By's Musings

Teaching and Learning

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Teamwork is Critical: Learning with and from Others

One of the blessings of my current physical situation  has been the opportunity to nventory anbooks on the d catalogue more than forty years of  collected files and academy. While working full-time I never had  the time to review all the files and books that I was collecting. These files  and books were just piling up in my university offices and in my home offices  and the storage areas of our homes. I had some idea of fwhat I possessed, but I  didn’t know for sure. This led to duplication of files and  books. As I have discovered  these duplicates, I have given them to individuals who can ake good use of  them.

However, the process of inventorying and cataloguing  has also created a problem. In Chinese philosophy, this dichotomy, where  opposite but complementary items form a complete whole, is known as yin and yang. The same situation is  viewed by some people as a problem and by others as an opportunity. A modern western  idiom attempting to express this is the question, “Do you see the glass as  half-full, or half-empty?” I must admit that as I have inventoried and  catalogued my collection of files and books, I have experienced both feelings.  At times I am elated at the long hidden jewels of ideas and thoughts that I am  finding in my files and books. As I consider these ideas I am easily distracted  and start trying to track down more about the given topic. I find myself  creating more files to add to my already abundant collection. When I try to  return to where I was when I was distracted, I can’t find my place or I can’t get back into the flow of things. I am pleased that I have been reintroduced to  many ideas that I had abandoned. However, I am frustrated that I can’t excavate  around these ideas more fully. I am almost convinced that a life-time of  thinking will take a second lifetime to explicate it.

One of the dangers when an academic picks up a book or  an article is the temptation to scan it. Whenever I start to scan a book or an  article, I find it almost impossible to put it down. It happened again and  again as I went through my books and files. At one point, I came across a  somewhat dated book with the intriguing title of Rural Development and Higher  Education: the Linking of Community and Method, published by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. While  I have been laid up, I have been reading and thinking about the development of American Higher Education. Recently, I was reading about the effect that the Morrill Acts and the establishment of Land Grant Colleges had on the overall development of rural America. My curiosity got the better of me, and I started  scanning the Kellogg book. I was trapped. Soon I found myself reading the last  chapter which was a summary of the nine Kellogg funded projects that were outlined in the book. The first section of this chapter was entitled, “Learning from others.” It began with a great story about “a city fellow who bought a thriving farm that had a new brood of baby chicks. A week later all the chicks were dead.” At this point the city fellow went to the neighboring farmer to find out what had happened and if there was anything he could do to prevent  this from happening again when he bought some new chicks. The neighbor in all  innocence asked the city fellow, “What did you feed them?” The city fellow was shocked and he stammered, “Feed them. I thought the old hen nursed them.”

The conclusion of this story is obvious. If you don’t  know what you’re doing, it can be very dangerous to make faulty assumptions. In  the setting of this book, the authors continued by suggesting that university faculty can’t hope to deal successfully with rural development if they presuppose full knowledge of the local needs, wants, and conditions of any given  location and any given group of people. This led to the standard operating procedure within all Kellogg funded  projects of forming a citizens’ advisory committee at the very beginning of the  project. Everyone was constantly reminded that “Teamwork is critical.”

In higher education this is not only true when we are  working on projects outside the institution, such as rural, urban, or  industrial development. It is also true when we are working on a project inside  the institution with our own students. How easy is it to assume we know what people  need and what they already know? We can save a lot of time by just plowing in  and developing assistance programs for them. Why should we ask students what they need? How absurd, they are only students! How many colleges and universities have set up student assistance  programs to help students and find these programs don’t address the needs of  their students?

Today almost everyone gives lip service to the adage  that cooperation is the best policy. People know that generally you’ll get  better results if you involve other people, seek their advice and help, early  in a process. People are more willing to help and accept change if they have  ownership in the process.

If teamwork was the most important lesson that the  Kellogg Foundation learned from these projects, there was one more lesson that  was a close second. This second lesson was that every project needs a project  director who possesses the appearance of neutrality, “the statesmanship of a  Disraeli, the leadership abilities of a wagon master, the selflessness of a  missionary, and the energies of a long-distance runner.” These are great  lessons for any organization to learn and master.

