Title | Burkes, Caseel OH10_267 |
Creator | Weber State University, Stewart Library: Oral History Program |
Contributors | Burkes, Caseel, Interviewee; Layton, Sarah, Interviewer; MacKay, Kathryn, Professor; Gallagher, Stacie, Technician |
Description | The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. |
Biographical/Historical Note | The following is an oral history interview with Caseel Burke. The interview was conducted on September 18, 2001, by Sarah Layton. Burke talks about education and his time teaching and being Dean and the individualized, competency-based system of teacher education at Weber State College for the AACTE Committee. |
Subject | Education, Higher; Universities and colleges; Higher education institutions |
Digital Publisher | Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, USA |
Date | 2001 |
Date Digital | 2015 |
Temporal Coverage | 1962-2001 |
Medium | Oral History |
Spatial Coverage | Ogden (Utah); Layton (Utah); Logan (Utah) |
Type | Text |
Conversion Specifications | Original copy scanned using AABBYY Fine Reader 10 for optical character recognition. Digitally reformatted using Adobe Acrobat Xl Pro. |
Language | eng |
Rights | Materials may be used for non-profit and educational purposes, please credit University Archives, Stewart Library; Weber State University. |
Source | Burkes, Caseel OH10_267; Weber State University, Stewart Library, University Archives |
OCR Text | Show Oral History Program Caseel Burke Interviewed by Sarah Layton 18 September 2001 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Caseel Burke Interviewed by Sarah Layton 18 September 2001 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Burke, Caseel, an oral history by Sarah Layton, 18 September 2001, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Caseel Burke. The interview was conducted on September 18, 2001, by Sarah Layton. Burke talks about education and his time teaching and being Dean and the individualized, competency-based system of teacher education at weber State College for the AACTE Committee. {Beginning of interview is missing – seems to be a technical problem.} CB: I was hired, eventually. Anyway, I’m talking about after I came to Weber College and got settled there, this is what happened. That year I taught a preliminary course background somewhere in education and spent the remainder of my time meeting with department heads, faculty members, and administrative personnel. The Utah requirements for teacher preparation and certification – well, I was the basic guy for program planning, and I spent quite a bit of time consulting with Wayne Winters, Vere McHenry, and the certification division of the Utah State Office of Education (USOE), making sure our plans conformed with state standards. It was the goal of the college to have a teacher education program in operation at the autumn quarter of 1962 and ’63, which would be the junior year as the four-year plan developed. I was anxious to build a good program, which would be an improvement over anything I had been acquainted with. SL: So they had just put in the four-year program? CB: Just barely started, that year. The year I went there I was the only faculty member of Teacher Education. Practically all my time was in planning, getting coursework set up; things of that kind. SL: So you were planning for it for like a year or so before, is that right? 1 CB: Well, the second year we began taking on faculty members. Third year, fourth year we took on additional faculty members and gave them assignments and so on. Getting back to the people that I’ve dealt with at Weber College, and so on, and selecting additional faculty members for the department of Education. This contains all the faculty members that were hired, as I recall it. SL: You’ve got them all in here? CB: They’re all here. SL: Wow. That’s a good memory. CB: Well, I’ve been doing it over a period of some time, but most of it has been done the last ten, fifteen years. I retired in… ’82. SL: So you were the Dean from ’61 to ’82? CB: No – from ’61 – well, they didn’t call us Deans. SL: I see. CB: Envision Chairman for a while, and then they organized the School of Education, and that’s when I was made the Dean. I was Dean then for – oh, I don’t know, a dozen years? SL: So when you retired in ’82, you didn’t say, “Okay, I’m not going to be the Dean anymore, I’m just going to teach?” And then you retired? You retired as Dean. Is that right? CB: Something that’s not in here, but if you want to go into all of the details of what happened… 2 SL: Well, I’m just curious. CB: After I’d been Dean and we’d received a national award for the Outstanding Teacher Education Program in the country, five Deans, and I was one of them, were released by the President of the University. SL: That’s right, I remember reading that. CB: But I didn’t teach for another – well, I taught until I was almost 69. After I was released as Dean, and one of our faculty members was made Dean. SL: I remember reading that in Dr. Sadler’s book. CB: Oh did you? SL: Yeah, he’s got that in there I think. CB: Oh, is that right? SL: He’s the one that told me, he said, “You have got to talk to this Dr. Burke.” He says, “If you can’t get a hold of him, you come back and I’ll get a hold of him for you.” So –he says hi. CB: Oh, that’s good. He’s a nice guy. I enjoy him very much. SL: He’s wonderful. CB: We used to work together in various capacities and operations at the college. But anyway, as time went on, I’m talking here all about the people that