She's On A Roll (Part 2 with Dr. Maura Grady)

On part two of our fascinating call, Dr. Grady talks about how she went from grad school to getting a full-time professor role, the impact of AI on higher ed, her amazing work with corrections ed, and some great career wisdom. 

You'll also hear about my ridiculous freshman comp story at Ohio University. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Totally, a hundred percent. I never would have gotten my job at Ashland if I hadn't had that job.

SPEAKER_03 0:04

There it is. I mean, that that was my question. I was like, what do you say to folks that are thinking about or they're approaching grad school or they're approaching maybe finishing up their doctorate when an opportunity, you know, how to evaluate opportunities?

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Yeah, I think it is a common thing that people will get a postdoc or a visiting assistant professor position, something those are there are more of those in some ways, and they're easier to get than the tenure track jobs.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

Not necessarily, but but it's okay to go after those.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Totally okay. Yes, yes, it'll help you get the next job. And you learn so much. That's what you have to think about when you're in grad school. What can I learn from every opportunity?

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Hey everybody, this is Caller ID. 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_03 1:10

Welcome into Caller ID. You're listening to part two of a two-week conversation with Dr. Mora Grady of Ashland University.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Funding for higher ed has tightened up even more in recent years. You know, the current administration has decided that not to fund or support higher ed in the same way. So grad programs are cutting teaching assistantships and fellowships. But at the time, so this was in the late 90s, I went back around and talked to my undergrad professors who I'd stayed in touch with and asked for their advice. And they they gave me some advice. And regionally I was looking out out west because uh my boyfriend at the time, who's now my husband, who you know, was planning to go to graduate school in Reno, Nevada, where his mother had been a professor. She's since retired. So he was he was looking to get an MBA and he did get an MBA at University of Nevada at Reno. So I was looking at schools out west that were either a short drive or a short flight from Reno, Nevada. And I did look at Reno as well. I did apply there. Uh I was fortunate enough I got into uh UC Davis, uh University of California at Davis, which is about a two-hour drive from Reno up over the Donner Summit.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

Um if you're what if you're listening or watching the Donner Summit, just Google it and you'll find out exactly what gruesome story that's all about. I want to interject though and say two hours through mountain, through a mountain range to go to school, and this is part of the hard work of number one balancing relationship and career aspirations. How hard was that?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

It it wasn't too hard by that time. My husband and I, we'd already been together for three years, four years, or something like that, by the time we made this decision to go out west. And uh I planned to live in Davis, and I did. I lived in Davis and he lived in Reno, and we got together on weekends and vacations and stuff like that. At that time, we were pretty solid in our relationship, and we were busy because we were in grad school. So it was it was kind of good because we were just were working really hard during the week on our school stuff, and then when we got together, we could just be together, and we didn't have to do all of that stuff alongside living together and having a day-to-day relationship. So it was good in a way, and UC Davis was a really interesting school. That there was a lot of turmoil and turnover in my program at the time I started, a lot of which I didn't quite understand at the time, but it it happened in a lot of universities where the literature program and the writing program were in one department, and then that split apart during the time I was there. It is a truth in most programs, at least it was at this time, that literature had kind of a higher position, was considered more important, more scholarly, more lofty than writing, composition, which was seen as sort of a the cleanup crew. You know, you're getting the you're doing the toilet training for the students before they move on to the really important stuff of analyzing literature. That sense of a hierarchy often had real life consequences. So the people who taught the writing classes didn't have the same kind of status, they didn't necessarily have tenure or even the ability to get tenure, they didn't get paid as much. Uh, you know, their work wasn't as valued by the university. I think it things have changed a lot since then. You know, we made it through that time and everything worked out and it is pretty good now. But that was kind of a rough start, disorienting to people who hadn't worked in a business before, you know, because you you don't sort of think about as a student the machinery of a university. You don't think of it as a business with coworkers and labor issues and management styles and all of those things.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

So those are real, those are real. Yeah. Every higher ed institution. Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

