1977-1980 Part 2: Teaching at Wayne State

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Mike

I bes a speech teacher. Continue reading →

I had no doubt that the speech department at Wayne State would be much different from the corresponding department at U-M, but I underestimated the degree of difference. Undergraduate students in many disciplines at Wayne State were required to take Speech 100, the introductory public speaking class. So, there was a large number of sections every semester, even in the summer. There were also fewer graduate students than at U-M. Consequently almost every graduate student in speech taught Speech 100. Many taught two or even three sections.

The makeup of the student body was also quite different. Almost no one at U-M commuted; almost everyone at Wayne did. Admission requirements at U-M were pretty high; at Wayne there were special programs for students who could not meet much lower standards. Nobody attended Wayne State in order to prepare for a career in the NBA or NFL but Wayne did have a good fencing team.

Before the first class in September 1977 the department chairman, Edward Pappas¹, held a mandatory briefing for all the first-time speech teachers. The emphasis of his presentation was to warn everyone that it was department’s strict policy NOT to correct grammar or spelling discrepancies‐I am quite certain that he avoided the words “mistake” and “error”. I soon learned that this policy was heavily influenced by one professor, Geneva Smitherman, who had a national reputation as a proponent of Black English as a legitimate dialect of American English.

This made it a little difficult to teach public speaking. One of the few tenets with which everyone concurs is that an effective speaker always adapts to the audience. If most of the target audience does not understand the dialect in which the speech is given, it is difficult to be effective. In Italy, for example, a speech given in Milan in the Neapolitan dialect would be understood by far fewer people than one given in English or German. The dialect is so different from standard Italian that Italians who move to Naples struggle to learn it. Almost no Italian knows two dialects. Public speeches are always in Italian.

In the very first class I always told students how I would calculate the final grades. Everyone was required to give four speeches, which counted for 15 percent each. The midterm exam, which consisted of short-answer questions (not multiple-choice), counted 10 percent. The final exam, also short answers, counted 25 percent. Each class started with a five-question quiz, the last of which was always an obscure trivia question. The quizzes and class participation together counted for 5 percent. I also offered extra credit to students who submitted an essay related to one of the topics covered in class. Only one student ever took advantage of this.

Some students did not notice important aspects of this, and so I emphasized them. Skipping any speech costs a grade and a half, more even than skipping the midterm. Also, the quizzes did not really count at all.

The prospect of tests that were not multiple-choice terrified some students. However, I always handed out a list of concepts and assured them that if they could give an example of each one, they would do well on the tests. I had one student who stumped me. She asked me after the class what I meant by “give an example.” I realized after a few minutes of probing that she really did not understand the concept of example. I did not know what to say. The word “example” to me is granular—I don’t know any way to explain it without using examples.

During my time at Wayne State the required textbook for the Speech 100 class was written by one of the professors, Ray Ross. After three years I had it pretty well memorized. I only mention this because one of my most memorable moments came at the very end of my college teaching career. In this case, the class was Speech 200 (Persuasion), which I preferred over the introductory class. We did not use the Speech 100 book.

In the very last class that I taught, a student named Irma was quite a bit older than most of the others. She had informed me that this was the only class that she was taking that semester. She had expected to get her degree (in education) in the spring, but the university had disallowed credits that she thought she earned when she took Speech 100 the second time. Evidently it never occurred to her that students cannot get credit twice for the same class.

One day there was a thunderstorm. I drove into school as usual. It was annoying to walk through the rain from my parking place to Manoogian, but I had done it in worse weather. A little after I arrived, I got a call from Sue. She said that Irma had called to find out if class had been canceled. She told Sue that she was sure that God had sent the storm to warn us not to have class. She was serious.

Irma did badly on both tests. Her speeches were only OK. I planned to give her a C. However, Irma turned in a paper for extra credit. It took me no more than a minute or two to realize that she had just copied one of the chapters from the Speech 100 textbook, the one book in the Library of Congress that every teacher in the department was almost certainly familiar with.

I thought about changing her grade to an F and contacting the dean’s office about her plagiarism. However, there would certainly be a hearing, and by that time I would be in Connecticut. So, I just gave her a C with no credit for the paper.

Believe it or not, she came to my office as I was packing up my stuff to leave forever to complain about her final grade. I told her that her grade was much closer to a D than a B. She told me that she spent a lot of time on that paper. I said that I knew that she had just copied it from the Speech 100 textbook. She admitted as much, but she insisted that she should be rewarded for her time. Needless to say, she had not learned too much about the techniques of persuasion for an audience of one.

One pair of students in Speech 100 evidently did not realize that the midterms would not be multiple choice. I knew that plenty of college students cheated on tests. I never did, and I was determined to make it extremely difficult to cheat on my tests. The classroom was wide, but shallow. I was sitting about twenty feet from them, and I could clearly see that they were copying off of each other. I did not say anything. When I graded their papers, both of their scores were in the thirties, and the next lowest score was in the sixties. They both dropped the class.

The first assignment in every Speech 100 class was to give a 1-2 minute speech introducing yourself to the class. In the first session after I explained the grading I would tell everyone about this assignment, which they would be expected to do in the second class. I then listed some of the things they might want to include. At the end, I asked for a volunteer to go first.

One time I forgot to recruit the first speaker. I felt bad about this, because people with stage fright might be very anxious that they would be called first. There was nothing that I could do other than ask at the start the second session for a volunteer to give the first speech. One student immediately raised his hand, went to the front of the class, and began his speech. It was something like the following;

Good afternoon. My name is William Robinson. I went to Mumford High School where I was on the track team. I am going to Wayne State University to study pre-law so that I can then go to Law School at Wayne State University to become a lawyer. Then I’m going to be a judge, so I can tell Whitey what to do. Thank you.

William gave all of his speeches, some of which were pretty good. However, he got the lowest grade on the midterm that I had ever seen, and he did not show up for the final exam. I had to give him an F.

On the other hand, one very diligent student had scores on the speeches and the midterms that were good enough that she only needed a low C on the final for an A in the course. She came to my office to tell me that about an opportunity she had to go to Hawaii. In order to take advantage of it, she needed to take the final in my class a few days early. She meekly asked me if that might be possible. I agreed. Just to be safe, the test that I gave her was from a previous year. She got a higher score than anyone who had taken it the first time that I administered it. I gave a different test to her class.

