6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: OT: My Favorite Teacher

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Thursday, May 13, 2004

OT: My Favorite Teacher

First off, I should say that, as I've aged, I've waxed increasingly skeptical of education's machinery. Too much of it is cant, duckspeak designed to fool a blinkered audience. When you see "My Child Is An Excellent Student At Nosebleed Elementary" bumperstickers on the back of every third car, you begin to suspect that the paeans aren't all that meaningful, and the mind inexorably begins to extrapolate that through high school and thence to college, the rubber stamp of academia. For years, I've suspected that the value of a college education in practical terms is in steep decline. When I was in college, back in the middle 80's, the problems were already apparent to anyone pursuing a liberal arts degree. Those of us in the hard sciences, and especially, engineering programs at the time were pretty smug, because the leap up in salary was enormous. Now, it's brother-can-you-spare-a-dime time for even Eta Kappa Nu types in the US, as literally hundreds of thousands of tech jobs have moved offshore. It seems there's little practical reason anymore to get into any of the technical or hard science degree programs. The market has spoken, and it wants Americans to be greeters at Wal-Mart.

Once upon a time when I wasn't so bitter about my future employment prospects should my present situation collapse, I was contemplating pursuing a straight computer science degree, simply because of the math requirements in the engineering programs. (You shouldn't read too much into this: the degree program really consists of four years of programming tricks, while navigating the tedious seas of Turing machines.) But something happened along the way that changed my mind. That something, or someone, was Kevin Shannon, then -- as now, apparently -- of Orange Coast College. I had him for precalculus, a subject I never got to in high school, victim of a series of horrible instructors there. He's the first and only math prof I have ever had who could make that light come on in my head. And now, he's received a $15,000 award for being so good.

Shannon is going to use his $15,000 to help his son go to college.
"He's 10, and he wants to be a pediatrician, so I think that will pay for about a year," said Shannon, a math teacher at Orange Coast College.
Shannon thought he was being interviewed as a finalist for teacher of the year. But when he showed up at the County Department of Education offices, he found out he had been tricked.
He was the winner.
Shannon said it must have been his students who got him over the top. "My students appreciate what I do, and they wrote letters of recommendation," he said.
Shannon's own essay helped as well.
"The value of a diamond is determined by the four Cs - cut, clarity, color and carat," he wrote. "A college education is more valuable than diamonds. In my educational philosophy, the four Cs of college teaching are connection, content, clarity and conduct. When any of these elements is missing, education loses its value."
OCC President Gene Farrell showed up to support Shannon.
"He's fun to watch teach," Farrell said. "He's so passionate about teaching. And he looks way too young to be at our school for 27 years."

Over my career, I got more out of his instruction than that pleasant but relatively small amount: I changed majors (to an Engineering program, despite the math, no longer deathly afeared of it). When I was at OCC, he was still the surfer dude fresh from UCSB, full of tales of days spent at the beach while "rotating right circular cylinders about the axis of the thumb" -- i.e., hoisting a few cans of Tecate. I wish him well, and hope he continues to help others the way he helped me. Thanks, Mr. Shannon.