But um, and I I had gone to UC Davis with the strong intention to study modernist British literature. That was my that was what I had been most interested in, what I had written my undergrad thesis on, which was my writing sample to get into grad school. And there was a pretty famous scholar at UC Davis who did gender studies and modernist literature and and other other literature too, but named Sandra Gilbert. And I had thought, okay, well, I'm gonna go there, I'm gonna work with her. And then when I got there, she said, Oh, yeah, I don't really do that anymore. I'm I'm mostly doing poetry now. So I was like, oh, darn it. So I took all of the classes that I could in that area, and then I was fortunate enough to get to be a TA for Dr. Scott Simmons, who is a film historian, and he was teaching a film class. And I was his TA in my second quarter, Davis is on quarters, 10-week terms, and just fell in love with that. I had always loved film. I had taken some film classes as an undergrad and uh just had a great experience working with him and getting to be a TA for that class. And then I started to think, oh, maybe I'm interested in writing about film as well as literature. And then I that's I moved in that direction.

SPEAKER_03 6:30

What was the job search like when you were finished?

SPEAKER_00 6:33

I had a I was fortunate. Davis had a program that was an exchange program with a university in Germany where you could essentially go and be a visiting lecturer for a year. I went to Germany um uh for a year and taught four classes a semester, which was great experience because I'd only ever taught one class at a time in essay writing, literature, film studies, media studies. Uh so after that I came back and there's a process in grad school, you have to take all these big exams, and then you have to write a plan for your dissertation and take an exam on the plan and uh have an oral defense and you gotta write the dissertation. And so I did all that and um had a couple kids somewhere in there uh along the way. And so I and Tim uh, my husband was working in Reno, Nevada. When we came back from Germany, he found a job uh working for a nonprofit there. And uh so we kind of wanted to stay around Northern California or Reno. And so I was I graduated with my doctorate in 2008. In 2000 and early 2008, I interviewed for a position at University of Nevada Reno, which uh was what in academia is called a term position, meaning that it's a job for just three years and then the job is over. It was a job that was partly teaching and partly administrative, uh, being the assistant director or one of there were two assistant directors for the core writing program, which is the what Reno calls their first year writing program. So freshman English, which is it's a large program. They have a doctoral program there in rhetoric and composition, which is the field generally that it does writing program administration. So I interviewed for that job and I got that job, which was perfect because that's where my husband was already working.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

Was the three-year thing, did that give you any pause, or was that a were there pros and cons to that? Because I mean, that's outside of academia. It happens occasionally in nonprofit world for like grant-funded positions, uh, or in professional sports where somebody gets a three-year contract, or in some C-suite level folks where they might get a two or three-year contract, but it's not common in most ways to know that, like, hey, three years, it's not like they're renewing, it's done. Like, how did you approach that?

SPEAKER_00 8:53

I was so excited to get any job. Um, that's part of it, especially in this location where my husband was already living and we wanted to live. Um, and I figured that would, you know, maybe I could find something else at the end of three years. There were other positions at the university. I thought maybe I could apply for one of those when this is over. Yeah. But you'll often find these um, sometimes they're called postdoc uh positions. So it's immediately after you finish your doctorate, they're looking to hire people right out of grad school because they are full of energy and a lot cheaper. Um and uh so this position is a three-year position because they they hire people who just finished their doctorate, they kind of get that energy out of them and then they can move them along before they have to pay them anymore.

SPEAKER_03 9:43

I mean, it's a win-win, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:44

It is, it was a total awesome job for me. I mean, I cannot say enough great things about working at UNR. I was so psyched to get that job. I had already been teaching as an adjunct at UNR from time to time while I was doing my doctorate. Um, I also was teaching at the community college in Reno, Nevada, too, which was a great experience. So I did know some of the people there and I was already familiar with the students and the program a bit. I think that probably helped me out. Um, my counterpart, the other assistant director, wasn't from the area at all. I felt really lucky that I had gotten that position. I my boss, uh Dr. Jane Detweiler, who ran the program at the time, was amazing, just a fantastically skilled administrator. That's a rare animal in higher ed.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

It doesn't lend itself towards that skill set very often in higher ed.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Not necessarily, no. I learned so much from working with her. I learned so much from teaching lots of different classes, from working with the grad students, doing all kinds of different administrative work. I mean, I was on committees, I was on a curriculum alignment committee with the community, we had an outreach committee, um, an assessment committee, you know, all kinds of like real faculty work that I got to do right away.