Debaters who took my Speech 100 class found it embarrassingly easy because I outlined what I was looking for in each speech, and I provided a list what to study for the tests. A debater had sniggered when he overheard me say that most of my students were afraid of me. However, after he had been in my class for a few weeks he reported back to me that I was right about that, but he could not understand why they were so intimidated.

A fellow who performed individual events (IE) also took my class. He skipped one of the speeches and never made it up. I gave him a C, and he hated me for it. He also borrowed a novel from me and never returned it.

Most of my amazing stories come from the university’s special programs. Project 350 was an admirable effort to aid students from the Detroit Public Schools who lacked one of the three requirements—test scores, grade point average, or teacher rating. 350 of these applicants were admitted conditionally for the summer semester. They took two or three classes, one of which was Speech 100. I taught these classes all three summers. I found that about 1/3 of the students had no business in college, 1/3 were questionable, and 1/3 were likely to do OK in college.

I tried to follow the department’s policies on correcting spelling and grammar. However, I was dumbfounded by one fellow’s midterm. I found almost every answer incomprehensible. I asked a few of the other grad students to try to make sense of them. No one could. The student did not finish the semester.

I felt sorry for several students. One was quite conscientious. He rode the bus to class on the day that he was assigned to give a speech. He rolled up a large piece of cardboard that he intended to use as a visual aid in the speech, presumably to make it easier to carry on the bus. Before his speech he set it on the teacher’s desk next to where he was standing. It unrolled a little, but I could not see what was on it, and he made no specific reference to it.

The purpose of the College of Lifelong Learning was to make a college education available to people who worked during the day. For the most part these students were older and more reliable. The classes only met once a week, but each session was three hours long! This made it difficult to prepare, especially for the classes in which the students gave speeches.

It was hard on the students, too. Most were tired, and they sometimes lobbied to be let out early. Because I was paid to teach for three hours, I insisted on using the entire period. This was not popular. To me it seemed that many of these students had little or no interest in learning. They wanted a college degree with the least possible effort. I cannot say that I blamed them.

One student, whose name I have forgotten, dressed in sweaters every week, several of them, one on top of another. His speech of introduction informed us that he was majoring in theology. The first graded speech was supposed to be expository, that is, to provide information, not to persuade people. His was a rather wandering disquisition about life in America. At one point he warned everyone that if Ted Kennedy were not elected president, God would visit a pestilence on the country.

One of the students later told me that this guy was a preacher/panhandler who hung around on Warren. One day while driving in to school it occurred to me that Wayne State, a private school, did not offer a degree in theology. He came to the first seven or eight classes, but I never saw him after that.

In one class I tried to explain the difference between correlation and causation. I ask the class if they thought that there was a positive or negative correlation between foot size and basketball ability. Most people in the class insisted that there was no correlation. I looked at the feet of the woman who was most vociferous about the lack of correlation. She was wearing gunboats.

I then asked who in the Detroit area had the biggest feet. Everyone knew that it was Bob Lanier, the Pistons’ star center, who wore size 22. I then asked who had the smallest feet. They were surprised when I started talking about premature babies in hospitals. I thought that this was a pretty good example to show that there was a strong correlation despite the lack of causation, but I don’t know if they understood the point.

The most dramatic moment in my teaching career came when a young man gave what was supposed to be a 5-7 minute expository speech. His subject was Malcolm X. About halfway through he proclaimed “I know I am going overtime, but I need to finish this.” When he finished his eleven-minute tirade he received an ovation from the class. I gave him a D on the speech. It was a dynamic speech, but it was not what I assigned.

The young man did not complain about the grade, and he worked hard on the rest of his speeches and did well on the tests. For his final grade I decided to throw out the Malcolm X speech, and I gave him an A for the class.

In almost every Lifelong Learning class one or more students suggested that the students should grade one another. I quickly snuffed that notion and guaranteed them that they did not want to be graded by other students.

I was also assigned to teach two classes with subject matters other than public speaking. The first was an introduction to argumentation and debate that was scheduled to take place at one of the schools extension sights. It might have been in Livonia. Only three students showed up for the first class, and I received a message shortly thereafter that the class was being canceled.

At Wayne State everyone studying in any field of therapy was required to take a course in group communications in the speech department. I taught one of these classes. Almost everyone in the class was studying to become a therapist. This group included the least skeptical people I have ever met.

One of the groups was scheduled to talk about access for disabled people. This was before the ADA had been passed. They held a preliminary discussion among themselves They then presented to the class their idea, which was to guarantee equal access to all businesses for all people regardless of their disabilities. It was warmly received by the rest of the class, and they could think of no questions for the group.

So I asked them about the cost. They said that in the preliminary discussion they had agreed not to talk about it. I asked them what they would do if the cost was more than the gross national product. They scoffed. I then asked them if they would include blind people, deaf people, and quadriplegics. All yes. Mentally ill? Yes.

Now, I am as liberal as they come, but even I think that this was outrageous. The grocery near our house came to mind. What would the poor owner do if a psychotic quadriplegic Helen Keller became a regular customer?

I honestly don’t know if I was a good teacher or not. I got very little feedback. However, I am quite sure that one of my presentations would have made the Sports Center highlight reel if they had one for speech teachers.

I was demonstrating how one might organize a speech on throwing playing cards² by making three main points, each of which had an example. The first point was how to throw a card up five or six feet and make it boomerang back to you. I did that by flicking the card up at a 45° angle with a lot of spin on it. I caught it when it came back down.

The second point was how to throw for distance. I threw a card as hard as I could. It flew over the students’ heads in a blur and crashed loudly against the back wall.

I then said that with a lot of practice you can throw for both distance and accuracy. I aimed a card toward the trash can in the back right corner. Its trajectory was a lazy spiral that terminated right over the trashcan. The card fluttered right in.I proceeded as if this result was totally what I expected. I calmly explained that you finish the last point, you simply summarize what you had said.

In actual fact, if I had a whole deck of cards, I doubt that I could have gotten any of them to land in that trashcan, which was thirty or forty feet away.

1. Dr. Edward Pappas died in 2018. His obituary is here.

2. A pretty good tutorial on card throwing is available here. I held the card the way that he shows, but I threw it overhand to try to snap the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers all at the same time. I have always had a rag arm, but with practice—and I practiced a lot!—I could throw a card more than thirty yards against a light wind.