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Relief Through Reading Part I

I am sorry, Readers, but I am going to subject you to a long, round about introduction to a posting about reading. It was inspired by two recent posts by bloggers that I have come to appreciated immensely. I can’t recommend their blogs highly enough. They are great people who have great stories to tell and tell them wonderfully.  The postings that inspired this long post are  Finding Strength to Stand Again  http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/hitting-my-head-on-glass-ceilings/

and Bended Spoon

http://bendedspoon.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/we-think-too-small-like-the-frog-at-the-bottom-of-the-well-he-thinks-the-sky-is-only-as-big-as-the-top-of-the-well-if-he-surfaced-he-would-have-an-entirely-different-view/

How many of you remember the old tv commercial that ran regularly during  major league baseball games? There would be a scene of a famous relief pitcher warming up, supposedly getting ready to go into the game. An off-screen announcer would say, “How do you spell Relief?” The camera would close in on the pitcher and he would say, “I spell it “R O L A I D S!”

How do you spell Relief? My wife spells it R E A D I N G !

I have been a voracious reader since I was a young kid. I recognize that there are ar least three types of reading. They are recreational, informational and work related reading. Recreational reading Is the act of reading to relax or escape. Informational reading is the act of reading to gain information or knowledge about a topic of interest not directly related to your work. Work related reading is the act of reading of material directly related to your work.

My wife and I are both aged-challenged. (We’re both eligible for Medicare this year. Please don’t tell her, I’ve told you how old she is.) We’ve been married for over 40 years and have known each other for almost 60 years. For all of those years, we’ve been readers, Although I must admit our reading habits are very different. My wife has always been a recreational and informational reader. She has always had two or three books in which she deeply engaged. Much of her recreational reading has included authors like Janette Oke, Terri Blackstock, Ted Dekker, or Frank Peretti. She also enjoys biographies and autobiographies. Her tastes in informational reading have centered on inspiration books like “Fear Not Tomorrow, God is Already There” by Ruth Graham or “Purpose Drive Life” by Rick Warren.

I have always been a voracious reader, but generally, “it had to have a purpose.” Since I have been in higher education all of my adult life, I have always owned a large collection of books. While I was in high school, my parents bought me the entire set of “Great Books of the Western World.” I set still have those classics, along with all the required readings from my college literature courses. I never sold a college text book or required reading after a course was over.  Most of my other books are work related. Although I have some informational books that you would find in the “How –to” or Religious sections of Barnes and Noble. The How to Books were bought to help me with my latest DIY project. The religious books were to help me with a theme for the latest adult Sunday School lesson or a sermon that I was preparing. To borrow a phrase from Rick Warren and use it out of his context, my reading has almost always been  “purpose driven.”

For years, my wife would chide me with the comment, “Why don’t you read something for fun?” I would reply, “I don’t have time for that.” Her response was “Try it, you may find that you like it.” My response back to her was, “The time that I want to dedicate to fun is better spent antiquing, exercising or doing DIY projects  like remodeling rooms, insulating and putting vinyl siding on our old house, adding a deck, or enclosing our back porch.

Occasionally, I would watch sporting events like basketball, baseball or automotive races on television. My wife and I also both like to watch new segments of “This Old House” or “Antiques Road Show.” We would take this last passion one step further by trying to find unexplored antique shops and digging through them for undiscovered treasures. Those things were fun. Fortunately for me, my wife also suffered from the DIY and antiquing viruses. We spent many weekends together trying to satisfy the cravings that those bugs would cause. If we were not at home working on the latest DIY project, we would be on a road trip to find one more of those unexplored antique shops.

On a Saturday when we didn’t have a pressing DIY project hanging over our heads we would get up early, and tell our college-age daughters that we were going for a ride. The girls would glance at each other, and one would say, “We’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.” Many times they were right. After finding an unexplored antique shop and digging through it until closing time, we would find a nice restaurant and a cute inn or motel and spend the night.

