Germans? Forget it, She's on a roll. (Part 1 of 2)

Dr. Maura Grady joins me this week as we talk about higher ed careers, but also more than that as usual. It's not just her career path to higher ed, but what she learned along the way about herself, how to not attach outcomes to identity, and what drove her to English. All of this and more in part one of a two week conversation with one of the best and smartest people you'll find anywhere. 

The truth is that both Maura and her husband, Tim, have taught me so many things. They've done so like all good teachers do, without judgment or "condescending me" (that's a movie quote for those of you out there, b/c Dr. Grady also teaches about such things). 

Also, a talk with a college professor who teaches on movies had to be dubbed with the line from the higher ed classic, Animal House. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Sometimes I've thought maybe I should have tried harder in science and gone into nursing, which is what my late mother did. And um later in life, I'm I thought, especially being in academia, which is a kind of a hard road to go down, I was thinking, boy, nursing might have been a better way to go.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 0:17

Uh, but I did so terribly in chemistry in high school. I didn't understand in high school that you could just work a lot harder and still learn stuff that you weren't naturally inclined to be good at.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 0:30

I didn't learn that until later on. You know, when you're young, you think I'm just not good at this, or um I don't know how to do this well. And so you think, well, that that's not for me, instead of maybe thinking about it a different way, saying, Well, if this is a goal that I really have, then I can find a way to learn what I need to.

SPEAKER_05 0:58

Hey everybody, this is CallerID. We're calling about your identity, your direction, and what you're doing with your life. I'm Brandon Davis Wells. Let's dig into what we're really doing here.

SPEAKER_06 1:11

Every once in a while you meet someone who reminds you that the most influential work in the world often happens in classrooms and conversations and in shaping how people think. If you've ever had a professor or a teacher who helped you understand stories and maybe how important they are as part of the world, you know the impact that great teachers and professors have. Dr. Mora Grady is an associate professor of English at Ashland University. She teaches courses on literature, film, television, writing, everything in between, and her scholarship explores everything from fandom and media studies to the cultural legacy of films like Shawshank Redemption, that everyone seems to know at least something about that movie. She joined the faculty back, I believe, in 2011 after earning her PhD in English with a focus on gender studies from UC Davis, and along the way has built a career including scholarship, teaching, cultural research, and a lot of community engagement. But what fascinates me, and I've I've known Maura a long time, isn't just the resume, it's the questions behind it, why somebody chooses to be a teacher or a professor, why uh someone goes into higher ed, what drives that sort of intellectual curiosity, and sort of how identity gets mixed in, particularly in higher ed, quite often with the topics that we are studying or teaching. So this episode is about all those things. This is my call with Dr. Maura Grady. Dr. Grady, thank you for taking the call.

SPEAKER_04 2:37

Thanks for having me on. It's great. Uh, I've been enjoying the other episodes of the podcast that I've been uh able to catch really interesting conversations with all kinds of people. I love it.

SPEAKER_06 2:46

I've been fortunate to um come into orbit with some fascinating and interesting people from all ends of the spectrum. And I've learned so much from people, not just doing this podcast, but you know, when you spend time with people that are that didn't grow up in the same place as you, that have moved around the country, that grew up with different types of people and in different regions, you just learn so much. And I think that's the beauty of higher ed, too. But when people ask you what it is that you do and you get into a conversation at a party or a gathering, uh how do you describe to somebody what you do?

SPEAKER_04 3:22

If I'm just meeting somebody, you know, like someone in town, uh the first thing I say is that I work at the university. Um, and they say, What do you do? I say, Well, I I'm in the English department uh and I teach writing and film studies and literature, and I direct the first year writing program. Um so that's usually what I start with. If I'm I'm talking to another academic, I would say that I'm the WPA at Ashlin, which is the writing program administrator. It's a specific academic role for the person who directs the first year writing program. And I've done that job here for the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_06 3:59

English professor can mean a lot of things. So if you just said that.

SPEAKER_04 4:03

Technically, because I'm not a full professor, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that. But nobody knows the difference outside of academia. But in academia, if I'm talking to another academic, then I would never say that I'm a professor because I'm not a full professor yet.

