Transcripts
Scientists Witness Undersea Eruption
Aptitude For Aging
Hear an exclusive Terra interview with Canan (17:59)
Retirement decision
LEE: Irma, you decided to take early retirement when you were just 55. What factors did you take into consideration when you made that decision?
IRMA: There were a number of things that were happening both outside of my life and directly in my life, and one of them was PERS, and the landscape of PERS started to shift and get very shaky, and my friends and I started to talk quite actively about how this might affect us each personally and what to do, so that that was kind of a backdrop.
I had had some serious health challenges that I had been dealing with, and the two kind of came together for me and it seemed like it would be a good thing for me to consider doing something other than the work that I had done, and I had loved, at OSU for all those years.
LEE: Did you have any anxieties about making such a big change in your life?
IRMA: Yes, huge anxieties. There was so much ambiguity, and it seemed impossible to have all the details I needed to really feel that I was prepared to make an unequivocal decision.
LEE: What kind of support structure did you have at that time? Did you have a place to go for resources, for information, for guidance, as you prepared to make this choice?
IRMA: I attended as many PERS workshops as I could. Those were helpful. I spoke with friends. That was helpful because we were all struggling with the same issues, and some of us ultimately decided to retire at that time, and others chose not to.
LEE: Before you actually made the move, what did you imagine your retirement would be like? How did you envision your days?
IRMA: I had no idea what my days would look like. It felt like jumping off a cliff. But I felt that that sounded like that was an exciting thing to do too. And so I decided that I knew what work was like — I had done that all of my adult life — and that something new would be a good thing, and I didn’t have … some people really have anxiety because they don’t know what it will look like. To me that just sounded intriguing, and I wanted to give that chance. So unlike some people who then would create a structure for themselves in anticipation of no more career, I wanted to leave it wide open and just see what sorts of things beckoned to me.
LEE: Irma, do you consider yourself as an adventurous person in general?
IRMA: In that kind of way, yes. I would say so.
LEE: It sounds like you approached this as kind of a big adventure?
IRMA: I think that’s right…
Health challenge
LEE: So you retired, February 28, 2003. What happened then?
IRMA: What happened after I immediately retired was that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That was part of the picture I hadn’t factored in, in multiple ways, in terms of what I’d be doing with my time and what I’d be focusing on and where my finances would be migrating, and so that was the next challenge I had to deal with.
LEE: That must have been emotionally devastating to get that diagnosis at that point in your life.
IRMA: It wasn’t to the extent you might expect because I had gone through a severe case of Graves’ Disease, for which I had gone through radiation in February of 2001. And that really contributed to my decision to retire early — and then had been diagnosed with an ovarian tumor and then the breast cancer diagnosis, so you know (chuckle), I was just in a kind of state where, OK, that’s the next challenge, roll up your sleeves, what do you do about it and move on.
LEE: You told me you that you sold your big house and downsized. Why did you decide to do that? I think some people might choose to stay in their house because it’s where they’re comfortable. They have their history there.
IRMA: I think that having to deal with illness the way that I did and being by myself, although I had tremendous support from friends and my students were unbelievably supportive. It was astonishing the way that they came to my assistance. But the house was an older home, which I loved. That was why I bought it in the first place, but I’d gotten to a point where I felt the house’s needs were rapidly exceeding my ability to meet them, and I didn’t want to have a house that needed more than I could give it, and I didn’t want a house that required of me these things that I became anxious about, so I felt that going into something that was less demanding would free me up to do other things.
New love
LEE: And then you met somebody new. Do you want to talk about how the two of you met?
IRMA: Yeah, actually we’ve known each other for about 25 years, only very, very tangentially, and we met because we’d kept in touch loosely over the years, just very informally. And then the day before the 2004 election we got together for coffee at the Beanery to talk about our mutual distress with the polarity that’s divided our country, divided our communities, divided families, and facing the election the next day, we started to talk about bringing together groups of unlike minded people to try to see where we have common ground and to see how the world looks through the lens of someone with a different world view … not to influence each other, not to change each other, but to really just kind of find how we can reunite as a community. And we started working on that project, and in the course of that realized that we had become deep friends and had fallen in love. It was totally unexpected in (laugh) each of our lives, but you just never know.
