willing to give. “I can’t believe the poor writing I saw from students in my group!” she wrote. “These were seniors. There should be more writing courses.”

Amen to that.

I don’t know where Neusner is these days, or if he’s still living [Note: Professor Neusner was alive and well, apparently, at Bard College, blogging in March 2011] but he would have loved the letter I got last week from a student who had been forced to read one of my columns, and took exception to it. I wrote back, commending him for getting mad enough to send what was at least a well written letter, even if he missed the point.

The piece was called “The Dumbing of America” when it came out in September 1996, and it seems that embattled English 200 students are required to read the thing as an example of persuasive writing. It makes some of them mad, I am pleased to report.

The column was about a UCLA study that found that U.S. students are “increasingly disengaged from the academic experience,” “frequently bored” in their classes and “considerably less willing to work hard” at learning than they were a decade ago. My point, coming at the topic from the perspective of someone who tries to teach, was that while this was hardly news to us in the trenches of academe, it may be for parents, employers and the larger society. Certainly, if true, it bodes ill for all of us.

My letter-writer thought I was making fun of students; he found the column “degrading,” he said, and pointed out that there are many factors involved in making unmotivated students, including poor teachers, bad facilities, early class times and the fact that some students shouldn’t be here anyway, but came only for social life or to find a spouse. He actually said that.

I’m thinking that he got my point — and Neusner’s — quite well, even though I really wasn’t criticizing students as much as myself and my colleagues. Whose fault is it, after all, if salesmen can’t sell, if welders can’t weld, if teachers can’t teach — the buyer’s, the metal’s, the student’s? No, as grumpy old Father Jake put it: we teachers have been pulling a fast one on students for a long time.

“For four years we created an altogether forgiving world, in which whatever slight effort you gave was all that was demanded,” Neusner told the Brown University students who never got to hear him. “When you did not keep appointments, we made new ones. When your work came in beyond the deadline, we pretended not to care.

“Worse still, when you were boring, we acted as if you were saying something important. When you were garrulous and talked to hear yourself talk, we listened as if it mattered. When you tossed on our desks writing upon which you had not labored, we read it and even responded, as though you had earned a response.

“When you were dull, we pretended you were smart. When you were predictable, unimaginative and routine, we listened as if to new and wonderful things. When you demanded free lunch, we served it.”

The reason we professors let students get by, Father Jake said, was that we get worn down. “Despite your fantasies,” Neusner wrote, “it was not even that we wanted to be liked by you. It was that we did not want to be bothered, and the easy way out was pretense: smiles and easy B’s.”

Well, as the 1997-98 academic year concludes, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Professor Jake’s unhappy harangue. Despite what lawmakers think about the cushy life of academe, having scores or hundreds of 20-something-year-old bosses who can’t pay attention in class because they were out late “studying,” whose homework was eaten by the dog, who can’t make the exam because of a surprise family reunion in Cancun . . . well, it’s wearing. And many of us feel more than a little wrung out at the end of the school year.

But then come the farewell messages from other students, like this e-mail I received yesterday from one departing senior, who has come through: “I have nothing to gain any more by sucking up, so this is for real: thank you. (And I’m sorry I gave you such s**t about the ethics class.) Thanks.”

As I pointed out to my English 200 critic, we don’t disrespect or even dislike you, and keep in mind that we keep coming back. Some of us, like Jacob Neusner, finally burn out and probably need a sanitarium and about a decade of sabbaticals. But most of us were right there for our students when classes started last Fall, and we were there yesterday at commencement, cheering and teary right along with the Class of 1998 and their parents. You students may drive us nuts sometimes — and I know we make you crazy, too — but we’ll be back for more when classes start again. It’s a little warped, maybe, but it’s what we do.

—Ted Pease (ted.pease@usu.edu) is head of the Department of Journalism & Communication at Utah State University. This column originally appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald Journal (6/7/98).

The Ostrich Syndrome

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Don’t Sanitize Our News. We Did It, We Should Own It

Letter to the Editor
The Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal, 4/26/11

To the Editor:

I was glad to read HJ managing editor Charlie McCollum’s discussion of graphic photos in the Sunday’s newspaper [“Sensationalism played no part in publication of photo,” Sunday, 4/24/11]. Specifically, the question was about running the image of a bloody Syrian boy shot in the head by troops during a protest.