SPEAKER_06 4:19

That's interesting. There's such a hierarchy that exists in higher ed, and it does, I think, impact the way we if you've worked in higher ed or you work in higher ed, do you think that is helpful, hurtful, like when it comes to our identity and who we are? What like how do you work through this?

SPEAKER_04 4:36

It's it's really nitpicky. I mean, if you know, when I'm filling out forms online, if they say what is your profession, then I'll put English professor, uh, because that's what I am. But there's this weird thing with the title and whether you've gotten tenure and then promotion, and then it's a big deal to go up for full professor, and then you're a full professor. But our students don't know the difference. Most people don't know the difference, so it's just kind of silly inside baseball kind of conversation.

SPEAKER_06 5:07

Do you aspire to be full professor at some point? Is that a thing?

SPEAKER_04 5:10

I do. I'm planning to go up this year for full professor. So if I get approved, then next summer I will be promoted to full professor.

SPEAKER_06 5:19

What do you think is the biggest misconception about professors that people outside of higher ed might have and what you do?

SPEAKER_04 5:26

Well, for English professors, I think it's that all we do is think about grammar all the time. Um and there's some serious irony in that because I'm teaching a 400-level grammar and usage class this semester for the first time.

SPEAKER_06 5:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 5:42

It is crazy hard to teach, and I it is not my thing. And it's so it's really the first time I've ever had to say there are right answers and diagram the sentence properly and so on. It's just not how I'm interested to talk to students. I'm much more interested in fun, weird linguistic things that I I want to talk about. So when we're learning about parts of grammar, um, we had a fun day where we were talking about um colloquial um intensifiers. An example of an intensifier is like very or really, you know. So you know, you can't.

SPEAKER_06 6:20

You can't be very, very pregnant.

SPEAKER_04 6:22

Yeah. Well, the car is fast, or the and if you want to add an intensifier, then the car is very fast or really fast. And I'm I grew up in New England, and I've got one student in my class who's also from New England. So we were talking about non-standard intensifiers, and this student said, What about wicked?

SPEAKER_05 6:41

Because in New England, I knew it was coming.

SPEAKER_04 6:44

Yeah, wicked fast, wicked cool, wicked old, uh, wicked new. Um, and all the Ohio students were looking at us like we were crazy. Uh, but we we talked about Hela as another unconventional intensifier. So those things are really fun, or when we were talking about modals, which are like might and could, I said, what about double modals in the south like might could? And yeah, that's the stuff that's really fun for me and interesting. I I, you know, I don't find diagramming sentences to be my life's calling, yeah. Uh, but I I'm doing it this semester, and my students are already better at it than I am. They're mostly education majors for the most part. So people who are going to be teaching either middle grades or seventh through twelfth. And so this is a requirement for their uh licensure that they take this class. And a colleague of mine usually teaches it, and I'm using her book, and it's always tricky when you teach somebody else's class because it it doesn't always make sense to you in the way that it would if you came up with it yourself. But I've learned a lot, and it's you know, it just it's a long way around to saying that a lot of people think that's what English professors do all the time. I can tell you I've been teaching for 25 years, and this is the first time I've ever had to teach a class like this.

SPEAKER_06 8:02

So 25 years of teaching puts you in a spot where you've seen all kinds of things. People have the misconception of what it is an English professor does, or an associate professor, however you want to say it.

SPEAKER_04 8:16

No, you can whatever.

SPEAKER_06 8:18

Um, how how what what does your work look like from week to week? What are the things that you absolutely love to do and you get to do?

SPEAKER_04 8:26

I am always so excited to hear what my students think about something they've gone off and read. Or if I'm teaching a film class, if I sign them a film and they have watched that film and taken notes, and then they come in and they share what they thought about it. That is my absolute favorite thing. And that's one of the reasons why teaching this grammar class is so hard because I'm just I'm not really interested in like the one answer to the question. I am so excited to hear all of their different viewpoints and takeaways from whatever it was that they read.