SPEAKER_03 11:00

That's awesome. Such a great experience.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

It was so fantastic. It is the reason that I was competitive for jobs after. Totally, 100%. I never would have gotten my job at Ashland if I hadn't had that job.

SPEAKER_03 11:11

There it is. I mean, that that was my question was like, what do you say to folks that are thinking about or they're approaching grad school or they're approaching maybe finishing up their doctorate when an opportunity, you know, how to evaluate opportunities?

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Yeah, I think it is a common thing that people will get a postdoc or a visiting assistant professor position, something those are there are more of those in some ways, and they're easier to get than the tenure track jobs.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

Not necessarily, but but it's okay to go after those.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Totally okay. Yes, yes, it'll help you get the next job. And you learn so much. That's what you have to think about when you're in grad school. What can I learn from every opportunity? So I was on the student senate in graduate school. I learned about Robert's rules. I learned, and you know, I've been on a lot of boards since then. I that was great experience. I was the secretary for that organization for a couple of years. I learned so much doing that. I learned so much doing that Germany position where I was a faculty member in Germany for a year. I had that experience. I think that helped me get the Reno job, you know, teaching at the community college, teaching adjunct at a couple of different places. You just learn how to be adaptable, you learn how to plug yourself in and make yourself useful. Um, you learn how to hopefully talk to people and find yourself mentors and build that kind of mentoring map of people who can help you out. You do have to be willing to put yourself out there. And sometimes that's really hard for people who academics, we don't tend to be the most extroverted people.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

My Jane Detweiler at UNR told me once, she said, if you want to understand why academic departments are dysfunctional, think about the kind of people who get PhDs. You know, anybody who's sort of extroverted and able to get along with others and outgoing and a self-start, you know, those people have left a long time ago to do go do other things.

SPEAKER_02 13:13

It's such a funny way of looking. I hadn't looked, I have never thought of it that way.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

She said this, she said that, and so what you're left with is like the most introverted bookish types who aren't who the best thing they can do is sit alone with a book and research by themselves and write by themselves. So you try to get them to do things in groups together, it doesn't always work out.

SPEAKER_03 13:36

It does explain a lot of things, I'll just say that way. Having been in higher ed and having you know been married to someone that was in higher ed for a long time, too.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

So sometimes in grad school, I remember thinking about particular professors, you know, trying to figure out somebody and going like, why? I'm you know, I don't know that they like me. I I get a weird feeling, I can't figure it out. And then if you think to yourself, oh, maybe this person's a gigantic nerd. And that kind of explains it. It does. I tell my students this. I'm like, look at us, we are not. I'm nervous in front of groups of people. It takes me a little while. And I tell I'm very honest with my students. I'm like, until I know all your names, yeah, it's like I'm standing in front of a room full of strangers every day when we come in here.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

It does, I mean, academia sort of lends itself towards a blurred line between what you teach or as a student what you study and your identity. Like right, like so how much of your identity do you think is tied to being a professor?

SPEAKER_00 14:39

Some, but I don't think all of it. You know, I I think what I love about being a professor is the stuff that I just generally love anyway. So I love books, I love movies, I love people, yeah, I love history. And so a lot of my work is looking at books and movies and history and people, you know. Some of the research that I do is on film tourism. So why do people travel to filming sites? Um, why are people fans of things and and and it makes them want to travel? I love part of my work is talking to people about why they're doing those things. And that's I love it. I love talking to people. I love asking people what kinds of movies and books they like. So I feel like my job, I get it's an extension of that kind of stuff that I'd be doing anyway if I were just out in the world.

