Deb Aronson's RSS feed. http://www.debaronson.com/ Jackson walks by Adam in the cafeteria and purposely spills his food on Adam. Later Jackson grabs Adam’s book and, despite Adam’s protests, throws it out the window. A teacher asks what is going on and Adam says “Nothing.” What sounds like a typical day in school is in fact part of a 20-minute movie made by eighth grade students and filmmaker Christopher Faull. This unique filmmaking project addresses the issue of bullying, while also involving students in 21st century literacy practices, such as working collaboratively to pose and solve problems, learning to use technology tools, thinking about cause and effect, and designing and sharing information. Using the topic of relationships and bullying allows students to incorporate their personal experiences and address issues that impact them daily, enabling students to fully engage in the learning process. Faull first had the idea for the program, called Stories of Us, when he noticed that some of his best movie-making results came with young actors. Faull wondered what would happen if he used young people with no acting experience, so as an experiment, he started talking to students about what issues were most important to them. Not surprisingly, relationships and all the things that go into them, including bullying, ranked the highest on the students’ lists. Faull’s experiment resulted in six movies about bullying that he made in collaboration with various classes of students in his native Australia. The Problem of Bullying Bullying is a behavior that is difficult to discipline and that often happens out of sight of teachers. Research has shown that students often don’t report it, but it can lead to poor school performance, depression, violence and a host of other problems. Teachers don’t always know what bullying looks like these days, or if they do recognize bullying they don’t think it is serious or they don’t know how to stop it. (The National Association of School Psychologists has a list of resources at http://www.nasponline.org/resources/listinga_d.aspx). In fact, an additional movie Faull intends to make in the future will be devoted specifically to educating teachers about bullying, including how to handle a bullying situation and what systems can help address bullying. Building on the success of the Australian film project, Faull brought Stories of Us to the United States this past year. He was interested in collaborating with university faculty who study the dynamics of bullying and school violence, and as a result of his academic contacts at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (Dorothy Espelage) and University of Nebraska in Lincoln (Susan Swearer), he connected with middle schools in those towns. Franklin in Champaign, Ill., and Irving in Lincoln, Neb., participated in the eight-week unit. The filmmaking process at Franklin required significant support from both the teachers and the administration. A year before the project started, the school’s master schedule was re-arranged so that two reading and math classes could be back to back, providing the potential for a longer period when needed during the filmmaking project. In addition, adjoining classrooms had to be found so that reading teacher Shameem Rakha and math teacher Anthony Jones could both keep an eye on the movie-making project and teach the students not immediately needed for the movie. Then Rakha, who was Franklin’s main coordinator, sent out information and permission slips to 60 students, 28 of whom were chosen to participate. Developing the Story When he came to Illinois in September 2007, Faull first asked the students to share their experiences of bullying. As is his usual practice, Faull collected those stories and then worked with students to develop one or two stories into a full plot. Each movie is the result of stories those students told Faull about their own experiences being bullied and being a bully. “There is nothing made up,” Faull told the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. They’ve given me all the pieces. I’ve simply constructed it into something … that’s real to them.” “I am constantly checking with them,” he says. “What would happen next? Are you sure this would happen? They are translating their own experience into a story.” The students and Faull write the story line, but not a full script. The story line charts the arc of the story, which includes information like what characters are involved and where the action takes place. “I started seeing how much work it was to make a movie,” says Laura Clark, who plays Izzy, one of the victim’s friends in the movie. “I thought the project would be like when I was in a play: we’d write the script, then memorize it, then recite it. I also thought it would be a boring educational film. But then Chris came and it got more interesting.” Although Faull puts most of the storytelling in the students’ hands, he is careful to control certain important elements. For example, any story “is intentionally structured so students can empathize with the victims,” says Faull. “They are not weak or pathetic; the viewers can see that it could be anyone who is bullied.” When the students audition, Faull typically chooses pre-existing social groups to encourage the students to act naturally while being filmed. “What I really liked,” said Rakha, “was that we had students create their characters — their names, what they were like, their background, their favorite things to do, clothes to wear, who their friends were, everything.” In one case, a student who played a troubled boy who bullied others asked Rakha what would make him act like that. He and Rakha brainstormed about what would make him so angry, and he developed the scenario that was used in the movie, in which the character’s parents were divorcing. When the film crew came, the students had to be ready. Just before filming, the students in a particular scene would rehearse once again and Faull would block out each scene, adding in the extras for the first time. Then Faull would shoot the scene from multiple angles. Consequently a single scene could take several hours to shoot. The rehearsal and filming took two weeks, including many hours before and after school. “It was insane, but a lovely insane,” says Rakha. The resulting movie includes two plot lines. In one, a girl who feels slighted starts a rumor about another girl and gets her friends to go along with it. That escalates to the point where the group arranges for the bullied girl to meet in the park with a boy she likes. They take a picture of the meeting and tease the victim by putting it on the Internet. In the second plotline, one boy starts picking on another, by shoving him in the hall and purposely spilling food on him, throwing his book out a window, and tearing up something he had written. The victim doesn’t respond until finally, goaded to his limit, he teases the bully about his parents’ divorce. Wide-Ranging Benefits The most obvious goal of the film project was to help students develop and deliver a message about bullying and its negative impact, but that wasn’t the extent of the project’s influence. Rakha notes that her class also learned an enormous amount in other areas. The focus on character, plot, and