I was the first person in my family to have a college degree of any sort. In this section, I'll tell the story of my college years. It all began when I realized that to get ahead in life, I needed some education. So, I applied to Flathead Valley Community College and I came up with $3300 in Pell Grants, more than enough to get me through my first year at college. So with a few purchases and a driver's refresher's course from mom, I was on my way to a college degree.
Report Card
Montana History: A
Intermediate Algebra: A
English Composition: A
Introduction to Mass Media: A
Russian I: A
Typing: S
GPA: 4.00
Montana History was an interesting class because of the professor. Jon Moses frequently went off on side roads that would lead to current political issues such as discussing the Presidential debates. This was a topic that had little to do with Lewis and Clark and the Copper Kings. Still, it was a memorable class.
One of my most interesting college memories is that the day before Thanksgiving, Moses put a tape in the VCR and then left the classroom. Immediately thereafter, the entire class left except for me. Professor Moses came back in and saw me sitting there, still watching the video. He handed me a piece of paper and said, "Write your name on this piece of paper and I'll give you 25 bonus points."
On my mid-term, I got a C+. Because of bonus points and assignments I was still 8 points above 100%. Still, I was determined to do as good as I could. I was determined to ace the final. Obsessively, I checked out every single one of K. Ross Toole's "Montana" videos that related to the test and watched every minute, taking notes, reviewing and rewriting them.
On my mid-term, I hadn't used all the words or completely discussed a topic that Dr. Moses asked us to discuss the importance of. So, I wrote down everything I knew about the Copper Kings and finished right at the end of class, as I handed in several pages to Professor Moses.
Intermediate Algebra was a remedial course. In four years since finishing High School, I'd forgotten a lot about a course I'd barely passed. Ann Beall provided a helpful refresher course as well as a breather after Dr. Moses' class.
English Composition with Blake Smith was the most enjoyable class of the semester. She found great ways to build our skills as writers. When I came to class most days, I wouldn't know what exactly was in store for us.
One day she had us write about the ceiling, another day she had us write about a rock. These exercises challenged us to learn to write quick and to sharpen our imagination. Blake always made her classes enjoyable.
She also taught the Intro. to Mass Media class. In that class, I got to try out my skills as a Student-Teacher. Everyone was assigned to teach one day and they were then rated by their classmates. It was a fun exercise that I wish more teachers had done.
Valerya Voronia's Russian class was fun and challenging. It was two hours, every other night for the entire Semester, so it was quite a schedule. My Schedule was all on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that semester. I had class from 9-11 in the morning and then again from Noon-2, and finally 6-8 in the Evening (except on Fridays).
My dad had thought I couldn't pass Russian, with its Cyrillic alphabet and entirely different language structure. However, through a lot of studying and hard work, plus God's help, I somehow managed to get an "A".
This was my most difficult semester. In the first semester I had to turn in 20 essays, 3 research papers, and learn an entirely new alphabet. After the first semester, I never had to write another research paper.
Second Semester: Spring, 2001
Grades:
Intermediate Algebra: B
Shakespeare: Tragedies and Comedies: A
Oral Interpretation: A
Student Publications 2: A
GPA: 3.69
Intermediate Algebra was a difficult course for me. Even though, it was one of two courses I got a "B" in, I still remember the class fondly because of the teacher, Frank Pace. Mr. Pace was from back east and spoke like Sid Caesar. He was the funniest math teacher I ever had and he did his job extremely well. I was in one of his last classes as he retired soon thereafter, so I was very fortunate.
Shakespeare helped me meet my humanities requirement and I enjoyed it immensely. In the course of two semesters of Shakespeare I met Iago, King Lear, Benedict and Beatrice, Prospero, Hamlet, and many others. My professor, Brian Bechtold explained the stories, the Elizabethan idioms and everything else we needed to properly understand Shakespeare's plays. He made the stories come alive and relate back to real life.
The only complaint I had was the movie version of Macbeth he played. It was Norman Polansky's adaptation and include nude scenes, none of which were authorized or inferred from the play. Polansky also ruined several scenes with his own interpolations. (Dancing midgets appeared in one scene where they weren't called for). Polansky was hiding out in France at the time, wanted for child molestation. I didn't know this at the time and when Bechtold asked if anyone knew what Polansky was wanted for, I answered, "Crimes against Shakespeare" and gained laughter from the class.