Like many HJ readers, I caught my breath when I saw the photo. I’d seen it the night before on NBC’s evening news, but the broadcasters had fuzzed out the gore. And there it was on my kitchen counter, in all its bloody detail.

But Charlie’s right in supporting the decision to run it. And if the photo made HJ readers mad, then all the more so.

Much of the problem with the way this country makes policy is that it happens in a safe, sanitized vacuum. We aren’t permitted to see the coffins coming home in the middle of the night from our foreign wars. We don’t want to see the outcomes of policies conducted in our name—and in our ignorance—that end in deaths and despair.

Out of sight and out of mind has become our national attitude toward unpleasant realities. Too many news organizations recognize this, and sanitize the news to “protect” us from unpleasantness. For years, international versions of U.S. news media—CNNi, Newsweek international and more—have offered global audiences much more complete, and graphic, reports on war and violence than appear in U.S. editions. We Americans apparently don’t have the stomach to confront the world—and our role in it.

In either the news media or ourselves, this ostrich mentality is dishonest. People—like that child murdered in Syria while demonstrating for the kind of freedom we say we support as a universal right—are fighting and dying, or living in horrible conditions and dying slowly all over the world. Often, these struggles have something to do with policies of our own government. They are far from our clean and safe kitchen counters, and too far from our consciousness.

Americans need more, nor less, awareness of the struggles and conflicts that are central to the lives of so many people worldwide. Seeing and hearing about those people is the responsibility of the press, and it's our responsibility not to turn away. We need and deserve more reality in the news media, please, not less, and must learn to take responsibility for our own role in it.

—Ted Pease
Petersboro

Resource: Photo Ethics/Framing

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Errol Morris, filmmaker/columnist

This is a fascinating and important conversation by filmmaker/director Errol Morris (Fog of War, about Robert McNamara’s decision to bomb Cambodia in the 1970s, The Thin Blue Line and others, including upcoming Tabloid, about a Miss Wyoming who fell in love and kidnapped her Salt Lake City Mormon boyfriend from his mission in England so they could have sex (!)) as part of The New York Times’ Opinionator blog.

Morris deals with photo ethics and image manipulation over some real cases of photos of children’s toys amid rubble in Iraq and other Middle East war zones.

Good for all journalists in considering how to present information effectively yet ethically, and for media consumer as a reminder to take all information with skepticism.

• Part 1: “It Was All Started by a Mouse” (1/3/2010)
• Part 2: “It Was All Started by a Mouse” (1/4/2010)
• Postscript: “Thought Experiment #2” (1/12/2010)

Teachable Moments

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Learning Begins with the Tough Questions

By Edward C. Pease
© 1996

“Judge a man not by his answers, but by his questions.” Gender bias aside, that’s one of the mantras of the classroom—for the professor, anyway. Or it should be. And in the context of “values” and learning, it represents a crucial tenet of education: curiosity and critical thinking.

At USU, as at any good university, the quality of the end-product—education—is measured not so much by what the professor tells the student, as by what the student is motivated to ask. And the worth of the outcome is not necessarily just in getting the answer right, but in students having the freedom and the will to ask the question in the first place. In that freedom to ask questions resides an element of risk for both the student and the professor, because asking tough questions is an inherently subversive activity that, when done right, both implies a challenge to what is accepted as “conventional wisdom,” and reflects a desire to seek new answers.

When I moved to USU from New York City two years ago, some of my friends and colleagues thought I was nuts. Aside from the East’s regional chauvinism (stronger on the East Coast, which considers anyplace west of the Hudson or Potomac rivers “the hinterlands,” than in any other part of the country), I got the usual battery of Mormon jokes, and concerns from well-meaning people about how an avowed liberal Democrat would survive in the arid conservative climate of the land of Orrin Hatch. Was I doing “missionary work”? they joked.

In a way, that’s what any teacher does. But more than that, I have learned to appreciate more fully than before the text of a poster I got from a mail-order place in Minnesota: “Minds are like parachutes: they function only when open.” As a teacher, I am in the mind-opening business; and, over the past two years at USU, my students have served the same mind-opening service for me.

Take Amy. When she and I met, she was a sophomore political science major from Idaho who, after an internship in Republican U.S. Sen. Dirk Kempthorne’s Washington, D.C., office, decided she wanted to become a lobbyist for conservative causes. Despite her misgivings about left-leaning journalists, she wanted a second major in communication to pursue her career goals.

