bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Friday, August 29, 2003 ::

It's Friday
And Friday Five lobs a fat one down the middle of the plate. I can't miss.

1. Are you going to school this year?
Well, yes and no. I'm in school, because I work at one, the University of Missouri-Rolla. It's a well-respected sci/tech school with aspirations for greatness. But then again, aren't we all?

But, am I a student in this school? No.

2. If yes, where are you going (high school, college, etc.)? If no, when did you graduate?
I graduated from high school in 1978, and from college in 1983.

3. What are/were your favorite school subjects?
I majored in journalism, so obviously my favorite subjects in college were film and history. Journalism was a distant third, but I liked much of it too.

My favorite film class was also a history class, and it was called Film and Society in the Modern World. How's that for a blow-off title? It was taught by a nervous Woody Allenish prof who, years later, killed himself by driving his car into a tree. I wish I could remember his name. But he showed us some great films -- it was my first exposure to the world of Akira Kurosawa (Yojimbo and Seven Samurai were on the menu), and we watched Roberto Rossellini's Open City as well -- and he also let us grade ourselves.

My favorite history class was America in the Sixties, taught by Bob Collins, who is still teaching. We read Kerouac's On the Road to set the stage, Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times, Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. We had no tests. We wrote two or three papers, as I recall. I always preferred papers to tests.

As for my major, I enjoyed two classes in particular:

The Foreign Press (now called International Journalism, taught by Dr. Robert K. Knight, who also first got me interested in journalism by recruiting me into the Urban Journalism Workshop (now, thanks to political correctness, transmogrified into the African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and Native American Journalism Workshop). The workshop was for minority high school or junior college students interested in a journalism degree. Dr. Knight, an Argentinian, fervently recruited minorities into the J-School back in the '70s, '80s and, I believe, early '90s, up until his death sometime in the early '90s. But I digress. The Foreign Press was another class that required only writing, no tests. Knight taught us how the press functioned in other areas of the world, and let us choose two countries for in-depth study. I picked El Salvador and Honduras, both political hot spots at the time. Although the USSR wasn't my nation of choice, I still learned much about the Soviet-era Samizdat through that class.

Communications Law, taught by Bob Spencer, a rail-thin bicyclist and health nut who died of a heart attack in the late '80s. It was a tough, "Paper Chase" type of lecture, presided over by an intimidating lawyer/scholar, and we read a lot of legal crap, but I learned a lot about the role of a free press in our society -- and the myriad conflicts between our First and Fourth Amendments -- and got the old-fashioned "hard C," which belied how much I actually learned.

4. What are/were your least favorite school subjects?
In high school: Just about everything, especially geometry, geography and physics.

In college: Business Law. As much as I enjoyed digging into the nuances of media law, I couldn't stand all this crap pertaining to business and contracts. I got a D.

5. Have you ever had a favorite teacher? Why was he/she a favorite?
In college, the history prof Bob Collins was a terrific lecturer -- not only in America in the Sixties, which was a relatively small class (35 or 40 of us), but also in the big 20th Century America course (a requirement for all journalism students), where he taught and entertained some 200 of us. I also include Robert Knight, Bob Spencer and the Woody Allenish guy who killed himself by crashing his car into a tree. Then there was Brian S. Brooks, who broke in budding journalists in the dreaded News 105. He was a tough editor, and taught us to "put your creativity on the shelf" until we learned the ropes of writing as real newspaper journalists.

In high school, there was Karen Kroll, who inspired me so much that I even wrote an essay about her.

:: Andrew 08:04 + ::
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