audience helped students learn how to tell a coherent story and how to understand an experience from another’s perspective. The group work required that they share their experiences, work together, and learn to trust one another; and the filming process exposed them to a variety of concepts, techniques, and terms used in making moves. Rakha’s class even had to learn how to handle the media attention that resulted from their movie, including giving interviews to print and broadcast media and being photographed in the classroom. As it turned out, it would be difficult to find a classroom project that better illustrates the range of skills currently termed “21st century literacies,” and considered increasingly essential for academic and real-world achievement. These include dynamic activities such as building relationships, solving problems, sharing information, thinking creatively, and creating multi-media texts, and are cited in recent documents such as NCTE’s “Toward a Definition of 21st Century Literacies” and the “Framework for 21st Century Learning” from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. For Franklin Middle School students, though, what stood out most about their film project may have been the fact that a problem like bullying could exist without their realizing it, and that working together, they could deliver a message that would make a difference. “Even though I was bullied a little in sixth grade, I wasn’t that concerned about bullying before we did the project,” says Akshay Krishnamani. “But when we did the movie and could act it out and be the person watching it on the director’s cut, I began to realize that bullying is really universal and is more serious than I realized.” “The films take you on an emotional journey,” says Faull. “If the authenticity convinces the audience that this is real then you have a real chance to have behavioral changes.” Franklin students agree. “The movie won’t stop bullying around the world,” acknowledges Krishnamani, who played a friend of one of the bullying victims in the movie, “but if a kid in school sees the movie and it intrigues them enough to listen then it might make them want to change.” Reaching a Wider Audience The completed movies, with their believable characters and situations, also are powerful tools when shown to other students, educators and the wider community. The authenticity of the movies, says Faull, is one of the most compelling parts of his approach and the one that comes from the students themselves. But he is the first to acknowledge that this project is exhausting and time consuming. “You have to have a lot of trust in the kids” for a project like this, he adds. Everyone, including Faull, has been pleasantly surprised at the amount of media attention Stories of Us has attracted. Both CBS and ABC have covered the project, as well as several major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune. But even more gratifying to Faull has been the interest from the educational community. “The educational community really got behind the films,” says Faull. The Australian Primary Principals Association put a link to the Stories of Us webpage on its homepage. The movies also were publicly screened numerous times. Faull’s work also has garnered interest from literacy teachers, principals, and educators concerned with bullying from as far away as England, Norway, Singapore, Japan, and Greece. And in the United States, many education and child welfare groups also share his enthusiasm for this approach to bullying. Faull has been invited to speak at many meetings, including the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Middle Schools Association. Faull also will be at the NCTE national meeting in November. At the core of Faull’s vision has always been to teach literacy through the medium of movie making. With that in mind, Faull has developed a full curriculum — soon to be nationally available — which involves not just screening and discussing the movie, but numerous in-class and homework exercises. These include writing a letter to one of the victims giving them advice, talking in groups about how to improve the situation, making charts comparing and contrasting characters’ attributes, researching topics like cyber-bullying and creating informative pamphlets, and writing a poem, short story or rap song about bullying. For information about the curriculum, go to www.stories ofus.com and click on “resources.” Faull believes so strongly in his approach that in addition to the middle school projects he’s completed, he is planning both elementary- and high-school-level projects. He also has developed guidelines so other schools can shoot their own movies and upload them to the Stories of Us website. The experience Faull shared with the students from Franklin will stay with them all their lives. Rakha, who was so central to the project at Franklin, was thrilled to have helped. “This project gave my students a chance to be truly engaged in learning. What other curriculum do we have that kids have helped write?” she says. “In addition, they were given the wonderful opportunity to be part of changing the climate of American schools. How many students can say that?” http://www.debaronson.com/features/stories_of_us/ 2008-09-10 Eyamba Bokamba joined the University of Illinois Department of Linguistics 34 years ago, and since then he’s made it resound with the intonations of a continent. Bokamba has grown the African languages program from one language to five and developed more than 35 African language courses, as well as more than half a dozen African linguistics ones. By the mid-1980s, the UI program in African languages had become the most comprehensive of its kind in the country. In some respects, Bokamba is the Program of African Languages and Linguistics (PALL). “I’m the mother and father of what is going on,” he said, with the wide smile of a proud parent. In addition to his work within the department, with the help and support of the UI Center for African Studies, Bokamba directed the prestigious Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI) last summer and will do so again this summer. Hosting SCALI, an intensive and unique language program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, is a national honor and a recognition of the strength of the African languages program at Illinois. At 68, Bokamba is a grandfather twice over, but he looks both younger and taller than he is. His square face is framed with short hair, and his richly colored skin has few wrinkles. In class, his deep voice resonates with authority as he paces the room. And that classroom means a great deal to him. For all the pride Bokamba takes in building PALL, that achievement would mean nothing if it weren’t for his students. “Figuring out how languages work amounts to doing detective work,” he said. “I find it fascinating to see the students develop those skills.” Linguistics can be roughly divided into two areas: the theoretical, which looks at how language is structured and learned; and the applied, which looks at how language is used in society. By studying a language’s implicit and explicit layers of meaning, one can better comprehend how the mind works and understand the human experience more fully. For UI senior