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Show End of class like loss of a friend the editor's column r I By MARC f I HADDOCK It was like losing a good friend last week when only four students showed up for my technical writing class, and the class was cancelled. For over five years, I've been what they call an adjunct faculty member at Utah Technical College -- now Utah Valley Community College. That meant I was part-time -with no office, no telephone and no responsibility beyond teaching a class and grading papers. That was just the way I liked it. I got into the teaching business in a round-about fashion when a friend contacted me to see if I would like to take over his class. Al had been teaching part-time at the Tech while trying to find his first real job. And he had just been hired by a local computer firm. I had already held my first real job -- a couple of them, in fact. At the time, however, I was out of work, and Al knew that. When he called about the job, I was a little uncertain. I'm just a newspaperman, I protested, and I don't know anything about technical writing. I didn't even have a degree in English, but in communications. "Don't worry," he told me. "Writing is writing, and the students won't know how much you don't know." It wasn't hard to get hired, since the school was in a bit of a bind. It's no easy task to replace a teacher in the middle of a term, and I had the appropriate credentials - a college degree, a portfolio and lots of free time. And much to my surprise, teaching technical writing turned out to be a delightful experience. teaching were, for the most part, aimed at students who were studying electronics technology, and the last thing they wanted to do with the English language was create deathless prose. So I took a don't-we-all-hate-English classes approach to teaching. "How many of you hate English classes?" I would ask the first day of class. Most hands would go up. "Don't worry," I would continue, "this ain't one of 'em." And we went from there. Most of these college students were thrilled to learn how to write using shorter words, shorter sentences sen-tences and shorter paragraphs. I tailored my lectures to suit what I preached about writing - "Stop when you've said what you need to say." Sometimes our classes only lasted 10 minutes, sometimes they lasted the whole hour. But they ended when I ran out of things to say, and the students appreciated that, too. The assignments were tough, but well-defined, and I made it clear that the grade was very subjective. I gave the papers what I felt they deserved, and if they wanted to complain, I was willing to listen. And instead of correcting the assignments, I edited them. If my judgment was worth anything, they could learn from that. If not, I probably shouldn't be teaching the class. I've followed that philosophy for the past five years, teaching one or two classes each term. In the meantime, I found a real job, moved from one Fork to another and had two kids. Teaching that class became as much a part of my life as those other events. And like everything else, there were successes and failures. At the end of each term, as students turned in their finals, a few would tell me it was the best English class they'd ever taken. Others weren't so sure. One former student, who made a "C" in the class, accosted me in a Provo store, told me what a jerk I was, and then went on at length to the sales clerk how I had forced him to write a description of a clothespin in the class. (It's true. Once a term I would show up with a worn paper sack, pour out a pile of wooden clothespins on the table and tell students they could leave the room as soon as they had written a description of one. Those kids learned to appreciate the complexity com-plexity of the clothespin.) Despite such incidents, I enjoyed teaching the class, and when I learned last year it had been dropped as a required class for the electronics program, I knew my days as a teacher were numbered. I was thrilled when the class carried for the fall term, and even more so when it carried for winter. So it was no surprise when only four people showed up Wednesday for class, and I had to tell them there wouldn't be a class. But I was surprised at how hard it was to see that last student leave and know I wouldn't be teaching anymore. It's one more goodbye - one more time to turn in the keys, pack up the books, and move on. The subject, however, is not a favorite with many people who teach college English for a living. College English teachers tend to be people who are in love with the language, and its ability to evoke emotional or intellectual responses in different readers. They are impressed with colorful, concise prose as it is created by masters of the art. Technical writing, on the other hand, is workmanlike use of the language to get a point across clearly with as few words as possible; Technical writing is to literature what drafting is to art. In addition, the classes I was |