Story of the Absent Professor

Background for an on-line art education digital-game based learning experiment

I have told the story of the absent professor several times until I’m beginning to believe it’s the story behind my game, Emeralda: Stamps ‘N Stories. It’s about a teacher who never comes to class and how the students are better off because he planned it.

By Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.

I'm thinking of a story to get Stamps 'N Stories started. I've told this story--a fiction piece--to several people. Today, for example, I was telling it to my wife. She seemed to think it was interesting. So I thought maybe I should write it down. Here is the beginning. You might call the story, The Absent Professor.

You need to know it's source is my autobiography.

It was Spring quarter, and a dozen students were waiting in a room on the second floor of the art building. It was the first day of class. The door opened, and all eyes turned, expecting the teacher to walk in. Instead, two more students came in, quietly, and embarrassedly, because they were late. As one closed the door quietly, the other one looked around, searching for the teacher. Seeing no one who looked to be in charge, then: "Has he started?" he asked quietly to one of the students sitting on a high stool nearby.

"He hasn't shown up yet," she answered, and then she looked at her watch. Another girl heaved a big sigh. "I'm in luck," the late student commented, and sauntered to the back of the room, next to the big etching press. Dropping his pack on the press bed, he eased himself up on a stool and waited like the others.

It was not a big group, as art classes go. It was a senior level printmaking class in this art school. Students who enrolled in this class had already taken Beginning Intaglio Printmaking. If you were a major, you had to have all the advanced classes in each of the four printing processes--intaglio, planographic, stencil and relief. This class was usually small, seldom did the enrollment reach 20. Not many students took a second quarter of intaglio printmaking - unless they were majoring in prints.

The dozen in the room were mostly majors in printmaking. The teacher was not a stranger to them. But as far as they knew he had never been late for the first day of class. There was an old college rule someone said, that a professor could be late to class by up to 15 minutes, and after that time the students were free to leave. But if the teacher were a full professor, the class might be required to wait up to a half hour. Already, this professor's time was up. Maybe he wasn't a full professor, though.

Several of the students must have been thinking about this. "Does anyone know anything about the prof?" a student asked no one in particular. One who was leaning on the wall in the corner raised his hand slightly. "I do. I was his TA last Autumn." The others looked at him expectantly.

He looked around the room. "What?" he asked.

The student who was last to come in, from the back of the room, spoke up. "Well, for one thing, how long do we have to wait for him? Is he a full professor or what? I heard we could leave if the prof is really really late."

The TA shifted on his stool, then he said, "Well, yeah, he's a full professor. Got tenure. Been absent awhile. He was on leave Winter quarter. He teaches this class every spring. I'd be his TA again if they hadn't cut off TA funds." He paused, and then he added, "They almost cut out this class, in fact."

A woman spoke. "What? I have to have this class or I don't graduate. It's the last in the series. It's required." Someone else said, "Me too." There was silence for a few more minutes. Then one student at the side looked at his watch, lifted his bag off the floor by his stool and got up to go. "Well, I'm out'a here. It's been 25 minutes," and he started for the door.

"Wait a sec," the TA said. "I know where he keeps the stuff to hand out on the first day, and I still have his keys to his office and his cabinet. I could get the handouts and explain them, that way we could already be started when he gets here." The others looked at him, mildly surprised he would volunteer to do this.

He returned their looks. The one who had started to leave hesitated by the door. "Really," the TA added. "I know him. If anything, he'll be glad we got started on our own." Then someone else said, "Nothing to lose. Maybe he'll give us A's for the day," and several of them laughed.

This story goes on to tell how the students taught themselves the course in advanced intaglio printmaking, using what they could find in the absent professor's cabinet. The first day went on to actually be fun. They worked together to piece together the handout (a 48-page booklet that fit in a shirt pocket). They worked out the next day's plan to have things ready to go when the professor showed up.

That day they always expected to see the professor walk in, but he never did. One time the door did open and another faculty stuck his head in and looked around. "Where's Ritchie?" he asked. There was a brief silence and several students looked at the TA. The TA said, "He's getting some more copies of our handout made," he said. "Oh," was all the prof at the door said, and closed it again.

Everyone looked at the TA then. "Why'd you lie?" someone asked the TA. He just shrugged. "Well, that guy at the door is always checking up on the prof," he said. "You watch, he'll be back." Then they went back to their work on the book. Someone muttered under their breath, "Professors!"

The second day, the professor still hasn't shown up. The students are becoming a little angry, but when someone says they should all go down to the main office and complain, the ones who need the class to graduate stop them. They believe if the office learns he's absent, they'll probably cancel the class. They don't have substitute teachers in a university like they do in school. No one can simply come in and teach advanced intaglio.

The TA convinces the others they can actually get the material on their own. Teach themselves, in other words, by using a team system the professor devised to run the printing shop and following the schedule the professor had planned for them. This teacher actually had put most of the material on videotapes and he provided a bibliography of books on the techniques of intaglio. He also had a network off campus with printmaking experts they could talk to.

Thus the pattern is set and the adventure in self-teaching ensues. The TA collects the prof's mail for him and takes it to his office and whenever anything comes up that needs the professor's attention, the would 'a been TA takes care of it well enough that suspicions are never raised much. The snoopy professor, the one who appeared at the door the first day, is one who seems to delight in the fact the professor is absent whenever he drops in, yet impressed that he always finds the studio a beehive of activity. No one would guess that the students were doing everything on their own in the absence of the professor.

This is partly because the absent professor's cabinet is a treasury of what the teacher has to offer. Not only the course' handout, but virtually everything about his teaching career is accessible. His library has been arranged in a database of reading notes. Many of his techniques for printmaking have been videotaped. He also has videotapes of other artists. Not only techniques, but theory too, such as videos, articles and journals he kept--all of them related in one way or another to printmaking.

To add something not dry and technical to this story, there are always two threats. One, that the professor's absence will be discovered and the course aborted (and the students' hopes of graduation lost) and, two, the TA will be reprimanded for lying and also for acting out of line on university memos and stationery.

And, above it all, the mystery: where in the world is the absent professor? The answer is, he's gone to Emeralda.

This is the story I think can be used behind the Stamps 'N Stories game, which  I want to use for a structure for on-line art education.

Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor of Art in Seattle. He taught 19 years at the UW as a professor of art, traditional printmaking and media arts. Resigning at 43 to start his own learning, research and production company, he created Emeralda in 1992, a game strategy he likens to a fantasy region accessible only by computer. He invented rules-of-play and an operating system he wants to be an online interactive game. He’s immersed himself in a virtual promised land in the age of digital reproduction.

He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a thousand or more saved, which you can see listed on the ten "islands" on the Web. An example is www.seanet.com/~ritchie/oszine.html, on the island of O'Studios in the Emeralda Region.

For further information via e-mail: Ritchie@seanet.com, and see the professional Web site at www.seanet.com/~ritchie. The company’s name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha #105, Seattle, WA 98109. Telephone (206) 285-0658. This article’s statistics are: 1615 Words. 7349 Characters. 4 Pages. ios30706 Story of the Absent Professor. ©2003 Bill H Ritchie, Jr.