SPEAKER_06 9:01

Or the black and white versus the nuance, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:03

Yeah, and even if it's a text or a film I've taught before, it's always going to be a new discussion. The students are always gonna come in with something different, and it's always surprising to me because it's not always where I was thinking or what I was thinking about. Sometimes it's interesting, depending on what they do or don't know, what they may have missed, that you need to give them more context for. And if I've taught something before, usually I I kind of know from the last time I taught it what students need more help understanding. And so I can do that. But um, that's the fun part to me is reading something and then sharing it with students and hearing what they think about it.

SPEAKER_06 9:41

If you think back to it being 18 years old, like what drove you towards this other than insanity, right? I mean, there's a level of like you're going into higher ed, uh, but what pushed you towards higher ed? Why why that?

SPEAKER_04 9:56

Well, I didn't think about higher ed as a career at all when I was going to college. And actually, when I was 18 and applying to colleges, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to college right away because I thought that I needed to have a career figured out before I went to college. I thought I needed to know what I was going to major in and what I wanted to do with my life, and I just did not know that. I lost my father when I was pretty young. I was 12 years old, and he had been a chemistry professor. I was very attached to the little college where he had taught. When I was young, I did a lot of music and theater, and that college had a big theater program and they had a summer stock program. We used to go see all the plays, and I knew some of his colleagues as a kid. And so I'd always thought if I did go to college, that would be where I would go, called St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. Shout out St. Mike's.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Still there.

SPEAKER_04 10:55

It's still there. It's a great school, really fantastic faculty. Uh, it's it's a great little campus. I didn't want to go to college right away, but my mother said, no, you should go. You can major in whatever you want, and then you can do whatever you want after that, but you should go and get your degree now. I was fortunate enough that even though my father had passed away, the school generously offered to extend the tuition benefit that I would have gotten if he'd been alive.

SPEAKER_02 11:21

What a gift.

SPEAKER_04 11:23

Such a gift. So that was another argument in favor of just doing it, because as my mother pointed out, it's free. Just go and major in something you enjoy.

SPEAKER_03 11:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:33

So I went and I was undecided when I got there. And I was taking some classes and I had made some friends and a friend of mine who later became my roommate and is also now a college professor at a community college in Massachusetts. I was kind of lamenting that my English class was not great. I had had an AP English class in high school that was really good, and and I had really enjoyed that. I had enjoyed history, I had enjoyed social studies, math and science. I didn't do so well with. I could do okay in them, but I just they just didn't click for me.

SPEAKER_06 12:05

Like didn't light the fire. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 12:09

So the English class I was in, I just wasn't enjoying so much. The teacher was great, um, and there were a couple of students in there that were interesting, but pretty much everybody else seemed like they were not interested in talking about anything seriously. And I I was just kind of bowled over by that. I I hadn't experienced that before because my high school, I had a a pretty smart group of folks around me and uh and some great English teachers. So uh I was complaining about that to my friend one day. Um, and she said, Oh, I'm in a majors only class and it's really good. Everyone's really smart and we're having a great time. And she said, Next semester, uh John Engels, who um has since passed away, but he's he was a professor at St. Michael's and he was a poet. She said, John Engels is doing a poetry class for majors only. So if you switch your major to English, you could get into that class. And so I did. I I went in, changed my major to English so I could enroll in that class, and then I just never left.

SPEAKER_03 13:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 13:09

I stayed in that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 13:12

I mean, those minor things sometimes can send us down a road that leads us towards a life's work, and that's sort of what has happened. Do you ever think back and say, what if I hadn't done that?

SPEAKER_04 13:25

You know what? I never have. I have never thought. What if I majored in something else?

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:31

Sometimes I've thought maybe I should have tried harder in science and gone into nursing, which is what my late mother did. And um, later in life, I'm I thought, especially being in academia, which is a kind of a hard road to go down, I was thinking, boy, nursing might have been a better way to go.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:48

Uh, but I did so terribly in chemistry in high school. I didn't understand in high school that you could just work a lot harder and still learn stuff that you weren't naturally inclined to be good at.

SPEAKER_03 14:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:02

I didn't learn that until later on. You know, when you're young, you think I'm just not good at this, or um I don't know how to do this well. And so you think, well, that that's not for me, instead of maybe thinking about it a different way, saying, Well, if this is a goal that I really have, then I can find a way to learn what I need to.

