Blackboard to surfboard

CSM professors find creative ways to occupy their time outside classroom

Friday, Dec. 19, 2008

His decision to take the sport up in the first place was equally remarkable: About 10 years ago, he enrolled in a surfing camp in California and learned to ply the waves alongside 9-year-old children. Some of them outshone him, but he didn't mind.

"I just knew it was time to learn to surf. It was a challenge," he said. "I knew that at the surfing camp, I would be, at best, OK. I'm not even that good."

The college, which celebrated its 50th birthday this year, serves 60 percent of local students who are in pursuit of degrees.

Those who are not familiar with the college might assume its instructors all trained to be educators, but the community college system is the intellectual home of professors with wildly disparate professional histories and personal interests, which is reflected in and enhances the instruction they give their students.

Klink's avocation for surfing seems unusual in a college professor, but it's par for the course among the interests of his colleagues.

Now he's decided to take on the ocean on every beach mentioned in the Beach Boys song, "Surfin' USA," because "it provided a sense of direction. I figured out where those beaches were and then went to them." He's tackled the ones in California, and plans to venture to Australia and the western Pacific for others.

In the meantime, he amuses himself showing up at East Coast beaches during hurricanes. At a New Jersey beach in October, Klink was thrown from a board and hit his head on it.

"That was a sound I had not heard before. The sound, by the way, is ‘thunk,'" he said.

His presence during violent storms "is not an accident," he said. "That's when it's dangerous. That's when it's fun. There were boards flying up into the jetties, people getting cut and smashed into the bottom — it was fun. It didn't happen to me. It was pretty exciting."

Klink brings the same relaxed attitude to his other sports, tennis and golf. During one round of golf, "I hit the ball across three different roads. And you're not supposed to hit the ball across any roads. Sometimes it goes a lot farther than I expected."

Armed with an advanced degree in English from Catholic University, Klink has amassed a long and varied curriculum vitae. At 23, he played a Latino teenager on a television show even though he doesn't speak Spanish. Now, he doesn't remember the name of the show. He's made and helped edit films as well. In 2003, he accepted a friend's invitation to narrate a documentary on acclaimed novelist E.L. Doctorow.

"I kind of had to use my karaoke voice," he said, explaining that "it wasn't deep enough" naturally for narration. "My general advice in karaoke is, sing in a deeper voice than the one you actually have."

An English professor at the college and its predecessor since 1971, he also created and teaches a course in popular culture at the La Plata campus, where students learn about the role of icons, heroes and stereotypes in everyday experience.

"Everyone has to deal with stereotypes, because you can't know everyone individually," he said. "The course is particularly interested not just in what stereotypes are, but who's doing the stereotyping and what that says about the stereotyped and the stereotypers. I had a good paper this semester about those T-shirts called ‘wife beaters.' The gist of the paper was, if you're a younger person, you're likely to use the term ‘wife beater' for that, but if you're older you tend not to. There's a detachment between idea and the term" for younger generations.

Upon emerging from his course, students "are kind of disoriented. Or a more serious answer to that would be that they end up questioning what their perceptions are and what does and doesn't fit with what their other perceptions are."

20 down, 371 to go

Rachel Drake, 47, who teaches information technology services at the Leonardtown campus, is working on her own list, although hers doesn't involve surfing. Instead, Drake has set a goal of visiting every national park in the country, a daunting task, as the National Park Service says there are almost 400.

So far, she has tackled 20; nine of them are parks and memorials inside Washington, D.C., and several more are in the area, including Great Falls and Shenandoah national parks. But her determination has also taken her farther afield, to the Golden Gate Natural Resources Area and other sites in California, and the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Next summer she plans to visit the Acadia National Park in Maine, and Yosemite, Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon are also on her list.

"It's just been a passion of mine," Drake said. "I love the ocean. I love the mountains, and then there are unique features at every one at the national parks, so I decided I would love to go and see all these places around the United States. It's a later-in-life decision."

She combines these visits with trips to see family, camping in a pop-up tent trailer pulled behind her car. When set up, the trailer houses seven and includes a furnace, refrigerator, cooking appliances, sink, toilet and shower.

"I haven't used the shower and the toilet yet, because most places I go to have those, so I haven't actually tried that yet, since my trailer is only 2 years old. But when I do, I'm not sure I'm going to call it camping in style — it's a very, very small space."

Drake purchased a "passport" from the park service to record every park she's been to. She doesn't know if she'll ever be able to visit all of them, "but I'm going to try."

From seeking

to teaching

When Dick Beers, 68, retired from a long career in industry, he placed an unsolicited phone call to the college, asking if he could be useful as a physics and math instructor. He could. He donates his salary back to the college every year — he just wants to teach.

Having held positions in areas like marketing and business development, Beers jokes that "I used to say I didn't do useful work." But his work gave him a hand in a host of nuclear weapons and power research programs; later, he played a key role in developing a company that performed medical, biotechnical and environmental work for the Navy and other clients, including research into defending against biological attacks.

With BB&G, a now-defunct research and development firm, he was part of a team searching northern Canada in 1979 for pieces of a fallen Soviet spy satellite.