were involved, for example Florence Barton that you may know – I didn’t know Florence, but she’s from Layton. Florence Barton and the wife of my friend Dale, from the days at USU, I was at USU for quite a number of years, joined us in secondary education. Olive McCarthy, of 3 the Ogden School District, came to us also, in elementary education. Harley Adamson, who had been teaching at North Dakota State University, also joined us in Secondary Education in the meantime. Clifford Clark, Freud Sucher and so on, joined us, from the University of Denver and the University of Northern Colorado. Most of these people came with doctorate degrees. We were a college that had quite a number of doctorate degrees on the faculty, but a lot of them were masters and so on, because it was still a junior college, or had been up to that point. But practically everyone that we took in would eventually have a doctorate degree from a major university. And the list goes on with people like that. I’ll tell you, the fact that it’s all written down here would be of more use to you than what I can tell you about it, we’re obviously repeating things here, to a lesser degree. But I know if you want to go on… SL: What were some of the biggest problems you came up against in trying to start the education program? I mean, I’m sure there were some things you had planned on and that didn’t turn out how you wanted, or – what were some of the problems that came up? CB: Well, my background was that I had been – I graduated from Utah State, and got a Master’s degree after the war and during the war – I’m 88 now, and – tomorrow – not tomorrow, next Monday. So I’ve been around a while, and I’ve forgotten quite a few things, so this is a – a better record than I can give you, this way. But the point is - when you talk about things that were problems - I had definitely in mind what I wanted to do. In the sense that I wanted to have it the best program developed. We had started from nothing. That means that whatever you do is your own creation, so to speak. I realized that the best thing I could do would be to get the best people I could find on staff. And 4 that was exactly what I went about, trying to find people – good people, as well as people who wanted to do something about teacher education. They were all public school people, and I figured, if I go to get a faculty, the best people I know are in the public schools. They know what they had in preparation, what ought to be the things that they would have had, if they could have had, and so I started asking people who were in the public schools. Every one of them had public school experience. Some of them had gone on to teacher education on the graduate level, and four-year level, so I knew a few things that I wanted to do. I knew a few things that I didn’t know, that I thought these people that I would bring in ought to know, because they’d been through this, so a benefit that I had was in bringing people in who were smart people, were welltrained, had the working teacher education, that are working in the teaching field, and that was the best thing I knew – it certainly turned out exactly that’s what happened. When I got these people there, they began thinking of things that now we’re going to have a new building eventually, and we got into it. We planned the building according to our needs. SL: Is that the building that’s on the campus right now? CB: Yes, by that time, I was Dean of the School of Education, and Family Life was part of our school, and Physical Education was part of our school. SL: They were all in by that time? Did they combine them just as they were – because before they weren’t like - Family Life was in the sciences, right? Instead of in Education? CB: May have been; I’m not sure where they used to be up there, but they were not in Education until that time, when they made the School of Education include Family Life 5 and the Department of Teacher Education. Then we had to be changed – not anything to do with physical education, but Family Life and Education would be in this new building. So part of the building had Family Life in it; part of the building developed the way we wanted in Education. There were some aspects about the building that were quite different from what we had had, and what we’d been used to, perhaps – or where we had been. SL: Where was – I have no idea – where was the Education Department housed before the building? CB: First of all, and it’s in here – we were housed in temporary buildings, taken from war surplus, I guess. They put some temporary buildings up and we were in a temporary building, an old-style barracks that had been converted to classrooms. Do you know Jane Dibble? SL: I know the Dibbles, I remember his name – actually, he was the principal of my high school, I think. Would that be him? CB: What’s his name? He was Dibble? SL: Yeah. I know he had a son named Dave; I don’t know her, but there was a Dibble that was principal at Layton high school. CB: They lived out on – what do you call it Gentile in Layton. My mother was related to the Dibbles somehow – I don’t know how, cousins or whatever the case might have been, and I remember going down to Layton when I was oh, six or eight years of age, and we walked from the bus stop right there on Gentile, down that street about a mile down to the Dibble place. 