LEE: What I’m hearing is that you had several major unexpected occurrences in your life and starting from practically the day after you retired, which says to me that one of the important factors, perhaps, that is important is resilience. Maybe you can plan some aspects of your retirement, but you always have to be ready to deal with the unexpected occurrences, the good as well as the bad.
IRMA: Exactly. I think that one of the things people don’t have enough faith in often is their own resourcefulness, and they have accumulated this entire lifetime of having had to adapt to all sorts of things, things that they have planned for themselves, and things that have come without their expectations. And to just really kind of rejoice in that and look into your tool kit and see what you’ve got there and see what you need to add to it. I think that so much in life, and this sounds trite, but so much in life is really about attitude and that can make the difference.
LEE: So what you are saying is really sort of an interesting twist on the idea of being older because, in our youth-oriented society, we would tend to think of being older as a downside of life. But you’re saying, you got this whole lifetime of skill and experience and understanding of how to make choices and how to make good decisions, and you can draw upon that huge wellspring with experience, rather than, I’m old now and I’ve lost my productivity and usefulness because I’m not employed.
IRMA: I would agree with that. I have two friends. We were born in the same month and the same year, and every year we celebrate our birthdays together, and we do something really exciting. We go away for a weekend to some interesting new place and do things, and when we all turned 50, they just really struggled with it and thought this was really a dark moment in their lives, and I was having a ball. Every stage and every age has something really interesting to reveal and to explore, and I think the older you get, the larger your archive is of those sorts of things, and to me that’s just all positive.
LEE: You said that a healthy retirement hinges largely on being what you call positive in one’s orientation. What do you mean by that?
IRMA: I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna, and maybe I do (chuckle) sometimes, but I think that there are so many different ways to look at the same thing, and things can be viewed as obstacles or as defeats. But I think that they more often can really productively be viewed as life lessons or skill building or unexpected opportunities and sometimes when something really devastating happens or just overwhelming happens, that’s just a moment in the continuum of a life, and as you pass through it, you can often look back and say, OK I get it, I now understand what I learned from that, and that prepared me for this next wonderful thing that I now am ready for that I wouldn’t have been otherwise.
Best days are ahead
LEE: Karen Hooker who is a researcher in the OSU Center for Aging talks about the ability of humans to grow at any stage in life, even when perhaps you know you are in a retirement home or at an assisted living facility. She said there are opportunities to grow and to learn from that, and I think that’s something that is very easy to forget.
IRMA: I think this goes back to your comment about this being kind of a youth-oriented culture, and I had the good fortune of being born to someone who was 44 when she had me, and so it was something I was used to, being around older people all the time and still am and very comfortable with older people. And I think that those kinds of environments can just keep alive the spirit of a person, at a time when our society says your days are behind you, now it’s time for you to just think about the past and not recognize that you always have a future as long as you are alive. And I think that that’s one of the great contributions to our contemporary society, is these living communities that when people age, and it becomes more difficult for them to sustain their independence living on their own, that they can now go into a community of peers where they can share the things that are important in their lives and make new friends instead of living in a world where you have this continuing shrinking population of people who’ve been important to you. And I have spent quite a bit of time recently in those environments for family reasons, and I’m really struck by the vitality that I see in people who would otherwise have just started to fade. It’s very exciting to me.
LEE: When you give workshops to OSU staff and faculty, what kinds of questions and anxieties do they bring to you? What do you hear from them?