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Mike

Living in Detroit was convenient but challenging. Continue reading →

U-M’s speech department knee-capped its debate program for the 1976-77 school year. I finished up my masters degree and applied to George Ziegelmueller at Wayne State as a PhD student. I was accepted. My new career as a graduate assistant started in the fall semester of 1977.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there when we lived there.

When I took the job at Wayne State, Sue was already working at Brothers Specifications in Detroit. It therefore made sense for us to move from our apartment in Plymouth to Detroit. We could get a lot more for less money, and both of our drives would be shorter. We rented a house at 12139 Chelsea, near City Airport (now called Coleman A. Young International Airport) and Chandler Park. We had at least twice as much space as before, and that did not count the full basement with a large wet bar.

At the time of our move I still had my little green Datsun 1200 hatchback. Sue’s Colt had been abandoned after it threw its third rod. She bought a gigantic Plymouth Duster to replace it. We called it the Tank; neither of us had ever owned a full-sized car before. I vividly remember changing one of its tires on an upward sloping exit ramp on the Ford Freeway in an ice storm. I got the card jacked up, but while I was loosening the bolts the jack gave way, and I had to start over. I was in a really rotten mood when I finally arrived home.

Sue and I had no complaints at all about the house on Chelsea. The rent was unbelievably cheap, and the house was well-built and comfortable. Furthermore, we lived there for quite a while without incident. The house to the right in the photo was occupied by a couple named Freddy and Juanita and their holy terror of a son, Fre-Fre, who used to throw rocks at me when I mowed our lawn. We were friendly with everyone in the neighborhood. When we moved in during the summer of 1977, all of the houses on both sides of the street were occupied. By the time that we left in very late 1980 several houses were empty and two or three were boarded up.

The first troubling incident occurred on New Years Eve. Sue and I were watching New Years Rocking Eve or one of the other countdown shows. We heard a fairly loud sound that could only have been a collision between two cars. I went outside and saw that our Plymouth Duster, which, as always, we had parked on the street in front of the house, was now sitting up past the sidewalk into the bushes in Freddy and Juanita’s front lawn. The left front bumper was a little dented, but otherwise it seemed OK.

The boy who lived directly across the street, whose name neither Sue nor I can now remember, told me that he had seen the car that crashed into ours and pointed up the street. I jogged up to where the car had just parked. I memorized the license plate number and the address of the house that the people in the car had entered.

Then we called the police. They came, but they were not much interested in pursuing the matter. They went to the house that I indicated, but the man who claimed to have driven the car said that our car pulled out and struck his car. He was allegedly sober, but the other man was not. Even though I told the police that there was an eyewitness, they said that there was nothing that they could do. Hey, it was New Years. No blood, no foul.

The second incident was at the office that I shared with Pam and Billy Benoit in Manoogian Hall at Wayne State. I was there in the evening because I was scheduled to teach a three-hour speech class in the College of Lifelong Learning. The next morning we all realized that some stuff was missing from the office. We called Wayne State Police. The lady who investigated noticed that the door had been scratched by some kind of tool. Evidently someone forced it open. That was a relief to me. The stuff the Benoits had lost was more valuable than what I lost (I don’t remember the items—a radio, I think). I am notoriously absent-minded, and I feared that I had forgotten to lock the door.

That week all of the doors in the building were outfitted with steel plates that were designed to prevent anyone from tampering with the locks.

Our house in Chelsea was attacked three times. The first time was in 1978 or 1979. While Sue was at work and I was at school, someone broke the glass on our back door and entered the house in broad daylight. They took the television, the Panasonic stereo unit that was also in Bob’s apartment on the Bob Newhart Show, and the AR-15 speakers.

We called the police, but they would not come because the perpetrators were no longer there. They told us to come to the precinct station to fill out a report. Since we did not have insurance, we could not see that that would accomplish anything. We did tell our landlord. He commiserated with us, and he replaced the glass on the door.

The second attack came when I was alone in the house taking a nap. I was awakened by a crash of glass that seemed to come from the back of the house. I kept my aluminum softball bat near the bed for just this eventuality. I walked swifty towards the back door brandishing my bat. The guy must have heard me; when I reached the door, he was running through our back yard toward the alley. I was disappointed. I planned to look him squarely in the eye and then swing at his knees. What if he pulled out a gun? Well I was still bullet-proof at that point.

I called the police and the landlord. The former gave me the same answer as previously. The latter replaced with plexiglass all the windows facing the back yard.

When I told some of the people at Wayne State about this incident, Gerry Cox took me aside and said that he and his 9mm handgun would like to move into our house for a little while. I declined his offer, which was serious.

By the time of the third attack late in 1980 we had replaced the television and the stereo system. This time when I came home I found the entire back door in the basement at the bottom of the steps. The plexiglass had held, but the hinges had not. This time the house was ransacked. Our brand new television and stereo were gone, but, thank goodness, they did not touch our computer and printer. They were both very heavy, and at the time it was pretty much unheard of for anyone to have a computer in the house.

This time the police came. They were especially interested in the fact that the mattress had been removed from the bed. The investigator told us that they were looking for guns.

This attack was a blessing in disguise. At that point we had already decided to go back to Connecticut after Christmas. The burglary gave us fewer things to move, and the insurance money just about covered the cost of moving what remained.

Sue learned about our last problem before I did. She received a call at home from the police. They informed her that someone had stolen the battery from our car, and they had it at the precinct station near Wayne State. She called me at work. I had driven the Duster that day and parked it on the street near Manoogian Hall.

This was, as I recall, my very last day at Wayne State. I persuaded someone to let me use his battery to help jump-start the car. That worked. I then very carefully drove a couple of miles to the precinct headquarters. If the car had stalled, I would have been stranded. There was no battery in it, and I had no means of communication.

I parked and stepped inside. I had to sit around for quite a while before a detective could talk with me. He said that the theft had been witnessed through binoculars by a Wayne State cop positioned on the roof of one of the buildings. She had called the DPD, and they apprehended the thief while he was still carrying the battery. He told me that the perpetrator was also wanted for grand theft auto.

I asked him for the battery. He said that the police needed it as evidence. I insisted that I needed the battery. My car was parked outside, and there was no battery in it. Furthermore, we were leaving town within the week, and we absolutely needed the battery. He still tried to claim that the battery was evidence, but when I pointed out that they had an eyewitness, and they were actually going to prosecute the guy for the auto theft, he relented.

