Tag Archives: Emporia State University

Small Town Jazz

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Small Town Jazz

William Allen White’s impermeable skull stared across the lake. The streetlamps hummed in the summer dark. Someone went out for beer, and didn’t come back. A boy and a girl in a hot room with the windows closed. Traffic shook the glass.

In the college music hall they played small town jazz, and snuck beer in the back. William Allen White wrote the charts. Electric sunbeams illumined the corroded music stands. In the art department a girl in a flesh-colored bikini yawned while a nervous freshman scribbled his sketchpad.

They had many sessions that summer somewhere. The drummer’s shadow was a scar of smoke across the sidewalk. In one room, a girl and four boys. In another room one boy and himself. In some other room, nobody and Mingus’s soundtrack for “Shadows.” At the AT & SF depot, Fat Max slugged someone outside the café. Cowboy Copas and Ferlin Husky did country sessions in the jukebox.

The banjo player had a silver revolver in his belt, didn’t take any shit. The drummer played too loud and had to quit. Somebody and somebody else had a fist fight at Sixth and State on Saturday evening. The police played small town jazz with large sirens.

One turned the calendar back and didn’t have to renew his subscription. The girl took off her bikini; trees modeled nude in the park. Three students with music scholarships unraveled the grooves on a Stan Kenton record. The brass bust of William Allen White didn’t change expression. In one room a boy and a girl opened the window and listened.

They heard small town jazz.

"Small Town Jazz" was published in Fishing at Easter, by Eugene Warren, published by BkMk Press, 1980. William Allen White is an important figure in Emporia and Kansas history.

I attended the College of Emporia and Emporia State University, receiving two degrees from Emporia State. I also met, courted, and married the love of my life in Emporia. As a student in Kansas schools, I read some of William Allen White's writings. In Emporia, Peter Pan Park is dedicated to him.

What I Learned and From Whom

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I taught writing and literature courses for 42 years. Teachers in higher education receive little to no training in how to teach. That's good, actually. While a novice university teacher may be relying on a year or two as a teaching assistant, at least the cumbersome bureaucracy of public education hasn't tampered with the novice's common sense. (That's a whole other topic that I probably will never take up here.)

I was a graduate teaching assistant for a year and summer at Emporia State University. My mentors there, Bill Elkins and J. D. Lester, taught me a lot. In the summer, they supervised a course in composition for students with low test scores. There were three of us GTAs and the two faculty members. A main thing I learned from that experience was confidence in my ability to design assignments and grade them well.

In the remainder of this post, I will briefly three teachers who taught me some important lessons about teaching, even though their focus was elsewhere.

Cliff Wood, a poet and editor, taught at the College of Emporia (Kansas) during my five-semester stay there. Cliff modeled openness and enthusiasm for me. For instance, he assigned students in a modern poetry class to select a poem and present an interpretation to the class. I chose Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." My interpretation was an abstract expressionist painting; I did discuss it in relation to the poem. Cliff accepted my "interpretation," an example to me of allowing students latitude in responding to assignments.

After College of Emporia, I attended Emporia State University, which actually awarded me degrees. I received Bachelor of Arts degrees in both English and Art. One of the art teachers was Rex Hall, from whom I took a painting class. Rex had students working at easels in a studio. During our class time, he walked around, observed students' work and interacted with them. He allowed each of us to pursue our own idea — landscape, abstraction, figure, still life, and medium — oils, water-color, collage. What I learned about teaching a creative art was: allow students to follow their intuitions but interact with them, and even interfere. Rex would often add a daub of paint to a painting for the student to respond to. I tried to emulate the classroom/studio format in my creative writing classes, having students write in class while I observed and interacted.

The last teacher about teaching I want to acknowledge here wasn't in a university at all. Scott Linn taught taekwondo 25 years ago. He was an effective teacher, and, while I'm sure he had no awareness of teaching me about teaching, he did. To learn taekwondo, one must master the moves and the forms that combine them. There is a very specific goal, a desired outcome. Scott was open, clear, and responsive to students' individual abilities and limitations. He modeled the moves and forms very well, had a good sense of humor, and a friendly presence. I took unintended lessons from him about teaching that enriched my own courses.