On each of these trips, I did most of the driving and my wife would pass the time in the car reading one more fascinating chapter of her latest engrossing novel or biography. Every once in awhile she would stop reading and say to me, “You really should read this book, you would really enjoy it.” I would pause for a moment then in all seriousness say, “I can’t right now, I’m driving.” My wife would sigh and say, ”I didn’t mean right at this moment. What about this coming week?” I would respond by saying “I have some work that must get done this coming week and all my reading will have to center on that job.”  She would sign again and go back to her reading. I guess she almost figured out that I was a lost cause, until she came up with a brilliant idea. She went to the local library and checked out some audio books, so on our next road trip, we both listened to someone read those books  to us. Using this technique, we read Mitch Album’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” and several John Gresham novels, including “The Client” and “The Rain Maker” plus a number of cat mysteries. I must admit the audio books did help to make the miles go more smoothly. Although I can’t remember the titles or the authors, other than Album and Gresham, I do remember most of the story-lines and I will also admit that this was a fun way to read.

All of this changed for us on March 16, 2009. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my story check back to some of my early postings. On that date I had what appeared to be a stroke. However, it wasn’t a stroke, a blood vessel in a benign tumor attached to my brain exploded (surgeon’s word) and the tumor imploded (again surgeon’s word)  creating all the symptoms of a stroke. After the removal of  the remains of a dead tumor, I have battled balance issues, fatique, aphasia, epilepsy and most recently Parkinson’s disease. I took a medically induced break from my life as an academic administrator, first on disability and now officially on retirement. Supposedly that should give me more time to read. I will tell that part of the story in Relief Through Reading, Parts II through V. In these posts, I will also share how Finding Strength and Bended Spoons have inspired me to expand my reading list somewhat, read  more and write about it.

As indicated above on March 16, 2009, I was introduced to a new phase in my life that supoosedly  should give me more time for reading, but I must admit that old habits die hard. It has taken me two years to get to the point where I can pick me a book and almost read it just for fun. However, instead of throwing open my reading list to many more recreational reading books, I have taken up more informational  reading. I have dropped the DIY readings and picked up readings about neurological dysfunctions, such as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks and ‘ My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Taylor, and higher education like Charles Murrays’ “Real Education” or Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary.”.  The neuologiacl books are helping me understand what I am going through and what I can expect ahead of me. The higher education books are keeping me in touch with the academy. The next three books on my reading list are “Awakenings” by Sacks, “Always Looking Up” by Michael J. Fox, and “Reading in the Brain” by Stanislas Dehaene.

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What Can Faculty Learn From A Broadway Musical?

An article that first appeared in the July 4, 2010 e-edition of the Technology Section of The Chronicle of Higher Education was repeated in the July 9, 2010 e-edition of Academe Today. The article was entitled “Linked In With: A Writer Who Questions the Wisdom of Teaching with Technology.”  Because I was familiar with Carr’s writings, this article caught my attention and I had to read it, even though I was confident of what I was going to find. The author of the article, Marc Parry, was talking about and interviewing Nicholas Carr, the author of a book entitled, “The Shallows,” and many articles, including “IT Doesn’t Matter” and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“As usual, Carr was questioning the efficacy of technology in assisting in the teaching and learning process. This article was vintage Carr.

I believe education is meeting students where they are and helping them to get to where they want and ought to be. If where they want to be is not where they ought to be, then our first job in education is to help them see where they ought to be. I believe every prospective teacher should watch the musical, “My Fair Lady.” Can teachers learn anything from a Broadway musical? I think they can if they are paying attention, especially if they are asked to reflect on one particular scene. The scene takes place in the Professor’s study, when he and the Colonel are celebrating Eliza’s triumphant debut at the gala. Colonel Pickering keeps saying, “You said that you could do it, and you did it.” Professor Higgins replies:”Yes I did it.” But did you see Eliza in the corner of the room crying and sobbing, “What have you done? “ They replied:”We made you a lady.” Eliza responded, “I never asked to be a lady. All I wanted was to be able to speak well enough to sell flowers at the corner shop. Now that I am a lady, there is nothing left for me to do, but to sell myself and marry a gentleman.” The Professor and the Colonel used good pedagogy and “taught her well”, but they didn’t listen to what she wanted, and they definitely didn’t help her understand what it was to be a lady and why that was important.

