The professor responds

As I was looking over my class rosters for the upcoming spring semester last January, I noticed with a great deal of surprise and at least a little trepidation that Dick Trail and his wife Ann were enrolled in my Sociology of Love and Relationships class. I use the word trepidation because Dick and I have both written a column for this newspaper for several years and to say that we are not like-minded on a variety of fronts would be a gross understatement. In fact, in many areas, we're 180 degrees apart from each other in terms of how we see the world.

So my first thoughts were that Dick was enrolled more to banter, critique and criticize than to learn and I gave a great deal of thought to that possible dynamic as I prepared to teach the class for the first time. I knew all the other students in the class; in fact almost all of them had taken classes from me before so I knew what to expect from them but I wasn't at all sure about what to expect from Dick and Ann.

In Dick's own words, written in his column on Tuesday, May 5, he said "Over the years both Ann and I had occasionally been less than thrilled reading his columns on unrequited love, broken relationships, love, love, love and wondered what in the world he was teaching those college kids. To find out we signed up for the class..."

So, as it turns out, my initial suspicions were at least somewhat correct about their motivation for taking the class. In the weeks leading up to the beginning of the class, I seriously considered revamping the very way I planned to teach the class since I was fairly sure I was going to have a couple of skeptics and perhaps even critics on board that I don't usually have. But I eventually realized that assumption was not necessarily correct. In my Intro to Sociology classes, for example, I don't usually know ANY of the students because they tend to be first year freshmen so there could be and probably are skeptics and critics in the room and yet that has never influenced the way I teach. Whenever I'm observed by Dr. Tubbs, the college vice-president, as part of his duties and responsibilities, I don't alter the way I teach. So it certainly didn't make any sense that I should change my teaching style for Dick and Ann Trail either. The style I use to teach is the style I've been using ever since I taught my first Political Science class as a graduate teaching assistant at Oklahoma State University and if it was good enough for thirty three years of college students at five different colleges and universities, it would have to be good enough for Dick and Ann Trail too.

But sometimes amazing things happen on the way to foregone conclusions. Dick and Ann proved from day one to be engaging students and delightful classmates. They bonded almost immediately with students five decades younger than them and when they contributed to classroom discussions, the contributions were always positive and reflective. I believe the educational experience of the traditional students in that class was significantly enriched by listening to the comments and observations from a couple coming up on their 50th wedding anniversary; even though a few times I think they came across as "old fogeys" to the younger students for some of their attitudes and perspectives.

And to top things off, in spite of my initial trepidation about their intentions for taking the class and their initial reasons, Dick, Ann, and I formed a friendship; a deep and abiding friendship based on mutual respect that I hope will be life-long. As I tend to do with all my friends, we came to emphasize our commonalities and kept to ourselves most of our differences. Dick and Ann come from a different generation than me, although in our particular case, it's really less than half a generation. But it's perhaps the most important half-generation in the history of this country because Dick and Ann were approaching adulthood in the 1950s while I was approaching it in the '60s. Dick and Ann grew up during the Eisenhower administration with flat-top haircuts, poodle-skirts, Eddy Arnold, Doris Day, and sea-to-shining-sea conservatism while I grew up during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations with three major political assassinations in a five-year period, the Civil Rights movement, the Women's movement, the Vietnam war, American soldiers shooting and killing American students on American soil, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and a liberal generation of young people who believed the government had screwed everything up.

So it's not surprising at all that our politics are different because our experiences were different. We are what we learn and Dick, Ann, and I were learning different things from different perspectives and for different reasons.

But it's amazing how one's attitude towards another person can change when you actually get to know that person. There are people in this community who don't know me at all and yet stare at me with hatred in their eyes because of some of the things I write about in this column. I wouldn't suggest that Dick and Ann fell into the "hatred" column but I think, most definitely, the "suspicion" column and I tended to see Dick the same way. We both live in the same world and yet interpret the things that happen in this world in significantly different ways because of our perspectives and our experiences. But when all we know about another person is restricted to the words they write, we really don't know that person at all.

Dick, Ann, and I now "know" each other; not at just a political level as we did in the past but now at a personal level. We know each other's hearts I think. We know we want things to always be better than they are; we just have different ideas about how to get that done. I admire and respect the accomplishments Dick has achieved in his life and I think he now has a better appreciation of mine as well.

I'm glad and grateful that Dick and Ann enrolled in Sociology of Love and Relationships because not only did they enrich the class, they enriched my life.