Oral Interpretation was my best subject this year and perhaps the most important of my college career. There, I learned key speaking skills that I care with me to this day. I entered the class a competent public speaker and exited a good one. I was taught to slow down a little in my speaking and other aspects of my speaking were refined under Blake Smith's tutelage.
In Oral Interpretation you read texts with expression and try and with your words bring across the meaning of the text. It's different from acting because in acting you memorize your lines. In Oral Interpretation, you aren't supposed to memorize anything as you have the text right in front of you.
With all of my selected "Interpretations" I was different. In some, I just did Christian interpretations which were different, in and of themselves. I performed Ray Boltz's "The Hammer", two poems of my own that had Christian elements, Josh Harris' "The Room", and excerpts from a sermon by Martin Luther King for my final. Some were just plain different such as when I performed a "Legally Correct Fairy Tale", dressed up in a suit to play the part of Goldilocks' lawyer, I also interpreted a scene from "Much Ado About Nothing" doing a Peter Loria impression for the role of Constable Dogberry.
In college, there is often a lack of understanding or even concern about America's founding fathers, so I did a couple classical pieces. For my prose essay, I did Benjamin Franklin's "How to be A Disagreeable Companion" and my best interpretation of all, Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty" speech. I performed that at least ten times in public and probably did forty practices. Blake liked it when I did it the first time and I got it almost perfect. She had me come and deliver it before a school function, before her acting class, and then I went ahead and delivered at our public performance.
The evening of the performance was odd. Most of the night had been light entertainment, including commercial parodies, music videos, a pseudo-Latin pop star, and other frivolities. Two acts before me, a man dressed as Marilyn Monroe had performed, "Happy Birthday, Mr. President". In the midst of this, I rose up to deliver a 200 year old patriotic speech. I didn't know how it would play. But as I got on the stage and delivered each line, not even having to look at the script, I had the audience's attention, until we reached the climax when I slouched down bound with imaginary chains and said, "Is life so dear, is peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?!" I then broke the chains and standing upright declared, "Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others might take, but as for me, Give Me Liberty or give me Death". I left to a standing ovation. This was before September 11. Whatever you call Montanans, don't call them anything less than true patriots.
My other class was working on the student newspaper, the Mercury. I learned how to write news as opposed to writing everything else.
My first beat was the Student Senate. The Mercury published a controversial story in which ignited a fire fight between a senior reporter and the Senate. I found myself caught in the middle. I had become slightly attached to the Senate, but I trusted our reporters that they had seen what they'd seen and stuck with that as policy.
However, the Senior reporter took his fight with the Senate a step further and published an edition of the paper without anyone's permission. The issue include a misleading photograph of the Student Senate President playing video games as well as an unprofessional response to the President's letter to the editor. The picture suggested that this was all the Senate President did. In reality the Student Senate President served on five separate committees and worked very hard.
In a future edition of the paper, I wrote an article telling the truth about the Senate, as well as the President' job. However, the relationship between the Mercury and the President was permanently damaged.
Still, I gained some key experience that Semester as I began to learn my way around the Journalism world.
Third Semester: Summer, 2001
Liberal Arts Math: B
GPA: 3.00
Have you ever tried to learn a Semester's worth of math in 3 weeks? My suggestion: Don't.
I took the three credit-course for two reasons.
1) Once I finished the course I would have no further math courses and this was easier than College Algebra.
2) I thought I needed them so I could have 30 credits on file and gain an Academic Scholarship. Little did I know that they counted my remedial math course, so I would have been fine without it.
Still, I managed to finish my Math Career and I only missed an A by half a percent.
Fourth Semester: Fall, 2001
Report Card
Intro. to Microcomputers: A
Cardioboxing: A
Advanced Student Publications 1: A
Intro. to Public Speaking: A
Shakespeare: Tragedies and Histories: A
Criminalistics and Forensics: A
The main thing I remembered from the first two classes was that one credit classes aren't as easy as they seem and for one credit they're a lot of work, especially if you're sweating to 1980s rock songs while an Army National Guard captain yells at you.