The property officer led me down to the area where all the “evidence” was kept. There were two batteries in the cage. Neither was tagged. He asked me which one was mine, and I pointed at the JC Penney one. If I had pointed at the other one, I am sure that he would have given it to me. I had heard that every year the DPD had a big event in which it sold all of the unclaimed property. There was no way that anyone ever intended to use my battery as evidence.

I had no involvement whatever in the most serious incident. I was home watching Wonder Woman while Sue went to a nearby drug store for something. When she stepped inside the door, a guy with a gun told her to go to the back of the store and sit on the floor. She did so. Eventually, the guy left and the police came. Sue told them that she didn’t know anything, and they let her go.

She was still pretty upset when she arrived back at the house. She said, “I couldn’t believe it. I walked into the drug store right in the middle of a robbery. The guy had a gun!”

I replied with great compassion, “Really? You sound a bit unnerved. You missed a great Wonder Woman. They showed Lynda Carter in a bathing suit.”

There was one other major problem with living in Detroit—the snow. The city plowed the main streets, but it never maintained the streets in our neighborhood. The years that we lived there were characterized by cold and snowy winters. For weeks after a snowfall the streets had two cleared ruts a foot or so wide. Essentially every side street became one-way. Getting from our house to a main road was often a real challenge, especially for my Datsun, which was the absolute worst car in bad weather.

We did not have a problem with rats at our house, but other parts of the city did. The city purchased small steel dumpsters for every residence. The lids were rubber or plastic. Ours was back by the alley. Not long after these dumpsters were in place, somebody discovered that it was fun to put a lit M80 in one and shut the lid. The dumpster survived with no difficulty, but the lid was blown to bits. Pretty soon the rats had easier access to the garbage than ever.

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Mike

Orals and dissertation Continue reading →

By May of 1980 I had enough hours in speech and related subjects to qualify for a PhD. My oral exams and my dissertation remained.

I needed to form a committee. I think that Steve Alderton¹ was assigned as the head of my committee. I doubt that I chose him. I did choose George Ziegelmueller, the Director of Forensics and also my boss, and Ray Ross, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. Other graduate students assured me that Ross was a soft touch.

I was not worried about the orals. I reviewed a few notes for maybe an hour just before the test began. A psych professor had told us that the average performance on oral exams is horrendous because most students get flustered. The best performance he had seen was by a mediocre student who also hosted a program on the university’s radio station. I figured that my 14+ years of debate experience was more valuable than that. I knew that the trick was to admit it quickly when you didn’t know something. Don’t try to invent an answer. That is, maximize the time spent on what you know by minimizing the time spent on what you don’t know.

There was one difficult question that I knew that I had to answer. Steve asked me whether validity or reliability was more important in a statistical study. I mulled over the question for a few seconds and then chose validity. I hedged my bet by saying that reliability was important, but if your study lacked validity, you did not have anything. I am pretty sure that I gave the right answer.

Anyway, the committee only kept me waiting for about five minutes before they told me that I passed.

The topic of my dissertation was communication in groups. I was most interested in the power of arguments. Before I describe what I proposed to do, I need to talk about a group-communication study on which I worked with Steve earlier in the year.

The data for Steve’s study was collected before I became involved. Forty or fifty people were presented with two different problems that were each described in two or three paragraphs. They were asked to choose between two alternatives in both cases. Their responses were recorded.

Then they discussed both problems as a group. My recollection is that there were fewer than ten groups. Each group turned in a recommendation for each problem. The discussions were recorded on tape. Someone transcribed these onto paper.

Steve and I then categorized some of the utterances in the discussions as arguments. The idea was to use statistical tools on the arguments to determine how powerful they were in producing the results.

For some reason Steve was only interested in one of the two problems. We spent a long time reading the transcripts and marking them up. He had somehow established a minimum level of agreement about what constituted an argument, and he claimed that our two evaluations had met this standard.

The final step was to find the correlation between the arguments and the conclusion. The statistical tools required that the items being counted are independent of one another. Well, most people in the social sciences would consider the groups independent of one another. If not, there would be almost no studies of groups. The individuals could also be considered independent, at least when they were filling out their original forms heard from other participants.

Steve, however, wanted to use a method called “conversational analysis” that someone at his Alma Mater, Indiana University, had advocated. In this method the arguments themselves were used to determine the sample size (always designated by the letter n). If you counted the groups, you would probably need at least one hundred of them to have any chance of getting a statistically significant result. Even if you counted individuals instead of groups, the sample size of this experiment was not very large.

However, if you set n based on the count of the arguments, and dozens of arguments could be identified in each discussion, it would be much easier. To me it seemed clear that the people in the groups were not independent of one another. It is even clearer that the arguments should not be considered independent of one another.

Steve had offered to add my name to the paper in which he summarized the findings. When I told him that I did not want him to do this, he asked me why. I told him that I thought that he was calculating his sample size wrong, and this decision made it much easier to get positive results. He responded that quite a few studies that used conversational analysis had already been published.

Believe me; I thought of a lot of sarcastic ways to explain my reluctance to be involved. I did not let any of them past my teeth, but my face may have betrayed how worthless I thought that this approach was. To say Steve was insulted would be a gross understatement.

What did interest me was the problem that he discarded. I don’t remember all of the details, but it involved a student who was challenging his final grade in a class. The grade was based on four tests. The letter grades for the tests, one of which was an F, were provided, as was the final grade assigned by the teacher. In the text it said that the teacher had not erred in his calculations. I think that the four test grades were B, B, C, and F, and the final grade assigned was a D.

In several groups, one enterprising member calculated the final grade the way that one would calculate a GPA: (4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for D, and 0 for F). By this method, the student had four grades with a total of eight points. The group member argued that the student should have received a C because 8 (3+3+2+0) divided by 4 is 2. In every group in which the argument was made, the group’s decision went in favor of the student. When it was not, the decision went the other way.

It was a perfect argument!

Well, like Pope Urban II’s famous speech that launched the first crusade, it was effective, but I would hardly deem it “perfect”. In the first place, the text of the problem explicitly stated that the instructor had not made this kind of a mistake. Furthermore, the 4-3-2-1 method is never used in grading individual tests because the range for an F is too great. What if the F on one test was, for whatever reason, a 0? If the B’s are 85’s and the C is a 75, the average grade is 61.25, a low D.