Amelia Coleman, it is just this detective work that appeals to her. “It’s like language has this secret structure,” she said, “and once you learn it, you see that the average person doesn’t even realize what they are saying. [As a linguistics major] I feel like it means something different to me and that I belong to a kind of secret club.” Bokamba has a knack for opening up those secrets to many students. “He played a vital role in my academic life,” said graduate student Tholani Hlongwa. “I would feel angry and frustrated, like I can’t do it, but then I come out of his office with a problem solved. …You can talk to him about everything and anything.” Bokamba is used to facing challenges and solving problems. Growing up in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), he lost his mother when he was 3. With the help of his father and uncle and the support of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which sponsored him, Bokamba came to the U.S. at the age of 15 to pursue his dream of furthering his education. Starting in the early 1960s, he lived with many different host families in Ohio and Kansas. To this day, those host families are part of Bokamba’s own extended family; he refers to each member as mother, father, sister or brother. That concept of an extended family - full of extra parents, uncles and aunts - is a practice Bokamba imported from his homeland for the benefit of both himself and his students. Although Bokamba has four grown children, he and his wife, Molingo, have gathered the PALL students around them like so many more offspring. “Outside of school, his home is our home,” said Hlongwa. “At school we call him professor Bokamba, but at his house we call him Dad.” http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/language_of_love/ 2008-05-01 As a child, poet Charles Simic played in the bombed-out buildings of his Belgrade neighborhood. His earliest memories include being thrown out of bed and across the room by the impact of a bomb, and seeing flames and dust and smoke so thick it was like nighttime at noon. Perhaps even more surreal were his experiences as a “displaced person” in France, where his family fled from Hitler’s forces. “It’s hard for people who have never had the experience to truly grasp what it means to lack proper documents,” he writes in his memoir, A Fly in the Soup. “The pleasure of humiliating the powerless must not be underestimated.” Hearing about Simic’s childhood, it’s hard to imagine him surviving it at all, much less accomplishing so much. Yet, since arriving in Chicago in 1954 at the age of 16 with only the most tenuous understanding of English and little ability to speak it, Simic has written 20 volumes of poetry, numerous essays and other collections. In addition, he has been recognized with, among other things, the MacArthur “genius” Grant, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Wallace Stevens award. He serves as the poetry editor of the Paris Review, writes for the New York Review of Books, and is now the Poet Laureate of the United States. “Our Most Disquieting Muse” Simic has harnessed the chaos and arbitrariness of his youth to write poems that have been described as “surrealist with a purpose.” Or perhaps his poems reflect his continuing struggles to make sense of those otherworldly experiences. “The disconcerting shifts and sinister imagery that characterize his work are always intended to suggest — however obliquely — the existential questions that trouble our day-to-day lives, ” David Orr wrote in a New York Times Book Review of Simic’s work. In either case, he is, as the Harvard Review once wrote, “perhaps our most disquieting muse.” Although Simic, whose voice retains traces of his native country, has translated numerous works of poetry from Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian and French, he has always written in English. “I wanted my friends to hear my poetry,” he explains. Those friends were ones he found at Chicago’s Oak Park High School. In addition to friends, Simic found some outstanding teachers, bookstores, libraries and fellow writers. He did struggle to learn English, but his solution was to read all the time, at least a book a day. “I wouldn’t have been able to write if I hadn’t read so much,” he says. Simic’s other formative experience was being forced to memorize poems, during his otherwise hellish year in France. Though he says he resented it at the time, he later came to consider it an important part of learning to love language and, from there, to write poetry. Still not envisioning himself as a poet with a capital “P,” Simic headed to New York City after high school. There he worked at various day jobs, writing poetry on the side. “Writing poetry was something I did without thinking it would be my profession or my lifelong ambition,” he says. That changed when Simic published two volumes of poetry, one in 1967 (What the Grass Says) and one in 1969 (Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes). Colleges began inviting him to come and teach. Although reluctant at first, that changed as he and his wife contemplated living in New York City with their infant daughter. Simic accepted an offer from California State University - Hayward. And so he became a Poet. After three years the Simics went to University of New Hampshire (UNH) and never left. Simic, professor emeritus at UNH, became a college teacher almost by accident. Nevertheless, his experiences in New York City high schools as part of a “Poets in Schools” program gave him some much-needed confidence. Wanna Hear a Love Poem? “The high school classrooms were scary then; they are even scarier today,” says Simic. “So you go into a rowdy class and the teacher says, ‘we have a poet with us today.’ The students look at you in disbelief. I ask them, ‘do any of you write love notes to some of the people in class? You take care when you write these things, right? You want to make sure whoever reads it is impressed’ and I start explaining the effort it takes because it takes many efforts to write a love note. Now they’re interested, and I say, ‘wanna hear a love poem?’ “Those classes, which were terrifying, gave me tremendous confidence,” he says. Simic figured out, in part from his own experiences and in part from the students, that the key is to find poems that connect and speak to each student. “What you do is you bring them poems that are very difficult for any human being, who has any imagination or thought processes, to resist,” he says. The connection will be different for every student and every school and cannot succeed with a cookie cutter approach. Simic tells of going to schools in Arizona where students were introduced to poetry through works by Robert Frost. “Those poems were culturally remote from the lives of the students and, I daresay, impossible to teach for that reason,” he says. Instead of teaching Robert Frost to students who have never been to New England, find something closer to their own lives, he suggests. Simic revels in overcoming that resistance to poetry that he found both in high schools and in colleges. “I can teach anyone to love poetry,” he says. It would sound brash, even arrogant, if he weren’t so matter of fact about it. The Value of Poetry “Nobody thinks they