A Brief Biography

My parents raised three families with children born in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the third child and only girl in a family of four children. My older brothers were 8 and 9 when I was born in 1946 and my younger brother was born in 1951. The year my older brothers left for college, my little brother started kindergarten. In many ways, I was an only child in a family of six. It gave me an interesting perspective on my universe.

Like a typical 50s corporate family, we moved to a new community every time our father was promoted. By the time I was 25, I had had 10 different addresses. Each move brought new opportunities, challenges, and a sense of renewal. Even now, if I live in one place for more than a few years, I feel a little trapped.

I spent most of my high school years in the Chicago suburbs, and then, we moved once again, and after spending just the last 5 months of my senior year in Lake Oswego, Oregon in the suburbs of Portland, I graduated in 1964 and I went off to the University of Oregon in Eugene. The 60s were an interesting time to be in college. Women were beginning to realize their power, the civil rights movement was in full voice, a war was stealing our friends and lovers at an incredible rate, assassinations took our leaders, and the modern environmental movement was picking up steam. We were hippies and flower children. We sang folk songs and protest songs. We painted our Volkswagens wild colors, tie-dyed our clothes, wore our hair down to our waists - men and women both, and drove our parents crazy; rejecting everything they had worked so hard during the 50s to give us. We enjoyed the advances of science, especially the freedom afforded by the "Pill". We stood across the street from the college administration building and watched friends face off as the National Guard members "defended" the building against their radical anti-war protester classmates who placed flowers in the barrels of their rifles. Somewhere in between all this we managed to get an education.

It was an exciting time. We found our passion and our voices. My peers and I in the sciences shared the amazement of space travel. We learned of DNA and genetics and dreamed of winning Nobel prizes.

Teaching is My Passion

I suppose I have always been a teacher. From teaching my dolls in a backyard schoolroom to my very first job as a swim coach, I have been a teacher. In fact, many of the role models in my family were teachers; my aunts taught 8 grades in one-room schoolhouses in rural Illinois. My generation includes several teachers, and our children are teachers, from grade school teachers to college professors. We were infused with the belief that teaching is the most noble of all professions - that the one way you can truly change someone's life is to give them the tools or perspective to make the change for themselves.

Since I was a child of the latest feminist revolution, however, I fought with every part of my being against choosing a "girl job" - teacher, secretary, nurse. I tried desperately to get out of typing class because I would never use that skill. Of course, today I spend 10 or more hours a day at the keyboard, illustrating one of life's most important lessons that I try to share with my students - Don't close any doors; what you will be doing 15 years from now hasn't been invented yet. I had a great love of science and, primarily due to a high school biology field trip, chose to pursue that science in the medical laboratory. (Engineering, my first love, wasn't available to me as most engineering schools weren't accepting women and those that did weren't consistently graduating them.) After four years of 60s Sputnik-driven science training in college, I took my first position as a Medical Technologist in a local hospital laboratory. Immediately, during the initial interview, I was informed that my primary role would be to teach the current employees the new techniques and procedures that I had learned during my training. During that year, I spent several months each in biochemistry and microbiology teaching and training employees, medical staff, and students. I had fallen into the teaching mode without ever choosing it.

Over the next 15 years, I took positions with successively higher responsibility and duties, but each time, my strength was my ability to teach and train. At one point, I took a position as a laboratory surveyor (inspector) for the national organization that certifies hospitals, but even then, our primary job was to sit with the personnel after the inspection and share our ideas and help them work out solutions to their problems - teaching. My last employment in Laboratory Medicine was as the Chief Technologist of a major hospital in Chicago where I served as coordinator for the consolidation of 35 individual laboratories, each with its own specialty and PhD director, into an efficient, computerized (the first computerized system in the city) Central Laboratory. Not only did this take tact and management skill but, once again, I found myself in a teaching mode as I implemented quality assurance procedures, training of Interns and Residents, and training of personnel for the new facility.

In 1983, when my only child was born through the magic of advances in fertility treatment, I left the medical profession to be a "mom". By the time he was nearly 2, we were both restless enough with each other's company that I began graduate work with the eye to becoming a research scientist in reproductive immunology. Almost immediately after joining the department, my age and teaching experience brought me the opportunity to work as an Instructor rather than the typical TA position open to most graduate students. I began teaching Introduction to Biology to classrooms with 300-500 students. Almost without realizing it, I was back in teaching mode. I have taught college biology classes ever since. I know that I have not chosen teaching as a career, it has chosen me. I could no more consider any other way of life than could I stop breathing. Is there such a thing as a genetic predisposition to teaching? I can only look around in my own family to wonder, especially as that son of mine, who has also tried to find other directions, keeps coming back to the reality that what he does best is share his thoughts and ideas with others - teaching.

Teaching Philosophy

Our understanding of the laws of the Universe, particularly the biological laws, changes each day. What we know and how we interpret that knowledge grows and modifies as each new piece of evidence accumulates. Though we seldom find out that our previous conclusions were completely wrong, our interpretations change as we learn more. Therefore, we do our students a disservice if we offer them a list of facts and suggest to them that this is the final word. If my biology teachers had taken that approach I would still be arguing for a 2 kingdom approach to the living world and DNA would be a mysterious new substance with some kind of effect on inheritance.

I have tried to keep up with techniques and theories of andragogy, as opposed to pedagogy, because I do believe that adults learn differently from children. Andragogy is defined as "the art and science of helping adults learn". When teaching adults, we cannot simply give them the information and expect them to incorporate it into their mental database. Children can memorize, and if they use the information often enough, it will find its way to their long-term memory and we will say they have learned the thing. Adults have very limited resources in their short-term memory and what they do have is filled with where they put the car keys, when they have to pick up the kids and when their boss wants them at work. We have to help these adults learn by understanding. If an adult understands something, he will know it forever. I can tell a child that the moon is made of cheese and he will accept that until a better idea comes along. The adult will ask a thousand questions because the data doesn't fit with what he already knows. Adults bring a lifetime of knowledge to the classroom. This puts a burden on us to fit what we are saying into that knowledge, but is also the joy of the classroom because each person's experience and background can be used to add to the sum at the end of the experience. I do not ask my students to memorize, I ask them to understand. I expect them to leave my classroom not with a list of facts, but with the tools to evaluate new facts as they encounter them. Six months after completing the course, they may not remember the names of each phylum of the animal kingdom, or the enzymes involved in photosynthesis, but they will know how all living things relate to each other and the importance of photosynthesis to the continuity of life. Hopefully they will then be able to use that information as they confront issues in their future such as discussions of evolution and the protection of our green-spaces.