SPEAKER_03 15:34

It sounds it does sound like you're in, you know, I talk about it every episode, the center of that Ike guy. You do love what you're doing and and you're getting paid to do it. Although people think I think one of the misconceptions about professors is people often think professors make a ton of money. And I mean, maybe maybe it may be at Harvard, but like maybe, but even there it's but it's in the publishing and and getting books sold, like even you know, guys like Arthur Brooks might do all right, but and that's not most writers.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Most writers do not get rich writing, right? I mean, we all write, everybody who is a professor publishes, does scholarly work. But I was just saying today to somebody that the professors who make the most money, the professors who are the highest paid professors at our university and at most universities are people who can make way more money doing whatever that thing is that they teach than teaching it. So, like an accounting professor could wake make way more money being an accountant than they could teaching it, which is why they have to pay them more.

SPEAKER_03 16:34

That makes it harder to find them, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:35

It's harder to find them, it's harder to find people who are willing, or nursing, you know, the nursing professors, it's you can make much more money as a nurse than you can getting a doctorate and teaching nursing.

SPEAKER_03 16:46

If your job went away tomorrow, I'm gonna give you a second to think about this, right? What would you do? Meanwhile, if you're enjoying today's show, follow the show, leave a five-star rating, share it with somebody else. If you want to go deeper, you can find my substack. It's B. Davis Wells. I'll link it in the show notes. Back tomorrow Grady. If your job were to go away for some reason tomorrow, you you either the job went away or you had to quit for for family reasons, whatever, well, what would you do next? How do you think you'd have to do that?

SPEAKER_00 17:21

If I had to still make money.

SPEAKER_03 17:24

Um, yes or no?

SPEAKER_00 17:26

If I didn't have to make money and I could just stop working, I would read all the books that I've got piled up. I would watch all the movies that I've got saved that I haven't watched, I would do all the programming at the library. I would join every book club at the library and just read lots of books and talk to people about books. That's what I would do.

SPEAKER_03 17:47

Uh kind of in line with what you're doing and just getting paid to do it.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

It's what I'm doing now. So I'm, you know, I feel like I wish I had more time to do those non-work related things.

SPEAKER_03 17:58

Like what's the last what's the last book you read that was not for school for for academia?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

I just finished reading a book by Harrison Brown, who's an a former athlete and an author called Let Us Play about Inclusivity in Sports. And uh yeah, co-authored by his sister, who's an investigative journalist. And it was just a fascinating read. So that's that's the last thing I read. I also, you know, uh book clubs are great for that because other people pick the books. Um, left to my own devices, I tend to read things that feel like work, like I'll read books on AI or teaching books, or you know, I I love finding new things to teach my students. I love changing up what I'm yeah reading.

SPEAKER_03 18:41

I have two two things. Number one, the last book that I've read is one I'm almost done with is a biography of Stevie Nicks, which is a fascinating book. I love music biographies as a musician. I love to hear about people's processes. I also love to hear about the backstage stuff and all the stories, and hers is wild. You mentioned AI. How how is that changing your life as a professor and people's role? I know it's huge right now.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Yeah, it's I don't want to say that's a whole different podcast.

SPEAKER_03 19:09

I know it's not.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

I don't want to say it's ruined everything, but it has certainly changed everything. And, you know, the way that we've been doing things, certainly you don't want to be static and you want to evolve and you want to try new things and you want to change how you're teaching because your students change. And I feel like I've done that, but this is such a radical shift that uh has utterly changed how we in in writing programs have to do everything. I was just at a conference last weekend where I was talking to some a bunch of other writing program administrators in Ohio, and it's all we're talking about. And we're so tired of talking about it because it's you know, at Ashlin, we've overhauled our first year writing curriculum to really focus in on the skills that students need to learn if they're gonna use AI later. For me, it's a real equity issue because the students who already can write pretty well are gonna be much more skilled users of AI tools than the students who don't have those basic writing skills. And the students who don't have those skills, if professors are outlawing AI or looking for it, the students who have the higher writing skills can disguise their AI use better, or they can use AI in the way that it's intended to just kind of polish and shape rather than to create the entire thing. Those students who have less developed writing skills when they get to college, if they start using those AI tools, it's a lot more obvious, they're more likely to get academic integrity violations. And so it just kind of intensifies inequalities that existed before college. And that's really disturbing to me.

SPEAKER_03 20:50

Well, I would never have thought of it that way. Honestly, that that thought never crossed my mind. And I know it's changing everybody's lives in many ways, whether they know it or not, and in many jobs. Do you think it will impact higher ed in a way that will be negative towards more professors, less professors? Like can it help? Can it be helpful?