like poetry; that’s the first feeling,” he says. “Even college freshmen and sophomores, they think poetry is difficult. They are well behaved but there is still a resistance. “I tell them, “you don’t have to like every poem in this anthology, some of them are boring, some of them I don’t understand, some of them I don’t care if I understand, but there are some that I love, that bring tears to my eyes. You’re going to find your own that do that to you. “That’s the fun of teaching. That you have a sort of resistance in the group and you try to convince them of the value of what they are reading.” Simic encourages teachers to persevere, not just for their students, but for themselves. “The value of teaching poetry for the teacher is one has to do the impossible; to teach a reluctant group to like poetry and in the process endlessly find a new way of articulating what is poetry.” http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/charles_simic/ 2008-03-03 Tall, slim, and perky, dressed in a turtleneck, tailored pants and sensible shoes, Betty Burch Mohlenbrock ‘62 ED, EDM ‘64, could be a woman who merely lunches with friends, entertains in her home and dotes on her grandchildren. Except for the grandchildren part, the rest couldn’t be more wrong. Mohlenbrock is founder and CEO of United Through Reading (UTR), a $1.4 million organization based in San Diego that unites families by encouraging parents to read aloud to their children. “There is a powerful bond that is established when you read to your child,” she said. “The joy of reading out loud is indescribable - but everyone knows it. We want every child to experience the comfort, connection and joy of being read to.” Reading together is an activity nearly universal in its appeal, but beyond the cuddly images of children curled up in parents’ laps exists a larger goal: Mohlenbrock is working toward nothing less than a “paradigm shift.” She believes that books can stem the tide of family and social disintegration. “Our goal is to bring families together,” said Mohlenbrock. “Our vehicle is reading.” Behind her sunny smile lies the steely determination that enabled Mohlenbrock to take a simple idea and make a difference in the lives of thousands. The 1961 University of Illinois Homecoming Queen credits her husband, Bill ‘61 LAS, a former Illini varsity basketball player and fellow entrepreneur, for supporting her and sharing her vision, and her parents, who were teachers and believed that reading was central to achievement. In addition, as Mohlenbrock went about establishing her project, she tapped into her Illinois roots, consulting with the Center for the Study of Reading on campus. Along with her own perseverance and ingenuity, Mohlenbrock has the help and support of her 16-member board of trustees, the UTR staff and an army of volunteers. “One skill I have is bringing good people alongside, getting good advice and following through on it,” she said. In addition, Mohlenbrock’s religious faith keeps her focused. “This is my ministry, my mission,” she said. “Research has shown that the single best predictor of success in school is whether a child was read to at home,” said Mohlenbrock, who spent three years teaching elementary school and almost 20 as a private reading tutor. “The second best predictor is if the child sees parents reading.” In 1989, when she was just getting UTR (then known as the Family Literacy Foundation) established, Mohlenbrock realized how physical separation prevented families - such as those serving in the military - from reading together. Her solution: Videotape parents on military duty reading books to their children, send the tape or DVD home and enable children to watch their parent read to them - as often as they want - while following along with their own copy of the book. Mohlenbrock points out the benefits - repetition helps learning and brain development, and the UTR reading format helps develop a closer bond between child and parent. The simple yet powerful project has caught the attention of the media, business and other nonprofits. The UTR program has been featured on the “Oprah” television show, received a non-solicited $200,000 grant from Target and won the 2006 Peter Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation. Mohlenbrock has also visited with President George W. Bush; Maria Shriver, the First Lady of California; and the aides of Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Far more important to Mohlenbrock, however, are the tributes from the UTR families. “My 22-month-old son, Alex, whom I’ve seen only about 4 1/2 months of his entire life, would barely talk to me on the phone when I called home,” wrote Army Maj. Steven Hopper, who was stationed in Iraq. “Now he not only talks to me but also calls me ‘Daddy’ and knows my voice and what I look like. The program has built a ‘bridge’ between this father and his pride and joy.” Mohlenbrock continues to identify other populations - such as incarcerated parents and grandparents living far from their grandchildren - that might benefit from the UTR program. Already her organization has reached 345,000 children and family members. Although Mohlenbrock will soon step down from the day-to-day operations of the business, the energetic 67-year-old seems incapable of being “retired.” For one thing, she’ll always be involved on some level with UTR, and for another, she is contemplating writing a book about her experiences. And, no matter what other projects she lines up, Mohlenbrock will most definitely make even more time to sit with her grandchildren, snuggled in her lap, reading books. http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/by_the_book/ 2008-02-01 The first time Henry T. Sampson Jr., MS ‘65 ENG, PHD ‘67 ENG, lost himself in the microfiche room of the UCLA library, it was to blunt the trauma of his recent divorce. Little did he know that out of that misery would emerge his “passionate obsession,” a decades-long quest that would bring to the world the previously untold history of American blacks in film, television and radio. “What drives me is curiosity,” Sampson says. “I love to learn. To me, that’s what living is.” And indeed, the courtly Southerner has lived a life full of discovery - as a nuclear engineer at The Aerospace Corp., as a man refusing to be trapped within the confines of racial segregation and as a human being whose hobby inadvertently turned him into both history buff and movie expert. An organized, focused and precise man in both body and habits, Sampson at times seems bemused by his unsought and unforeseen spot in history. An acclaimed engineer noted for his co-discovery of the gamma electric cell and the owner of several patents, he seems fated to leave his mark on both the scientific and artistic worlds. At 73, with his energetic air and a voice still carrying the flavor of his Mississippi childhood, Sampson appears to be having a great time in unfolding his story, not for the silver screen but for the printed page. Newspapers to the rescue The seed for Sampson’s expertise on blacks in entertainment was planted during his childhood in Jackson, Miss., where films with all-black casts portraying characters other than “mammies, servants and buffoons,” as he put it, left a big impression on him. Who made