Honoring My Teachers by My Actions
December 6, 2019 | Kelly G. Wilson
A GOOD PLACE TO START-CIRCLING BACK: Dianna and I are in Spokane visiting my Dad and Aunt Joan. While here, I made a trip out to Eastern Washington University to give a talk for a small number of students gathered by my friend Professor Russell Kolts. The talk was on finding our way into a world that is larger than the one we know or can even imagine.
Dianna and my story began here in Spokane when we got sober back in 1985. Dianna and I were bottomed out. I had just got out of a month in a locked psychiatric hospital and a month in drug and alcohol rehab. We had no home, no money, and a ton of debt. We asked my mom and dad if we could move in for a couple of months while we got back on our feet. Four years later, I graduated from Gonzaga and we moved out to go to grad school in Reno.
In between getting sober and Gonzaga, because I was broke and had dropped out of high school, I went to Spokane Falls Community College. That is where you go if you do not have the right academic record.
The very first class I took there was a Western Civ class taught by a guy named Richard Baldasty. Richard was a magnificent teacher and truly brought the subject matter to life.
Critically, Richard took time with me, he took me seriously and listened for what I was trying to do with my life. Richard is the one that encouraged me to go to Gonzaga. And, he reached out to people there who gave me a chance. He knew, though I was not sophisticated enough to know, that Gonzaga would offer an intellectual breadth and richness that would match my appetites.
Gonzaga gave me a full ride, I suspect on the very strong recommendation of Richard, who was an alum himself. That first year was also Sam Leigland’s first year on faculty at Gonzaga and I took his learning class during my first semester. Sam knew people like Steve Hayes and Charlie Catania and Jay Moore and Willard Day and Murray Sidman, along with many, many of my behavioral heroes, including B. F. Skinner.
So at my talk yesterday, I invited Richard. He came. And, I think could see and hear what a wonderful impact he had on me, how he saw in me things I could not see in myself, how he saw in me what I needed that went beyond what I was prepared to even want.
A great teacher can bend the arc of a life in ways that can produce extraordinary outcomes–sometimes in just a tiny number of interactions. This morning I got messages from Richard and couple students expressing appreciation for my odd autobiographical methods talk that started right here in Spokane at the community college and loops back around 35 years later to say thank you.
You might wonder how it is that this talk was at EWU rather than Gonzaga. Though I am ever grateful to Gonzaga, I am a better fit with EWU which has many, many first-generation college students. I was always an odd lot at Gonzaga. These youngsters at EWU have not grown up in privilege and do not know their own stature, whether they even belong in higher ed and in the broader world of knowledge creation. They do not know their own stature. I did the talk so that they would sit in front of someone who came up that same road and found his way, my way, to a life I could not have dreamed of.
I put in a slide, seen below. It is the home page of Spokane Falls Community College. It says “A Great Place to Start”.
It certainly was to me. And, for today, feeling incredible gratitude for my parents who took us in, for Daystar Group Home which employed me. and for all the teachers along the way who saw in me something I could not see in myself and who helped me to the next right thing, who cared for me persistently, even when I stumbled. This is the true meaning of being a teacher and I hope that I have honored them all in my actions.