CWU LIVING HISTORY PROJECT

Susan Madley

(Transcription of Tape 1, Side 1)

EJ:        [Tape begins mid-sentence] 2002, and we have the privilege of interviewing Professor Susan Madley [sounds like “Medley”], just recently retired.  The interviewer is Eldon Jacobsen, and on the camera is Ham Howard.  Susan, in order to give the listener a frame of reference, it would help if you gave a background of yourself:  your birthplace and where you grew up, parents, siblings, whatever you feel like bringing up at this point.

SM:      Okay.  I was – as you will detect fairly quickly into this interview, I was born in England, and my students here at Central used to say “You have an accent,” and I was always very quick to point out that I didn’t have the accent because I spoke English, and they spoke a dialect called American.  So we used to have some fun right off the bat.

So anyway, I was born in England during the War.  Actually, I was born just before WWII, and so I was brought up sleeping many nights in a bomb shelter with bombs dropping, and food rationing – I can remember the first piece of candy I had because I was quite old at the time, because we didn’t have those things.  I was educated K-12 in England in both private and public schools.  Went to London University, got my Bachelor’s, and I double-majored in English and Physical Education.  I was an athlete.  I swam on the British team, so I was always involved in sports, and I coached as well, later on in life. 

Having graduated – and I modestly say with a distinction – a national distinction from the University, I then taught K-12, and I taught English, and I taught Physical Education, and again, I coached.  I then went to a teacher’s college to teach, and I was very young, and I’m not quite sure how I got there, but at the same time I was working on a Master’s degree – again at London University – and that was in Curriculum and Supervision.  And then in 1966 – oh, I had taught, also – in the summers I taught in Munich University, and – some summer sessions – and I also taught for a while in the public school system in Switzerland, in Gerrodsville [phonetic], just outside of Zurich – which was interesting trying to teach in a foreign language.  My German was not good, but I’d learned survival very fast.  I have a great belief in language – the way you learn it is immersion, and – immersion  plus the desire and need to learn a language, and it will come. 

But – so I did that, and then I came – when I was teaching at the college, we had a visiting Professor from the US who was a Music Professor, and she and I became good friends, and she knew I was anxious to work on a PhD, and to – and I’d done a lot of traveling already, and she said, “Well why don’t you come to the US?”  And I said, “Well, I don’t know about that.”  Anyway, long story short – I came to the US and I was employed at Eastern Michigan University in – in Michigan, which is about six miles down the road from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where, of course, is the University of Michigan.

EJ:        What year was that?

SM:      That – I came in 1966, and started teaching at Eastern in the fall of that year – the fall of that year.  Um – and I taught some Physical Education, I coached at the University, and I also taught some classes in the Psychology department because I had a strong Psych background, too, when I was doing my Master’s.  Then I stayed at Eastern for quite – for about 11 years.  Started as an Assistant Professor, became an Associate.  In the mean time, working on my PhD at Michigan, which was down the road, and I worked – I did my PhD in Psychology and Administration – I had a double.  And that kept me going, and because I had the double I did 92 hours beyond my Master’s.  It was a chore, but worth while. 

I then had an opportunity to – oh, in the mean time I’d taken time off from the University to – because I hadn’t taught in the public schools in this country.  So I took time – a semester – two semesters off from the University when I was still working on my PhD, and taught in the inner city of Detroit.  And that’s when they were locking us in and out, there were buildings being burned, and it was quite an experience at that time.  When I found that students are students the world over.  They’re not much different.  American students were a little more verbal in the classroom than British students or European students, but when I gave them something to write, it was a revelation.  The “We look like [inaudible]” power system that I was brought up in in England is you write a lot more, and you are not as verbal in the classroom.  The American students were much more verbal, and ahead, I think, of handling themselves verbally in a classroom, but when it came to putting it in writing, then they, I thought, left a little bit to be desired.  And I mean that at the University level, too, not just in – I mean, in Detroit.  There were lots of problems.

EJ:        You were teaching what level?  Maybe I missed it.

SM:      In the public schools when I [inaudible] –

EJ:        Secondary?

SM:      Yes, high school.  I prefer the – I’ve always preferred – I’ve done third grade, but high school was always my –

EJ:        About what year was this in Detroit?

SM:      It was Sixty-nine, I think.

EJ:        Because it gives a frame of reference of the upheavals.

