I was born in Baltimore and grew up in various neighborhoods around the city. I felt familiar with life in a metropolitan area but I wondered about living in a smaller town. So, when my course in the history of Western higher education convinced me that Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota had a deep dedication to the cause of education, from kindergarten to graduate school to applied research for the betterment of the society and its citizens, I kept my eye open for university positions in those states.
Forty-three years ago, we moved to central Wisconsin and I began teaching as an assistant professor of education. My PhD in statistics, measurement and experimental design was probably better suited to match the needs of a doctoral campus since practice and tradition aim teachers at teaching practice far more than at research on education. I had previously the 5th grade for four years, and a taught a course in educational testing at the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland. My first day of teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point involved two classes: undergraduate educational psychology and a graduate seminar in the writing of a master's paper.
I had been used to thinking about, working with, and applying statistical methods of analysis to data for three years prior to UWSP teaching. I realized that such specialized work was of interest to a few scattered people around the campus so I put a paragraph in the faculty newsletter stating my interest in discussing and working with anyone interested in statistical analysis. That led to an offer by the campus authorities who were puzzling over just what to do with a new computer they rented from IBM for faculty research purposes. So, for the first 18 months. I split my time between working with that machine and its potential uses, while teaching classes in teacher preparation.
Learning about computers in my doctoral program had involved an odd 1 credit course that lasted for three years. Four or five of us in the program bought a book on Fortran and sat with our professor every now and then as he developed his ideas about what would help him and us learn the ins and outs of computing. The basic on-going project was to build a computer program that would calculate the number of days between any two dates he supplied us. Just a minute ago, I used Excel in Microsoft Office 2010 to find that there have been 13,358 days between my first day of assistant professing and today. I used technology and tools that didn't exist then.
To me, one of several fun things about teaching as a subject is that it is situated between humanness (classroom confusion, misbehavior, crushes and hatreds) and abstraction (how can the teacher track learning progress and analyze obstacles both multi-person and individual). That allows an investigator to capture and analyze classroom life using everything from poetry to canonical correlation. That same complexity and variation continues to show us that humans are unique and even to this day, not all that completely understood.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