6 SL: Wow. CB: Jane Dibble was a member of our faculty. And she was of that particular family. So I am somehow related to Jane. She’s up there in that area now. Well, anyway, getting back here to what went on at the school: as we began to develop, these people began getting ideas, that I had hired. I had some ideas, and I had to put in – I had to put in a teacher preparation operation, which I did, and I had some ideas – I wanted to make it a little different from Utah State in a few aspects, because I didn’t like what was going on up there. SL: Uh-huh. CB: I’d been there about twelve years. So I knew that. I had taught at the University of California Berkeley, and I knew what they were doing there at Berkeley. Again, what I wanted to do was something that would be different. If it’s good, if it’s something that’s worthwhile. So that’s kind of what happened. This gives you what happened, along about – let’s see – 1966 or ’67, or a little before that, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, they had a system throughout the nation of accrediting schools for Teacher Education. And Leanne Perry Cheston put it in, after we had been about two or three years in our regular program. They said, why don’t you get them here and see what happens. Well, they came, and they liked most of everything. They didn’t like the holdings we had at the library, but the fact that we were building – planned to build a building - they said, tentatively you’re okay, but here are some things that ought to be done. So that got us started. Then we knew that the National Council for Teacher Education had a meeting each spring, in February, in Chicago. We got to thinking, there’s some unique things about this program; there’s some things that people are 7 writing about that they think would like to be in a good educational program. Let’s go for their award. And every year they gave an award, to the Outstanding Teacher Education Program in the country. So we wrote it up. One thing we knew: if we did anything important, it would cost money. Well, who would finance that? It was rather interesting. During that time, quite a few - the federal government and other agencies were putting money out for promising programs, and we thought from what we knew about funds that had been given, that the Carnegie Corporation of New York was a possibility. So I called – I talked to Carnegie on the telephone, rather wrote, and told him that we had something new going on, and we’d appreciate someone coming with the idea of the possibility of helping fund the program, which was quite unique and quite different from the programs we’d had. The man from Carnegie – I can’t remember – his first name was Allen – I think it was in that book that I wrote for the – after the award was given to us. They asked me to write the account. That’s the thing that’s up there in the file. That’s in detail as to what happened. This one includes the faculty and who was involved in it. That doesn’t include so much of that as it does what we were doing. SL: What happened when you won the award? CB: What happened in actually getting the award? Finally things kind of worked around to the point where they were interested in us. They sent their representatives out to talk to us a time or two, and the things that we were interested in, they liked. The Carnegie Corporation thought that it was a possibility. Well, the outcome of it was that they granted us $192,000.00; that’s quite a bit of money. It gave us a chance for a solid year. They gave us the chance to use that money after we had had a number of national figures in teacher education come to the campus, talk to us, and they gave them 8 stipends for doing so, and asked them to make a report. Apparently their report was very good, because they had given us $5,000.00 to bring these people in, and then they gave us $192,000.00 to help us develop the program. What we did was hire some public school people to come in and teach some classes that they were in favor of teaching, while we spent some time working on the program. Our faculty got away from the building pretty well, into one of the dormitories where they did not have enough students to fill it. So they gave us about a floor of the dormitory there and that was our headquarters while we were preparing. We hired consultants from Arizona State University, in Tempe, and they were recognized as consultants of value, and the things that we developed, we submitted to them. The major difference was that we wanted these people to become, these people coming through our program, to become good educators before they ever went out and took a job in the schools. Well, we went through a lot of kinds of experiences that most teacher educators never went through. Thiokol developed – one of our faculty members – interactional land, which we use. A lot of people got excited about that. After the award was given, I took a sabbatical leave. Right there I went to probably fifteen or twenty schools, telling them particularly about our program on their request to come. So quite a number of schools in the Midwest had a chance to hear about our program. I was there for a year, and they didn’t require me to do anything other than just be around, so that’s when I finished writing that thing that was up there in the file. That is, a summary of the program as far as the National Council for Teacher Education. Well, that year I was elected to become a part of the National Council, and for the next three years I was involved quite often in going to Council activities in which we were making the - people that wanted to get into the 9 Council, wanted to get approved by the Council, we went about that activity; I