I thought that it might be interesting to explore why people in the groups capitulated to what seemed to me a poor argument. However, it was Steve’s data, and I did not have the gall to ask him for it to write a competing paper. As it was, he was very irritated with me already.

For the dissertation committee I also needed to recruit someone from outside the department. I planned to ask the professor who taught the psych class that I had aced and who explained about the orals. However, when I finally got around to asking him, I learned that he was on sabbatical. I really had no choice but to ask the psych department to provide a substitute. I sent the assigned professor a copy of my prospectus, but I had never actually talked to him!

For my study I wanted to use the “shift to risk” studies to which I had been introduced by Prof. Cartwright in the psych department at U-M. At that time at least forty papers had been published that used exactly the same set of twelve problems². The original study had concluded that groups made riskier decisions than individuals. Some later studies found that this shift only occurred on nine of the twelve problems. One problem showed negligible change, and in the other two the group decisions were actually more conservative.

In these studies the answers were always given in terms of a probability of success at which the riskier choice would be desirable. That is, people were asked to assign a number between one in ten and and ten in ten that represented the lowest chance for success for which they would recommend the riskier alternative. My hypothesis was (1) that each of the twelve problems had a natural set of arguments; (2) not all people are accustomed to making risk-reward decisions based on Bayesian probabilities; (3) these people can be swayed by arguments that they had not considered.

Steve asked the committee to determine whether this study was (1) important enough for a dissertation, and (2) really about speech communication. The psych professor immediately spoke up. He said that he could not address the second issue. However, he said that mine was a very clever approach to an important topic. Despite the fact that there had been a large number of studies to analyze these shifts, no one had ever proposed this mechanism. I was dumbfounded by this unrequested assistance, and all the committee members were very impressed.

Steve insisted that I add conversational analysis to my methodology in order to bring it under the rubric of speech communication. I agreed to do so, but as I was telling the committee this, I said to myself that I would never spend a minute on this study. It now seemed to me like a potential nightmare that might drag on for years.

I also realized that I really did not want to be a professor of speech communication. I loved debate, and, at least at that time, the only way to coach debate was to be on the speech faculty of a school with a debate program. I probably would need to fight for funding for the program, a task that I would not enjoy. Furthermore, because of my background in math and statistics, I felt certain that I would be asked to sit on every committee that evaluated a statistical study. I had heard about and even participated in a few of these, and I had yet to encounter one with which I would want to be associated. Here are a few examples.

My first postgraduate class at U-M had been an introduction to graduate studies. In it one of the students asserted that he wanted to go to an Arab country to study their television shows to determine how much they widespread and influential American shows were. He wanted someone to finance him to go to Arab countries, watch television for a few months, and take notes. For a PhD!No, he did not speak Arabic. When I asked if they had something like a TV Guide that he could analyze, he said that that would not be sufficient. He said that he needed to see how many camels there were and stuff like that. I am not joking.
At Wayne State I participated in a study in which the experimenter obviously lied about what was happening in other aspects of the experiment. The fact that I figured this out should invalidate his approach. It is absolutely not allowed. If I were on his committee, I would have made him start over with a new design.
I also read Juddi Trent’s dissertation. She found that the speeches in Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign differed significantly in style and content from the speeches in 1968. It was a well-known fact (and one that she acknowledged in the first paragraph of her dissertation) that Nixon wrote the first set, and he employed a team of speech-writers for the second set. Her null hypothesis was that the techniques were the same. She then used statistics to prove that the two sets were not likely to be identical, something she knew for a fact before she started.

Faculty members have three main responsibilities: teaching, publishing, and serving on committees. I had little interest in the subjects I would need to teach and publish, and I would be considered an ogre by all of the graduate students. I decided to do something else with my life.

What I decided to do was to try to help Sue’s fledgling computer software company become more viable. Since Michigan was in the throes of one of its increasingly frequent “auto depressions”, we decided to move back to Connecticut.

1. While writing this I discovered that only a few years later Steve Alderton changed careers entirely. He got a law degree and then became (for almost three decades) an official of the federal government, a world traveler, and an artist! His obituary is here.

2. This is called the “Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire” (CDQ) published by Kogan and Wallach in 1964. Here is an example: “Mr B, who has developed a severe heart ailment, has the choice of changing many of his strongest life habits or undergoing a delicate medical operation which may succeed or prove fatal.” Participants are asked to read the statement and then imagine they are advising the main character. They are then asked to indicate the probability of success (from 1 in 10 to 10 in 10) sufficient for them to choose the risky alternative.

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Mike

1970’s debate tournaments. Continue reading →

In my last undergraduate semester at U-M I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament, and I intended to make the most of it. This post has details about a few debates. If you need a primer on intercollegiate debate in 1966-1970, you can find it here.

I must describe our coaching staff in 1969-70. Bill Colburn was the Director of Forensics, but he no longer worked with the debaters or took trips. The Debate Director was Juddi (pronounced like Judy) Tappan, who was finishing her PhD. We had two excellent graduate assistants, Roger Conner, Mark Arnold’s partner in 1968-69 at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, who had been a very good debater at Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them. Cheryn did not work with us much.

Juddi’s major contribution was to insist that I reserve the last thirty seconds of my 2AR to summarize the case. She was big on style and polish. No one else did this in 1970; time was too precious. So, on the affirmative we always had less time to present and answer arguments than our opponents did.

We received valuable help from an extremely unexpected source. In my senior year Jimmie Trent was a professor in the speech department at Wayne State University. He had been a legendary debate coach at (of all places) Emporia, KS, and was universally credited with introducing the Plan-Advantages form of affirmative case, which by my time had almost completely replaced the traditional Need-Plan format.

Jimmie Trent died in 2013. I found no other photos.

Jimmie had a big impact on my thinking about the negative. I was almost always 1N, which meant that I attacked “the case,” the reasons for adopting the plan. One of my principal weapons was “inherency,” which challenged the affirmative team to prove that the “present system” was incapable of producing an equally desirable result. Jimmie argued that this was an unreasonable standard. In his (and eventually my) way of thinking, both teams must defend an approach. The negative’s approach could, of course, merely allow things to continue unchanged, but it could not keep changing its mind about what that entailed, i.e., “we could just …” I did not immediately change my tactics on the negative, but on the affirmative I always tried to pin down the other team.