It fell "in January, of all times," and an airplane dropped him and his co-workers off with pallets of supplies but with training limited to this advice: "They pushed us out the door with a bunch of pallets and said, ‘There are some tents in there. If you don't want to freeze to death, set them up,'" he recalled.

Although it was a nuclear satellite, it turned out not to pose a serious threat. Nonetheless, during the exploration, dubbed Operation Morning Light, his expedition struggled to warn the local Inuit of the danger its remnants might pose.

"Just imagine you come upon a bunch of Eskimos and you're trying to talk to them about threat of nuclear radiation. There is nothing in their vocabulary," he said. "We wound up, through a translator, calling it ‘invisible lightning.' It was the closest thing we could find in their vocabulary. They were afraid of lightning — ‘You can't see it, be afraid of it.' It was kind of a gee-whiz thing."

Another expedition, with a different company, took Beers to the minefields of Kuwait after the first Gulf War, where he assisted with mine detection and removal.

He took photographs of the aftermath of the Iraqi occupation in one Kuwaiti town, with collapsing buildings and several school buses, packed with appliances and other goods, abandoned in the street. Iraqi soldiers, he explained, had stolen the buses to carry their plunder out of the country, then abandoned them as U.S. troops advanced.

Even with the Iraqis gone, hazards remained, especially from oil well fires set by the soldiers as they fled. Even fires thought extinguished could flare up again.

"Oil fires would sneak up on [the team] and they start again. It's kind of scary," he said.

Now, he brings the same dedication to the classroom as he did to business, purchasing unusually sophisticated equipment for his teaching laboratory, as well as setting up simple demonstrations to illustrate principles in action.

During a recent visit to his Prince Frederick classroom, Beers showed a visitor a globe held in midair by magnets, and challenged her to predict the behavior of pendulums and of softballs hanging by strings.

"We probably have the latest, best kind of lab equipment, but not for its own sake," Beers said. "As a professor and someone who has had a lot of experience, I went out and bought equipment where students are able to replicate five Nobel prize-winning experiments in exactly the way they were done originally," something that gives students historical perspective on the science they are learning. Studies have shown, he said, that college students remember these lessons much better if given interactive demonstrations.

"The lab is full of toys. I've brought all kinds of interactive things. Generally, when students come in, they are playing with toys that are around the classroom. … I'm just an overgrown kid. I like to play, too."

Blending cultures

Economics and business may seem buttoned-down subjects to teach, but Athena Miklos has found an unusual way to cut loose in her free time: dressage, or "horse ballet." The discipline, which includes turns, hops and even standing on the hind legs, is a workout for both Miklos and her horse.

"I like to think of dressage as muscle training for horses — Pilates for horses, that's my own view of it," she said. "The basis for it stems from many years ago. The foundation for it is a military foundation — a Greek, Xenophon, was first to really identify the usefulness of the horse in war, and some of the movements horses do in the ring are movements warhorses did."

Her horse, Royal, loves the exercises, which allow a communion between horse and rider.

"It's a very interesting discipline, and it relies very heavily on your ability to partner with your horse. It's a partnership," she said. "I look at my horse as my partner, and I feel honored and privileged that he allows me to get on his back. Being on a horse's back is not a natural thing for a horse, and they're typically slight animals. To create a relationship with a horse, and a bond with a horse that is trusting, is a privilege and an honor."

Miklos also participates in fox hunts, in a sanitized, American version that spares the life of the quarry. Instead, the sport is about appreciating nature and observing the interactions of the fox, hounds, horses and the humans guiding them.

"It's more to watch the hounds work, and to view the fox, and see if you can find them, because they're clever," she said. "So a lot of it has to do with the hounds that you have and the hounds' ability to find them and then to give chase. … It is concerned about the environment, because if the environment goes and if you continue to build without really thinking of what you're doing when you're building, you're going to destroy habitat for all of the wildlife, including the fox, and we don't want to see that habitat destroyed. We don't want to see that fox put on an endangered species list. It's a marvelous wild animal, and viewing it and watching the hounds work, the calls and sounds of hounds, it's interesting to listen to them when they catch the scent of a fox and the cry that they have when they are on the scent."

Miklos was born in Athens, Ohio, but still has strong ties to her parents' culture. She was named Athena not for her birthplace, but because it is a venerable family name.

"I was named after my grandmother, who was named after her grandmother, who was named after her grandmother," a Greek tradition, she said. "I really can't tell you how far back it goes. My parents said it was just a family name that has gone back through generations."

Despite being born abroad, her parents, especially her mother, were determined to Americanize themselves. Her mother would speak English to her in public, so that neighbors would know she could speak it. After returning from a trip to Greece, Miklos' mother knelt down on her kitchen floor and gave thanks to God to be home in the United States. Despite her mother's enthusiasm, Miklos felt that in her situation, speaking Greek at home and English at school, that "you weren't really Greek. You weren't really American. You were just a fish out of water."

It was through her studies that she found a place for herself. Before starting to teach at the La Plata campus, Miklos worked as a strategic development consultant, helping businesses research expansion opportunities overseas. Miklos said she found her work and studies in international economics to be the ideal way to reconcile the two cultures that define her: her American birth and her Greek ancestry. "I had finally found ground. I was in my element," she said of her studies.

emitrano@somdnews.com