The following exchange between Perry and  Carr reminded me of that scene from “My Fair Lady:”Perry asked Carr: “If the Internet is making us so distracted, how did you manage to write a 224-page book and read all the dense academic studies that much of it is based on?” Carr responded, “It was hard. The reason I started writing it was because I noticed in myself this increasing inability to pay attention to stuff, whether it was reading or anything else. When I started to write the book, I found it very difficult to sit and write for a couple of hours on end or to sit down with a dense academic paper.” I have found that most of our students today don’t know how to sit down for a couple of hours to read or write. They mentally and physically can’t sit for a couple of hours to read or write. They definitely don’t know how to sit down and read a dense paper. They also don’t know why that should be important. It is not enough for us to tell them just to do it, because it is important and it is good for them. How often to our question of why, do we accept the answer, “Because I told you so; besides it is good for you; or you ought to do it.” At one point in the article after renouncing the use of the internet, Carr says, “my abilities to concentrate did seem to strengthen again. I felt in a weird way intellectually or mentally calmer. And I could sit down and write or read with a great deal of attentiveness for quite a long time.” Our students don’t know why that is important for them unless we help them learn that. Just telling that it is good and that it works for us is not enough. If we want to reach these students, we need to meet them where they are and help them see the benefits of the reflective pursuit of knowledge and truth for them. If we don’t do that, these students might well be like Eliza, sitting in the corner crying that we didn’t listen to them, and we haven’t. The other more likely possibility is they will give up, walk away and never engage in the reflective pursuit of knowledge.

My next question may sound like heresy coming from someone within the academy, “Is the reflective pursuit of knowledge the only way to obtain knowledge? The ancient Greeks allowed and even encouraged at least three different ways of knowing, theoria, poiesis and praxis. Theoria is the word from which we get our words theory and theoretical. In ancient Greece, it meant contemplation or seeing by observation. It developed into the idea of the theoretical pursuit of knowledge and truth through contemplation or reflection. Poiesis is the word from which we get our word poetry. It meant to make or produce. It developed into the idea of creating something of value. Praxis is the word from which we get our words practice or practical. It meant action. It developed into the idea of knowledge applied to one’s actions. The goal of theoria  was truth. The goal of poiesis was a product. The goal of praxis was action.

I challenge those of us in the academy, are we open to different ways of knowing and learning? Are we willing to meet our students where they are, listen to where they want to be, and help them see where they could and ought to be? Are we willing to help them get there, even if it means using multiple ways of knowing and learning that may not at first seem comfortable to us?

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Living with Aphasia: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