SPEAKER_06 14:22

Quick pause. If you're enjoying this, make sure you're following or subscribed wherever you listen. It helps more than you think. If it's hitting home, take 10 seconds, five stars, share it with somebody who needs it. Just a quick reminder. So walk us through what it was like to go from being studying English to then starting to think maybe I want to do this as a career, maybe I want to be a professor. Like what happened?

SPEAKER_04 14:47

Well, I loved my English classes and I loved reading books and writing papers. That was all really great. I ended up transferring out of St. Mike's after two years because I had also been really interested in German, which I had taken in high school, and I had run through all of the German classes that they had at St. Mike's. They had a couple of years worth of German classes, but St. Mike's had a a kind of a reciprocal arrangement with the University of Vermont, which was down the road, that if they didn't offer a class, you could go to the university and take it. So I started taking German over at the University of Vermont and really liked it. And I had was had always thought about wanting to study abroad. So I wanted to do a whole year in Germany, all in German. So I ended up transferring to the University of Vermont to get a higher level of German.

SPEAKER_06 15:42

What was it about German that that for you and triggered like something in the brain or the heart that was like, yeah, I love this?

SPEAKER_04 15:48

I don't know. So in I grew up in northern Vermont and uh we're really close to Quebec. And so there were lots of students, kids in my schools who spoke French at home, who had like a grandma at home who only spoke French. We all started taking French in sixth grade, which is early for the US. It's late in every other country, but um sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, we all took French. And then most people continued with French in high school. But I just didn't love French. Uh, I didn't take to French in a way that I I had hoped. My uh late father had had learned German with for his doctorate, and then there was a British TV series based on a book series, uh, an adaptation of a book series called Flambards by Cam Pennington, I think. Cam Peyton is the name of the author. But I had watched this series and it it takes place in World War I, which was a historical period I was really fascinated with. And it's it's um, you know, this character lives in England um during World War I, and they live on a big farm. And uh at one point they have a German prisoner of war, and he only spoke German and it wasn't subtitled, and I was just fascinated by it. And so when my high school offered German, I decided to try that out, and I just loved it. I've talked to people about picking a language, and and sometimes it's like picking an instrument, you know, you can try a bunch, and some of them just feel right, and some of them you you might be able to play a little, but you know, that you don't take to them in the same way that you do something else.

SPEAKER_06 17:23

Because I like I've personally only studied I studied four years of Spanish in high school and I loved it. And I it still sticks with me. I can speak it pretty well now, and I didn't take any in college, and I wish I had. So you so you end up in Germany for a year. What does that look like? How does that end up?

SPEAKER_04 17:37

So I I transferred to the university. Um, I took another year of German. Then I went and did a full year in Germany, and it was a great experience. I it was an intensive German program. I took a big test so I could matriculate directly to the university and take classes there, not just like as an exchange student.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Right.

SPEAKER_04 17:56

Um that was a great experience. Then I came back and uh did a an last year at UVM. I wrote an honors thesis in English on that period of like British literature around World War One. Yeah, uh it's called the modernist period. So you have people like Virginia Wolfe and Ford Maddox Ford and you know, sort of the war poets. And I was just fascinated by that historical period and and the literature that came out of it. I had thought about graduate school, but I also was kind of feeling tired of being in school and thought, well, it's a really hard road to go to graduate school and try to become a professor. So maybe I could try doing something else, and maybe I could be happy doing something else. So let me try not to go to grad school and I I will just graduate and see what happens. So this was in the 90s. It was a different time. I understand how much harder it is for our students nowadays to just go and find an entry-level job somewhere. I signed up with a temp agency and had a variety of kind of weirdo jobs, and then they put me in an office job with a a startup in Vermont called Digital One Television that at the time had the rural licenses to market direct TV programming in Vermont. Um, when Direct TV got started, they just they were focusing on urban areas, they were focusing on being competition for cable. They had the licenses for all the rural counties in Vermont and a couple in New Hampshire. I started there in customer service on the phones, helping people with their installations and their programming, satellite dishes and stuff.