SPEAKER_00 21:13

I I don't know yet. It's so hard to tell. Um, one one of the uh effects that it's had is we've really changed up how we teach writing. We're trying to break apart the different skills and really try to get students to invest in developing their own individual voices and pursuing topics that matter to them so that they're less likely to just feed something into an AI. Another thing is to build their confidence because students lean on the AI tools when they feel like the way they write isn't good enough and doesn't sound right and doesn't sound academic or something, whatever they think that is. So really helping students to have confidence in their own writing voices and try lots of different things and realize it's okay to sound like yourself. Um, that's what we're trying to do more of and uh reinforce that. But that's more intensive to do as a teacher. It requires a lot more constant feedback and a lot more, you know, sort of smaller assignments that you're you're collecting more often and giving more feedback, conferencing one-on-one with students, giving oral tests, doing more in-class writing. We also in writing programs have to respond to the fact that our colleagues in other departments, like history and political science and religion and philosophy, are going back to blue books and in-class exams because students are using AI to write the papers and they don't want to read that. So now in first year writing, we've got to help give them practice with doing in-class writing because they're gonna have to encounter it in their other classes.

SPEAKER_03 22:45

It is amazing, by the way. If you watched this video two minutes ago, I could see all the joy and happiness coming out of you about like books and all that. And then as I mentioned AI and I could just see it like sap it out of your whole existence.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

I'm sure that it has wonderful applications. I was in a coffee shop with two colleagues here a couple of years ago, and we were talking about this is when Chat GPT first really became available, like two, three years ago. And we're talking about it, and we're talking about what it can do, and of course, it's all new. And I often say that I wish we could just press pause and we all get up to speed on all of the different generative AI tools out there, and but they are constantly changing, and so you you can never get caught up. You just feel like you're running from it all the time. But we were having this conversation, and somebody kind of leaned in and said, I don't mean to eavesdrop, but um, I couldn't help but overhear your conversation about AI. And he said, Well, I'm a marketing professional and I love these tools, they're great. I I can do all these things that used to take me a lot longer, I can do them much faster. And I said, You know how to do them all the old way, and the tools helping you do it faster. Would you hand this tool to a brand new marketing intern who didn't know how to do the old things and have them produce something and trust in it? And then he was like, Oh, well, no, they don't know how to do those things yet. And that's the problem. How are they gonna get there? How are they gonna learn to do the things that they need to use those tools well without learning it the old-fashioned way first? The students are just skipping over learning it the old-fashioned way, and so that's something that I feel like in my program anyway, we've got to kind of bring it back to basics and really get them to eat their vegetables, which they don't tend to like.

SPEAKER_03 24:29

Yeah, that much. That's that's a really good analogy. I think you're right. When it comes to uh when it comes to teaching, uh, you know, I always ask people this question about their job and their career. What brings out your Ted Lasso, your most joyous moments, you're you're where you're like, man, this is it. This is this is like I had the best day ever versus your Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm, where it's like, I can't believe that I just had this day and this just happened. What is that for you?

SPEAKER_00 25:01

I just love being in the classroom with my students and seeing them get excited about something that we're discussing. This semester, I'm teaching the grammar and usage class, which I've had some great days in there with the students when, you know, just everybody's getting it and we're having a great time talking about this. And also we're remarking on how much we've learned in such a short time. That's really amazing, especially because this is a it's a new skill for almost all of us in that room, including myself. People were really apprehensive at the beginning being able to master this, and they've just they've come so far, and that's so exciting. And the other class I'm teaching as part of a study abroad program to Germany, it's a literature and film class. So we are looking at literature and and film adaptations uh having to do with World War II and the Cold War in Germany. We were watching a kind of awful film, uh Nazi propaganda film, and talking about the role of propaganda and talking about how this film, the impact that this film had historically. And the students just had so much to say. They were so excited, they they were really interested, and they were starting to learn all the film terms that we've been learning. So it was all kind of coming together that day. I got several comments after that. It was a great discussion. I love days like that where we're all just the whole class is joining in and having a great conversation. And it it doesn't feel I don't lecture, I don't like standing in the front of the room talking. I much prefer to have my students lead that discussion or, you know, really take ownership of what we're learning in the room. And I'm there to help them get there. Days like that, where I'm just having a great conversation with a bunch of students who've read everything that they were supposed to read and are excited to talk about it, those are great times. I love reading what my students write too. Um, those are some I don't love grading. That's sort of my least favorite part of it. I wish I could just have a conversation with all of them instead of having to give them a grade.