For Me, Aphasia Is Like Solving Jig Saw Puzzles with Missing Pieces

When asked what it’s like living with aphasia and trying to speak or write, I describe it by saying that it is like putting together jig saw puzzles with pieces missing. One trouble with both writing and jig saw puzzles is that you usually don’t know pieces are missing until you get pretty far into the process of writing or solving the puzzle. Like most people, I do jig saw puzzles section by section. After I work on a section for a while, sometimes, I get to a particular place and I find a puzzle piece is missing. I can’t find it. It is just not there. I have hundreds of puzzle pieces spread out in front of me. With writing I get to a particular place and I can’t come up with the right word. I have thousands of words running through my mind. Whether with jig saw puzzles or writing, I am shuffling through all those pieces and words, but the right one that perfectly fits in that one place, is not there. What do you do with jig saw puzzles in this situation?
Most people would usually start looking at another part of the puzzle and try to find puzzle pieces that fit into that new part of the puzzle. If I do that enough for a puzzle, I will use up all the pieces that were in the box, and then I would know for certain that a piece or two are missing. After searching the house for the missing pieces, I might get out the other puzzles and see if the pieces got mixed up in those puzzle boxes. After all that, I really only have three choices: 1) pick up the puzzle pieces and put them back in the box and mark the box to indicate that a piece or two is missing; 2) go to one of those websites that advertize that they can replace missing puzzle pieces and purchase new pieces; or 3) pick up the unfinished puzzle and throw it away.
With my writing, I operate similarly. When I find myself stuck on a word, I will finish the remainder of the essay and then come back to the part with the missing word. Sometimes by then I will have found the word. Sometimes I haven’t. At that point of time, I will start searching in earnest through the word helpers like a cross-word dictionary or a thesaurus to try to find the right word or words. If that doesn’t work, I will set the essay aside and come back to it later. If I can’t find the right word or words then, I know at that point it is time to ask someone for help to find the appropriate word or words. That is like going to the puzzle websites to buy missing pieces. If that doesn’t work, I can either put the project aside and wait for a long time before I come back to it, or I trash it and forget about it.
Right now I have five or six projects on my computer that I have started but are in various stages of incompleteness. For the ones that are almost complete, I have sent copies to friends and former colleagues and asked them to review the projects and make suggestions. For the ones that I think still have possibilities but are in a much rougher state, I have set them aside, and I will come back to them off and on, at much later dates. Over the past months, I have looked at several essays that I have started and have decided that they are beyond repair or restoration. I have trashed them. I keep a file of ideas for essays, just the ideas, but not the real rough starts. Perhaps, I will come back to these ideas with a totally different approach at a much later date. This is a whole new way for me to operate, but it permits me to write and still cope with my mild case of aphasia.
If someone else has used the analogy of living with aphasia to missing jig saw puzzle pieces, I apologize for appropriating it. As an academic I have been trained to give credit for ideas to where credit is due. I did what I thought was a fairly exhaustive internet search on this topic and came up with nothing that was similar to the approach that I am taking in this essay. There were references to many exercises in aphasia therapy in which the individual with aphasia is asked to fill in a missing word in a simple sentence or to name a missing object in a simple picture. However, none of them compared the exercise to missing pieces of a jig saw puzzle. There were many references to autism as living with missing puzzle pieces, but none to aphasia that I could find. In dealing with autistic individuals or individuals with aphasia, I would in no way suggest throwing them away. Here is the place for a therapist or a care giver to provide the right degree of challenge and support to help the individual. An essay or a piece of work is far different from and far less valuable than the individual, although, for many of us, we find it difficult to separate ourselves from our work. It is a lesson from which we could all benefit.

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Living with Aphasia: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

Living with Aphasia: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks
By Baylis
You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. I have heard this saying for many, many years. (Does that make me an old dog?) Over the years, I have observed the difficulty in retraining dogs that have become acclimated to behaving in certain ways. You never heard this saying about cats. I don’t think cats were ever mentioned in the same way because cats are very hard to train in the first place. They train themselves. However, once a cat has settled into a routine, it is extremely difficult to break that routine. We had a cat that we started feeding first thing in the morning. After that, if we didn’t get up when the sun would first rise, this cat would come into our bedroom and gently remind us that it was his feeding time. He would put his face right next to our faces and start rubbing against us or purring.

I have now had first-hand experience with this adage. For many years prior to the hemorrhage in the  blood vessel in the tumor on my brain, I was not the best filer. My filing system has been called clutter. I would have eight to ten piles of papers or journals all around my office. There did not appear to be any rhyme or reason to the piles. However, I was renowned for my memory. I would easily have a dozen jobs in the air at any one time. When someone would come into my office to talk about something, I could inevitably go to the correct pile and within a minute or two, find the document that we needed to discuss. People were amazed that I knew where it was. I can’t do that anymore, although I still have eight to ten piles of papers all around my office at home. However, when I get an idea about how I can update an essay or article that I’m working on, I can’t find the documents. Since I can’t use my former filing system anymore and knowing what it was probably won’t help other people now, I will let you in on my secret of filing prior to the episode. As I said I had a good memory. But I was not remembering exactly where a particular document was. What I doing was constructing those piles according to the day that I worked on the particular project under question. All I had to do was remember what was the last day I had worked on the project. I could go to that pile and find the needed documents.

Since the episode I have tried to put all the documents that I work on in manila file folders and label the file folder. The difficulty that I will have to teach myself to overcome is to now put the file folder away in some semblance of order other than by date. I spent several days this past week alphabetically filing all the file folders that accumulated in my office, first according to author and second by title. It’s amazing what I have found. There were several duplicate files, that if I had been following this procedure all the time, I wouldn’t have had to create. What’s also true, but should not be amazing, is there are some things that I know I worked on but are now lost.