The Mercury was more fully staffed than in the prior year, however this was due to the fact that for the second straight semester the advisor (Marita Combs) class on News Writing and Reporting was cancelled due to lack of Student Interest.
This had happened to me twice the prior Semester as Marita's other class on Videomaking was cancelled after I'd signed up for it. She'd had us watch Citizen Kane and make a note of every type of shot used. I didn't even get to turn in the assignment.
The prior semester, the cancellation of Marita's class sent me to Blake's Oral Interp. course. This year, I found myself in Carol Bergin's speech class. In any crowd in Montana, Carol Bergin would stick out like a sore thumb. A fortyish woman with a nose ring, and short red hair, who speaks with a very precise New England accent is going to be noticed in the state of Montana where accents are rare, rarer still if they're not southern or western.
Two weeks into the Semester, college and the real world collided when September 11th happened. I first heard about it on the way to my 7:00 a.m. Intro to Microcomputers class. Only on my way home did I realize the full impact of what had happened and over the next two plus hours, I was devastated by what I saw on television. I did go to my 11 o'clock Cardioboxing class but my mind wasn't really focused on the class.
I wrote a poem called the "Day of Terror". I read it and it was met with the approval of classmates. One man, of few words, a former Air Force officer just simply gave me a thumbs up.
In my speech class, our teacher was an avowed critic of the President. I wasn't his biggest fan, myself. I worked my tail off to get Alan Keyes on the ballot and viewed President Bush as an inferior choice. My speech for September 11 was to be on the current primary system as a promoter of candidates like President Bush and Al Gore. However, September 11 necessitated a new speech.
On Freerepublic.com, where I had been one of the president's most outspoken critics, I declared that on September 11, whether we support Bush, Philips, Keyes, or Buchanan that in this time of national crisis, we're all to be Bush supporters. That's the message I gave to the class in my speech. I reminded them that we only have one president and it is President Bush.
We didn't hear anymore attacks on the President for another couple weeks anyway.
In Speech class, Bergin, like Blake brought out the most interesting parts of people. As such, in this class, it was filled with people who were very quirky and odd.
In my second speech, I spoke on the Fair Tax and seemed to do such a good job that I delivered some convincing arguments that made Ms. Bergin think that perhaps the Income Tax wasn't such a great idea after all. I still remember when I referred the entire class to a chart of how the income tax had changed the average family's expenses immensely. Her eyes went wide with shock and horror when she saw how much the government took from the average family's check.
The third speech I did was one on the success of abstinence sex education. Apparently, my perfectionism and quality of speeches was beginning to annoy some of the class as I became an easy target. Ms. Bergin was gushing over the amount of energy, I'd put into the speech. Quipped one woman, "I guess that comes from the abstinence."
Next was a series of panel discussions. I was on the third panel. The first was on the subject of Euthanasia. One panelist complained that I asked "mean" questions when I challenged their assertions, especially the fact that they were equating Assisted Suicide with withholding heroic measures to save the life of a patient.
The third panel was on gambling. I was speaking on the negatives of gambling. I hammered them home, showing how the gambling industry was exploitative and damaging to the moral and economic environments of a community, after a presentation in which the main argument for gambling was the libertarian point of view ("It's none of our business") and the argument that it gave old people something to do.
It was followed by a man, named Klint's perspective on the issue, coming from experience with people in his family who had problems with gambling and different addictions making the point that everyone's addicted to something. Of course, all addictions aren't harmful nor do we really consider them addictions and I handled his barbs well. Klint had gotten in trouble for his different views and was afraid that I would want to beat him up after our exchanges in the panel. I, of course, did not.
