Faculty Profile
Dr. Kevin Garrsion
If you've ever read or watched Jurassic Park , you know what happens when you put life in a cage. The T-Rex escapes. People die. The children end up puking. Of course, the movie ends on a happy note: the most important characters escape with a grand musical score playing in the background. The camera pans to a flock of pelicans flying across a setting sun. Majestic.
Of course, the book ends with the raptors escaping from the island.
Putting my own life into a few hundred words feels about the same way as locking a dinosaur into a cage. I didn't really create my life. It just happened with very little rhyme or reason.
I didn't intend to be an English teacher or study technical communication. In fact, I told my high school counselor, who incidentally was also my high school English teacher, that I would never teach English. So I decided to become a wildlife manager. That Davy Crockett-inspired dream lasted one semester – long enough for me to ask why animals needed to be managed. So I decided to become a computer programmer. I was the best player that the Nintendo 64 ever saw (or so I fancied), and I figured I could spend my life programming video games. Then I struggled all semester just to barely get a “79.5” in my first programming class. So I decided to become a psychologist. After all, counseling people and telling them what to do with their lives sounded like a lot of fun. And then one day, my psychology professor told me that there were no hard and fast rules in psychology – the best counselors, apparently, only take several theories, merge them into their own theory, and find something that works. So if you like Freud, you tell people that they needed to explore their subconscious mind. If you like Stanley Milgram, you get to listen to people scream in pain as participants administered shocks. So I decided to become a philosopher. Then I found out that most philosophers struggled to find jobs. So I decided I wanted to study English.
Personally, I can't give anybody a really good reason why I study English or how I ended up in this position, except this. Children are really good at asking “why” at the most inopportune moments, so schools tend to make everyone to be silent, digest the right answer, and spit it all back up. But communication isn't like that. We all want to know “why,” and reading/writing/listening/speaking gives us a chance at an answer. I want to know why everything: why people exist, why lip reading is nearly impossible to do, why America became so powerful, why people are addicted to iPhones and Blackberries, why churches are so bad at interpreting the Bible, why the Cowboy's haven't won a Super Bowl since 1995, why my two sisters and I have a hearing impairment, why eating trans fats are bad for the body, why technology is growing faster than users can keep up, why the trout in Lake Eagle Nest in New Mexico have progressively gotten smaller. And what is fun is that I never find good enough answers; usually, I only find more questions, and that prompts me to write my own answers. And I spent 10 years in higher education trying to find answers, and decided to do it professionally. After all, what other job gives someone a chance to read and write for a living?
Pedagogically, I also struggle to give my students a really good reason why they should study composition, rhetoric, literature, poetry, technical writing, business writing, or professional writing. No English teacher will have any problems telling you what they think is the best book ever written. And nine times out of ten, what they like is not what you will like. But that is the fun of reading and why I like teaching it. You have to wade through thousands of pages to finally find one person who actually speaks to you. And then, once you understand them, you can always go back and re-read them. Again and again. And then once you re-read them, you'll find yourself with questions that you want to answer. So you write. In my classes, I often have students imagine what life would be like without language. There would be no past or future. No idea of places outside of your own context. No ideals. No dreams. No hypotheticals. No imagination or hopes. No fictional characters. No God. I think that is why I study language and writing; because, after all, it was God who spoke and there was light. Because even though I can't really prove it, I think that maybe language is what opens up the cage and frees life.
