Teacher of the Year

A blare of trumpets outside her classroom interrupted Emily Teipe as she was teaching her Wednesday morning American History class on March 25. What she first thought might be mariachi music turned out to be a contingent of well-wishers, led by President Hodge, come to inform her that she’d been chosen as Fullerton College’s teacher of the year.

“The in-class announcement was great,” said Neil Patel, one of Teipe’s students.

“Trumpets came in and everyone was wondering what was happening," Patel said. "Dr. Teipe was shocked thinking that it was a Cinco De Mayo event. Some students were laughing while others thought it might be someone who is running for A.S. in the upcoming elections.”

Teipe will be among 60 teachers of the year representing public schools and community colleges throughout the county to be honored at a dinner at the Disneyland Hotel on October 23, said Kristin Rigby, project manager at the Orange County Department of Education.

The teachers will receive gifts including $500 from Schools First Federal Credit Union and an award from the sponsor of the event, the James Hines Foundation, which varies in amount from year to year but is usually about $900, Rigby said.

The 60 honorees are also eligible to chosen as one of five Orange County teachers of the year for 2010. Winners will be announced on May 7. Four will come from k-12 schools, and one will represent a community college. Each of the five finalists will be receive a cash award of $15,000.

Teipe knew she had been nominated, but she was surprised to win.

“I’ve been nominated 17 years consecutively for this award,” she said. “I just considered it an honor to be nominated.”

Teipe usually teaches Western civilization and, her great love, women’s history, although this semester she is teaching U.S. history instead of Western civilization. She was in graduate school when she took her first class in women’s history.

“I sat in that class and I was hooked,” said Teipe. “I. Was. Hooked. I was like, ‘There’s this whole gap in my education. There’s this big empty space. Where are the women?'”

When she was hired full-time at Fullerton College, after teaching part-time for two or three years, she proposed a class in women’s history here. When there was no textbook available, she wrote one herself.

“I have hundreds of young women go through that class every semester,” she said. “I’m always running into someone in Orange County who was in my women’s history class. I go to the Cheesecake Factory and the server says, ‘Oh, Dr. Teipe, I was in your women’s history class.’”

Teipe said she thinks teaching is very life enhancing.

“I just wanted to be in a place where I could counsel women, I could encourage them, I could help them. I was a single mom going through school. I’d been there, done all that. When they come to me in class with their stories, I’m like, ‘I hear you.’”

Men also enjoy her classes, she said.

Patel, who is the recorder for the Student Senate as well a being a member of Teipe’s American history class, agreed with that assessment.

“Dr. Teipe is a very funny teacher,” he said. “She gives great lectures and interesting books to be read but very difficult tests.”

Performance Cancelled

If you went to It's a Grind to see Mossi last night, you were disappointed. He didn't show -- but he has a great excuse. His wife went into labor with their first child. Cheers to Mossi and his wife!

Trust Betrayed

Emilio Perez Fired
Tuesday night the district board of trustees came out of closed session and, with a unanimous block vote and no public discussion, approved several items on their agenda, one of which was the termination of Emilio Perez, director of public safety at Fullerton College.

Why? Who Knows.
Rumors both licentious and larcenous had been kindled by the sudden removal of Perez, who was put on administrative leave last January pending the outcome of a district investigation. Investigation of what? Who knows? Reporters at the Hornet tried doggedly to unearth a source who would speak on the record, to no avail.

One reason given for keeping quiet was to protect Perez’ privacy. That’s a sticky issue, but I would argue that campus administration should consider the possibility that public disclosure would be a healthy response.

The California Public Records Act makes most records held by public agencies, including community colleges, open to public inspection, but Government Code 6254 (c) exempts: “Personnel, medical, or similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Privacy No Excuse
How do you interpret that word “unwarranted?” An unwarranted invasion of privacy is forbidden, but are there cases in which a violation of an employee’s privacy is warranted? What would those cases be?

The First Amendment Coalition, a non-profit organization formed to protect the people’s right to know, says here that California courts have found that if an investigation of a public employee results in discipline or termination, then the contents of that investigation should be open to the public.

We Should Be Told
A reasonable person might ask whether there’s any purpose to be served by airing dirty laundry when Perez is gone. Whatever he did is over and done. Why raise a ruckus over a dead issue?

But just what is the real issue, and is it dead or simply voiceless? Was Perez the problem, or was he a symptom of a problem not yet resolved and now shuffled under the rug? How will we ever know?

"No one's gonna help you"
Here’s the basis of my concern: Late last September, a student came into the offices of the Hornet with a complaint. (See the Hornet's story here.) She’d been using a restroom in the school library when someone thrust a camera-phone under the divider separating her stall from the next one over.