Financial concerns
IRMA: The one that’s most common is financial. And that’s the one that I find the most daunting to respond to, because retiring for financial reasons is not a good motivator. I think it would have to be a spirit-driven decision, that you retire because you see for yourself a richer life with that option. When I retired, I’m one of those so-called window people for PERS. I thought I knew what I was going to get as retirement, and it turns out I’m going to be getting 8.33 percent less, as well as most of the other window people, so if my decision had been entirely financially driven, that would have been really devastating. But I think that the financial piece is very critical for a lot of people and even at the time I had applied to retire with PERS, they made it clear that in the process you will not know what your actual retirement amount will be until you’ve been through that process, so you don’t know what that is. So that’s the number one anxiety. Another one that came up frequently or comes up frequently is people for whom their primary identity is their work. They really are unprepared, ill prepared, to face a future that releases them from that and requires that they find other aspects of themselves to make them feel whole.
LEE: So how do you address that? It seems to me that what I’m hearing you say is that if a person is going to have a healthy fulfilling productive retirement they need to start thinking about that well before they retire, perhaps in developing interests outside of work and passions that go beyond their employment.
IRMA: The question, in terms of the financial aspects, I just say you can’t know. So you just have to let that go, as hard as that is to do. You just have to let that go. But as far as the other one goes, what I usually say is be really honest with yourself and think about what is it you love, and if you’ve been an academic all your life, that becomes, I think, actually a rather difficult issue, because so much in an academic’s life comes with working with colleagues and working with students, and there are specific kinds of feedbacks that you get that let you know you are doing your job well. Well, what if you really love bowling, what if you really love fishing, but you know in your mind that’s not what an academic does. Well I think you have to give yourself permission to really accept the things that make your heart sing, you know, and go with those things. Give yourself the opportunity to enjoy yourself.
LEE: So giving yourself permission?
IRMA: That’s a big one. I think that’s the biggest one. I have nothing but good things to say about retirement (laugh).
Be open to experiments, be honest with yourself
LEE: Some people think, well, I’m retired now, I should move to Florida or I should move closer to my children. Do you advise people on whether they should make those big kinds of moves?
IRMA: I think, two things: one, if they think they want to do it, they should try it, and they should recognize that if it doesn’t work, that’s not the end of the line. Most of those kinds of decisions are reversible. One of the great joys of retirement is that it’s really an opportunity to explore in a way that you haven’t been able to do since, you know, college days. It’s a time to try things out, and that’s one of things that I think that’s really important too, is that, to give yourself, again, permission to have something not work out the way you wanted it to. But that doesn’t mean you failed. I think people sometimes are very hard on themselves, that they try something and it doesn’t work the way they thought it should. They are embarrassed about it. They don’t know how to explain it to their friends and family. You try it, it’s an experiment, it works, it goes into directions you don’t expect. You realize that you love Corvallis, you know, whatever it is, you just kind of follow that thread.
LEE: So Irma, what’s the most important piece of advice that you would give to someone who is thinking about retiring?
IRMA: I think the most important thing would be, be honest with yourself and don’t bring into your reflections what other people might think, what it might do to your status, or anything like that, but just really, this is your moment, and give yourself the opportunity to make the most of it.
LEE: One more question. Aside from your new love, what has been the most fulfilling or surprising or exciting part of your retirement?
IRMA: The most surprising part for me was I thought I would feel the need to remain much more linked to OSU and the community here, because my whole life, my active adult career was here, and I loved it. It was fabulous for me. I was very fortunate. But there’s a whole world outside of OSU, and I’ve had the opportunity to explore it, and I think that the biggest surprise for me is that is truly everything that you do after retirement is self motivated. You find out what does motivate you when nobody else is making demands on you, and there can be some amazing surprises and gifts in that regard.
Reinventing High Schools
Lee Sherman: Hi, I’m Lee Sherman. I’m a writer for Terra magazine, here with Michael Dalton and Molly Knott of the OSU College of Education. We’re here to talk about their recent report on high school innovation in Oregon. To help schools reinvent themselves, OSU is collaborating with the Portland-based nonprofit organization, Employers for Education Excellence, E3 for short. E3 is funding this project with a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about the purpose of your study and how you got started?
