Testifying

Jenna paid me a visit yesterday. Jenna graduated in 2012, and is about to finish up at U of O law. When she was here, she was cheerful, hard working, and a joy to teach. She told me from the start that she wanted to go to law school, and I told her she should join the debate team, but she never did. Over the years she's told me that difficult tests and rigorous standards for writing assignments did a good deal to prepare her for law classes. And yes, yesterday she told me she should've tried debate. Jenna is well positioned to go out and make a very satisfying, meaningful life, and I'm proud of her. And I got to teach her.

I have a student in public speaking this term who is very different from his classmates in a number of ways. For one, he's a veteran. For another, he's unbelievably eloquent. His word choice is so unique and evocative and powerful, I've told him several times he reminds me of a slam poet. For a third, he has something going on that from time to time causes him to freeze, dead silent, in the middle of a speech; not just for five or ten seconds, but for two or three minutes. On some occasions it's meant he was unable to continue and had to sit down, while on others he's shaken it off and finished. There are five assigned speeches in my class, and on top of those we do a class exercise in impromptu speaking that supplies a little more practice. On his third assigned speech, he made it through for the first time ever without freezing, but he came in under the minimum time limit, and was quite vexed with himself. But then, this week, he gave the fourth assigned speech, which is the most difficult of all of them, and he nailed it: beautiful construction and language, no freezes, well within the time limit. The next day I got to my office and found a drawing had been slipped under the door. On the back, it said, "I knew I was an artist, but I didn't know until now that I was a poet." Yesterday, he stayed after class and said "Not bad for my fifth speech ever, eh?" I told him I was very, very proud of him.

Sierra is the backbone of the forensics team this year. She is talented, upright, industrious, and genuinely the sweetest and most loving person it's ever been my privilege to coach in speech and debate, which is not a community of people known for their sweetness and love. A few weeks ago, she asked me if I would write a recommendation letter for a scholarship she sought. I wrote the simple truth, expanding what I said in the second sentence of this paragraph into a full page letter. All of it was direct and honest, and none of it puffed up, exaggerated or misleading. Yesterday she emailed me that she got the scholarship. It reminded me of years and years ago when I performed Jordan and Tessa's wedding: I got to say "I now pronounce you husband and wife," and the world was different. Here, I got to describe what I saw, and then affix my title to the letter, and that helped move a foundation to give Sierra money that helped make school affordable.

When I arrived here in 2007, they told me that one goal was to prepare more NCC students to go on for graduate degrees. They also told me that historically, very few communication majors had done so. Since then, two of my advisees have done master's degrees in counseling (Krista and Britni), one in TESOL (Ambria), and Jenna did law school, but no one had ever pursued a graduate degree in communication, which left me just a tiny bit irrationally sad. But then, last week, I found out from Kelsay that she was going to be the first. Several months ago, she told me she had her eye on a master's program out in the midwest, and asked if I would write her a recommendation. Kelsay, like Jenna and Sierra, had been a career-lengthener and a burnout antidote, so of course I was willing. One fun twist to the task was that I knew a faculty member at the college who happened to be the associate director of the graduate program, so I decided to try to push all his buttons toward getting Kelsay a graduate assistantship. As with Sierra, I just told the simple truth about what I'd seen, but I chose the details that would make her a good candidate for scarce assistantship dollars. So when she stopped by with the good news last week, it included the wonderful detail that she was funded. She's going to teach public speaking, and every time I imagine her in a public speaking classroom, I get excited for the students who are going to learn from her. She'll be superb at it.

This year has been one of the most exciting in the past several years for newly declared communication majors. I won't name names and go into detail here, because I'd leave someone out and inflict hurt feelings, but I look over the list, and I can't contain my happy little office chair wiggle. (I do make sure my office door is closed, first.) I know there are  going to be days they drive me crazy, and I'll probably have to chew each one of them out once or twice, but it's an incredible, talented, joyful, lovable, wonderful group of people, and I have the privilege of a front row seat while they grow into themselves.

God is good.