The final assignment was the best. It was a debate between a short-haired middle-aged woman and I. I have some Libertarian leanings and she leans strongly that way. It took us a whole 20 minutes to find an issue other than abortion (which Ms. Bergin asked us not to debate) that we vehemently disagreed upon. Israel was our topic. While for most of my speeches, I dressed as I normally would on any other day. For this speech, I got dressed up in my suit, and printed up hand-outs with pictures of the middle east, of the original Palestinian mandate as well as a graphic presentation of how the British had divided it into two zones, Palestine and Transjordan, giving the Arabs 75% of the land and leaving 25% for the Jews, then showing how that was subdivided further. I made the case that the Arabs controlled 99.5% of the Middle East and now were hungrily seeking to gobble up little tiny Israel. I showed how anti-Israeli hate speech had been issued from Islam's most holy site in Israel, how Palestinians raised their children to be suicide bombers and concluded the only hope for peace in the middle east could be found in the Bible. "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it."-Micah 4:3,4
I had dressed up in part, in order to give myself a competitive edge, an advantage. Kathy, however wasn't intimidated in the least. She made her case against Israel as a bully that practiced nazi tactics. While I didn't agree with her points, she made them well. We questioned each other vigorously afterwards, and would have continued on for several hours had Ms. Bergin not asked to sum up so the next debaters could get on. We both got A's for the Debate and Ms. Bergin said that it was an example of what a debate should be.
Across the board, this was a great semester for me. On the Mercury, I'd moved into a role of Senior Correspondent, taking a greater part in the production of the Mercury. I was contributing more articles and editorials to the paper.
The only downside to the year was that I struggled through my Forensics and Criminalistics class. While in English and Literature classes, I'd find myself the most valued member of the group, in Science I found myself the least valued member of the group as I struggled to keep up. Still, I got an "A" in the course and learned a lot about criminalistics which will help me if I every decided to write a murder mystery. (My primary reason for taking that course as my Science.)
Fifth Semester
Report Card:
Intro. to Criminal Justice: A
News Writing and Reporting: A
Advanced Student Publications 2: A
Practical Botany: A
Intermediate Word: S
Advanced Word: S
Semester GPA: 4.00
Final GPA: 3.88
The most memorable part of the Criminal Justice class was a mock trial the class staged. Through eight weeks of the Semester, the Teacher had been absent several times, we'd had trouble getting the class together, and over the course of a week and a half stretch, we had 15 minutes of class time. She acknowledged that the first few weeks had not gone well and she wanted to do something to spice up the class. The idea of a mock trial came up and she found a case for us.
A Newsweek article detailed the story of a woman who hit a homeless man with her car and then, according to police, left him on the hood, dying for three days. I chose to be on the prosecution side. From the prosecution would come the judge and all court officers. I wanted to be the judge. Regrettably, in a very mature and fair way, even with my legal training, I was beaten for the honor, in a game of paper-rock-scissors and was scheduled to be the bail hearing judge instead of the trial judge. They also ignored my suggestion to prosecute the crime as negligent homicide rather than deliberate homicide.
I would play multiple roles in this case. Even though I was the bail judge, they wanted me to be the Forensics Expert (as if my schedule wasn't busy enough). Well, I went home and researched my role and found that subsequent to the Newsweek article, the forensic scientist came out and said that the homeless man couldn't have been dead but for a couple, three hours, I testified that way in court and this hurt the prosecution case. As I had angered my comrades, I had to produce the news story which proved my testimony accurate.
In the next class, I was asked to take over as Prosecutor during the Defense case. I did my best to eviscerate the defense case. The defense attorney was obsessed with winning this case and even tried to present odd conspiracy theories that she had no evidence to back up including the idea that the homeless man had thrown himself in front of the car as an act of suicide. She also tried to prove that all of us pretend experts weren't real expert witnesses, so because we hadn't really attended school for six years to become what we were pretending to be, our testimony should be ignored. I don't think this worked.
In the end, despite our best efforts, the defense won because the defendant shouldn't have been charged with deliberate homicide but only negligent homicide (as a certain paralegal had advised the prosecution). Still, the trial was a lot of fun.
I took Practical Botany which was an 8-week course that was two nights a week for three hours. The originally scheduled professor came down with Heart problems and was replaced halfway through the course with two other teachers, Dr. Bob Beall and Ann Beall. It was an intensive course in simple basic Montana Botany as well as general botany principles.