SM:      Yes.  And even on our campuses then there was the Black – the Black – Eastern Michigan University has a high Afro American population, and it – there was a lot of unrest.  Students would be very militant, and we also had the Viet Nam War was on, and that was a cultural shock to me, because having been brought up in WWII, I was very supportive of military, and I was not popular at demonstrations because I felt that it was criminal that we were – whether we should be there or not, to send our young men and women over there – being yanked out of my classroom sometimes, during the middle of – and then not to support them.  I found that very hard, culturally, and then I remembered that this country, until very recently – 9/11 – had not really been invaded in that sense.  And so I understood it, but it was emotionally difficult for me. 

Anyway, I got my PhD in ’78.  It took me a while because of the hours, and because I was working full time.  Then I was employed by the public school district.  I became an administrator, since – because I do like the public school system and that age group.  So I was Director of Athletics, actually, for a very large school district.  And then I became a Principal of a high school in Ann Arbor, and then I became Assistant Superintendent, but I didn’t like that.  I liked the contact with the students, and you lose that.  You just get everybody’s litigation problems. 

And then I became – I was a Principal in Ohio – Cleveland, Ohio.  They called me up and asked me to come.  I had a reputation of going into schools and cleaning them up, and – but that gets to be very wearing, after a while.  And so I’ve been now in high school administration as a Principal in high schools, and the last school I was in was about 2000 students.  That was not a small high school.  And I decided I was done fixing things – the same thing I’d fixed so many times before, and I figured that I was getting a little burned out, and so I decided, “What do I really want to do?”  And I – and people said, “Well you’re crazy.  You’re 50 years old.  What do you mean you’re going to go do something else?”  I said, “Yes.  I want to go back to University, where I came from in the first place –” because I didn’t do things in a more traditional sense.  And I said, “Yes, I want to go back to University because I’m current, and I want to help prepare administrators for the real world, and not for a textbook world – for the real world.”  And in the mean time I had been stabbed as a – and had some very tough situations to deal with, and I thought this would prepare me to help – well, those experiences prepared me to help prepare students who were aspiring to be public school administrators. 

So I started looking around, and decided that wherever I was going, I wanted it to be where I would like to retire after ten, twelve years, and so I interviewed, and ended up – I had – I could have gone to Indiana University – a lot of places, but I chose Central because I love this part of the country, and I was familiar with Seattle.  I have friends and family over there, so I decided I would take the position they offered me at Central, and I came to Central in the fall of ’90.

EJ:        Well thank you for that background.  You are a little unique for this particular set of tapes, having been born in England and gone through their school system.  So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about a comparison between the curriculum in secondary school in England and United States.

SM:      It was more different when I went through it than it is today.  I mean, everything evolves.  There is still more stress on – less memorization – more – given facts, you’re supposed to be given the facts, or to look them up yourself, and then do something with them.  So that there’s more application in the teaching.  But now, in this state with all the new things that are coming down in the testing, a lot of the educational practice is into more higher level thinking, relationships, being able to explain what you do, rather than just to be like a calculator and spitting out. 

So we did a lot more writing.  An essay to us as a high school kid was maybe five, six, seven pages long.  An essay question would be.  When I came here, and I said, “Well, this is an essay question,” I’d get a paragraph if I was lucky – until I understood the system here.  I had never taken a true or false test, or multiple choice test in my background.  It was all writing.  And so that was different.  There was less choice.  The curriculum is more structured.  You don’t get to choose whether I want to do this, or whether I want to do that.  You can be – choose different strands, but once in there, the curriculum is – you’re told what you’re going to take, if that’s the strand you want to be in. 

There’s a lot less parent involvement in the school.  Here I know we encourage it more and more, but there is not – there is not as much – sometimes I recall it as administrator interference, and it is very tough today being an administrator in a public school in this country – in any country, but it is here.  Lots of challenges.  So much so that sometimes my students – the graduate students at half would say “Are you really telling us not to go into this?”  And I’d say, “No, but if you’re going in it because you think you’re going to have a lot of power, or money, or prestige, forget it.  Because if that – you’ll not survive a week if that’s your reason for going in today.”  It’s – and that’s why we’re short today in this state, in particular, at the secondary level, of administrators.

EJ:        Do you have any ideas of why the students in the United States tend to be a little more disruptive, and so on, than they were in Britain?