On the negative Jimmie recommended that we try the Emory switch when we thought that we could get away with it. Previously I was 1N, and I attacked the case. The 2N attacked the plan, arguing that it would not achieve what the affirmative claimed and that it would cause severe problems. With the Emory switch the roles stayed the same, but my partner became 1N, and I became 2N. We attacked the plan first and then the case.

This had many advantages. More of the plan attacks were “canned,” which is to say that they were the same for many different plans and therefore written out in some detail. Having the extra time to prepare for attacking the case was more valuable than for attacking the plan. 2N got more time when he needed it most‐to rebuild his plan attacks after the affirmative had answered them.

Also, of course, it messed up the opponents’ strategy. Each of them was doing an unfamiliar task, and our approach also gave the 1AR only five minutes to rebuild their case and to deal with the defenses of the plan attacks. Finally, it let me give our last speech, and I was a little better at selling.

There is an obvious counter to the switch. The affirmative team can delay presenting its plan until the 2AC. One of Dartmouth’s teams tried this against us. However, the 1AC made no sense without the plan, and two or three minutes were still available when he finished. I had no trouble adapting. I just reverted to my old role as 1N, and the 2A, who had to present the plan in his constructive for the first time ever, had too little time to defend the case well.

A better approach, which we would have used if anyone had tried the switch against us, would be for the 2AC to present additional advantages of the plan after (or before) dealing with the plan attacks. Then, the 2AR can then drop some advantages and defend others.

We only lost one round all year when we switched. We met a pretty good team from Loyola of Baltimore at a tournament in Miami. They did not even try to defend their case in rebuttals. They only argued that our approach was unethical because it emphasized the “spread,” i.e., taking advantage of time limitations to present more arguments than the opponents could possibly answer. We had a very good set of answers to these arguments, but the judge voted against us on the ethics issue. The lesson we learned was to avoid the switch if the judge seemed too conservative. Loyola evidently knew the judge better than we did.

Our first trip in January of 1970 was the “East Coast Swing,” where we used the switch in every round except the one in which Dartmouth delayed presenting the plan. My partner, Bill Davey, and I were allowed to fly to Boston to participate in the tournaments at Boston College and Harvard. At BC we went 5-3 and narrowly missed qualifying for the elimination rounds. Because we did not have a long drive ahead of us, we decided to watch the octafinals. I watched Brown on the affirmative v. Southern Cal. Bill watched a different debate. One of the Brown debaters was visibly startled when he saw me enter the classroom and sit down. He nudged his partner and whispered something to him.

A few minutes later I found out why. Brown’s first affirmative constructive speech was word-for-word the same as ours! Evidently they had tape-recorded one of our rounds at some previous tournament and transcribed it. I have never heard of anyone—in the previous seven and a half years of debating or the subsequent six and a half years that I coached—doing anything like this. In disgust I stopped taking notes a few minutes into the speech.

Brown’s was a bad strategy. USC, which ran a similar case when they were on the affirmative, annihilated them. I was totally embarrassed that a team incompetently running our exact case qualified for the elims at this tournament, and we did not. I told Bill about it, but no one else.

In contrast, Harvard, which was the biggest tournament of the year, with over 100 teams in attendance, was our best tournament ever. In the prelims we were 7-1, losing only to Canisius on our affirmative. By the way we had an astoundingly good record on our negative all year. If we got to face Canisius in the elimination rounds, we would be “locked in” on our negative.

In the octafinals we faced an overmatched team from Boston College. We lost the coin flip (as usual; we only won one coin flip all year), and so we had to debate affirmative. It didn’t matter. All three judges voted for us.

The quarterfinal match against Oberlin was somewhat controversial. The Oberlin pair was Mark Arnold, whom I knew from our days in Kansas City, and freshman Paul Zarefsky, whose brother had been a champion debater at Northwestern, and he now coached there. We were affirmative again. The timekeeper was a debater on Canisius’s second team. We barely knew him, but he was friendly with our opponents.

The first two speeches delivered by Davey and Zarefsky were fairly routine. I was somewhere in the middle of my constructive when someone, I think it was Arnold, yelled out “Time.” The timekeeper was busy taking notes and had neglected to time my speech. He put up the 5 card, followed quickly by the 4. Arnold was sure that he gave me extra time. I thought that he cost me at least a little, and he certainly flustered me a little when 5 turned into 4 so fast.

Anyway, we won three of the five ballots. Oberlin had had a very good first semester, they had done well at BC, and Arnold was considered one of the best debaters in the country. He later coached at Harvard.

Dallas Perkins had a lot more hair and a few less pounds in 1970.

Our opponent in the semifinals was Georgetown, a perennial national powerhouse, represented by Dallas Perkins (who also later coached at Harvard) and Howard Beales. Once again we lost the coin flip. I thought that we debated pretty well, but all five judges, including Laurence Tribe, voted for Georgetown. I will always think that if we had won that coin flip, we would have won the tournament, but who knows?

Still, it was our best tournament ever, and I was the #5 speaker out of the 200+ who attended. Dartmouth also had a tournament, but we did not attend.

When I called Bill Colburn to pick us up at Metro Airport, I told him that we had dropped eight ballots at Harvard. He just said “Really?”, and I replied, “Yes, but the good news is that seven of them were in the quarters and semifinals.”

Hank Stram & the Chiefs matriculated up and down the field.

I remember riding home from a bitterly cold tournament on January 11. I was sitting shotgun and therefore had control of the radio. I found a CBS station, and we listened to the surprisingly calm voices of Bob Reynolds and Tom Hedrick. It was near the end of Super Bowl IV, and the Chiefs seemed to be running out the clock. The Vikings were thirteen-point favoritess, and so we all assumed that the Chiefs had just given up. Au contraire, mon frère! KC had pounded Minnesota 23-7. I knew that my dad and all my friends in KC would be ecstatic.

Juddi made all of the decisions about pairing and scheduling. Two of her decisions puzzled me. The first was to have me debate with sophomore Mike Hartmann at the most important tournament in the district at Northwestern. Mike was a really good debater, and Juddi must have wanted to give him some incentive for the next year. That’s fine, but we had never debated together, and he did not know our case. I would not have minded too much if it was another tournament, but Northwestern was perhaps the most important tournament of the year.

