Senior Faculty Member Dr. Richard Wakefield Reflects on 38 Years at TCC

Dr. Richard Wakefield, TCC’s senior faculty member, retires at the end of Fall Quarter after teaching in the English Department for almost 38 years. We hope you enjoy Professor Wakefield’s essay of reflection on his time at TCC.

In 1985, a couple of years out of grad school, I was teaching night classes for Central Washington University and working days as a writing consultant in aerospace, including being farmed out to NASA to work on the International Space Station and the shuttle program. The day job was remunerative and interesting. Still, working it side by side with a teaching gig, I could easily see which path my ideal career should take.

I applied to several local community colleges as well as to Western Washington University and Northern Montana College. Although my wife and I wanted to stay in the Puget Sound area – we wanted to raise our family here, and her career was beginning to take off – the Bellingham and Montana jobs were still appealing.

I was offered an adjunct position at WWU and was scheduled interviews at NMU and three community colleges. At TCC, I met a group of people who I wanted as colleagues; among them were Frank Garratt, Bob Thaden, Jerry McCourt, Joanne McCarthy, Dick Lewis. (Georgia McDade was on leave that year, but if she had been there, she’d be on the list, too!) It was easy to sense that these people worked together with a shared sense of mission. There was nothing pro forma about the interview, just sincere questions about teaching and curriculum and serving out students.

After that interview, I told Catherine that if they offered me the job I would ask all the other colleges to remove my name from consideration. They did, and I did. After marrying Catherine and having our daughters, it was the best decision I – we! -- ever made. Even after a complete turnover of faculty and six or seven presidents, and even during my times of darkest self-doubt, I never second guessed that decision. My colleagues have made me a better teacher and a better person. They have challenged me and supported me, all in the interest of serving our students. If I start giving examples this essay will stretch to volumes. Let it suffice to say that my life has been richer for their influence and that they guided and sometimes goaded me to help our students get where they wanted and needed to be.

Has anyone else been in the same office for 38 years? Has anyone else been in the same office for 38 years and still not figured out what that second light switch is for? I never lost the sense of joy in being able to walk down the hall, lean into a friend’s office, and have a conversation about literature, music, physics, geology, math, teaching in general, and then channel the experience back into my teaching.

I was lucky enough to team up with colleagues to teach in coordinated studies. We combined literature, composition, philosophy, psychology, music, and other disciplines. It was the best teacher training a person could have. Coordinating with a colleague or two, teaching elbow-to-elbow, shaping our lessons to complement each other’s – I don’t know that I’d have the energy or intellectual resources to do it again, but it made me a better teacher, and it made TCC a better school.

I’m a little sad that the world has evolved in ways that make it necessary to focus more on guiding our students very deliberately toward specific careers. In our regular classes as well as in those coordinated studies classes, we had the excitement of seeing our students discover interests and talents that they hadn’t suspected in themselves. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that fewer and fewer people have the luxury of going to college for self-discovery. College is expensive, life is expensive, and time is short. So it goes.

For all the ways the college has changed, the devotion to our students never faded. We – I -- have learned to be more sensitive to the parts of our students’ lives that don’t show up in a transcript, the ways they struggle to overcome countless injustices and personal obstacles. While that journey is never complete, we are much, much farther along that road than we were 38 years ago.

I have also came to realize that college teachers tend to be way too sure of the benefits of the classroom. We are the ones who, as students, flourished there, and naturally our earliest models were our own teachers. There’s no doubt that a good lecture is a good learning experience for our students, not only for the information conveyed, but for the lesson in how someone who knows a lot strives to make that knowledge accessible and exciting. What we miss, however, are the students for whom the classroom is alienating, or at least stultifying, for whom the information comes too fast or too slow, and a half-dozen students who are better aligned with the teacher’s style wave their hands in response to every question. When we walk out of the classroom feeling that we really nailed it, we’re probably right; we did nail it – for those half-dozen students and, maybe, for another half-dozen. Meanwhile, another dozen or so are left wondering where those fifty minutes went, and whether they can slog through another fifty minutes tomorrow. We have explored alternatives to traditional classroom teaching. No surprise that we have discovered that nothing works for everyone, and nothing works for anyone all the time. There are a lot of wrong ways to teach, and no single right way.

One part of the old life at TCC I miss is the commencement tradition of having the faculty march from their office buildings and converge outside the gym. It was always stirring to be part of those four or five streams of robed academics streaming into a single column to honor our graduates. It seems like a small thing, but good big things are always made up of a whole bunch of good small things.

For many years I continued to teach in the evenings for CWU and, later, for UWT. There were two years as visiting faculty at The Evergreen State College. I also had a 25+ year gig as a literary critic for the Seattle Times, which led to editors from other publications asking me to contribute, which in turn led me in directions I couldn’t have anticipated, like publishing articles on art and philosophy. Eventually, some publications started accepting my poetry, and that turned into its own career. We have lost count, but the total number of essays, reviews, articles, and poems is somewhere north of seven hundred. There are four books in there, too.

Every morning for fifty years I have gotten up at five or so, headed out the door, and logged miles – through graduate school, parenthood, and all my jobs. Until a couple of years ago, I ran. Now, in a concession to age, I walk, but still eight or nine miles a day. This fall I hit 130,000 miles total – a bit over 51 miles a week on average, although quite a bit more than that each week after our daughters didn’t need constant tending. I have no idea whether all those miles will help me live longer; I know for sure that they have helped me live better. As long as my feet work, those morning excursions will continue.

I have tried to keep up my guitar, piano, and banjo playing. I’d like to claim that my very limited progress in music was due to lack of time. Most likely, it has to do with lack of talent and discipline. One of my hopes for retirement is to focus on music to get as good as I can before the clock runs out.

Keeping in touch with friends and former colleagues is important. Georgia McDade gets the credit for maintaining the network of retired TCC faculty, and she invited me to join long before my own retirement loomed. The catch is that Catherine and I plan to move to Eugene, where one set of kids will be minutes away and the other set within an hour and a half. Still, the miracle of the internet gives me hope that we won’t lose those precious connections.