SM:      I think it goes back to parenting, or lack of parenting.  On the other hand, students in England are still more disruptive today than they were before.  I mean, it’s a cultural evolution that goes on in every country.  But there is still a little more respect for, I think, age, and – it was very funny.  The first time a professor walked into a class – I attended University of Michigan, and when I took my first class, I wasn’t thinking about anything, and the prof walked into the room, and I immediately stood up because it was just second nature that when a teacher or prof walked into the room, that you would stand.  Just a little thing.  And everybody looked at me like, “What are you doing?”  And I was kind of embarrassed, and I sat down.  And then they wanted to call some of the profs by their first names, and that, to me, was difficult.  And I said, “I’m not comfortable doing that.  You’re Dr. So and So, or Mr. So and So, and that’s – ”  So it is different.  There are parts of the Brit education that is still better than I think, in some ways, and there are lots of things in this country that are better.  You can’t really compare chalk and cheese.  It’s a different culture, it’s a different way of life, and that’s reflected in the delivery of the education system.

EJ:        You’ve explained why you picked – you like this area of the country.  I’m curious, and for those in the future, comparison of salaries.  Did salary enter into it at all, when you were selecting?

SM:      Well it almost resulted in me not coming, because it was so low.  And you remember, I’d been an administrator in public school earning a lot of money, so it was a tremendous – I mean, two thirds less than what I’d been earning.  And I was a little upset, because I had held an Associate rank – now I know I’d been out of doing administration, but I felt that I should have been, with all my experience, been given Associate rank.  They wouldn’t give it to me.

EJ:        And you were not.

SM:      Yeah.  So that made me even lower in salary, and – but I made that decision that there was quality of life I was interested as opposed to – I’d made that decision when I decided not to be a Principal anymore.  Thirteen, fourteen years was long enough.  And so I liked Central.  I liked what they offered me to teach, too.  I was – the Education Department at that time was one – it was a very large department – and –

EJ:        Give us a date on that, so that –

SM:      Sixty – ha, sixty – Ninety.  Fall of Ninety.  And that was before the department split in half.  It was together for at least four to five years while I first came.  And then I was going to teach some methods courses for the seniors in Teaching, and I was going to teach Administration courses.  And – which is what I wanted to teach full-time, but at that point the opening was to teach both.  But I gradually moved – very quickly, actually, I moved into teaching only graduate students and Administration, and of course, ended up being the Director of that program. 

And so salary became a bigger point after I had made the decision to come.  I was then aware of how bad it was, and a lot of the inequities that were there.  A year after came, they hired a gentleman with less experience than myself – a lot less experience than myself – gave him, on the basis of a little Adjunct experience, Associate Professor, and of course a salary higher than mine one year after me.  So that was not a happy time.  And so I got a little involved with a number of women, and especially in the Ed Department, who felt they were discriminated against, and we bound together and we – at that point we wrote to Ivory – he was the President then – and we kind of banded together.  We were never given a response.  In fact, we were on the point of going to lawyers, and I kind of spearheaded a little bit that.  There was a little compensation, but it was not really very satisfactory. 

But you can’t go on being bitter.  I mean, you either – you try to change things, or, if you are not then prepared for the change not to happen, then you need to leave.  There’s no point in being bitter.  I mean, I was bitter, but it didn’t get in the way of me being loyal to the University, and to my students first and foremost.  And the program and the students made it all worthwhile, even though it was disappointing, and of course, being involved as – being brought in as an Assistant rather than as the Associate – a rank I’d held in other University – they – it was harder for me to get the promotion through the ranks, and – which part of that is related to maybe a question you can ask me later about publish and perish, and the difference – the difference in – the thing that strikes me about this University is how different the different departments or schools are. 

I mean, promotion and tenure is all in – we all pretty much have the same.  You’re expected to do all these things – provide documentation, etc.  But the environment in which you’re supposed to produce scholarly work is so different in departments.  First of all, in our departments the load – we’re teaching at least four or five classes per quarter.  In my case, I was traveling to the west – to all these different Centers, and I’m driving over the pass late at night, hours on the road.  I had administrative interns all over the state – as far as Vancouver, Spokane – and so the amount of time I’m spending – I’m just giving my example, but there are others – many others doing the same thing – and then they looked at me and said, “Well you haven’t published a lot.”  And I’m saying, “When?  Get me a chauffer, and I’ll sit in the back and write, but there are only so many hours in a day.”  And I would be very upset – or jealous, maybe, is the right word – at some departments where they are teaching just a couple of classes here on campus, and then have time to do some writing.  It’s also difficult in a – this University – it is not predominantly a research-oriented – and I think the mission of this University needs to be considered, and the inequities in terms of time for different – there should be different equate – equating out different kinds of service to the University.  But that’s something Education has always had to fight on a campus.