SPEAKER_03 27:03

I just you know, I I I talked with an English professor in episode two, Dr. Mark Rankin from James Madison, who said a very similar answer. And he's he's a Shakespearean literature and Renaissance literature. And he he almost had the exact same answer that you just had about the worst part of the job. Yeah, yeah. And the best part is influencing students and getting them to think and think deeper and what that looks like. What do you wish somebody had told you when you were going into higher ed that you you would know that you would have known then?

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

I wish I'd really known about rhetoric and composition as a field. I didn't know it as a discipline. I had never taken a composition class until I was teaching one. Uh because I had taken AP English in high school and kind of skipped all of those classes in college, went right on to the literature stuff because it's a fascinating field. After I'd been working at Ashland for a bit, I uh was fortunate enough to get to direct the writing center and of course the writing program. Uh I did the writing center for two years. I've done the writing program for 10 years, and I I really love this kind of work, the administrative work and the kind of research that gets done in composition and in writing program scholarship. It's a very different, it's more on the education side. And so I did get an MED from Ashland University along the way just because I wanted to study more of this kind of research. And I I love it. If I had known that that was something you could get a doctorate in, I might have gone in that direction. But I had to learn it. I had to learn it along the way that that was something that you could do.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Uh I've told you this story before, but my comp uh class, my freshman year at Ohio University, my professor, and they were on quarters, my professor went AWOL seven weeks in. Just stopped showing up. He stopped showing up. And so, like first day, we're like, Well, that's weird. You know, professors sometimes wouldn't, you know, they they whatever, they got sick or something, and nobody put a sign. There was no e there was just barely even email back then, right?

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Second day, and you probably didn't know I should go talk to the chair. All that kind of thing. Oh, we didn't know that. No, no, no. When I was an undergrad, I didn't know who the chair was, it was a Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.

SPEAKER_03 29:23

class.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Oh my gosh. Yeah, and so five days a week.

SPEAKER_03 29:27

Five days a week. It was five credits.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Oh, dude.

SPEAKER_03 29:30

Day two, we show up, and there's you know, 20, 25 of us. Guy doesn't show up again. Like, what is happening? Third day, still not there.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

So ever showed up, or was he there at the beginning and then stopped showing?

SPEAKER_03 29:41

Well, he had been there for the first six weeks and then just stopped showing up in week seven. And so by the end of the week, we get to Friday, and I was like, look, I just led the the charge. I was like, look, we're not coming back, no one come back Monday. Like, I and I I think at that point I did contact the the dean or the the like somebody and said, uh, yeah, our professor stopped showing up. Well, that guy went A-WOL, and like there was a story in the newspaper about him. I he went, he went.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

I've never heard this story from you.

SPEAKER_03 30:11

Yeah, so so a week later, all right, a week later, we all get an email from the dean, I think, or the chair, it says, Hey, please show up at class tomorrow. I know you like so we're now two weeks of nobody got nobody showing up because this guy stopped coming. He says, Please come to class. Well, somebody will be there tomorrow. We show up. We're now at the end of week eight of a 10-week quarter. And the the chair says, Look, I have your grades. We we were able to contact him. He's alive, he's okay. Uh right. I mean, we didn't know, we didn't know what had happened. So, you know, he he he gives us, he's he gives us the option. He says, If you like your grade, it's fine. You can take your grade and we'll give you credit for the class. If you don't, we'll give you one more assignment and it can only help your grade.

