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highschool: Mr. Eggen who taught Civics. At the time I thought he was totally nuts. He would toss out totally outrageous political beliefs and we'd debate like crazy with him. We watched Harold & Maude in his class.. not sure why. He delighted in telling us stories about how, in the 70s, kids were falling out of their chairs all the time because they were so stoned. Now that I'm older, I think he made his outrageous statements to make us think about our own belief systems and understand why we believed what we did and challenging us to defend them. It is a skill I'm glad I now have.
college: Dr. Smith, creative writing. He'd been a student at Berkley in '68 and was totally a hippy. In 1986, we were a very conservative generation in comparison and it drove him CRAZY. He was always encouraging us to have sit ins or protests over things like the lack of parking on campus. But, our generation was pretty complacent (I think we didn't believe we could facilitate change no matter what) and we really disgusted him. On top of it, he admired modern poets who wrote pretty disgusting stuff and poems that made powerful urban statements, like Howl by Ginsberg, Sylivia Plath, etc. and wanted us to write that way. My sister-daughter and I sat one night thinking of all the grossest combinations of things we could and I formed them into a poem. He made me read it to the whole class because he loved it and wanted to publish it! I just totally wrote to how he wanted us to write but it wasn't my own style at all! My mom found that collection of writings in my room after that class and asked me if I needed to see a counselor because my writings were so disturbed.. LOL. I explained to her that I was just writing what the prof wanted to get the good grade and not to worry, I was not falling into some deep dark pit of depression! He was bizarre!
Dee
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