EJ:        Well I’m glad you brought that up – the differentiation – because it hadn’t been brought up by many of our interviewees.

SM:      Well maybe a lot of them have not been in the Education Department.  [Laughing]  I think if you interviewed the Education Department, they would – especially as we’re encouraged all the time to drive to Yakima and open a Center.  I taught in Wenatchee, Seattle, and that is very demanding and time-consuming.  So how much energy you have left over to do these other things – I did some international conferences in Wispeka [phonetic] – we helped do some certification for administrators in England, which helped my situation.  But it was a lot slower in coming, because no one looked at the – the – how sensible it was to – plus I’m very much into my students, and directing the program, we were short-handed. 

That’s another problem that I encountered here, was the hiring of adequate faculty to – numbers, that is, to – to service the students.  We’re encouraged to get more and more students, go out to Centers, do all this, and then there’s no one to teach the courses.  And I would hate us to become a University that was just barely making the classes, because I’m using only Adjuncts.  I – I – the quality and control of an emission of each department and its philosophy is very hard to maintain when you’ve got people in Seattle teaching a course – they haven’t come and been – again, we would do this on our own in Ed. Admin.  We would sit down with these people.  We would say, “You can’t go off and teach with another text.  This is what we do, and you either become a part of it, or you won’t get the job.”  So we tried to – to um, circumvent the weakness of having too many Adjuncts, and we hope, as best we could.  But people would retire, and they wouldn’t replace them.  The end there, I was – we had over three hundred graduate students in the program, and it was – I was the – I was full time.  We had somebody on a one-year contract, and phased retirement.  And we had programs in Seattle, and here.  And who was going to do all the theses?  Because 90% of the people in the – well, 75% of our program people are working on Master’s in Ed Admin, as well as the certification.  And so the load of work on thesis and projects was unreal.  At the last graduation people were laughing and teasing me because – I think I had – those that are marked, I had about ten finishing up last summer, and during the year, I think, last year, I had about 18 that finished.  So it’s – again, the load is pretty heavy.

EJ:        Was that project, or theses, or mixed?

SM:      Mixed.

EJ:        Mixed.

SM:      A lot of them did choose projects because they were doing – very often they were in the middle of their administrative year internship, so they would do something very relevant for that school district.  But not always.  Some would do –

EJ:        Where do you feel the real pressure for publication came from?  Was Education not autonomous enough to bring that about?  Was it pressures from higher up than Deans, or –

SM:      No, I think it’s a little bit of everything.  Even your own colleagues, sometimes – those who are not on the road traveling, those who are not doing eighteen theses a year, or whatever, and who do manage to do more writing – I don’t know.  This – it’s never clear.  I mean, I was on the Promotion Tenure Committee myself, many times, and it is – you know – what is a publication?  Is it a refereed one?  You know.  And then I said, “Well we should be taking into account all the technology – the production of CDs now.”  I mean, that’s a form of publication when they’re reproducing these things and using them in school districts, that we have technically made.  So I think there was this desire of everyone to hold on to “the Ivory Tower,” and at the same time be practical.  And it creates unhappiness and inequity in promotions, I think. 

I think it’s hard to – another example is nationally, if you teach only graduate classes, you teach a nine-credit quarter, right?  And NA kids had a problem with this, and I don’t know how they sweet-talked them around it last time, but they – we have never had – there are very few professors on this campus, which I found out, who teach only graduate classes.  But we have a big program, so some of us teach only graduate classes, and so we said we felt we should – and maybe some of the other people should have theirs pro-rated in terms of – but that never happened.  And again, with the graduate goes the thesis and everything.  But, um – so – it’s a tough question.  But you’ve got to have enough people to run the program.  And it’s nice to meet the demands – the public schools want this, they want the other, Olympia wants this, they want the other, and Administration says, “Well go do it!  We need to respond.”  And my answer to them always was, “Give me the money, give me the people, we’ll do the program.  You’ve done it on our backs.  We have volunteered and gone overtime, and done all these things, and done it because we care about kids and program, and we’ve – loyal to the University – we want to build.  But don’t keep asking us to do it on our backs.”  And that has – some of us have really got burned on those extra programs that we’ve done the extra for and have been no faculty or support. 

