When Harry taught grad students

Harry in his post-retirement college days

Harry was like an advertisement for "intergenerational" programs. Those are organizations that pair school kids with elderly mentors, or connect young adults with seniors who want computer lessons. For my dad, it was natural to reach out to people in younger generations, to improve communication, to help bridge the gaps. In the following email to one young friend, in October 2009, he wrote personal details about his volunteer work with grad students at the University of Maryland.


There is so little communication between my generation and yours that, whenever there’s a breakthrough, as between you and me, it’s like a shot in the arm of hope and encouragement.  …

Some professors are quite adept at bruising the egos of young students. Later on, some bosses are even more adept at doing that. As a boss, I was never good at that; instead, I tended to soothe and massage young egos, and over the years I had a lot of young interns work for me each summer while they were in school and while we had an active program of hiring young interns. But I had a different kind of experience after I retired. For fifteen years after I retired (I retired in 1986 when it was fashionable to retire at age 65), from 1987 to 2002, I took courses each semester at the U. of Maryland. At the same time, I worked as a volunteer on campus teaching English to foreign students and for seven of those years, remedial English to American students working on advanced degrees.

Would you believe that Young Americans in their early to mid-20s, studying to obtain Masters and PhDs, had to learn basic English composition and even language skills, as well? That’s when I learned how to bruise egos and do some verbal spanking, so to speak. I could not understand how they could graduate from high school, nor could I believe they had actually obtained undergraduate degrees. And I let them know in no uncertain terms how backward I thought they were and what they had to do to write a thesis or a dissertation.

Incidentally, I had an intern one summer – a boy – whose job most of the time was filing newspaper articles in an alphabetized index system. We did not realize until after he was gone that he actually did not know the alphabet and had misfiled almost everything. When I realized it, I got in touch with his school and they (whoever) were smart enough to figure out that he was dyslexic and was really smart enough to cover up well enough to fool everyone through high school and get into college by faking his way. He really was a bright kid and talking to him you’d never know he had real difficulty reading and writing. As far as I know, they treated him – there is a standard treatment for dyslexia – and that worked out okay.

But, to get back to the kids I was talking about, they had no such excuse. They weren’t dumb kids. Most of them were pursuing advanced degrees in a scientific subject – physics, chemistry, math, electronics, engineering, etc. – they just had never been taught the fundamentals in English or had never been pressed by their teachers to do the work required.  

So I was helping them write papers on subjects far beyond my grasp, and if I was exasperated by their lack of English skills, they were exasperated by my lack of comprehension of their subject matter. I had to explain everything about composition to them and they had to explain verbally everything they were trying to say in their papers. I must say, while I learned a lot from them about those sciences, I don’t think they learned a lot from me about writing. I blame our education system from grammar school on up through high school for not doing an adequate job of teaching English and the associated skill of composition writing. Also reading, because in my experience, the person who does a lot of reading, books and essays of all kinds, learns how to write almost by osmosis. Reading is essential and I’m glad to see that you’re a reader and even like the same authors that I like. 

About writing, you (that’s a general you, not so much specifically you) have to cultivate your writing skills in many different ways, no matter what profession you choose to follow. One way to do that is to keep a journal. There are other ways, but I like a journal best. Not a bound journal – a loose-leaf notebook journal, in which you move pages around so you can keep subjects together. Thus, if you write something about say, the weather, one day, and then have some different comments about it a week later, you put the pages next to each other and wind up with different thoughts on the same subject in one place. You need not make comments in the journal every day – it’s not a diary. But you should make entries fairly regularly. And, those entries are for your eyes only – unless you want to share some of them with someone else – like your parents, or your grandmother, or maybe even me.

The purpose of writing your thoughts in a journal is not only to hone your writing skills, but to get into the habit of writing, of noting your observations on the world around you, on people or events, on your thoughts and feelings about yourself. Doing so has certain benefits, too – it clarifies in your own mind your thoughts and feelings. Often, we think we know how we feel and what we think about something or someone, but it’s all unclear in our minds unless we enunciate it or write it down, and then it becomes clear. And sometimes, when you write something like that, it may even surprise you because it does clarify your thoughts and you come to a realization about something that you were not fully aware of.


Idioms to ponder

While we’re on the subject of Harry’s teaching, in September 2007, he wrote this brief article, I believe for his community newsletter.

I taught English to foreign students at the University of Maryland for fifteen years after I retired. The ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Program at the school consisted mainly of graduate students who were fair at reading and writing, but needed a great deal of help in speaking and listening. Those of us for whom English is our native tongue simply don’t realize how many idiomatic expressions are sprinkled through our everyday, normal speaking language, or just how difficult it is for speakers of other languages to grasp the meaning of phrases that cannot be taken literally. Here are just a few examples of words or phrases whose meaning has no relationship to their literal meaning:

No doubt writing this article put a smile on his face

Barnstormer
Cheesecake
Double take
Fire eater
Handwriting on the wall
Make a scene
Out of line
Play second fiddle
Pull strings      
Top banana
Hanky-panky
High horse
Let your hair down
Life of Riley
Read the riot act
High hat

That’s enough to get the idea. Can anyone think of more? Actually, there are hundreds of such idiomatic expressions. It’s easy to think of them, but try explaining their meaning to someone who only sees the literal words.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Harry challenges the cost of text books

Harry was known (by his family at least) to get a little angry about things he found unfair. His story on this page illustrates an issue that bothered him at best, and how he tried to make a difference. He wrote it to his younger cousins who had children heading to college, when he was in his mid-80s.