was there for three years. In the meantime, my wife got sick with cancer. And she died in ’76. Let’s see – for the last couple years I just couldn’t go, because my wife was deathly ill. In the meantime we had children – we raised them in Ogden, mostly. We started out in Logan and then had them in Ogden. Let’s see – none of them graduated from Weber, but at least two of them, and my stepson – my wife and I married later – he went to Weber College. The other kids went up to Logan. For some reason they liked Logan. They wanted to get away from home. SL: Probably. CB: Well, that’s – some of the details, but again, if you want the facts, like I say, this is. Now, I’ll give you a copy of this, and if you don’t need it, just put it in the file up there. Now what I’ll do is give you an extra copy. So if you get to that file, would you ask Miss Keller if I can leave this copy? Because this is a summary of the Teacher Education Program. Anybody like yourself who might be interested in it, which they probably won’t be, but if anyone wants to, I don’t know whether they’d find a more complete summary. SL: Probably not, because I’ve looked through everything. I’ve been searching through stuff, and nobody has compiled anything, except for you, it looks like. I’ve just got a whole bunch of loose papers. CB: Well, probably done more than I should have done. But then, the thing that I was always interested in is if there’s anybody cares about it, wants to know what happened, it’s all there. Now, in my own personal history, I said a little bit about the situation at the time when these five deans were dismissed. It was alright as far as I was concerned because, well, I didn’t expect it. 10 SL: Oh, it was a surprise? CB: I guess I might have done, because there’s some of us who did not agree with some of the policies of the new president, President Miller. SL: I see. CB: But anyway, that’s not the point. The important thing is that we did something that was important. We had people throughout the nation, we had people from foreign countries come to see what we were doing. Somewhere in my writings, I guess it’s in my life history, I think we had very close to a thousand people come to Weber College to look at our program, to ask us about it, to find out what we were doing. Some of them were from the Far East, some of them from Europe, Australia, various places; who came to America to find out what was going on in various places, and one of the places they were told to go was Weber College and find out what they are doing. By then we had the offer age well under way, and we had something to show them. What happened since then? I have no comment. SL: I’ve still got to look into all that. CB: That you do. SL: I know. CB: ‘Course, there are people who are there, you know Luan Ferron, Dr. Ferron? SL: I have him on a list, and I need to get hold of him – he’s one of the people that I’m going to go talk to. CB: Dr. Ferron. 11 SL: Dr. Sadler gave me his name too. CB: Blair Low lives right on campus. SL: Oh, does he live on campus? I’ve got Blaine Parkinson, Luan Ferron, and Blair Low, also on my list. CB: You’ve got Blaine Parkinson. Blaine’s right there, Blair Low’s right across the street from him. SL: And I guess he’s in Willard or Perry or someplace. CB: Who’s that? SL: Luan. CB: No, Luan Ferron’s in North Ogden. Well, not North Ogden – he’s just over by Ben Lomond High. SL: Oh, okay. One of these guys is out in Willard or Perry. CB: Well, he’s – Harley Adamson. You’ve got Harley? SL: Yes. CB: Okay. Harley Adamson. SL: That’s who it is. CB: Every one of those guys can tell you what happened, because they were all there. They made it happen. SL: That’s what Dr. Sadler said. You hired these four, is that right? 12 CB: Yes, I had to do the hiring. And of course we hired some – not just faculty members, we hired some people in support of the faculty members. And we were just very lucky in getting extra fun people. Extra good people. There was no evidence that I ever ran across that somebody was trying to outdo somebody else to get some advantage in salary or whatever. Nobody of that kind, on attack. If they did, nobody knew it, or they kept pretty low. So I think you’ll find it’s important. If they’ll tell you the truth, the program is developed by the whole group. I had to approve what was done, and I strongly approve the ideas that they brought or that they proposed. A man from Utah State came down and became Dean of the faculty; I guess you would call him. He was all for us. He liked what we were doing and did everything he did to help us out. I don’t know - he’s in Salt Lake somewhere. But anyway, I don’t know what else I can tell you that isn’t written down much better than I can tell you. SL: That’s everything? Let me get something straight that maybe I didn’t understand. When you were planning the program, you brought in outside teachers, and you guys went to the – for some of the classes – so that you guys could get away and do only the planning of the program. CB: That’s right. SL: Okay. That was in the dormitories. CB: Members of the faculty who were there, each one of them had some time to be over here working on the program, and maybe there were some things they still were doing in the program, but we brought in two or three people from outside. As we developed these program materials, we had to have somebody editing, somebody putting together, 13 somebody getting them ready, and our people who were coming from some places in the country – I don’t remember