The second lesson that I have learned through this process is that one needs to keep one’s computer files in order also. There are documents I know that I have created but they are nowhere to be found on my computer. I have looked at all the files alphabetically and chronologically, and the documents under question are nowhere to be found. To try to remedy this situation, I first set up a spreadsheet listing all the files I created. The spreadsheet had entries that could be sorted by name of file, author, source (if it was from a journal or website), and date. As I created new files, I entered the information related to that file on the bottom of a front page and copied that front page to various pages that I then sorted by title, author source and date. I know this type of problem and process is more suited to data bases. Why did I use a spreadsheet and not a data base? I have always been more comfortable setting up spreadsheets than data bases. The old dog is barking again. I have learned the hard way this is more of a data base problem than a spreadsheet problem. The last two times I sorted the pages of the spreadsheet I didn’t make sure that I was sorting the whole page, and I found I was mixing up file titles with the wrong source or date. This week I believe that I will have to step out and try two new tricks. The first is to create sub-files on my computer and file documents in an appropriate sub-file. The second is to create a data base for my files. Next week I will report on my success or failure.

In our adult Sunday school class this past week we were discussing Abraham and someone asked the question: “Why do we seem to learn more from failures than successes?” Another individual brought up the example of Thomas Edison. After more than 100 attempts to construct a working light bulb, someone asked him if he was discouraged. I think his response can help us. He is reported to have answered the question by saying, “No, I am not discouraged. I now know 100 ways that won’t work. I won’t use any of them again and I can try something else.”

As I live with my aphasia and memory problems, I am collecting a whole set of practices that I now know I won’t have to try again. I won’t have to make those mistakes again. I have also learned the secret to teaching old dogs new tricks. It is actually quite simple. KEEP AT IT; DON’T GIVE INTO IMPULSES OR WHIMS. The minute you let the old dog revert to his old behavioral patterns, you have to essentially start over again with the training. With that in mind, I decided to try practicing some of the new filing techniques this week. How is it going? The best I can say is that it is going, but not as well as I had hoped. I must admit I have had to resolve to start over twice and I must also admit that I failed in setting up a working data base. Old habits (Old tricks) are hard to shake off. What actually are old habits? They are engraved patterns of behavior, etched into the synaptic paths of our brain. To construct a new habit, we must break down and eliminate as much as possible the old habits. What we know from brain research is that unless the paths are completely eliminated by damage to the brain, those paths are still there. We can make new dominant paths but the old paths are still there, and the individual can easily revert to those paths. It’s similar to putting a new roof on a house, you really should remove the old shingles before you put the new shingles on. If you don’t, the new shingles will not always as effective as they should be and you will have to replace them much sooner than you normally would. If you have read my first blog on living with aphasia, it’s all about the story of perfect practice making perfect. The amateur practices until he gets it right once. But that’s not enough. Chances are, when the next opportunity to make that play or perform that number occurs he’ll get wrong again. The professional practices until he can’t do it wrong. The muscles are locked into particular movements and the individual just does them naturally.
I have just discovered a new (new to me) site for aphasia patients and caregivers. It is a blog entitled Aphasia Corner. It can be found at http://aphasiacorner.com/blog/category/aphasia-corner.
I invite you to look them up. Someone involved Aphasia Corner has my type of humor. QUESTION: What is aphasia? ANSWER: It is the weapon on Star Trek used to blow up enemies. You don’t ever want to lose your sense of humor. Even in the toughest of times, a laugh can be medicine for the soul.

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Hello world!