Michael Dalton: Sure. We started by exploring innovation in high schools. And a lot of people feel like there are difficulties in making innovations in high schools. And the high schools are the same now as they were 50, 100 years ago. And there are barriers and challenges to high schools being innovative. And so the original purpose of the study was to look at these barriers and challenges that high schools were facing. But we soon shifted as we talked to schools about that. We shifted our frame from these obstacles to innovations. We shifted the focus from why you can’t to how you can be innovative within the current policy, financial, regulatory world. And so it was really a start from looking at challenges and barriers and then became looking at innovation and change. So the half-full rather than the half-empty version of this.
Molly Knott: And I think part of that was being out and talking to innovative schools and realizing that the language of barriers didn’t really resonate with them. And so that was a critical part of that reorientation in the study.
Lee Sherman: So what is it that enables some high schools to be innovative while others just can’t seem to get to that point?
Michael Dalton: So let me ask the question back. Could it be additional time? Could it be funds from special grants? Could it be the depth and variety of resources in a metropolitan area? Could it be small size allowing for personal relationships? Some dynamic, charismatic leader? Is it a district leadership model or board policy? So these were the things that we looked at and explored as we were thinking about this.
What we found is, innovation or the absence of innovation turns out to be possible and manifest itself in all of these places. There are places that have grant funds that are innovative and not particularly innovation and places in urban areas that are innovative and not And small schools that are innovative and not. So, it had to be something else. That’s really what we began to pursue as we looked at this research, is what is this other thing that’s happening, or the processes that are in place. So as we explored this more, the high schools that had become innovative by creating what we end up calling the “bigger here” and a “longer now.” So this innovation in Oregon high schools uses case studies to document the ways in which these high schools employ this new way of thinking to find innovative, creative ways to meet the diverse and changing needs of students. Innovative high schools all use this new way of thinking to frame their problems and solutions around their broader conception of opportunities and resources that are available as opposed to what they lacked. So again, it was about the innovations and not the challenges and barriers. It’s around opportunities. Something is not working quite right, so this is an opportunity to do something different, not a barrier to stop and get stuck.
Lee Sherman: So could you be a little more specific and tell me what you mean by this new way of thinking?
Molly Knott: Sure, I think the best way to describe the concepts of the “big here” and “long now” and this new way of thinking is to excerpt several of the stories that we include in our study. So I’d start with Scio High School which is a very small high school in a rural community in the Willamette Valley.
Geographic isolation and a lack of growth have presented Scio School District with its share of challenges over the years — shrinking resources, potential school closures, consistent cuts to an already small staff. In 2003, the district really had to consider whether it still possessed the resources to support the existing high school diploma. The administrators began to seriously consider reducing the number of credits required for graduation. The former Scio high school principal, now the superintendent there, posed a really powerful question and said, “I knew in my heart, less wasn’t the answer.” So kind of what Michael said. Let’s take this challenge, and what are the opportunities that we can mine from this?
So fast-forward three years. In June of 2006, the first group of Scio High School students graduated from the Promoting Accelerated College Entry, or PACE program. The PACE students took their senior year courses at Linn-Benton or Chemeketa community colleges and received an advanced diploma with community college credits or, in some cases, graduated from high school with also an Associates Degree. The high school’s CIM (Certificate of Initial Mastery) passage rates have improved markedly. Eighty percent (80%) of students passed the science CIM, up from 60%, and seventy-eight percent (78%) meet the benchmark in writing, up from 48%. So instead of offering less, Scio High School has raised achievement, they’ve expanded student options, they’ve significantly increased the rigor and relevance of the high school senior year, and really strengthened student access to post-secondary education.
So again, their former principal Gary Tempel said, “If I wanted to offer more, but had no way to do it in my building, where could I go?” What emerged from this question is really a broader vision of the high school senior year and a challenge to the discrete, linear relationship between high school and college. So by leveraging the instructional capacity of its two neighboring community colleges (note: both are roughly 30 miles away), Scio High School transformed a senior-year environment characterized by scarcity into one of abundant opportunities for its students and demonstrates this concept of creating a “bigger here.”
Another example that I think is very powerful is David Douglas High School. Complete opposite from Scio. Very large urban high school.