She was stunned into inaction briefly, but then she rushed out after the perpetrator. She saw no one, but she found a campus staff member who said she’d seen the likely suspects and might be able to identify them. The student also noticed cameras installed in the library that might have taped the fleeing peeping Toms.

She went to campus safety, numerous times, but felt like she was being brushed off. She went to the vice president of Student Services, which oversees campus safety.

“I told her honestly that, more than the incident itself, the way that it was handled, the things that I was hearing from the director [Emilio Perez], actually made it a lot worse than the incident itself.

"And she said, ‘I understand that. Let me talk to him.’”

The vice president was polite and prompt, but didn’t really help. Campus safety had told the student that they’d reviewed the tapes from the library, but, according the student, the v.p. said she’d been told the library cameras weren’t working.

As a last resort the student came to the Hornet to tell her story.

Why the Hornet? She said that students should be given a heads up so that if they're ever in a similar situation they will quickly grab the offending phone, thus taking matters, literally, into their own hands. Here’s how she put it.

“Students come here to better themselves. And I strongly believe that they should provide an environment where it's safe for us to freely educate ourselves, but things like this happen and you're just lied to, and I feel like I've just been jerked around. That's why I want everyone to know that they should grab the phone if that were to happen to them. I want them to know that that's what they should do because after that it's too late. No one's gonna help you.”

That’s a hell of a way for a student to feel about her campus. Maybe hushing things up, moving things along, and shutting students out of issues that directly affect them isn't the best way to foster trust.

Mossi at It's a Grind!

The multi-talented Mossi Watene will be playing at a coffee house in La Habra this Friday. Here's the clever and engaging promo he made in the library at Fullerton College. He's a student here at FC, of course.



To hear Mossi sing, check the column on the right.

KinderCaminata

On March 20, hundreds of kindergarten students descended on Fullerton College for the annual KinderCaminata, a festive mix of childish enthusiasm and college spirit that's been going on since 1994 when 2000 children attended the first event at Santa Ana College. Galal Kernahan proposed the concept to Los Amigos, an Orange County service club whose motto is, "You plead it, you lead it." And so he did, with great success.

Each year kids from local public schools are bused to college campuses where they are treated to events and entertainments designed to spark their interest in attending college when they grow up. The recent gala at Fullerton College was the first I'd ever seen or heard of KinderCaminata. I had a blast. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves too, both the little ones and the college kids.

You can read the Hornet's story by Alyssa Navarro here.

Romance and Facebook

Photo Credit: Leo Postovoit

I'm trying to catch up with the new social networking tools because I'm told they're a goldmine for journalists. But mining is hard work, and you never know if or when you'll strike gold. I posted and twittered for quite a while before I found anything glittery.

Facebook is a carnival, and I still find it confusing. Yesterday the managing editor of the school paper sent me a message, and I had a heck of a time dealing with it. Where was it? Was it on his wall? Mine? Some sort of private message? Was he not answering me because he was busy or because I replied in the wrong place?

Finally I called him, using my landline because my cellphone still feels like unfamiliar technology and I don't trust it. It was jarring when the managing editor of the paper last semester asked us all for phone numbers and specified that they should be "real" phones, not "some number your mother's going to answer."

I think by "real" she meant "cell," which seems as odd to me as the notion that my mother, who lives in another town, would pick up my landline. For the purposes of that discussion, I guess I am my mother -- that is, the person who answers that ancient, immobile instrument in the kitchen. They always said we turn into our mothers. I was warned.

Then there's Twitter. It's quieter and I like that. I can also see some real potential in it for journalists. I can send short text messages from my computer or my phone (well, I can't send text messages from my phone because it's primitive and I'm incompetent, but, in general, people can send them), and they'll be received by anyone who is following me, following being a little like stalking, but with the active cooperation of the stalkee.

Oddly, though, the most interesting part of Twitter has been the minutiae. Paul ate at The Hat and posted a photo of his chili fries in a tweet. That's the sort of little stuff that makes our lives real. After a while you begin to feel like you know Paul. And you develop a craving for chili fries.

And then, amid the carnival confusion and the twittering minutiae, I catch a glimmer of something else. Ethan Morse, the student trustee representing Fullerton College on the district board of trustees, has just proposed to his girlfriend, after sunset at the pier, with the words "Elizabeth Marry me" spelled out in candles in the sand, placed there by friends. There are pictures on Facebook the next day.

Pure gold.

Blogs vs. Newspapers

Print journalism is on the decline, and that's ok with me.

Don't get me wrong. My father was a reporter. (That's him on the left -- Ernie Crowley at work at the Middleboro Gazette in the middle 1950's.) I grew up thinking newspaper writing was pretty grand.

Now that I'm studying journalism I've come to realize its importance in enlarging our worlds and holding us all together.