Welcome to my site. THe following Grand Rapids Press article tells a little bit about my story. This story told the story to October 2009. On December 30, 2009, another adventure began. I had four grand mal seizures and was hospitalized again for a week. I am now classified as an epileptic with all the challenges of that disease. I hope the blog will help me speak about higher education the thing that I love the most besides God, my wife and the rest of my family. I hope to post an original essay each Monday and a commentary on a selected news item from the top Higher Education Newsletters.  For those who are wondering what’s up with the beta squared, since my initials are BB and I am a mathematician, I have been using beta squared for years as my initials. ?2

Former Cornerstone University provost develops aphasia after blood vessel bursts in brain

By Nardy Baeza Bickel | The Grand Rapids Pr…

November 21, 2009, 4:35AM

GRAND RAPIDS — For 40 years, Bayard “By” Baylis has worked with words to develop curriculum for students and to help faculty teach better, most recently as the provost at Cornerstone University.

But after undergoing brain surgery earlier this year, words have been a bit tricky for Baylis: They behave like cats, not dogs, the educator said.

Bayard BaylisCourtesy Photo of Former Cornerstone University provost Bayard Baylis, shown here with his wife, Elaine Baylis, had a blood vessel burst in a brain tumor and developed aphasia, a disorder that impairs language skills.“Dogs come when you want them, but cats … they come to you when they want to come to you, not when you call them,” said Baylis, trying to explain what it feels to live with mild aphasia, a communication disorder that limits a person’s usage and
understanding of language.

Learning how to pick through his brain to find the right words has not been easy for the 63-year-old, who until recently spent his days revamping Cornerstone’s curriculum and designing new strategies to improve student retention and enrollment at Christian institutions.

“He was a beloved provost because of his humble manner. Faculty and students could sense that he cared about them. He’s such a good listener,” said Alan Blanchard, who worked with Baylis in developing Cornerstone’s journalism program he directs.

“He really seems to genuinely care about people.”

Now, Baylis keeps a small notebook in his shirt pocket to make sure he will capture the ideas as they come to him. He also color-codes the ideas throughout his writings to make sure he does not leave any of them without proper explanation.

“That’s part of the insidiousness of the disease. There are times that I know I sound as if I’m making sense, but it’s not the sense I wanted to make. This week I’ve been (writing) an article about liberal arts and practical education, and I’m trying to understand the ancient Greek system. It’s just been a battle,” he said.

The experience has done nothing but strengthen his relationship with God, Baylis said.

“God is a god of miracles and not a god of convenience,” Baylis said. “The timing of the episode was a small miracle. If it had happened 15 minutes later, I would have been making 70 mph on I-96. And if it had happened a couple of months later, we would have been in Illinois, not knowing many people, not having doctors, not knowing the medical (community).”

“That in itself was a miracle,” agreed his wife, Elaine Baylis.

This spring, Baylis resigned as the second-in-command at Cornerstone to revamp the academic curriculum at Trinity International University in Deerfield, IL, where he was to become dean and vice president of academic affairs.

He was in a meeting with faculty and staff at Cornerstone when he got the worst headache he ever has had.

His speech became slurred, he broke out in a cold sweat, and his face became ash-white.

Baylis has no recollection of what happened later: Of his friends calling 911, fearing he had suffered a stroke; of the ambulance ride to the hospital and of doctors finding, and removing, a non-cancerous tumor in his brain.

His wife, 63, was told to gather the family. If he made it out of the operating room, doctors told her, he never would be the same.

When Baylis woke up after surgery, his speech was altered, but he couldn’t tell the difference.

“It was so frustrating. There was a word that described the condition I wanted to describe and I couldn’t come up with it. I would have trouble following directions, oral or written,” Baylis said.

After months of physical, occupational and speech therapy, Baylis said, he is doing much better. Now retired, he had to pass up the job at Trinity.

He can follow a conversation without much help and already passed a test to regain his driver’s license.

But he still is easily exhausted and, once in a while, words elude him, he said.

Just recently, while attending a funeral service for a Cornerstone employee, Baylis said he had trouble recalling names of former colleagues.

“I knew what they did. I knew what they taught. I knew where their offices were, but I couldn’t come up with their names,” he said.

Still, he pushes forward. Baylis and his wife hope to move soon to Pennsylvania to be close to his family. They still spend most of the mornings, and some afternoons, talking with colleagues about the future of academia and what colleges should do to better to educate students.

E-mail Nardy Bickel: nbickel@grpress.com