SPEAKER_02 30:57

And that was I like I looked at my grade, I had an A, and I was like, I am out of here.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_03 31:03

You know, just just showing up is is half the battle, I think they say sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

You know, one thing I didn't mention in this conversation that I I do want to say something about teaching in the classroom is amazing. I've done some online teaching too, which I also think is super rewarding, and you have a totally different kind of relationship with your students. Another piece of my job that has been really amazing is um that Ashland has a large prison education program. And we have face-to-face classes at some locations in Ohio. Um, and I as part of my job, I oversee the faculty who teach there. But we also have a big online program. So we have online classes for students who are are taking their classes while they're in prisons. And uh that has been just an incredible learning journey for me and uh for all the faculty that I get to work with who teach in that program. We've had so many incredible students, so many amazing writers come through our program for whom these classes really are life-changing.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

It's it's a bit of a cliche sometimes. We talk about, you know, changing lives and getting to transform our students' minds and everything. But and I and every student I come across, I think this is an opportunity to really reach this student and have a great relationship and have a great conversation. But I especially want to give a shout out to our students in our correctional education program who work so hard in really tough circumstances and learn so much and are excellent students. I mean, not everybody is an excellent student, but in terms of some of the best students I've come across have been students in those programs who just are really grateful for the opportunity and work their butts off. And so shout out to them and to all the wonderful faculty that I have who work with those students too.

SPEAKER_03 32:59

All right, we got time for word association, success, happiness. Career.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Whatever you make it. These are not good answers.

SPEAKER_03 33:16

Um, career can be anything.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

I mean, I I think there is not a career, there are careers and there are through lines, and you you put those together and you make a life. I I don't think that there's only one career.

SPEAKER_03 33:35

Yeah, I agree. It's why it's why I think that the term calling can be tricky for folks. Uh and having worked in the Career Center for Life Calling at the Ashland University, that tripped up a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

I think people think, and our young students think, and not just young people think, they've got to find the answer, the one thing that's gonna make them happy, like their professional soulmate or something. And I think that there are a lot of soulmates out there, and you know, you can learn something from every job you have, every relationship you make um when you're working. And I think all of that you're just learning. I guess career, I would say learning. Just keep learning, and that's gonna be how you get to the next thing. To go back to Brian Heffernan, my great boss at Digital One Television, he said, you need to have a good story when you go in for an interview. And whatever job you had before, that's part of your story that you're gonna tell. And so that's what I try to tell my students. Try to have a good story. People like stories.

SPEAKER_03 34:41

They sure do. Failure.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Giving up. I think that's that's the only time you fail is when you give up.

SPEAKER_03 34:51

I love that answer. And that's been a common refrain from guests. It's not always the answer, but it is a common uh answer, and I love it. I I agree. Identity.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Not your job.

SPEAKER_03 35:05

Money.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

It's nice. I've never had much of it.

SPEAKER_02 35:14

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

If if it were important to me, I would not be doing what I'm doing. I'd be doing something different where I would make a lot of money. Somebody that I worked with at Digital One Television said to me, he was getting an MBA at the time. And I said, Why do you want to do that? And he said, I have realized about myself that it's really important that I have a lot of money. So I need to get this degree so that I can get a different job where I can make a lot of money.

SPEAKER_03 35:40

The first thing I've told people every time I do career coaching with folks is the most important thing is to know yourself. And if you don't know yourself, then you don't know what you want and what's important and how to set your values and figure out all right, well, well, I don't know what I want. Well, if you want money and that's high on your list, you know, okay, you need to know that.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

You make different choices.

SPEAKER_03 35:59

You do make different choices. Yeah. Last one, impact.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Students, I guess. I feel like as educators, we have the opportunity to have an impact on our students, who then in turn can have a great impact on all the people in their lives. For students on main campus, students who are taking classes at our high school locations, or students who are taking classes in corrections. Their education is gonna have an impact on them, on their families, on their communities. So I do feel like there's a lot of value in making those connections, having that impact on people.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

Last question. When your teaching career is finished, what do you hope your legacy is?

SPEAKER_00 36:49

I hope my students loved learning things. I hope they take that with them in their lives, that just learning is exciting and that they never want to stop learning.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

Wise words. Thank you, Dr. Grady.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

No, thank you. This was great.

SPEAKER_02 37:09

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 for Brandon Dave as well.