SPEAKER_06 19:33

And in English, in English, not in German, though. In English, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:37

Although when I had the interview, they were impressed by that. They were, you know, they were like, How's your French? Because sometimes we have French uh people calling in, and I was like, Well, I can, you know, very basic French that I learned for three years in junior high. I actually took a French class in Germany uh when I was studying there.

SPEAKER_03 19:54

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04 19:56

Because um most of the German classes at the university are just lectures, so I wasn't like meeting people in the way that I wanted to, but if you take a language class, you have to talk to people because you practice somebody speaking German teaching French. Yes, yes, she was French, so she was speaking German with a very thick French. Oh my gosh, right, but um, yeah, that was that was interesting, and I did meet a few people that way, and it was really fun. When I had the interview that for this job, they were impressed by that, and um they just thought that was cool that I had done that, not that it was necessarily applicable to the job. So it was you know, it was customer service on the phone. There were some really smart people who worked there. One uh woman, uh Jennifer, who wrote a really fantastic like guide for us on the phone that basically any problem that came up, you could flip the page and it it would tell you how to handle the problem. And I had a great time working there, it was really fun. And uh I ended up going for a promotion to marketing associate. It was it was all in one building at that time. So the CEO was in the building and the sales team was in there, and customer service and marketing, everybody was in the in the building uh together. So I I took a promotion to marketing, didn't really know much about marketing, but I figured it out. And um, I had never taken a marketing class or anything like that, but I could write well. And uh I remember the first time that I wrote something though for the sales team, and my supervisor um shout out Brian Heffernan, great guy. He said, This is great, this is really well written, but you're gonna need to like knock down the levels a little bit. He's like, our guys are not gonna read this. This is too many long sentences.

SPEAKER_06 21:45

When I was at OU at Ohio U studying journalism, I remember one of my writing professors saying for TV, said, You need to write to a fifth grade level education.

unknown 21:54

Yep.

SPEAKER_06 21:54

That was his exact phrase for television writing.

SPEAKER_04 21:57

Yep, it was something like that too. He's like Just think these guys are busy. They're not gonna take the time to disentangle like whatever this sentence is that you've written. And that was good advice. He was a really good mentor to me. And uh, so I was in that position for a little while, did a bunch of stuff with marketing. Um, and then our company was very successful and it got bought out by another company, and they started shaving off elements of the company. Like as soon as I moved out of customer service into marketing, soon after that, they moved all of our customer service to Louisville, Kentucky. They were, you know, kind of consolidating some of these rural networks, and customer service wasn't in the building anymore. And then uh I got promoted to a sales management position. I was in that position for a while, and I knew the company well, I knew the product well, I knew all of our salespeople. I'd traveled around and talked to uh the people who were selling for us and you know, talked to them about the company and everything. And that was interesting for a while, and then we got bought out again. And then almost everybody got laid off, just me and a couple other people were still gonna be there, but not in an office. I was just gonna be driving around with a cell phone. And this was in the 90s in Vermont, cell service was terrible, yeah. And it just it wasn't it wasn't what I wanted to do. It was really fun to work with all those people, to work with that team.

SPEAKER_06 23:20

And you love working with the team, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:22

I loved working with the team. That was what was so fun was going in and talking with all those people every day and and being in the office and being in that environment. And I didn't believe in the product as much anymore in the way that I needed to, because of the way that you know, when it got bought by the larger company, we just didn't have the same in-house care for the customers anymore. Then around that time, a job was posted for a company called Music Contact International, which was based in Burlington, Vermont, still is. Um, and they did international choir tours and other kinds of music tours, and they needed someone who had sales experience and marketing experience and travel experience and a second language, preferably German.