It’s beginning to change.  The Administration – you didn’t ask me about the Administration, but I’ll volunteer.

EJ:        Happy to have you pick up on –

SM:      When I retired, I made fun of this in my letter – it had a Union Jack and an American flag, too, and I said that I had survived – in eleven years I’ve survived three Presidents, three Provosts – actually four now – four Provosts, five Deans – at the College of Education – and six Chairs.  Now anybody who knows anything about Administration and stability and – knows that that is not a good record.  And then we split our department in half while we were [inaudible], so there’s been a – there was a lot of our people – a lot of our people during the time I was here – I think now, and I said it before I left or retired – I wish the Administration that we have now was here five, six, seven years ago, because I see some things happening now, and some support, and some dialog, and some building of trust that wasn’t there before.  And people who understand – I mean, the Dean of – Rebecca Bowers understands the discipline, and is helpful, and she’s a good administrator, and things are better now than they have been – ever been.  I was almost sorry to go, because – also in terms of our Chair, we presently have David Schorr, one of the best Chairs of the six that – in fact, I was very instrumental in making sure he got that job.

EJ:        As long as it’s been so positive, would you mind mentioning for the camera who these positive administrators have been?

SM:      Well one – Rebecca Bowers, the present Dean of the College of Professional Studies; David Schorr, who is the Chair of the Teacher Education Programs, which is half of the split, as you know; and those – and I think the President herself.  I’m very impressed with – one can always criticize, but having been in administration I think you look at it a little differently than people who just have never walked in any shoes that take that responsibility.  So I think what I’ve seen Ms. McIntyre do is reach out, first of all, to the community.  I mean, we did not have a good image.  We were often fighting our own community here in Ellensburg.  I think she has joined civic things – I’m Kiwanian, I was President last year, and we were organizing a coffee thing, you know, the rest stop area?  And her husband is a member of Kiwanis, and there she was up at the rest stop doing her bit, and I’m – and I cannot envision any prior of the three or four Presidents I’ve gone through doing that, or getting their spouse to be there with them to – and so, um, there’s a reaching out.  I think there is maybe a little more careful selection of new administrative positions.

I am concerned, however, by the escalation in the amount of administrative positions – how they reshuttle, but – you know – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  The – the – we don’t seem to decrease – if you really looked at the way they restructured things, and on the surface it looked like we were eliminating some administrative positions, but we eliminated one big one, and created two small ones.  So we didn’t really save, in that sense.  So that still needs to be addressed, but – and the salaries need to be addressed.  We’re ten percent – in the tenth percentile, I think, in the nation on our faculty salaries, and the faculty – the one – one of the great things about this University from the – should be, if the students realized it, is that they get people teaching them who want to teach.  At the big Universities you get graduate assistants, you get Profs showing up once a week if you’re lucky, you know, when they’d rather be doing their research.  Here you have a lot of dedicated faculty who care about the kids.  I shouldn’t say kids – students – whether they’re graduate students, and – they spend a – speaking for my own Department – an extraordinary amount of hours beyond what they need to with the students, and there’s a real close bonding.  And that, of course, is the thing that I miss in retirement, are the students.  But they keep calling me.  And – which is really nice, because they’re in administrative positions, a lot of them, now, and they can call me up and say, “Well what do you think?”  And I said, “Well you remember.”  They said, “Yes, but we never thought that would really happen.”  And I said, “Uh-huh.”  So it’s really nice to keep in touch with the students, and they’re all over the State.

EJ:        Well since you’ve got an interviewer – the camera person that’s preceded you here for a number of years – let us tell you that you probably came among the worst times.

SM:      “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” right?

EJ:        Right, in terms of the quick turnover of the administrative personnel.  And some that would have gone to the rest stop to work.

SM:      Yes, prior to that.

EJ:        Yes.

SM:      Harrington would be one, right?

EJ:        Probably, yes.  And Brooks.

SM:      And Brooks, yes.  Uh-huh.  Which whom I’ve heard about.