But journalism is not synonymous with print journalism, and print journalism is turning out to be unsustainable. It's a very odd notion, isn't it, to gather "all the news that's fit to print" and distribute it daily to thousands of households on paper that will fill recycling bins and line birdcages the next day?

Which brings me to blogs.

Among journalists it's a hotly debated question (see the editorial in today's Hornet) whether blogs will replace newspapers. The argument against blogs is primarily that they are unreliable. Who knows who's writing them, how knowledgeable or trustworthy the writer may be?

But that betrays a basic misunderstanding of the blog.

Does anyone worry about how knowledgeable or trustworthy a printing press is? Or a roll of newsprint? A blog is a medium the way newsprint is a medium.

Is anyone seriously going to argue that Pravda, for example, was totally trustworthy just because it was printed on paper and its name means "truth" in Russian? What about The Enquirer? It's a newspaper. Does that make it a reliable source of news?

The reason people trust newspapers, to whatever extent they do, is that those newspapers have established a solid reputation. Readers sort out the wheat from the chaff when they read, and they can do that online as well as anywhere else. They can tell the difference between The New York Times and The National Enquirer.

Sure some blogs are tripe, but they're not all tripe. Readers with a taste for top sirloin will be able to find that online as well. Some pretty impressive writers have jumped on the blogwagon. If you need convincing, check out the bloggers at the Huffington Post.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

To honor the date, here I am in a hollow tree in Ireland.... a v-e-r-y long time ago.

Free Speech

Camille Paglia's in the news for speaking out against even the suggestion that the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated, though the chances of that actually happening may be pretty slim.

"I don't get it," she says in this audio clip from a radio interview on New York's "The Mark Simone Show."

"The essence of the 1960's, my generation, was about free speech," says Paglia. "That's what Lenny Bruce was about. It was about the free speech movement, for heaven's sake, at Berkeley. What are my fellow Democrats doing?"

Maybe it's an old lady thing.

I was born in the same year as Paglia, and I remember the free speech movement. What happened to it?

You can be given the cold shoulder, fired, thrown out, divorced, or excommunicated for saying the wrong thing. There was a time when you could stand on a soapbox in a public square and rant at length, but public space is diminishing and free speech rights don't apply in private space.

Campuses are considered semi-public. In the interest of safety, campus officials may restrict free speech.

Even then, expressing an unpopular opinion can get sticky. Campus safety felt they needed to protect one speaker this past January , and the student paper itself objected to the same speaker's message last year.

To better manage possible conflict, Fullerton College's free speech area has been shrunk from the entire quad to a postage-stamp sized bit of lawn, and speakers must reserve a time-slot in advance (see AP5550).

That's better than the strategy at Yuba Community College which not only required a reservation to speak in a sharply defined area, but made even that option available for only two hours a week. That landed them in court.

So is it an old lady thing, this taste for free thought and outrageous opinion? Or is there still room left in the world for a little political incorrectness in the interest of diversity?

Taking Classes vs. Learning

Yesterday I asked a member of the science faculty for help with an audio project on the Asian citrus psyllid, and his first answer was that he's too busy teaching classes to keep up with the topic -- that topic, plant pests, being his specialty, you understand.

I sympathize completely. School really can get in the way of learning, whether you're teaching the classes or taking them.

It is one of the great blessings of not being a serious student -- that is, I'm not going for a degree or a certificate or even for a grade -- that I can concentrate on learning what really matters.

I take only classes that meet my specific need to learn, and I concentrate on those parts of the coursework that I care about and just don't worry about the rest. It's amazing how much I'm learning this way, but it's also sad how much school tries to get in the way -- how much I'm supposed to read that isn't particularly useful, or how many topics I'm supposed to cover that aren't important to me, or how many topics are important but aren't given enough weight in class.

I guess being older and really focused gives me a different perspective. I haven't got time to worry about details that are, in all senses of the word, academic. I'm too busy on a grand adventure.

Thoreau wrote, "If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets."

I take that to mean, don't sweat the small stuff. It works for me. You just need to be sure what stuff is small and what's big.

By the way, the science guy ended up being a big help. :)

Photo Credit: David Hall,
USDA. Agricultural Research Service

SDS Lives!

The first time I went to a community college, in the late sixties, Students for a Democratic Society was a big deal. They were organized and exciting and protesting the war for all they were worth. In those days it was the Viet Nam war.

And now they're back!

Last Friday I attended a "student rally" at Pasadena City College. Originally designed to protest budget cuts, the event became a last-minute thank you to legislators who'd just surprised everyone by passing next year's budget several months early, and surprised community colleges by being very kind to them.