1/3 of the grade was taking field trips to various areas of the county to view the local plant life. This was the first summer I'd worn sandals (w/o socks) and I was already dressed for Summer with a polo shirt on. Dr. Beall then mentioned that the area we were walking through had a ninebark in it and that ninebark was often home to wood ticks. From that time forward, I never went on a Botany field trip without regular shoes and my Winter coat.
This class on Montana's plant life was made more difficult by the fact that we had a late Winter. The class is condensed into one half of a semester so that students aren't learning about these plants in Winters. But when the class started two weeks before Spring Break, it snowed. It also snowed three times in May that year.
I had a choice about whether to take the final or not. If I didn't take the final, I would get a S/U grade of S, a satisfactory performance, and no alteration to my GPA. I was scared to death of a final closed book science test, still I decided to take it. I don't know how I scored on it, but somehow I got an "A" in the course. I wasn't sure what I had gotten, as there was a portion of the test I had thought we weren't going to have and therefore I hadn't studied for. On graduation day, I nervously asked Dr. Beall whether I'd really graduated. He informed me in the affirmative.
The main focus of this Semester was the Mercury. I found myself the only writer on staff (thought that would change soon thereafter with the addition of Aaron Norton). Much to Marita's relief, I informed her that I'd already had story ideas in my head for which I'd done the legwork for. Because of this, we had no trouble meeting our deadline for the first issue.
The focus after the first issue went to the Literary Review. Though, the course description officially required us to put out a literary review every year, as far as I could tell we hadn't done so in about a decade. We waited quite a while to get it together. Initially the deadline for getting all the articles into the literary review was in late February, but got pushed back several times as we waited for more material to come in.
We did get a literary review ready to go to press in April, just as the Student Allocations Committee was meeting. The Mercury's request was simple: $4700, that which was ideally needed to run the paper. We reduced our budged all the way down to $3,000 to accommodate a low budget for everyone else..
This wasn't enough for the allocations committee, we could have all survived on a lower budget, if there'd been an across the board reduction of around 10% in requests, instead the allocations committee decided to take the full, brunt of it's cuts out of the Mercury and reduced our budget down to $0. The committee full of people who had never run a college paper and had no interest in doing so was full of suggestions.
Some suggested that we could make it on advertising alone. The problem with this idea is that advertisers don't want to buy advertising in a paper that they don't know will come out. Others suggested letting people not in the Mercury Class come and work on the paper. This was a great idea except that we struggled just to find enough people to write the literary review, and that while we made it clear that everyone could contribute to the paper, very few had. However, these logical arguments were met mainly with derisive and emotional attacks on the Mercury. The Committee voted by Secret Ballot to defund the paper. Disgusted, Marita and I walked out of the meeting.
My initial ideas on how to handle the situation was to make a big stink about it in the paper, but in the end, we decided to follow a more professional path. As I looked around that room, thoughts planted themselves in my mind. Thoughts that, in the end would lead to my departure from traditional college campus.
The opposition to the Mercury was vociferous and led by people I thought had a lot in common with the political left from their statements, beliefs, and lifestyles. In my mind, I examined the Mercury editorials during the past year. They weren't what you expect from a college paper. I excoriated California Congressman Gary Condit (D-Ca.), then wrote a rallying cry for the War on Terrorism, calling those who opposed the war merely because they were scared of the draft "cowards", in December I wrote a sympathetic article on Christian Fundamentalism, and in January, I dared to suggest that decent, hard working people like Dave Thomas could get ahead in America.
I strongly suspected that my ideas and not any other perceived issues with the Mercury was in part behind the adamant opposition to the paper. Although, I loved college life and FVCC, I didn't relish my appointed role as the campus conservative iconoclast. In at least three classes, I played the role of the Conservative, the one who would actually stand up for what he believed, whether the professor cared or not. In a couple cases, I felt bullied, and was mocked by two of my professors in front of the entire class.
In the end, my professors respected and didn't resent my differing views. The fact is that every professor I had at the college who talked at all about their political beliefs had a conservative streak in them with maybe one exception. And despite their liberalism, most (including Marita) allowed me to be who I was and say what I thought.