EJ:        Well, yes – I appreciate bringing that up, but from your reference and for the camera, I thought I’d just put that in.

SM:      That it was the turbulent time, yeah.

EJ:        You’ve been excellent in covering so many of the areas.  You’ve mentioned problems.  Any other problems that you haven’t mentioned that you would like to?

SM:      No, I – I think – something [inaudible] that I’ve seen happen, too, towards the end is that the Faculty Senate used to be, in my opinion – when I first came, it was just a kind of a group people who were patting themselves on the back, but over the last few years I’ve seen it take more leadership, and it had some teeth.  I was also here when – in terms of dealing with the Board – some of the faculty wanted to – when things were really bad, that you were mentioning, they took some kind of vote and sixty-something percent said, “Let’s have a union.”  Everyone was so frustrated.  And then the Board of Regents stopped that, and – things did get a little better, and I think that’s why now that groups that are still pro-union are smaller in number, because it really isn’t the nature of University professors to – to be radical.  Not on this campus. 

And it is a beautiful campus.  And I have gone from a rabbit hutch in Black Hall – literally a rabbit hutch, we used to call them – to a beautiful building, and the Science Building, and it’s almost like – when you drive around and I bring visitors around, it’s almost like the little New England campus.  It’s a pretty campus, and I’m impressed by the way we keep the buildings up, and the renovated old buildings, and the new buildings.  I think we’ve done very well with that, and we’ve even saved the new Music Building that’s going to come now.  So those are all positive things.

I’m concerned that we don’t have enough classes for all – um – and profs to teach them, for all these new students that we have.  They’re running around trying to find classes, and there aren’t – the classes are closed, or they’re getting really huge and we’re loosing that –

EJ:        That seems to be such a problem.  I’m wondering if you’ve had any idea how the resolution of this disparity in teaching load and research could be addressed – that you’ve mentioned the Senate and it’s approval.  Would that be one of the possibilities, or are there others?

SM:      That might help, and they have, I think, tried to attack that problem.  But it’s – you know, with the academic free sergeant-major [???] and they will all do it!  That doesn’t work any more.  You talk to people.  You dialog with them.  It takes longer and that’s very frustrating, but you have to change.  You have to deal with what you’ve got, not what you think you should have.  And so it’s a – it’s a challenge.  And the other thing I decided was that Chair of a department is the worst job in the world, because you have a lot of responsibility, and no power to do anything.  You take all – excuse me, but you take the crap and very rarely get any accolades.  Those poor Chairs – and they have – and again, I think with new leadership I see them trusting the Chairs, and giving them a little more responsibility.  I see that in terms of Education Department and Dr. Barrow.  So that’s all good. 

I think – I’m – you know, I’m very positive about what’s happening.  It’s – it was a cultural shock when I came, because when I walked in to the Ed Department it was like 38 people – maybe not that many – 34, maybe, and there were only about three of us women.  And there had been even fewer before, I understand.  It was a very male-dominated – which is unusual in Education.  Now the women outnumber the men in Education Department, which is kind of interesting.  I was also – they would – on this equity position, and I thought, “I don’t know if I have the energy to do this again.”  Because when I was at Eastern, in ’78 or so – Eastern Michigan University – we went through all this, and the women got more money to try to catch them up and do – and I thought, “They’re just beginning to do it here.”  I was thinking, “I can’t do this again.” 

And it was also a shock because I saw so few minorities on campus.  Now remember, I’d been teaching in Detroit, and I’d been in Cleveland, and there were no African Americans, and – certainly were very few.  I’m glad to see that has increased some, but it was – it was – I looked around and I said, “It’s very white.”  And that was one of my first impressions, and – but then, of course, we’ve got more Hispanics now, and Native Americans, and they’re beginning to come into the classrooms, and that’s good. 

But the one thing that bothers me, and should bother all of us is we have too many students coming to the University who cannot read and write.  That’s a little strong, but more than half of the students we accept have to go into remedial English and writing before they can take 101 English.  And that permeates and is coming through the graduate students that we’re getting now, because – I mean, they grow up, they become graduate students.  They can’t write, and that’s another problem with the thesis and the projects.  They can’t write formally.  Well I think – no, you don’t write “I think.”  Where’s your research to say what somebody else thinks, and then you discern it and da da da da da.  It’s really hard.  The writing skills of our students – not our students, they’re everybody’s students – are really decreasing.  I don’t know what we’re going to do about that, because by the time they get to trying to write a thesis or a project, I must confess I have – should have my name on a few that I have totally re-written.  Because there’s only so much you can do.  You say, “This isn’t formal enough.  You need to – there’s no transitions here,”  ba ba, ba ba, ba ba – and they bring it back to you, and it’s the same.