exactly. Did they put down Lucy Isaacson’s number? SL: Should I write her down? CB: Lucy Isaacson, if you want to find what was going on. Lucy Isaacson, she had a Master’s degree from Oklahoma, New England. But Lucy lived right across the street from myself. And when her husband died in an accident at Bear Lake, her husband was a veteran… Well, when Lucy decided to take the job, Lucy became very important. Of anybody outside the faculty, Lucy is the most important of all. SL: Do you know where she’s living at now? CB: Well, I thought she was there on Edgehill Drive. And I’ll tell you – do you have a – well, what’s another faculty member that you have? SL: I’ve got – well, would Dr. Sadler know? CB: Not so much as the ones from faculty. SL: Okay. Well – the Lofgreens, I’ve been talking with. CB: Alright. Carol Lofgreen will tell you everything. Karen. SL: Karen; I talked to her, she was the first person I talked to. CB: Okay, and that’s why she sent you. SL: And Karen would know? CB: Karen would know where Lucy is. Lucy could tell you the operation of it, and what the students were saying, and what they liked and didn’t like. She knew what they liked and so on. Nobody could tell you better than Lucy as to how it was going over, and who 14 came and what they did. Now, Pat Steiner is the one who did our publications. She sent little kits to some of the schools that wanted them throughout the country. She knew all of that. Maybe you don’t have Pat Steiner there. She lives somewhere in Ogden. She was divorced, and is remarried. But Pat Steiner was our editorial staff, and she did a terrific job. If you ever run across her, she’d be glad to tell you what she thought about this. SL: Okay, sounds good. Dr. Burke, I want to know one thing. I want to know the funniest thing that happened in all your time planning everything. What just was so ironic or so – something that just, you didn’t expect was going to happen to you. I’m going to really work on your brain for a minute. CB: Well, I guess the telling moment was the money we got from Carnegie. Now, it’s not very funny. But the point is, the fact that we got it, a little school just beginning, and only been in operation six or eight years when Carnegie came in and started helping us. That was highly important. I’d been looking forward to going on a sabbatical and getting away from the College after I’d been there a number of years, which happened afterward, after we did the program. Then I had a chance to go to about a dozen schools back East, which I mentioned before. Let’s see, what else. Something funny. I don’t know whether it’s something you want to write about, but I went to – is it Baker University? Down there St. Louis. Is it St. Louis is part of the city on this side of the river and then over here is Kansas. SL: Yes. CB: Okay. It was over in Kansas, and it was not right in St. Louis area, Kansas City. Not right in Kansas City, but it was Baker University, I think, just nearby. They asked me to 15 come down and talk to the faculty, spend a couple of days, I don’t know what the assignment was. But it was about our program. We were sitting in the cafeteria, students all around, you know, lunchtime. All of the sudden I heard girls screaming and so on, and some streaker went clear through the – everybody was having a great time, and he got away somewhere. The people I was with said, “Well, this doesn’t happen very often…” But anyway, that was the funniest thing, but again, maybe you don’t want to say anything about that. I don’t know that I would. But the point is… that didn’t have anything to do with the program. SL: No. I just wanted to know. CB: It was horrible. But anyway, let’s see. No, I’ve got nothing. Some of the things that sound funny to me may be disparaging to somebody else. SL: I doubt it. CB: Let’s see, this Harley Adamson, that I hope you can talk to, Harley will tell you a lot of things. Luan Ferrin will tell you a lot of things about it, and Blaine Parkinson knows the whole thing. There was a lot of activity on campus, but nothing happened until the time the President had served seven years. It seems like seven years – sabbatical period, a sabbatical is usually seven years; but after three years, there was a question as to whether they had chosen the right person to be President. Well, after seven years he was hired, and he was a very fine President. Well, I don’t know. Now, if you want to call me and say, look, I forgot about something, or about this, I’m here most of the time. SL: Okay, sounds good. 16 CB: I go to the spa, get my exercise, I come back and I’m usually tired; I take a nap, and if I’m not tired, I’m right here in the neighborhood. I drive my car around, I don’t go very far from home. My wife has the other car; whenever we go to Ogden. Our group – one thing that’s important – if you talk to any of these people, our group I believe is probably the closest-knit group on campus from back in those days. Because just about every year since then – not every year, but quite a number of years – we have met as a group and just talked. Talked over old times. SL: Karen Lofgreen was saying you were up there just not too long ago. CB: Yes, at Elena Watson’s place. Elena was one of our fine faculty members. Mrs. Lofgreen knows the whole works. She’s been there since… SL: That’s what she said, “They probably sent you to me because I’m the oldest, huh?” I said, “I don’t know, they just said, start with her.” That’s who I started with. CB: She can tell you where Lucy Isaacson is. If you want to know below the faculty members what happened, Lucy Isaacson can tell you all kinds of things. SL: Okay, that sounds good. This has been neat. Because now I understand better the program that I’m in. When I decided to go to Weber State – when I graduated from high school, I had a scholarship – a Utah Career Teaching Scholarship – and I could go to any university I wanted to in the state. So I just pretty much had to decide which one I was going to go to, and kind of started looking into things, and found that Weber State really has a good teacher education program, that the majority of the teachers in Utah graduated from there. A great majority of them in high schools and junior highs. 