Harry took classes here.

Talking about books earlier today brought to mind a memory I’d like to share with you. As you know, I retired in 1986 and the following year I started taking courses at the University of Maryland. The first few years it was free for senior citizens, but then they started charging a nominal sum, about 100 or 150 dollars a semester. When I stopped, about 15 years later, I think it was 2002 or 2003, it was up to about 250 dollars a semester. I usually took one or two courses each semester and in 15 years I had accumulated enough credits to … ah, but that’s another story. What triggered this one is the cost of text books.

While I was spending only 100 to 200 bucks for books, some of the kids were spending anywhere from 400 to 500 to as much as 800 dollars. Some were having a hard time, even buying used books at discount prices. Anyway, I got so mad about it that I wrote some letters – to the President of the University, to the Chancellor, to the State Legislature, and to the Governor. The ex-Governor, who had been out of office for several years and who had been teaching a course in government and politics which I had taken, told me who to write to and what buttons to push. He and I were the same age and had pretty similar life experiences, except that he became a politician while I became a civil servant. Anyway, we became good friends.

So I wrote all these letters complaining about the exorbitant cost of text books. Almost all text books are published by universities, which organize their own publishing companies and operate their own presses. Almost all text books are written by professors at these schools. When I began looking into the business, I found all kinds of people who had their fingers in the pot. In the book publishing business, most new books today run 25 to 35 bucks. In the text book business, most books today run 60 to 80 bucks, and some even more. That’s a national average. And it’s inflated beyond all reason, because too many people get a piece of the action and depend on it. It will take a revolution to bring the price down to reasonable levels again.

Well, my letters were discussed at a session of the state legislature, which only meets for two or three months a year, and for a while it became a hot subject for debate in the university system, but no politician took it up as a “cause” and after a while it just drifted away as an issue.

I truly believe that the cost of text books is a scandal that will someday explode on the national scene, but some smart politician will have to push it so the media will pick it up and start harping on it. For a while, I got some people to start thinking about it.


If anyone wants to pursue this issue, I’m sure Harry would be proud. Let us know what you find out.

In this 2006 photo, Harry and Jeanette waited in a University of Maryland theater lobby to see grandson Mark perform with Cornell University's improv comedy team. Harry felt at home on campus, where he took courses and volunteered for 15 years post-retirement. (Also, UMD was Jeanette's workplace for 20 years and granddaughter Sandy's alma mater.) Never mind that the cost of textbooks maddened Harry, he thoroughly enjoyed mingling with his young classmates, as he revealed in an earlier post on this blog: "The value of learning and journaling, according to this self-educated man"

The value of learning and journaling, according to this self-educated man

In his elderly years, Harry mentioned in an email to someone close to him that their regular correspondence "gives me an excuse to write about my life, at least bits and pieces of it." He also said that he would save some of those emails in a file, like a journal. The excerpts below are from those saved emails. For me and other family members, they offer formerly unknown bits and pieces of my father's life.

I've always had a thirst for knowledge, so I read a lot and even studied subjects that interested me. So, in some ways I became what is usually called a self-educated man. That may be satisfactory to some extent, but it's not the same as the education you get in a formal way – in school. For one thing, in school you're forced to study some subjects that hold no interest for you. That in itself, disciplines you, forces your mind to work in ways that you don't like. Just doing that is valuable exercise for your brain.

The greatest value of a college education is the discipline it instills. And, the truth is, that while you may learn a little bit about the basics of a few things, you don't really start getting an education until you're out of school and working at your chosen profession. I missed that for myself. Now, I have to work very hard at trying to learn something that does not interest me.

It's easy for me to learn about things that I'm interested in. There's no end of information on the internet on almost every subject you can name. The trick is to distinguish between good information and bad or phony information. There's plenty of untrue or false info on the internet, too. So you cannot rely solely on what you find there – you also have to look elsewhere if you're doing research.

A little enterprise
Anyway, for a few years, in order to make some extra money, I started a little enterprise called "Articles on Demand." Believe it or not, there is a demand for people who can write articles on any subject. So, I was asked to write articles on some very weird things – for example, a 750-word piece on the number of fresh-water lakes in the world, where they are, how much water they contain, how they were formed, etc. Did you know that Canada has more fresh-water lakes than all the rest of the world combined?

That one went over so well that I was asked to do another on fresh-water rivers in the world. Did you know that the Amazon River in South America has more fresh water flowing in it than all the rivers in the rest of the world combined? Well, to do the research for those two pieces required more than just browsing the internet and, since I had no interest in it, I found it hard to concentrate on it, but I forced myself and ultimately found it interesting. It's the compiling of figures and statistics that I found hard to put together, but the final results after a lot of hard work, I found fascinating. 