those movies, Sampson wondered in 1974 as his marriage dissolved, and how many were there? He headed to the library to find out. By 1913, when blacks first entered the motion-picture industry, most U.S. cities with a sizable minority population carried one or more black weeklies. These weeklies held a treasure trove of information, and UCLA had an extensive collection of them. “I started from the very beginnings, the 1900s, collecting information, issue by issue,” Sampson said. “It was fascinating. You can imagine how long it took to collect it all.” What he painstakingly unearthed was a well-organized black movie industry running parallel to the white one. In the early 20th century, black-owned companies used all-black casts to make films that were distributed to black-owned theaters for their audiences to enjoy. Plots ranged from Westerns, adventures and action to romances and musicals. Despite Sampson’s intense and challenging job as director of mission development and operations of U.S. Air Force satellites at The Aerospace Corp. in California, he found himself becoming more and more intrigued by the film research he was conducting in his spare time. Upon returning home from the library, Sampson would transcribe every note, first with a typewriter and, eventually, a computer. When his job took him on the road, he would take the opportunity to peruse other libraries as well. Soon, Sampson realized that he had collected a great deal of information. “It was very, very fascinating, and nobody had written anything,” he recalled, “so I said, ‘Hey, look, I didn’t know beans about writing, but … maybe I should try to write a book.’” That first effort, published in 1977 as “Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films,” is a seminal, 700-page reference book filled with synopses of black movies, biographies of black actors, five appendixes, as well as a history of the making and distribution of movies by blacks. Sampson’s other books over the years have included “Blacks in Blackface,” about blacks in musical shows; “Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910”; “That’s Enough, Folks,” about the portrayal of blacks in cartoons; and most recently, “Swingin’ on the Etherwaves” (2005), which, at 2,500 pages-plus, sells for more than $400. That book documents how the radio industry, foundering amid the lackluster lectures it was broadcasting, turned to airing shows directly from nightspots in Harlem. In essence, big-band leaders like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway revived the dying radio business. “After that first book came out,” Sampson said, “suddenly everybody got aware of all these African-American films, so people started doing research on this area. “My book sparked that,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “You’ve got people all over the country now claiming I am the expert.” According to Paula Massood, an associate professor of film studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, “Blacks in Black and White” is becoming more significant for film scholars as time passes, because it wasn’t until the last decade that historians began to uncover many of the titles mentioned in the book. By digging around in the archives, Sampson “did a lot of the ‘dirty work’ for subsequent scholars,” she said, “and his work joins a group of recent studies that point to the long and quite rich history of African-American film in this country. “‘Blacks in Black and White’ illustrates the sheer numbers of people involved and the variety of films made during the early part of the 20th century,” Massood said. From Mississippi to Illinois Sampson’s interest in intellectual challenges began when he was a child, following the example set by his parents, Henry T. Sampson and Esther Ellis Sampson-Marshall, both of whom enjoyed the life of the mind. The elder Sampson, an esteemed professor of mathematics, was executive dean of Jackson State University (the library of the Mississippi institution was named in his honor in 1970). Sampson’s mother, alive today at age 96, was the first black social worker in Jackson and the executive director of the Head Start program there. Although he started out on the pre-med track at Morehouse College, Sampson soon turned to engineering. He enrolled in Purdue University’s chemical engineering program (despite never having seen a slide rule). Denied good work in Mississippi because of racial discrimination, the new graduate took a civil service job with the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert. For someone who had never been west of the Mississippi River, the landscape was mind-boggling. “My parents put me on a train, and I rode across the country,” said Sampson. “I can remember vividly seeing the country change … I could see the trees disappear, and then the desert appeared. And I thought, ‘Oh gee, what have I got myself into!’” While in California, he earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and met and married his first wife, Elizabeth. Deciding to pursue a doctorate in nuclear engineering, Sampson sought a school with a working reactor. According to George Miley, a University of Illinois nuclear engineering professor and Sampson’s eventual thesis adviser, Illinois held the most advanced one at the time, an advance trigger reactor that, when it pulsed, produced 1,000 megawatts of power. But Sampson’s ability to enroll at Illinois depended upon being able to find housing for a black family in Champaign-Urbana. Fortunately, the Sampsons (who had Henry T. Sampson III by then) found married student housing immediately. “That decided us on the University of Illinois,” he said. “It was a truly great experience. There were high-charged people from all over the world. And the faculty and students were very close-knit.” Sampson remembers fondly many cookouts and softball games mixed in with hard work. Miley, in turn, recalled Sampson as “a delight to work with. He was very self-motivated, congenial and collegial. “I’m pretty sure that Henry was the first black Ph.D. in nuclear engineering anywhere in the country,” said Miley. “But within [our] department, everyone was so used to diversity that we didn’t even recognize or fully appreciate that until he left.” At Illinois, Sampson worked with Miley to develop and test a Gamma-Electric Cell, a new device that was able to turn gamma radiation energy directly into electrical energy, which could provide a faster and more accurate way to detect radiation. “It was a great challenge,” said Miley. Having earned doctoral degree, as well as a patent, Sampson then was wooed by The Aerospace Corp., based in El Segundo, Calif. Work and play The issue of housing reared its head again as he considered moving back to the West Coast. “I told [Aerospace], ‘I am not going to work for you guys unless you can find a place for me to live that is no more than 10 minutes from where I work,’” Sampson said. “I didn’t know at that time that that was a challenge because the beach cities - Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach - were all highly segregated.” After renting a home in El Segundo, the Sampsons bought a house on a quarter-acre lot in Palos Verdes Estates. Eventually, their neighbors’ anxiety about integration disappeared, and the