Ode To Dr. Wallis R. Sanborn III

Tonight I learned that my favorite professor, Dr. S., will be leaving OSU after the summer quarter. I have been his student for over two years now and have taken almost every course I can from him. The reason he is leaving? OSU does not offer benefits to online professors. This is a crying shame and something needs to be done about it. I hope the founding fathers will dust themselves off and realize how important and VITAL the online classroom is. Without the professors, where are we?
Why is a professor standing in a classroom better than an online professor? The online professor is easily more accessible than the one in the classroom. The online student can open up his or her mouth where the shy one may never speak out in a classroom. Online discussions are not limited to one hour sessions, and may go on for weeks or months until the subject has been thoroughly explored and learned.
Online classes are better, and Dr. S is the best.
If any of you out there know how to lobby or something, please fill me in. Online professors deserve the same benefits as on campus professors. Anyway...

I wish Dr. S. luck in his new employment at Angelo State.

Here is a list of some of the amazing works I have been able to study with Dr. S:
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Maggie: A Girl of The Streets by Stephen Crane
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper
The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
The Floating Opera by John Barth
The End of the Road by John Barth
George Washington Gomez by Americo Paredes
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Ironweed by William Kennedy
And many more short stories...

Most of those books are hard, gritty novels that I wouldn't recommend as bedtime stories. But there are truths in them, especially in The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam War, that must be told.

Don't read any of them because of me, though. As Lavar Burton says, "Don't take my word for it!"

And to you, Dr. S., should you ever read this, thanks.


"When will the public cease to insult the teacher's calling with empty flattery? When will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings?"
-William C. Bagley from Craftmanship in Teaching