In the 1990’s, David Douglas High School made a pivotal decision about the high school program: they deliberately placed counselors and a highly structured guidance curriculum at the center of the reform. This move was very radical at the time, and really still is, a departure from the traditional counseling structure that’s on the periphery, crisis oriented, largely reactive. Their former principal John Harrington said, “If we were going to make truly substantive changes to the high school program and were serious about getting kids to college, then the counseling office and early, long-term guidance needed to be the underpinning.”
David Douglas’s guidance program was re-designed from scratch to align with the key features of the high school’s overall reform and especially to place an emphasis on post-secondary connections. The curriculum starts early, with 8th graders at the district’s three feeder middle schools. The 8th grade transition is designed so that when freshman arrive at David Douglas, students have already met individually with their counselor and have a four year plan in place.
Much like the intensive front-end transition activities for 8th graders and freshmen, the 12th grade counseling curriculum includes a variety of transition-oriented individual and group sessions with students and families. Counselors help students develop a personal file, including a resume and recommendation letters, and a personalized “to do” list of transition activities. So before graduation, each senior participates in an individual exit interview with his or her counselor.
The innovation at David Douglas High School has been sustained over the last fifteen years, which is incredibly notable in the area of high school reform. And what they have accomplished is indeed impressive. While implementing higher standards, experiencing tremendous population growth, and facing a poverty rate that hovers around 70%, the high school has dramatically increased its college attendance rate to 89%. The vast majority of students earn a 3.0 grade point average or better. I think the staff at the school really acknowledge it as a total paradigm shift. The current head of their counseling department says she gets asked a lot by counselors at other schools, well, with all the pressure around test scores, how do you justify all the time out of class for guidance or counseling activities. She just turns it right around and says, ‘How do you not?’”
Lee Sherman: So both of the examples you’ve given, Scio and David Douglas, are really interesting and innovative but are very different kinds of innovations. Can you describe to me what they have in common?
Michael Dalton: Sure. Let me take a try at this. These two schools characterize what we call “big here” and “long now” thinkers. And so some of the characteristics of these “big here” thinkers, thinking about things in a different way, is that they broaden their traditional conception of “here.” They include people, institutions, communities across all levels of the education system. There’s a lot of talk about P-20 education systems, and P-20 education reform. These two examples are two good examples of that, of thinking bigger than just their school. They search for new ways of framing the issues, not as problems but as opportunities, not as scarcities but as abundance. And where is the abundance? They pursue a broader, more comprehensive way of addressing the issues, including the community and the other institutions and the other resources.
By contrast, more traditional “small here” thinkers, focus on one box at a time. They think about a single district, a single school, single subject, a single grade level, a single school year. They tend to think small and incremental chunks rather than as a continuous P-20 system.
Similarly the “long now” thinkers extend and lengthen their conception of “now.” They think differently about “now” and make it longer. They conceptualize and implement programs as multi-year processes, not single year processes. As multi-teacher, multi school, multi institution, not one at a time. They orient programs and resources around students’ longitudinal progress through the educational system.
By contrast the “short now” thinkers, the more traditional ways of thinking, define “now” only in the present tense, short term. And frame educational progress as one-year chunks. Or as one principal would say, we finish with them at the middle school and we throw them over the wall to the next level to the high school. So the “big here, long now” thinkers think about them in a longer, more comprehensive way.
Lee Sherman: So what can high schools do with the information in your report? Are you suggesting that other high schools implement these same innovations?
Molly Knott: Well, I think what I would suggest for high schools or really anyone that’s interested in high school innovation is to start by looking at the stories that are included in the report. We do have a wide variety of innovations represented. We have high schools that are engaging other local schools to share students and offer a broader more rigorous academic program. We have teachers engaging other teachers in coordinated or interdisciplinary instruction. We have educational institutions and systems engaging their civic, business, family and other communities in policy, programs and practice. We have districts creating a portfolio of diverse high school options to meet the needs of a diverse student population. High schools improving alignment and coherence with middle schools and post-secondary institutions. We have stories of educators and the elementary and middle school levels using information about student learning at the high school level to go back and inform their teaching practice. And high schools using secondary level programs and opportunities to inspire changes in expectations among parents, teachers and students at the earlier schooling levels.