I put "student rally" in quotes because the rally was organized by a community college public relations group. It had sponsors and VIP seating and began with an opening address by the president of Pasadena City College.

That's not the way I remember the student rallies of my youth. In the old days there were blockades designed to keep students out and shut down the school. At this new-style rally students were bused in, and there were uniformed police cadets politely pointing the way.

But guess what? A little background research turned up the cool fact that SDS has been resurrected and students are still taking to the streets.

Need to see it to believe it? Check out the video: Funk the War

Ho`omaika`i

It means "congratulations" in Hawaiian, where Larry Buckley, Fullerton College's Dean of Instruction, earned his advanced degrees.

I never learned the whole story, but apparently his job was in some jeopardy but has been salvaged. I've never met the man, but I've heard only good things about him, so I guess it's a good thing that he's still among us.

Get a Room -- A Locker Room

Did you know that cops sometimes wear garters that hold their socks up by attaching them to their shirts?

I know because I see police academy students dressing on the roof of the campus parking structure. No nudity, you understand. Just the occasional unexpected man in boxers. One of them said this is where they've been told to change. Before the structure was built, they got ready for class in a parking lot.

I'm not going to tell you which parking structure or when, but it's been going on for a while, and it's taken me a while to figure out what I think about it.

Finally I realized that coming around the back of my van and finding a guy reaching into his open fly to adjust... well, whatever it is guys do adjust ... pisses me off.

No, I'm not mad at the guy. I'm pretty sure it wasn't his idea. He's just going along to get along.

And I wasn't shocked or embarrassed or titillated. Just pissed off.

I'm way too old for this.

I'm too old to put up with second-class treatment just because I'm a student. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? I mean, the guys who are changing are students and the people who park in the structure are students. Someone has decided that behavior that wouldn't be tolerated in another public place is perfectly ok if it's just a bunch of students who are affected.

I don't think the practice shows much respect for me or for the students who are changing their clothes in public.

Have I got this wrong? Is stripping to your boxers while standing next to your car in a parking lot pretty much routine these days? What do you think?

California's Budget - How Long Will It Last?

California legislators finally pulled it all together and passed a budget last week, but it may come unraveled -- again! -- and pretty quickly at that.

This year's budget, which covers from June 2008 through June 2009, wasn't approved till September, a jaw-grinding 85 days late, and then it fell swiftly apart. By December it was so out of balance the governor called a fiscal state of emergency and convened a special session of the legislature... which then haggled till last week when it finally approved a plan covering the rest of this fiscal year and next year as well.

But will it last? Is the California budget in good shape for the next year-and-a-half?

Maybe not so much. There's been no real long-term fix. The state is depending on borrowed money, more stimulus money than the Department of Finance says we're likely to get, and a sale of bonds that depends on voter approval in May.

And even if we can borrow everything we want, get all the economic recovery money we need, and sell those bonds, those are all short-term fixes. We're still at sea in a leaky boat, bailing for all we're worth.

Fred Williams, finance guru at the Chancellor's office, uses terms like "smoke and mirrors" and "house of cards" and "How long can they keep this up?" when explaining the budget.

Sooner or later we need to head for dry dock and fix the damn boat.

Here's a good source of information: The California Budget Project.

Larry Buckley, Administrator of the Year

At its last meeting on Thursday Fullerton College's faculty senate voted to give their first annual Administrator of the Year award to Larry Buckley, Vice President of Instruction.

A faculty award for administration is not a totally predictable move. As Ken Collins, faculty senate president, said, "We tend to do battle with administrators."

Nor is it typical to create an award and choose the first recipient all in one meeting. Usually there's a proposal to make an award, a vote on the proposal, an announcement that nominations are being accepted, time for names to be received and studied by a subcommittee, followed by a vote of the senate.

Collins explained why faculty should offer this first award without the usual preliminaries: "We do have a situation that I think Larry in particular could benefit greatly from receiving this if it was awarded and that was sort of why we're rushing at this time."

The situation was never explained in the open meeting. What situation? Why the rush?

Collins did say he'd talked to some members before the meeting, and in fact Buckley was nominated by Jennifer Combs, curriculum chair, before Collins mentioned his name. It looked like an orchestrated move.

The closest I got to an explanation on the record was the suggestion that more information would be forthcoming at the next board meeting Tuesday night.

To be continued...

Back to School

At the age of 60 I somewhat impulsively decided to return to college. I've got a degree and more academic experience than one degree would imply, but I never found work I liked with the skills I had, and after some years of retirement those skills were rusty anyway. I needed a skill-set makeover.

So here I am listening to teachers young enough to be my children. They look out over an audience of mostly youthful faces and say things like, "You are the wave of the future."

It's a little weird.

These are my impressions, the events that have caught my eye, the issues that intrigue me.