Mike and I won all of our negative rounds and two of the four affirmatives. One of the losses was to a good team. The other was to the worst team in the tournament from Northeastern Illinois University, which I had never heard of. Their record in the tournament was 1-7. The judge, whom I had never before seen, gave both Mike and me higher speaker points than either of the NEIU debaters (although considerably less than we received in any other round). However, he gave NEIU their only victory of the tournament. The text on the ballot was short and bitter: “I just can’t vote for this case.”

Sixteen teams qualified for the elims. We were seventeenth. You know what they say about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I think that 1970 was also the year that Bill and I flew to the tournament at the University of Miami. I remember that it was 70° warmer when we exited the plane than when we boarde. I also remember that right in the center of the campus was a huge swimming pool. The diving team was practicing when we were there. The centerpiece of the Michigan campus is the graduate library.

It was not a great tournament. My recollection is that the elimination rounds started at the quarterfinals, and we missed on speaker points. This was very annoying for a number of reasons. The first was that we lost a negative round on ethics, the only time that we lost when we switched and one of only a handful of negative losses all year.

The other annoying thing occurred against a weak team. The judge was a Miami debater who had graduated the year before. He came up to me before the round and told me that he knew the debate was a mismatch. He demonstrated a little sideways wave with his hand as he said something like “If I do this, cut it short. There’s no reason to prolong the agony.” I ended up cutting at least a minute or two off of my constructive, and I jettisoned the thirty-second summary in my rebuttal. We did win, but he gave us speaker points that were well below our average.

The third annoyance was that we had wasted time and money on this second-rate tournament. I don’t remember any more details about where we went and how we did.

Districts:I need to mention that Juddi and Jimmie tried for a while to keep their torrid relationship secret, but nearly everyone surely knew about it. At some point during the year they got married, and Jimmie tendered his resignation at Wayne State to become chairman of the speech department at Miami of Ohio. Juddi decided that she might be a political liability for us. She decided not to go to districts.

We had to supply two judges. Roger and Cheryn were chosen. This was fine with us, but it did not erase the last few months.

1970 was the first year that I seriously prepared for the district tournament. Roger worked with us quite a bit. We prepared by sprucing up our affirmative case to appeal to a more conservative audience and by working on how our arguments would work without the switch. We were too afraid of political consequences to pull the switch at districts. The only round that we had lost with the switch we had lost on ethics. We could certainly expect arguments like those in every round. Some judges might vote against us on general principles even if the negative did not make the arguments.

Some words of explanation about the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT are in order. The district was composed of four states‐Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The national committee also invited seven additional pairs that did not qualify.

Northwestern was always a national power. Its coach, David Zarefsky, left his top team, Gunderson and Strange, at home because he was confident that they would receive an invitation to the NDT, and he was right. Northwestern sent its second team, Sitzma and Welch, to the district tournament. This was a break for us. We had beaten Sitzma and Welch all three times that we had met them during the year.

The district committee evaluated all the twenty-four teams in attendance. Six were rated A, six B, six C, and six D. Everyone debated two from each group.

Maybe we were not mentally in gear. Roger had tried to teach us to yodel, which he claimed was the best way to warm up. At any rate we lost the first round on our affirmative to a C team from Indiana State. Both Bill and I were just off. I thought that we had won, but I can understand why a judge could vote against us.

Then we met two pretty good teams—Hample and Sproule from Ohio State on our affirmative and Sitzma and Welch on our negative. We mopped the floor with both of them, and they knew it. It turned out that they were our two A teams. This kind of surprised me.

The next three rounds seemed uneventful. The seventh round was on Saturday evening. We faced an obnoxious guy named Greg Rigo from Ohio University on our negative. I don’t remember his partner’s name. They were a mediocre team with a very standard case. We debated fairly well and pretty much pounded them.

Two of the judges had familiar faces. The third one, who voted against us, was someone whom I had never seen. He came from one of the very weak schools. This sometimes happens, as it did to Mike and me at Northwestern.

One of the familiar judges voted for us and wrote that it was not close. The other judge, George Ziegelmueller, was the long-time Director of Forensics at Wayne State in Detroit. In my four years at U-M he had NEVER voted for any of our teams. His ballot in this debate was incomprehensible.

When I started debating in 1966, Wayne State was a highly ranked national power. The team of Kathy McDonald and Don Ritzenheim had narrowly lost in the final round of the NDT two years in a row. By 1970 they were just another mid-level team. I am not sure what happened to them, but it must have frustrated George.

Needless to say the Jimmie-Juddi business probably did not sit well with George. A faculty member at his school, who had probably never helped coach any of his debaters, was giving valuable tactical advice to a rival school! This just was not done.

I worked for George for three and a half years in the late seventies. I never brought this up, and neither did he. In those years I confirmed my impression that George was not considered a good judge. His note-taking was weak, and he tended to get fixated on one aspect of the debate, even if the debaters did not emphasize it.

The eighth and final round was on Sunday morning. Unbeknownst to us Juddi had shown up for the coaches’ cocktail party on Saturday night. I am sure that she pumped everyone with whom she was on speaking terms for information. Outside the room of our last debate she showed up with a huge grin on her face. She told us that we were doing very well, but we shouldn’t be too overconfident We had also heard a lot of buzz in the hallways that we had blasted everyone on our schedule.

At any rate in the last round we were on the affirmative against a so-so team from Illinois State. Both Bill and I were superb. We obliterated them. I had absolutely no doubt that we picked up all three ballots. In fact, one of the judges, David Angell from Albion College awarded me a perfect score of 30 and wrote on the ballot that it was the best performance that he had ever seen.

All the debaters, coaches, and hangers-on assembled for the announcement of the five qualifying pairs. Juddi was all excited when we told her that the last debate was by far our best.

Next came the assembly. Five teams would qualify for NDT. It took them at least half an hour to process the ballots. The district chairman finally came out and began, “There was one team that was 6-2 but …”

I swear the following is true: I screamed out “Oh no!” and buried my head in my arms on the desk in front of me. Everyone looked at me as he continued, “unfortunately had too few ballots to qualify. So, let’s have a hand for the University of Michigan, 6-2 with fourteen ballots.”

We lost ten ballots, five of them on the negative. We had only lost one negative ballot in the second semester, and that was on ethics. We lost that first affirmative debate 3-0. OK, I can live with that. We beat both of our A teams and our B teams. We kept both Ohio State and Northwestern from qualifying. The critical round, though, was clearly the seventh. There was no way that we lost that debate. However, we also somehow lost three other ballots on our negative. This just never happened that year.