SPEAKER_02 24:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 24:06

So on paper, it was kind of the perfect thing. It was I took a pay cut from the job that I had to take it, but it was really exciting opportunity. And so I worked in that job for about a year full-time in the office. And then um, I just kept having this nagging feeling about grad school. I was trying really hard not to go to grad school, and I just couldn't stop thinking about it. So I had gone on vacation with some friends, and on the way back, I was the guy who was driving the Winnebago that we were in. I was like, I kind of don't want to go back to work. I'm I'm starting to think about these other things I'd like to do. And he really encouraged me. He's like, Why don't you do that? Why don't you why don't you do the thing that you want to do? I thought, oh, okay, well, maybe I I will. So I walked into my office and gave my notice, and my manager was like, What's happening? Why are you? And I said, Well, I think I want to go to grad school. He's like, Well, would you maybe move to part-time for a bit while you transition? And and so I did that for a while. And I ended up still working with that company um for a few years, uh, just as a tour guide where I wouldn't plan the trips anymore, but sometimes I would go as on-site logistics coordinator when a choir would tour somewhere. No, I continued working with them into grad school until until I had my daughter.

SPEAKER_06 25:30

I would tell people often in in career coaching that when you have that nagging feeling and you have that sort of gut feeling or that instinct that's telling you, hey, this is I can't, I can't shake it. I feel like I need to do this and I want to do this.

SPEAKER_03 25:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 25:49

What I often tell people is, look, sometimes my gut tells me to buy a lottery ticket, but but also if I go and share that gut instinct with people around me that know me, like your friend in the Winnebago, and they affirm it, that's a whole different thing, right?

SPEAKER_04 26:07

It is, it is. You know, I I was trying to do what felt like the practical thing at the time was which to stay with this job that I had that on paper was everything I wanted, right? It was it had to do with music, which I'd always been involved in, travel, uh, using my language, marketing and sales, which I thought was fun and interesting to do, working with choirs and musical people and creative people. Yeah. Uh so there was so much, it should have been the perfect job for me. And yet I still had this feeling that I was missing something. And I know, you know, the most obvious thing if you say you're going to grad school is I want to become a professor. But I I feel like I was a bit of a realist and knew that wasn't a guarantee you could go to grad school and never get the academic job. But I decided that I wanted to do the work enough that I was willing to take that risk. And I also, because I'd been working it for five years after undergrad between Digital One Television and Music Contact, I knew, well, okay, I'm gonna go do this work. I'm gonna go to grad school. And then if it doesn't work out and I don't get a job in academia, I can go back to doing marketing and sales. I, you know, I know that I can do other things, and that's okay. That actually was really healthy for me in grad school because I saw a lot of people who had their whole identity tied up in this idea of being a really good undergraduate student and that they wanted to be a professor. And then when grad school was hard, which it really is, and it's not just that the work is hard, it's it's it's really tough on your psyche. For a lot of people, that that was tough on their identity because this thing that they were had always had as their identity is the thing they were good at. There were people a lot better than them, or they felt insecure about how good they were, or they were faced with challenges that they hadn't encountered before. And that was really rough on some people who went right from undergrad. So I was grateful that I'd taken that time to try other things because I knew I can do other things. I know I can do something else if this doesn't work out. But I knew I wanted to do the studying, I wanted to do the work.

SPEAKER_06 28:19

Yeah, you can't control the outcome, right? Like you can you can trust the process, do the work, put the work in, and it sounds cliched to people, but it is real. You can't control the outcome. You can only control your effort, you can control your attitude, you can control how you know how hard you work. And then hope that things work out for the best, right? You know, you end up getting through graduate school, obviously, and things do work out. I'm jumping forward, but like things sort of work out, and you end up looking for uh professor roles or teaching roles around the country. How challenging was that? I know the story a little bit, but you know, for folks out there, I've heard stories for every professor opening associate professor or whatever, you got three, four, five hundred applications sometimes for one role, especially when it comes to the humanities in English.

SPEAKER_04 29:09

It is a tough market, and it's even tougher now than it was. Now, I got some good advice from my undergrad professors who said, don't go anywhere that isn't going to pay for it. Which is what I tell my students as well if they're thinking about graduate school.

SPEAKER_05 29:26

You just listened to part one of a two-part conversation with Dr. Mora Grady. Come on back next week for part two. Thanks for listening to the Caller ID podcast. Please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe with all of your friends on all of your social media platforms. Thanks again for signing off, Brandon Dave as well.