Amy knew within the first five minutes we met that she disagreed with me on just about everything from politics to primetime. Over the past two years, I don’t think I ever changed her mind about anything, but we like each other, enjoy butting heads, and both have learned something in the process.

Amy lives to bait me: “Rush Limbaugh said...,” she’d say.

“Pompous windbag,” I snort.

“Where is he wrong?” she challenges.

“Where not, Ditto-Head?” I retort.

“Oh, you liberals....” She waves me away.

And we’re off to the races.

The reason Amy and I like to torment each other is the process, the exchange, the joy of disagreement, and, as the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill said, the value of defending what each we each know as “truth,” which makes learning happen.

This process of questioning, of disagreement, of examining one’s beliefs, and, finally, either reaffirming or altering them—that’s the joy of teaching and learning. It’s not that we professors necessarily know “the truth”; the best we can do (on a good day) is to force our students—kicking and screaming, if that’s what it takes—to learn facts (which are different from beliefs), and make them decide for themselves what they believe.

Amy is not the only student at USU whose worldview conflicts with my own, and she also is not the only one willing to debate me. In the process, both my students and I find our minds opening like parachutes, and discover a willingness to reexamine what we thought we “knew” in the context of each other’s new ideas.

For me, a child of the activist, anti-establishment 1960s and ’70s, this process recalls the counterculture mantra of my youth, “Question authority,” now reborn as my favorite teaching tool in the 1990s. In some ways, it is an alien concept in Utah, where so many young people are raised to do just the opposite. But for students like Amy, a willingness to distinguish between facts and beliefs, and a growing enjoyment in questioning everything (including whatever the professor says in class), healthy skepticism becomes a valuable tool for learning, and for life.

I despair when I see students relentlessly scribbling down everything I say, because I know they think they’re getting the answers without ever having had to figure out the questions. So when I sit in my office or classroom and have a student bristle at me, get in my face, disagreeing, pushing back, questioning what she’s been taught as “common knowledge,” starting statements with, “BUT...!” and trying to change my mind. Well, that’s a good day for teaching and learning.

This willingness to question and examine and then reexamine is particularly critical in my teaching area—the mass media. Because the journalist who simply writes down what the mayor or the police chief tells him is a scribe, not a watchdog on society. And the TV viewer to moviegoer or voter in a presidential campaign year who simply absorbs and unquestioningly accepts what he or she hears in the information age isn’t a citizen, but a sheep. For me, teaching about the mass media is the same as teaching about life. It is a playground for the curious and socially conscious. And, if done correctly, it is prime territory for teaching students to question what they think they know.

For example, if “more Americans get their news from ABC than from any other source,” as the network claims, what then? What about this new study that finds kids learn about sex from TV, not from their parents or schools or even the older kid next door? Will the Internet cause intellectual birth defects? If children spend more time with “Barney” than with Dad, will the next generation talk and walk like purple dinosaurs? Does the “v-chip” defend kids against TV violence, or against parental neglect, or both? Should women look like Barbie or Elle McPherson or Rosie O’Donnell? Can you believe anything politicians say on television? What about Martha Stewart? Do movies really make people go nuts and kill their parents? Why does TV portray African Americans as criminals or buffoons, and women as sex objects or Donna Reed? And so on.

Questioning what we’re told—whether in the classroom or on TV—is what learning and good citizenship is all about. And it is an especially crucial life-skill in an age when most of what we learn or think we know about the world comes to us second-hand, in soundbites and images transmitted to us from far from our own lives, by people we don’t know. For students like Amy, whose generation has been raised by the mass media, honing a healthy skepticism is new and exciting, and a critical survival skill in the electronic age.

And for teachers like me, who are lucky enough to have such students in their classrooms, this is the joy of the profession—watching students challenge what they’ve always accepted as the way things are, and seeing them come up with their own answers, arrived at not because that’s what they’ve always been told, but because they’ve done their own thinking about the questions, and not just memorized the answers of others. Provoking questions is a noble and enduring profession, and students, if they are engaged, ask better questions than professors do.

So when Amy wants to fight about politics, when Ken declares that he “gets it,” when Evan gets angry at the evening news, when my students ask tough questions for which I have no good answers...that’s a good day on University Hill.

• Edward C. Pease is professor and head of the Department of Communication at USU. This appeared in the USU Magazine, Fall 1996.