Take that risk management. I would hang from the tree in the front yard several times a day at the 39th street house to try to stretch my right arm out so I could regain full use. I did.
2. Bud Bence was still Division Chair. With the death of David Smith, Steve Lennox took over the MA program. Russ Gunsalus came to teach youth ministries that fall, and his office was right next to mine. He was in the last office on the northwest corner of the suite. We had known each other from Asbury and had run into each other of all places while I was visiting Kingswood. We had a nice conversation about postmodernism driving around Sussex.
I was in my own little world, but things were happening in IWU. The year I came, IWU opened its Indianapolis Center. Up to that point the LEAP program had been meeting in hotel conference rooms and such. I actually taught a 5 week philosophy class at a hotel in Indy in 1999.
IWU would eventually open 17 satellite campuses in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. These saturated in time and began to decline in enrollment. But we found that they increased online enrollment even more than they attracted onsite students.
Online also began the year I came (1997). I remember starting out with an LMS called Whiteboard. I liked it. I liked it more than Blackboard, which we switched to thereafter.
The Maxwell Building also opened on campus in 1998, but it was the APS Building at that time.
3. I preached my first service in chapel on November 11, 1998, in the PAC in those days. The title was "Anchor Deep," about grounding our faith in the core of what we believe rather than on the issues around the edges. A transgender student came up to me in the cafeteria afterward and said, "You know, when I saw how you were dressed I thought you were just another suit, but I really liked your sermon."
Over the years I would tell many students, "Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again." The rest is icing on the cake. It's a little simplistic, but helps put the basics into perspective.
4. I still have some of the excel files from 98-99. In the fall of 1998, I see I had 62 students in one section of philosophy and 57 students in another. I see familiar names like Susanna Childress, Kris and Cory Pence, and Michelle (Dodrill) Hawk.
The class sizes have come down considerably since then. My sense is that those of us who taught them did not mind so much. Wilbur Williams always taught very large classes. We received a little extra for them. Of course the students didn't benefit from the large sizes, perhaps other than it made it possible to keep the overall cost of education less.
Overloads were also quite common in those days. And of course it costs less to pay a professor or adjunct $2700 for an overload than the some $10,000 it costs to pay a professor within load. I was regularly teaching 6 courses in both the fall and spring.
I also got to teach Greek for the first time in 1998-99. I had taught Greek at Asbury and in England, but I was delighted to get to teach it at Indiana Wesleyan.
5. Those who were around in those days will no doubt remember the striking oneness of spirit in the spring of 1999 when in April the faculty met in the McConn chapel to vote on a gen ed revision. The UNV-180 course was created--"World Changers." I think we ratified the new mission statement: "Indiana Wesleyan University is a Christ-centered academic community committed to changing the world by developing students in character, scholarship, and leadership." In my third year, President Barnes would go around giving people 5 dollars if they could say the statement from memory. I missed my $5 because I said academic institution instead of community.
6. I began adjuncting for Notre Dame in the spring of 1999. Jimmy Dunn put in a good word for me with John Cavadini, who was chair at that time. It was a completely different set of students than IWU. To be honest, I didn't really know what the landmines were, since it wasn't my tradition.
I would do it several times. I even was able to get season tickets for Notre Dame football the next year. It was their Foundations of Christian Tradition course--a third OT, a third NT, and a third early church. I used Stephen Harris' book, Understanding the Bible, as others had. Man, I learned a lot of things I had never heard at Asbury.
A fun anecdote was one day I was talking about the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25. A guy came up to me after class and was confused. In his Bible it said "bridesmaids" instead of virgins. It was clear to me that he did not think of bridesmaids as virgins at all.
7. President Barnes must have hired Nathan Birky about this time. It was a quite clever venture. Like Phoenix, APS (Adult and Professional Studies) mailed students their books for each class. The way that these courses worked was:
- A content expert provided the substance of the course, based on the outcomes of the course.
- An instructional designer put the course into a form that would best facilitate learning.
- A facilitator would teach the course, based on this pre-set form and content.
With a captive audience, the university could make even more money by writing some of the textbooks that the students would then be required to have. And since the books were mailed to them, they always paid full price for the books.
So at some point--I don't remember exactly when--Nathan and I began a conversation about writing a New Testament Survey textbook for the APS audience. At first there was some talk of collaborating, perhaps different professors writing different chapters. But I was the most motivated to write and strongly desired it to be good scholarship in addition to hitting the right level of pedagogy and spirituality.
I believe the conversation had started this early because I remember Melanie questioning a working title, "Heirs of Paul" for the Pastorals. She wanted to make sure I was not going to argue pseudonymity. Since she would leave the next year, we must have been talking about a survey book even in my second year.
[1] Angie and I went to Greece for our honeymoon in August 1998. Angie, Stefanie (6-7), Stacy (5-6), and I lived in the 39th street house. The first semester I drove Stefanie and Stacy every morning to Redeemer Lutheran School in Kokomo. Then I returned to teach morning classes. In the spring they switched to Lakeview.
We added the chocolate lab, "Buddy" on 209 E 39th street. Angie would also spend the spring and summer of 1999 expecting Tom.
[2] I am quite untalented at basketball, but I was quite fast. I was actually playing in the infamous intramural game at Asbury when Chris Bounds broke his ankle. I thank God it wasn't me who messed him up, because it certainly could have been. As Bounds is wont to say, "Not everyone should be allowed on a basketball court."
He is quite good at basketball. One thus can question the ethics of him playing for the NeRPs in the first place (non-recruitable players, an idea of Bob Lyon to elevate the marginalized :-)
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