At home in 2011, Harry pointed out to dear friends his name in Years of Upheaval, by Henry Kissinger. Could this be the book that Harry discovered his name in while auditing a university course after he retired? Harry refers to those college days in the paragraphs below. The tribute in Kissinger's book: "I owe a belated thanks also to Harry Zubkoff, whose news clipping and analysis service based in the Department of the Air Force has been of enormous value to US government personnel for years and has been an invaluable research aid for my staff in the preparation of White House Years and this volume." 

From mingling to keeping a journal
The year after I retired, I started taking courses at the U. of Maryland – subjects that interested me or that I thought I knew something about and just wanted to see what was being taught in school. Each semester I took one or two courses, and I did that for the next 15 years, from 1987 to 2003.

Now I found myself mingling with students from 18 to 25, because I was taking some undergraduate courses and some graduate school courses. And once again, I found myself treated by my fellow students like an ancient ancestor – or a wise old man who knew everything (that’s what grandchildren think) and someone they could come to for advice and counseling.

[Harry was referring to an earlier reflection, included in the previous post: “The art of listening and consoling”]

And again, I found myself being consulted about all kinds of problems as though I had all the answers. And again, I found that I was most helpful to these young people just by listening to them and asking some pertinent questions – which forced them, in a way, to clarify their own thinking.

And I learned something else – that if you want someone to think clearly about whatever problem he/she has, get him to write it down. Put it on paper. Nothing concentrates your mind on a specific problem or issue as writing it down on paper. That’s why I would urge everyone – including you – to keep a journal and put your thoughts and reactions to events and situations you encounter in that journal, not necessarily daily, but certainly regularly.

By a journal, I mean a loose-leaf notebook, so you can move pages around, rather than a bound book where the pages are fixed in place. I don’t mean a diary, which is simply a daily record of your activities, but a journal, in which you record your thoughts and feelings about people and events. And try to use words and adjectives that convey precisely what you are thinking.

For example, if someone upset you by a thoughtless remark, try to describe your reaction. Were you resentful? Furious? Enraged? Embarrassed? Astounded? Disappointed? Confounded? Disgusted? In other words, it’s not enough to be upset. Try to pinpoint exactly how you feel. You will find, when you do that, that you understand yourself better and you actually are either more or less upset than you thought you were. And maybe even more understanding of the person who upset you in the first place. What exactly did you dislike about the remark? See what I mean?


Harry's little black notebook 
Well, guess what else we found in the smartly cluttered office Harry left behind? Right – a loose-leaf notebook filled with brief, handwritten entries. However, rather than a journal containing his personal thoughts and feelings, it appears he jotted fictional musings that he could go back and grab for his story-writing hobby. Or, had he grabbed these musings from the stories he'd finished? Could the blurbs be factual, not fictional? Or, maybe, based on fact? You decide. See some samples from his notebook below this photo.
 

Harry's little black notebook is undated, though he may have 
kept it while he was attending U of MD classes after he retired 
(1987 - 2003). Future generations of our family should enjoy the
 look and feel of an ancient handwritten journal.

• Why do I fly? I thought. For space? Might as well ask why I breathe. I guess, I thought to myself, sounding pompous in my own mind, it’s because I like the feeling of being part of a huge and powerful machine that’s been tuned to perfection but that takes its direction from me. The feeling of independence and linkage, operating in unison.

• She had large (gray) eyes, a straight narrow nose, a nicely rounded chin, and a determined mouth with lips that looked eminently kissable.

• The flickering fire threw pictures on the wall, shadows chasing each other around the room.

• You probably don’t realize it yourself, but you have a look – well, when you look at someone like that, I think you scare them. They suddenly realize that you are … could be … dangerous?

• I had grown adept at instilling confidence in people – usually a few kind words would do it. And after all, what does that cost?

• He looked harmless; a short bald-headed, mild-mannered man, but behind that bland exterior was a mind as agile and sharp as any I’d ever known.

• Once on the trail of something or someone, there was no turning back. Impossible to quit with the job undone, the chase not concluded.

• The expression on her face mirrored her uncertainty, her doubts, her nervousness. Still half child, part woman, she did not yet know how to deal with men like me – too old to be a boy-friend beau, too young to be a father figure or uncle!

• He saw the funny side of everything, and his lips twitched, continuously, as though he were about to break into laughter.

• Everything we did was a sort of river, just rolling along like the song says, through time and through generations, with new people just like us coming along while the old ones floated slowly away, transients on the water’s surface, passing from view and from memory. No matter how well known, how celebrated and honored, in a short period of time as history goes, we’re all forgotten, nobody caring that we lived and accomplished and died and scarcely made any difference at all to the current crop of newcomers. Not good for the ego, is it?

I haven't read Harry's unpublished stories, still piled in old cardboard boxes. When I do, I'll keep an eye out for the musings from his little black notebook. He may have shared stories with friends or relatives; did he share any with you?