November 15  2023

Dear Friends,

In the last episode, Donna had just hired me as an adjunct faculty member to teach in the new online competency-based degree program in Organizational Leadership.  Donna regularly held meetings with program faculty first to discuss procedures in teaching the courses, with later meetings also adding information about how many students were in the program, or information about special students.  Unlike some of the faculty, it turned out that Donna and I had the same philosophy about our students.

We weren’t there to show how smart we were, or to see how much power we could hold over students, as some faculty seem to be.  We were there to help students pass their courses.  Donna became sort of a den mother over them, giving guidance and encouragement to each student as needed.  She also had to work with the faculty to ensure they too were student oriented.  On the down side, some weren’t.  Donna went a long way trying to bring those faculty in line with how to treat these students, but had to end up firing a few of them.

It was always, in all my teaching experience, to do my best to work with students, teach them the topics we were in, hold their hands (figuratively) if necessary, treat them all equally for the circumstances they were in.  Teaching students, rather than doing research, was the reason I had become a university professor.  Always fair and encouraging to students, I found it hard to understand how some of the faculty, in the name of “rigor,” made it very difficult for students to pass their courses.

So in Donna’s eyes, I was one of the better teachers.  At some point, I invited her over to my office in the science building to go over some the technical issues relative to our courses.  How to enter certain data in the computers, schedules to follow in these seven-week program semesters, and such as that.  We got along well, of course, and I asked her to lunch over at the Panda.

It didn’t take long before lunch together became a daily thing.  Had supper together over at Lone Star Eatery one evening, and Donna’s adult daughter, Rachael came along.  Much of the conversation was me telling them about life in King Salmon, Alaska, when I lived while age 10.  No TV, no grocery store, only about 100 people, etc.  Leaving the restaurant, I gave Donna a great big hug.  I think that’s what let Rachael know that I was quite interested in her Mom.

As we got to know each other better, it became clear we wanted to stay together.  The big thing we had in common was of course the degree program and our interest in our students.  Our romance and time together had nothing to do with quilting, and that never occurred until after we were married.  Donna left the university to devote full-time to working with our new Handi Quilter longarm machine, spending a solid year at learning, experimenting, and creating until she became an absolute expert.  It was after that she started teaching classes at one of the regional quilt shops.  About a year after that we opened our own small quilt shop, and dedicated ourselves to be the best educators we could be in teaching others how to use their longarms and their Pro-Stitchers.  And that’s still our mission today, helping people, educating people, in their creativity and use of the longarms as well as other types of sewing/quilting related machines.

Chip