17 CB: Well, by the time the program got underway; one of the things that is evident here, all the way through, is that we were not about to build something and say, “Now here it is, this is your…” We brought public school people in, the superintendents of Davis, of Weber and Ogden, Box Elder, Morgan – they all came in, time and again, and we told them what we were thinking of doing. “What do you think about it?” If they didn’t like it, they may have kept their mouths shut, but if they liked it, they’d say, “Well, let’s give it a try, I think you’re doing the right thing.” They told us that all the way through, and it – they had a lot to do with it. So it was not in any sense anybody’s program – it was everybody’s program, including the public school people, who we wanted to have on our side. When the students became – going out into the schools, they recognized these students as something, and our students were just picked up every time. That doesn’t mean they didn’t go to Utah State, or the University, or BYU – sure, they wanted some of those too, but our students had first try in our day, there’s no question about it. At least, for some time. SL: And I’ve noticed that the relationship between the Education department and the public schools still is very strong. CB: That’s good. SL: I really enjoyed my time – I haven’t done my student teaching yet, that’s next semester, but the first two levels we do either tutoring or you do a three-week session of student teaching. First I was out at Ben Lomond High School, and that was – turned out great, it was the tutoring thing. Then, the next semester, I was out at Mound Fort Middle School, and we did a three-, four-week student teaching thing, and I just loved it. It was great. It was such a good experience; the faculty there was so supportive of us. They knew who 18 we were, and it seems like that happens every year, from what my professors have told me. They’ve said, you know, we send as many as we can out to this school, or to this school, because they just really love the student teachers. They really send them everywhere, but there’s some special ones that they send a bunch to because of the good relationship they’ve got with them. So it’s doing good still. CB: Well, we got started off right I believe. We did a good job as long as we were there, and many of them lasted there much longer than I did, and they were continuing to do fine things, did some extra things. Luan Ferrin, for example, had a project that he was working on for a number of years on a national basis. Blaine Parkinson got away – while I was in the East, I had considerable contact with a number of Universities that wanted to know. Well, I’ll tell you. If you read that… SL: Okay. I will. CB: You’ll see, there’s some things you’ll probably want to use, and some things you don’t, but the point is if there’s anything you need to call ask about, well what about this? SL: Not a big deal. Sounds good. Thank you so much for your help. CB: Well, it’s interesting that you’ve been on a mission. My second wife and I, we served a mission in San Francisco. SL: Oh, did you? CB: After I retired. I retired in ’82, and about ’83, ’84 they had called us to New Zealand. Just before we were to go I got a heart attack, put me out of commission. SL: That’s when you know you have to go, is when you get sick, huh? 19 CB: And I didn’t have any idea that I had any problem. But they pulled me through. The doctors here in Ogden. Let’s see. I wonder. SL: You want me to take that one to archives? CB: Would you do that? SL: Certainly will. I’m up there a couple times a week anyway. CB: Just go up to the head librarian if you’d like to and let them know that I asked if you would put this into my file. I stopped writing, started doing other things in my life, so they’ll put that in. SL: I will certainly have them do that. CB: Anyway. Whatever you want to do with those is perfectly alright. SL: Sounds great. CB: I think I’ve told you about everything I know. SL: Okay. Well, I’m excited to read that, and I will certainly get you a copy when I’m done with my paper, so you can have it. CB: I’d like that. SL: I’m hoping to get everything together, starting clear back with the Academy. CB: You know, after I was released from Deanship, somebody suggested that we write up the program. Well, the program hasn’t been written up. This copy that you have there is most detailed as far as what it covers. The big copy that went to National is there in the file. That covered the major events, I think, that happened and why we did this and that 20 and what it was all about. So it’s now - I think - well covered, by the time you write yours. 21 |
Format | application/pdf |
ARK | ark:/87278/s6pztafj |
Setname | wsu_stu_oh |
ID | 111798 |
Reference URL | https://digital.weber.edu/ark:/87278/s6pztafj |