neighborhood children befriended each other. His professional life was also a success. In addition to Sampson’s competitive work at Aerospace, he wrote papers on rocket propulsion, direct conversion of nuclear energy to electricity and computer simulation of electrical systems. A ‘blessed’ existence While Sampson wears a warm and ready smile, he remains no pushover. When society told him in the 1950s that he couldn’t work in the oil business near his Southern home, he went to California. When society told him his family couldn’t live in a white neighborhood, he bought a house anyway and moved in. When someone threw eggs at his home, he called the police and said, “Listen, I don’t care what happens to me, but nobody better mess with my family.” Sampson doesn’t take any grief, but he doesn’t give anyone grief, either. The retired engineer remains philosophical about life’s turnings (one of them being that, despite his extensive research on films, he’d rather read a book than see a movie). Sampson regrets the demise of the black film industry, muscled out by the financial power of a white market. He somewhat rues the fact that because of the attention he has cast on black films, the movie stills and lobby cards that he used to pick up for a quarter at flea markets now go for astronomical prices. And when Sampson has bumped into ignorance over the course of his years, he’s nodded and gone around it. Sampson still lives in the modest, tidy Palos Verdes Estates house, with its book-lined study and large windows overlooking the ocean. His air of contentment suggests that life doesn’t get better than that. “Even those things that were setbacks in my life turned out to be beneficial,” he said. “I’m not very spiritual, but I do think I’ve been blessed.” Case in point: While Sampson’s interest in writing books grew from the pain of divorce, in the end it helped rejuvenate his love life. Set up on a date because they both were authors, he and Laura Young, an associate professor of language, literature and culture at Cal State San Bernardino, found that they indeed had something in common. They married this past spring and honeymooned in St. Thomas. They enjoyed it so much they bought a second home there. None of the neighbors complained. http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/the_strengths_of_sampson/ 2008-01-01 Physics professor Carl Bender embodies that good old Missouri saying, “show me.” His knack for questioning things often taken for granted has led to exciting results. Quantum physics is formulated in terms of a set of axioms that are physical and have an experimental basis. All axioms, it turns out, except one. The axiom, that a crucial component of quantum mechanics had to be Hermetian, meaning the numbers must be real — (i.e. whether positive, negative, rational or irrational, they can be found on a number line) — was, says Bender, more an “axiom of convenience, a mantra. It really bothered me because it was not physical at all, it doesn’t sound like physics; it was purely mathematical.” About nine years ago Bender suggested a more physical, alternative axiomatic framework , allowing for complex numbers that lie outside the real number line. This new framework is based on PT symmetry (i.e. the universe is symmetrical if reflected in space and time). He describes this new framework as “more beautiful and interesting, very simple and easy to understand.” In recognition of his achievements, Bender, who has been with Washington University since 1977, is being installed as the Wilfred R. and Ann Lee Konneker Distinguished Professor of Physics. Although he grew up on the East Coast and first taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bender is a confirmed Midwesterner. In addition to the ease of life in St. Louis, he appreciates the high caliber of the Washington University students. “The undergraduates here are really, really good,” he says. “They are the smartest students I’ve ever met. They also are nice kids and a lot of fun to teach.” Bender treats many of these students as colleagues, co-authoring several papers with them. One of the biggest thrills of his research, he says, is how many people have advanced their own work using his theory. “Physics is a very combative field. If you want to convince physicists you have to have a very big fight and that is how it should be. The first reactions were shock and horror, but what has happened is that hundreds of people all around the world have joined in and I’m, well, basically I’m the leader,” he says with delight. “You can’t imagine how fantastic it is to go to an international conference where every single paper presented is in this new field. I’ve done lots of work in my lifetime, but this is the first time something this cool has happened to me.” http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/rethinking_an_axiom/ 2007-12-20 http://www.debaronson.com/features/novacation_nation/ 2007-12-01 http://www.debaronson.com/features/jonathan_kozol_bearing_witness/ 2007-11-01 Nothing much surprises Chris Crutcher, author of numerous young adult novels, including Ironman, Whale Talk, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, and Stotan!. Having worked extensively as a therapist for those experiencing child abuse and neglect, Crutcher has seen the dark underbelly of life. “Working in the field of child abuse and neglect took all the surprise out of me,” he says. “I was so often surprised by our capability for inhumanity, and at the same time so surprised at where I’d see heroes come from.” Crutcher’s books typically tell stories about both cruelty and heroism lurking beneath the surface of otherwise ordinary-looking lives. His characters face struggles with their parents and other authority figures, yet they also find caring adults, while learning about being loyal and even heroic. Sports also play a big role in most of Crutcher’s books, whether the characters swim competitively, train obsessively for triathlons, or perfect their self-defense skills. Crutcher’s stories resonate deeply with his young readers. “I’ve been humbled and honored by some of the responses I’ve received,” says Crutcher. “So many kids have written and said they connected with one character or another, that they read it at exactly the right time. I know many other authors who get that same message, and it has the same effect on them. ‘I read your book and I thought you knew me,’ is another one. It’s all about connection. I’ve felt that connection with books myself.” And yet, Crutcher was not a reader in his youth, having gotten through school reading and enjoying only one book, To Kill a Mockingbird. That makes it particularly sweet for him to hear that boys who don’t read, tend to read his books. Crutcher’s stories come from his experiences as a teacher and therapist. He spent a decade as a teacher and director of a small alternative K-12 school in Oakland, California, and then worked as a therapist with families involved in child abuse and neglect in the 1980s and 1990s. “I didn’t draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain,” Crutcher has said. Beginning with his very first effort, Running Loose (1983), Crutcher’s books have both won awards and been the target of censoring efforts. Opponents argue that Crutcher