EJ:        Do you have an impression of whether or not the “new standards” from the State Superintendent’s office might be a variable?

SM:      Well I come from a system that likes to say not everybody is equal in [education] – you know, you’ve got your bright ones, and not so bright.  The bar they have put in now, with these tests, is high.  The bar is high, and that is good, because it makes people reach up.  I think there’s more accountability for teachers, there’s more accountability for students.  I don’t know – I’m concerned about – we’ve got students in there who don’t speak English, who have had maybe little education prior to coming to this country, who are being tested, and they are – so they’re setting them up for failure.  There has to be a system whereby we can encourage without losing those students.  And I think we don’t need to go on witch hunts for schools who can’t raise scores.  You’ve got to look at the population of that school to set any realistic levels for that school to reach.  I mean, if you’ve got two thirds of your school on free and reduced lunch, a third of them where English isn’t their native language, you cannot be expected to – or be surprised when there are a lot of –

[Transcription of Tape 1, Side 2]

SM:      – who cannot.  See they – it’s fine for your middle of the road to upper students.  It’s pushing them, and it’s all good, because it is higher level thinking, and acting, and being responsible.  But at the same time, when you know before they even take it some of these students are going to not even begin to pass, what have you got in place to assist them?  I mean, you can’t just leave them like – out of the loop.  We’ve got to try and get them back into the loop.  But that’s a big challenge, and –

EJ:        You mentioned in England that they do write better at the secondary level, and therefore also at the college level.

SM:      Many do.  Not all, but many.

EJ:        No, but many.  Whoops!  We’re so accustomed to the averages here that presumably the average writes better.  Do they start quite early writing the kinds of things that would be paragraph and thinking in that paragraph?

SM:      Yes.  And now they’re having to do that more here, because of these tests.  Because they’re geared to that.  But prior to that, teachers say, “Well, I’ve got too many children in my class.  I can’t correct all these papers.  It’s not realistic to make them write all this stuff.”  But with the use of computers, we’ve got more students to write who wouldn’t write before.  So there’s all kinds of tools now to try and encourage students to write, and one said to me the other day, “Well, you know, [by the] time my children write we’ll just be speaking into a machine, and it will never have to write.”  And I said, “Well fine, if you really believe that.  Maybe the importance of it is,” I said, but you know, you just need to be able to do it whether you use it or not, because on the one time you need to do it – it’s like the math. 

I was at the grocery store not long ago, and the machine – scanner and everything – went down.  The young woman at the checkout could not figure out the tax, because it wasn’t in the machine to figure itself, so here I am with a calculator, showing her how to add the tax on to the – you know – and she says, “Would you stay here and help me with the others?”  I said, well, I said, “I’m showing you how to do it for me.  Now you do it for these others.”  But it was like, whoa, the machines are down and we’re all stuck.  So – I just think we need to make sure that our students can verbalize, write, and have a sense of number, however advanced that may get, to function.  To be happy.  But it – it’s a challenge. 

England’s facing the same challenge, because it has now some really – people from different countries.  You walk in London now, you see – it’s almost hard to find an English person.  There are many, many foreigners, and they’re facing, again, the language, and it does impact the schools.

EJ:        Well you’ve been very upbeat about being here, and yet you’ve expressed some problems and you still keep the upbeatness.  Can you think of any humorous events that occurred to you while you were here?

SM:      Not really.  The humor that happened to me happened to my classroom.  I’m kind of – I’m a teaser, and the student – now remember, I have graduate students – and I would tease them, and I had a reputation for giving nicknames to people.  And somebody says, “How do you get away with that?”  And I said, “Well, I’m a bit like Sam Rust.”  You remember Sam Rust?

EJ:        Oh, yeah.