In retrospect I think that we should have somehow made it clear to the other schools that we would definitely not be using the Emory switch at districts. The other 23 teams that were going to districts probably wasted many hours trying to figure out how to adapt to our tactic. This could have irritated a lot of people.

We submitted an application for a post-bid, but I knew we wouldn’t get it. The district recommended the two Northwestern teams and Ohio State in a tie for first. They recommended us, but as their fourth choice. They thought we were only the ninth best team in the district! NDT only gave seven post-district bids altogether. The other three from our district all got bids. Once again we got the shaft.

Our performance at Harvard earned us an invitation to the Tournament of Champions. Juddi encouraged us to go, but I could see no point to it.

Thus ended my debate career. Was I bitter? Yes. I only had one goal, and I would never get another chance to achieve it.

Bill Davey made it to the quarterfinals of NDT in 1971. He is a professor at the University of Illinois. His very impressive biography page is here.

In 1972 Mike Hartmann also made it to the quarterfinals of NDT. He is a lawyer. His webpage at the firm of Miller Canfield is here.

1970 October-November Basic Training Part 2: Army Lingo

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Mike

Army to English phrase book. Continue reading →

The 3 s’s: Every trainee is expected to start every day with a shit, a shower, and a shave.

AIT: Advanced Individual Training conducted immediately after Basic. Each MOS had its own type of AIT. Mine was at Fort Gordon, GA. Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

ASSUME: The favorite joke of Army instructors was that if you assume, you make an Ass out of U and Me.

AWOL: Absent without leave. An AWOL turned into a desertion after, as I recall, thirty days.

Basic: Short for Basic Training, which in the Army was almost never called Boot Camp.

Charlie or Mr. Charles: The Viet Cong. You never see the one who gets you.

Class A’s: The dress uniform. In summer it was khaki slacks and short-sleeve shirt, both starched and pressed. Winter was a dark green suit-coat with a tan shirt and a black tie. The hat was like a tent.

DILLIGAFF: Do I look like I give a flying fuck?

Duck: Member of the U.S. Navy.

EOD: Explosive ordnance disposal. The guys in these units searched for and disabled bombs and munitions.

ETS: Expiration of Term of Service: the date of one’s exit from the military. It can also be used as a verb, as in “I am ETSing next Thursday.” Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

Fatigues: The olive drab denim work uniform. Pants were bloused above the boots. The hat was also OD. It was shaped like a baseball cap.

FUBAR or FUBB: Fucked up beyond all recognition or Fucked up beyond belief. Common conditions in the Army.

Hitch: The term of one’s commitment to stay in the military.

Jarhead: A member of the Marine Corps.

Jody: The guy who was hitting on everyone’s girlfriend at home and would inevitably seduce all of them.

Gig line:The edge of the left side of the shirt, the belt and the fly should always form one vertical line.

Guardmount: An inspection of equipment and uniforms before a duty shift.

Gung-ho: An adjective that describes someone who is unduly enthusiastic about things military.

Hospital corners: A way of making one’s bed so that the blanket is tucked in with folds at the feet of 45° angles and absolutely no bumps or wrinkles.

KP: Kitchen police. Some people in training are assigned to help the cooks, sometimes for punishment. I did this in both Basic and AIT. It is not the worst duty, but it is also no fun.

Latrine: Any place in which one is allowed to eject bodily waste. It could be a whole in the ground, a beautiful lounge, or anything in between. Bathrooms do not exist.

Lifer: Someone who intends to make a career out of the army. In 1970-71 this was a very pejorative term.

Light ’em up if you got ’em: The phrase used to announce a break in the field.

MOS: Military Occupational Specialty. Everyone gets assigned a particular role for training purposes. In the field you might get assigned to do something else. Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

NCO: Non-commissioned officers are basically sergeants. Corporals may possibly qualify. SP4, SP5, and SP6 definitely do not.

OD: Olive drab was the color of fatigue pants and shirts as well as the field jackets. The summer dress uniforms were khaki. The winter dress shirts were khaki with dark green coats. We had no camouflage. I don’t know why the services shifted to all-camouflage uniforms.

Personal problem: Another favorite joke. If you complain about something to an NCO or officer, the reply is often, “That sounds like a personal problem. You should take to the chaplain.”

PMO: Provost Marshall’s Office. On Sandia Base this was police headquarters.

Reup: To enlist for another hitch.

RIF: The Reduction-in-Force policy (that almost no one has heard of) instituted in the early seventies that, among other things, chopped six months off of the active duty requirement for draftees. Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

Rock and roll: The setting on an M16 that allowed it to fire a burst of bullets when the trigger was pressed and held.

Salad: Slang for the oak leaf clusters worn by majors and lieutenant colonels on their epaulets.

SBNM: Sandia Base, New Mexico in Albuquerque.

SEAD: Seneca Army Depot, Romulus, NY.

Shit: In addition to usual meanings “shit” can basically refer to any aspect of a person, including property, or to the totality of the person. “Getting shit together” means preparing for an eventuality. E.g., ‘You better get your shit together for the captain’s inspection, or your ass is grass, and I’m the lawnmower.”

To “jump in someone’s shit” means to reprove someone verbally and vehemently.

Short: Having few days left in one’s hitch in the military.

Slick-sleeve: A trainee in Basic is a private with a designation of E1. He has no sleeves on his shirt. If he gets promoted, he gets one stripe and his salary goes up to the E2 level.

Slopes/gooks: Pejorative designations of Asians.

Spec# SP4, SP5, and SP6 are ranks that allow the Army to pay some people higher salaries without becoming NCO’s. They are officially pronounced Specialist 4th Class, Specialist 5th Class, and Specialist 6th Class, but everyone calls them Spec 4, Spec 5, and Spec 6.

An SP5 and a “buck” sergeant are both in pay grade E5, but an SP5 cannot jump in your shit if your boots aren’t polished unless he/she is your direct boss.

Strack: Describes a person who always strives to have his shit together. This could be a compliment, but it usually is not.

Weapon v. gun: The purpose of a weapon is to inflict severe bodily harm on an enemy. The purpose of the gun is, among other things, to inflict severe bodily pleasure on a friend.

Zoomer: Member of the Air Force.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Monthly Archives: July 2020

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

1970 October-November Basic Training Part 2: Army Lingo