writes about things that young adults aren’t ready to handle, like being gay, struggling with abusive parents, or racism. But having his works perennially on the list of most frequently challenged books does not faze Crutcher in the least. “I define myself as much by my enemies as I do my friends and I know what these people are about,” says Crutcher, of those who try to ban his books. “They pretend to care about children, but they won’t do the slightest bit of homework on child development, nor will they spend any time talking with kids to see their perspective. They have a belief and an agenda and they don’t listen to anything else. “When we censor these stories, we censor the kids themselves,” he adds. “Imagine falling in love with a book because somehow it mirrors your life, and gives meaning to it, and may even offer solutions to your personal situation, only to have those in power over you censor it because it is offensive. All but the most hard-nosed of us might think our very lives were offensive.” Whenever he can, Crutcher supports those fighting to keep his books available to children. He writes letters to newspapers, school officials, and politicians. He visits, both to give speeches and to meet with people trying to ban his books. But Crutcher’s work, in addition to being attacked, has been widely praised. Crutcher has also been recognized by NCTE for his First Amendment efforts. In 1998 he won the NCTE/SLATE National Intellectual Freedom Award. He was the first individual to receive the new award, which was established in 1996 to honor individuals and groups for advancing the cause of intellectual freedom. In Crutcher’s case he was recognized for his efforts to promote anti-censorship activities for young adults. Receiving these awards is about the only thing left that does surprise him. “You know, every time I get a major award, I think I’ve pulled the wool over the eyes of a universe, even today,” says Crutcher. “I like the Margaret Edward Award (administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association) because it’s for my body of work and speaks to tenacity. I also like the ALAN Award (from NCTE for contributions to adolescent literature) and the [NCTE/SLATE] Intellectual Freedom awards. They speak to what I believe in, and they were given by people for whom I have so much respect.” http://www.debaronson.com/features/chris_crutchers_stories_resonate_with_young_readers/ 2007-09-01 In the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, followers strive to bring harmony to the universe through the balance of opposites. So too has Ping Fu, MS ‘90 ENG, carefully negotiated a balancing act in the course of her life. Moving from the violence of China’s Cultural Revolution to the positivity of America’s entrepreneurial climate, Fu has counteracted despair with hope, chaos with order, and survival mode with serenity. Fu, a comparative literature major who now heads Raindrop Geomagic, a $30 million software company, continues to strive for that harmony today, even in the sometimes cut-throat business world of high tech. According to the 49-year-old entrepreneur, the “essence of what you do … is to make life better.” Hope for a better life may have seemed elusive in Fu’s childhood during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Ripped from her home in Nanjing, China, at the age of 7, Fu and her sister, Hong, 3, were sent to live in a dormitory for children of “capitalist-road” parents. Fu spent her entire childhood there - 11 years - until she was released at age 18. Eventually, she made her way to the United States as a young adult and now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. Today, through a combination of perseverance, resilience and a bit of luck, Fu heads Raindrop Geomagic, a leader in the field of digital shape sampling and processing (DSSP). The technology, which uses optical beams to digitally capture a physical object and automatically create a three-dimensional model, can be applied to manufacturing, testing and inspection purposes. The technique is so precise and efficient that NASA used it to replicate damaged space shuttle tiles on Earth while the shuttle was still in orbit. Among other honors, the company earned Fu recognition as Inc. magazine’s 2005 “Entrepreneur of the Year.” One of a kind According to Fu, Geomagic, which is located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, is the only company of its kind in the United States. “We could see right off Raindrop Geomagic’s applicability,” said Paul Magelli, whom Fu approached for guidance early in her efforts to form the business. The senior director of both the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership and Illinois Business Consulting at the University of Illinois College of Business, Magelli said, “There was never any question that Raindrop Geomagic was a strong technology; it was just waiting for its time.” Before Geomagic, the skills required to create a smooth image from the shape sampling took a fleet of engineers and designers working laboriously for weeks to digitally process an object. The method was too time-consuming and expensive to work. With Geomagic’s magic, that step now takes place with the click of a button. The technology has already transformed business. American firms use DSSP to perform full digital inspection for new parts. A preservation team utilized the software to record the Statue of Liberty, so that it could be reconstructed, if necessary. Toyota uses the software to design cars and inspect parts. The software can benefit an individual from head to toe - from better-fitting dental bridgework to hearing aids to high-tech prosthetics. Fu imagines that with a DSSP model of their feet, consumers will soon be able to send the design to a manufacturer to order new shoes. Steak and sizzle But Geomagic is about more than technology for Fu, who speaks of her company’s goals, not in terms that are measurable but in ideas that are far less tangible. “Our goal was not to go public or make a billion dollars - what does that mean?” she asked. “To set a goal for your company like ‘We have to make $10 million this year, $15 million next year’ is the same as telling your children, ‘You have to get an A on everything.’ It doesn’t mean anything.” The “essence” of what we do, she said, should “create a true value.” Magelli might phrase it differently. He said Geomagic has the “pow and wow” factor - the potential to be a “disruptive force” in the marketplace, knocking out the old way of manufacturing, and replacing it with something completely different. And Fu’s vision for Geomagic - its essence - is to change the very nature of production. She believes that businesses are cutting manufacturing costs to the bone instead of taking a knife to the far meatier portions, such as inventory and enormous advertising campaigns. “Why do you need to spend $30 million on advertisement for a shoe?” Fu posed. “What did [the marketing] do, make [the footwear] more comfortable? “So,” she went on, “spend the $10 to manufacture the shoe in the U.S., instead of the $2 it takes in China, and spend less money on advertisement, inventory and building those bigger and bigger stores where I go in, and I can’t find a pair of shoes that fits me.” Fu wants Geomagic and the technology on which it is based to bring manufacturing back to the United States and stop the model of cutting costs in all the wrong places. “If manufacturing is the steak and advertising is the sizzle - you lose the steak, you don’t have the sizzle,” said Fu. “Our technology will help build better products closer to where the customers are, so businesses don’t have to spend a lot on advertisement or shipping or the wrong model. You think Chinese workers are better off working for $2 per shoe? They’re not better off, either.” From China to Champaign It’s a long way from China to the United States, and Fu’s path was particularly tortured, both figuratively and literally. As a child, she was forced to watch the Red Guard kill or torture people, including her little sister, who was scalded for making too much noise while playing. In another instance, when the Red Guard threw Hong into a river, just to watch her drown, Fu jumped in to save her. For that action, Fu was raped, and both girls were beaten. In 1976, Chairman Mao Zedong died, the Cultural Revolution ended, and Fu was released. She began her university studies, during which a professor suggested Fu study the rumors of female infanticide in the Chinese countryside. In 1980, the professor received Fu’s findings, which were then published in Shanghai’s largest newspaper. At first, the report was widely praised, though Fu was not given credit. In a turnabout, when the story received negative international attention, Fu was blamed. As she was taken into custody, she felt certain she would be executed. Instead, Fu’s luck began to change. Inexplicably, she was bundled on a plane and sent to the University of New Mexico, where she studied comparative literature. Fu then changed majors and moved to the University of California, San Diego, to complete her undergraduate degree in computer science. A chance meeting on the beach between Fu and Len Sherman led to a part-time job for her at Sherman’s startup software design company. But while she enjoyed financial security, making money was never Fu’s goal. Despite being offered a stake in Sherman’s company, which would have made her a millionaire, she instead headed to Bell Labs in the Naperville-Lisle area of Illinois. “Even in China, we knew that Bell Labs was the place to work, that it was synonymous with innovation,” Fu said. While there, she had the opportunity through a special program to earn a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois. That’s how Fu met Herbert Edelsbrunner, a UI computer science professor. Her relationship with Edelsbrunner drew Fu downstate, where she began working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the Urbana campus. They married in 1991. “I like Herbert’s mind,” said Fu. “He is an incredibly intelligent person and so intuitive and down-to-earth.” Fu loved her job at NCSA, too, which, at the time, was the center for computer graphics and visualization. Among other things, her eight-person group did ground-breaking work on the movie “Terminator 2” and early work with the simulation of tornadoes. Fu started the team that developed Mosaic, the first graphical browser that led to Netscape and made Marc Andreessen ‘94 ENG a household name. “NCSA was such an incredible group of people who were excited about doing new things. It was a dream job,” said Fu. ‘Being so close to failure somehow gave me confidence’ In 1996, while still at NCSA, Fu founded Geomagic. The going was rough at first, with Fu unable to attract technical talent or managers to central Illinois. Reluctantly, in 1999 Fu and Edelsbrunner left Illinois for the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where Edelsbrunner now teaches at Duke University. Even worse than personnel matters was the slow signup of potential customers, who were skeptical of the new technology. Fu ran through her first $8.5 million without making a sale, but she didn’t lose faith. She hunkered down, laid off her sales staff and mortgaged her house to pay their severance. Fu asked her remaining employees to give her three months to turn the company around, and she succeeded. Within a year, the company was showing a profit; it now employs several hundred people in three countries. “Being so close to failure somehow gave me confidence,” Fu told Inc. magazine. “Everybody worked together; we reinforced each other. The crisis committed me to running the company.” After reading about leadership and attending leadership “boot camps,” Fu developed her own style of command, which sounds quite similar to the way Benjamin Hoff describes Taoism in his best-selling book, “The Tao of Pooh.” “Taoism is happy, gentle, childlike and serene,” he wrote. “Its key principles are Natural Simplicity, Effortless Action, Spontaneity and Compassion. That simplicity and compassion are evident in Fu’s analysis of where she wants her company to go. “I don’t have an ultimate goal,” she said. “I want every day to be a good day. And I want tomorrow to be better than today. I want my employees to wake up in the morning and feel energized and want to come to work. And, if I have customers that love to do business with us, I have a business. This is how I see the company.” One of those employees, Rob Black, has been an applications engineer at Raindrop Geomagic since 1999. “Ping doesn’t overwhelm you with her personality,” he said. “It [wasn’t] apparent at first how different she was. Soon, though, I began to realize how approachable she is. She would just come around and chat with us. She’s a very strong person and perfectly capable of making important decisions, but she also does a great job of listening to us. Our input is very much valued.” Fu often tells people that being a leader is not that different from being a mother. “The key is when you wake up in the morning and your best interest is someone else rather than yourself - your perspective changes,” she said. Fu’s own perspective has been changed by XiXi (pronounced “shi-shi”), her 13-year-old daughter with Edelsbrunner. “I’m much more interested in her curiosity and learning ability,” Fu said of her daughter. “I want her to want to learn. That’s what I’m proud of. We are not focusing on her grades. “To me, so long as the person has motivation and knows what they want to do, they can do wonderful things,” Fu said. “But their motivation cannot be to please their parents or to please their teacher or their boss. Their motivation has to be what they want. And that makes a world of difference. I see so many children who go to an elite school because they are pleasing their parents. Their parents will be so proud if they go to MIT or Harvard. If they do, they get a car.” Fu laughed at the very thought. “I would never do that for my daughter,” she said. While Fu’s outlook on child-rearing differs from some, her gruesome childhood experiences and incredible resiliency have also given her a wholly different perspective from most entrepreneurs. “I had to have this mindset,” she said of her resistance to fear. “I had to believe, ‘I can be somebody someday.’ “No matter what negativity or tragedy happens around me, I have to grab for the beacon of light,” Fu said. “Otherwise, I would never have survived.” http://www.debaronson.com/features/the_tao_of_fu/ 2007-07-01