SM:      Like everybody remembers Sam.  And I said – how he wasn’t put in jail or sued I will never know, but I said, “I tease the students, but I only tease ones that I know can handle it, and will tease me back.”  And one example is – some people got very upset – I had a quadriplegic young man who is now an Assistant Principal, and it happened in a wrestling accident in high school, and – just a delightful, very bright young man.  And he had a great sense of humor – he’d tease me in the classroom, and I said – one day I said to him, I said, “Okay, Wheelie,” because he’s in his wheelchair and I called him Wheelie, and he loved it, right?  So he says – he signed his emails to me “Wheelie,” but the rest of the class were like, “[Gasps], you can’t say that!”  I said, “Is he complaining?  He uses it.”  So I said, “Quit being so hyper-sensitive and get a sense of humor.”  You know, how they think of you, “Whoa!”  You know?

And I had another guy, and he would – it seems to be guys I’ve given the nicknames to – not all that way, though – and he was always smiling, and so – and the other students would call him Smiley, too, and we had a lot of fun, and one was very good on technology, and – in fact, he did this presentation – because we had all this technology in Black Hall, and he was marvelous, and he interjected movie clips, and it was relevant to the task.  It was a community relations plan thing.  And he put the music on, and he put me at the end of it – a picture of me – and then he played the music, “She’s Too Sexy for her Shirt,” – you know that song?  And the rest of the class went “Oh my God,” you know, and we were laughing, and I’m saying, “This is – you know – you’ve got to be – if you’re going to be in Administration, and in school today, you’ve got to be able to take it, and you’ve got to be able to give it.  But you have to know – what offends somebody doesn’t necessarily affect somebody else.”  And I said, “You just were all so politically correct, and all these things anymore,” and I said, “It doesn’t – being politically correct, or being over-sensitive doesn’t really say what we need to say about equality and differences, etc., etc.”  I said, “You’ve got to be able to feel comfortable, and you don’t say it because it’s the right thing, you say it because it’s what you feel in your heart.”  So anyway, we’ve had some talks.

EJ:        Well you and your cameraman both think that appropriate humor in the classroom is right.

SM:      Yes.  You know, it’s – life is too short.  You’ve got to be – you know, and I believe in being in – a little passionate about what you’re doing.  If you’re not, how are you going to – you know, the students come into your classroom today, whether it’s K-12 or University, and they look at you like, “Well, entertain me.”  You know, we’re not really trained to be entertainers, but that’s pretty much what you’ve got to do to keep track.

EJ:        [Inaudible] the remote control.

SM:      Right.  They can’t turn you off, right?  But the one thing that I have noticed that is interesting, and I hear profs talking about more and more in the last eleven years, is that the students behavior in the classrooms at University level is not as appropriate, in their eyes, as they feel it should be.  And in fact a couple of profs said, “Well this happened,”  and I said, “Well what did you do about it?”   Well, “If I had wanted to deal with these things I would never have left the public school system.”  And I said, “That’s not right.”  I said, “All these problems in the schools – where do you think they go when they graduate?  They go on, many of them, on to college, and those inappropriate behaviors are brought to your classroom.”  And I said, “Even at the graduate level,” I said, “If you don’t pull them up short,” I said, “These gra – my graduate students teach all day long.  They sit suddenly behind the desk when they come, and they start acting like a student.”  And I said, “Sometimes,” – and it would drive me crazy.  We’d have a lot of dialog going in class, and somebody would be saying something, and two other people over here are talking.  And I would just stop and say, you know, “You would not tolerate this, and it’s absolute rudeness.  You will listen to each other and respect each other.”  One of [inaudible], “That’s what I was only saying in my classroom this afternoon,” and I said, “Well, we’d better practice what we preach.”

EJ:        Okay.  We’ve signaled that we are almost out of time.  What I would like you to do is think back, and if there’s something particularly that you would like to leave as a message in the last minute or two on the camera, I’d please offer you the opportunity.

SM:      I would say the eleven years I’ve been here there have been many ups, and many downs, but the enthusiasm of many of the faculty I’ve worked with, and some of the good administrators, but most of all the students, have made it a very challenging, and sometimes rewarding eleven years.  And I’m not sorry I came, and I’m not running off.  I’m going to stay right here in Ellensburg, and be involved, still, with the University.  They asked me to teach a class.  I’m not going to do it this summer, but – they call me pretty regularly to give some advice, or something.  So I feel still connected, and I’ll always feel connected.

EJ:        Well thank you, Professor Madley for a very stimulating interview.

SM:      You’re welcome.