I, however, looked ahead to a future at the University of Montana in Missoula. Missoula, the crown jewel of the Democratic Party in Montana. Missoula, the place where the population is evenly divided between Far Left Democrats and Communists. Ah, Missoula. Osama bin Laden would be safer at the NRA convention than a Conservative would be at the U. of M. I had read of the politically correct atmosphere on Campus. What I'd seen in Kalispell wasn't too bad, but Kalispell was a small town with a strong Republican Majority. How much worse would things be in Missoula?
I didn't want to spend my time fighting a determined political left, swimming upstream down a waterfall full of sharks. My heart was no longer in going on with traditional college. Even though I took and passed the FVCC Board of Regents scholarship exam, I decided against continuing my educational plans at that time.
The vote of the Allocations Committee almost robbed me of my any joy I had had at FVCC. I would have let it do that, too. I was even thinking of skipping the graduation as people who had voted to defund the Mercury were going to parade in cap and gown and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
However, circumstances intervened. I'd earned the right to graduate, and wouldn't let anyone take it away. The bitter taste FVCC left in my mouth also went away in an unexpected way.
Marita's mother moved close to death and she had to fly out to California to be with her. I found myself, suddenly and shockingly "running the show". I ran down to Marita's class to show videos, picked up assignments, and handled many day-to-day details of running the Mercury. At the last moment, it became apparent, she wasn't going to make it home in time for us to get out our last issue and I found myself with a new title: Managing Editor.
We had the entire paper done with the exception of page 10. Aaron was due to be done with Page 10 on the last possible day. He came in and apologized and said it wasn't done. Instead of opting for a whole page of whitespace, I opted for the one story that I had on my mind. Despite all of the bad feelings and ill-will I wrote my FVCC farewell column with a mention of the "Thursday Night Massacre". I remembered Blake and Marita, Brian Bechtold's Shakespeare class, and all the good that I'd seen at FVCC. I remembered my friends, particularly from my Freshman Year. I remembered all the great things that made me love FVCC. And it is those memories that I think of first when I remember my Alma Mater.
While writing the article, Aaron served as my copy editor. I included humorous and self-deprecating notes in the column about embarrassing incidents that happened to me in my FVCC career such as getting lost in the LRC building. I would write, "It seems just like yesterday that (such and such happened). Oh wait it was yesterday." When I came to writing about forgetting where my car was parked and wrote, "Oh wait it was yesterday.", Aaron said, "Dude, it really was yesterday." I smiled and added, "This time, I'm not kidding."
Graduation Day came on May 17, 2002. It was the end of a chapter of my life. The Ceremony was memorable because of one student's performance of "God Bless the USA". We were the class that had lived through September 11. We could never forget about it. Even as Cody Anderson sang the song, I wanted to join in but didn't for fear that I'd look incredibly out of place as no one else was.
I watched as dozens of my classmates, received their diplomas. At last it was my turn. I walked slowly as I wanted to relish this moment, I'd never live through it again. I shook hands with Jane Karas, the FVCC president and John Engebretson, the President of the FVCC Board of Trustees. I walked down in my cap-and-gown, holding the cover for my Associate's Degree, and proudly wearing an honor chord. I had come a long way in two years. I knew I had still had a long way to go.
I said goodbye to FVCC, the Mercury Office, and old friends. Leaving was sad and even somewhat disturbing to me. It was the feeling of my own utter insignificance in the college's history in the long run. I had read articles in the Mercury archives by those who came before me whose names scarcely anyone remembered or even cared to remember. The few times I've visited FVCC since graduation, I felt like a ghost haunting a place where I no longer belong.
Despite my failure to "save" the Mercury, it still continues on. With my departure as well as that of an allocations committee, made up mostly of seniors, all the bad feelings and ill-will was washed away. At FVCC, every year, provides a chance for renewal and a clean slate. The new Student Senate gave some of its funds to the Mercury and I'm happy to report that the Mercury continues it's 30 year tradition of Journalistic excellence, a legacy I was proud to share in.
I remember my college days as some of my best and happiest. When I came to FVCC, I was a shy young man who lacked self-confidence. Through achievement and a steady learning process, I gained that confidence. It served as a springboard to my future. Despite the difficulties and problems I encountered, I give FVCC my highest recommendation. It's definitely had a positive impact on my life.