So really a wide variety of different innovations presented. But to answer the second part of your question. The answer is “no.” We want to emphasize that we are not encouraging specific replication of these innovations. But instead to use these stories as a way of understanding the concepts of the “big here” and the “long now” and the five processes that Michael described so that schools and communities can release their own self-organizing capacity for innovation based on the resources and opportunities available in their local context.
Michael Dalton: And then of course, in order to implement the processes and think about a “bigger here” and longer now” certainly has implications for the leadership that’s in the school and the district and the state and the policy implications for how to support and encourage innovations and the implementation of the processes, so that the work that the schools do is being supported by the policies and leadership, not being in spite of existing barriers and challenges that is where we started this conversation.
Lee Sherman: And if schools want to get a copy of your report, they should be able to do so at the College of Education Web site. Thank you.
Pressure’s On
High-strength Building Products
What is VTC wood? (0:34)
VTC wood is really just densified wood. It’s normal wood that we mechanically compress to increase its density. It’s a fairly simple process although the control that we need to have on the process is somewhat complicated. But basically, all we’re doing is taking a piece of wood, we are compressing it perpendicular to its grain using the right conditions so that we non-destructively increase its density, and the whole idea behind this is simply to increase the strength and stiffness of the wood so that it can be used for structural purposes.
The VTC process can meet some wood product needs (0:50)
I think one of the benefits of this particular process and, for that matter, any process that deals with modifying the properties of wood, is that you can use wood that you cultivate very intensively on a relatively small land mass. It grows quickly. You get large volumes of wood very quickly. It may not have the properties you want, but with a little bit of additional processing, you can modify those properties to achieve the end result.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that we could satisfy our needs for certain wood products using a very small land mass. And perhaps a good species for that is the hybrid poplar because it does grow so quickly, and we have some excellent areas within Oregon where we can cultivate it.
Making VTC wood (1:14)
This is our laboratory device for making the VTC wood, and it probably doesn’t look at all as it would look if it ever becomes a commercial process. Basically what we have is a reaction vessel. It’s a 50-liter volume stainless steel vessel. It’s heated on the outside. We have a lid, which is raised right now, that we’ll close down, and then a supply of steam that we can inject into the vessel. We control the steam pressure, we control the temperature, and while we have the conditions set in the proper place, we use a small hydraulic system to apply a mechanical compression perpendicular to the grain to increase the density of the wood.
Now the whole key to the process is to get the wood conditioned to a temperature and moisture content that is above a glass transition temperature. What that means is that the wood is highly softened, almost like molten plastic, so that when you do apply the mechanical compression, that it will densify. The cell walls will collapse, so without any fracture to the cell. So that’s the key. You don’t want to fracture the cell. You simply want to cause them to collapse.
What happens to wood during the process? (1:00)
Wood is made of cells, and these cells are hollow. If you think about wood, to the naked eye it looks like a solid piece of material, but it’s actually about 50% just void space. So when we do the densification, what we are doing is, simply, the removing of these voids and utilizing then the full strength and stiffness of the cell wall. In addition to that, the cell walls, they are just polymers, you know like plastics that we know of, polyethylene, for example, polypropylene. Those are synthetic polymers. These are natural polymers, but they behave somewhat like those synthetic polymers. We can get them to melt and flow. What also can happen at the high temperatures that we use, is that we can get additional covalent bonding or chemical bonding to occur that will lock those polymers into their new deformed shape, and that will help us maintain that thickness after we finish the process.
New wood products (0:43)
What you’re going to see here is … you’re going to see products that have better performance. So for example, you may now be able to build a floor system that has a much longer span. So instead of having a clear span of 20 feet, perhaps you could have a clear span of 30 feet without having any interior supports, and that would be beneficial, I guess, for architects trying to design larger, more open spaces. You could take advantage of making beams that are simply smaller with a material that is higher in strength and stiffness, so you have a beam that instead of being 12-inches deep might only be 6-inches deep but yet performs in the same way.