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History keeps beckoning his students forward
Sunday, January 21, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Professor of the year gives the past a future
HUNTINGDON -- It seemed like a swell idea at the time.
Juniata College professor David Hsiung's history class was talking
about tarring and feathering. And up came the question: Does a first-rate
tar-and-feather job really hurt?
"I said, 'Well, we can find out,' " Hsiung remembered. "I asked if
somebody was willing to volunteer an arm to be tarred. Somebody was. I
said I was willing to volunteer my old feather pillow."
And because pouring on blistering hot tar didn't seem a prudent option,
Hsiung figured he'd just go get a bucket of that cold slap-on stuff from
the local building supply store.
"Then, my wife says, 'Isn't that substance, like, carcinogenic? Doesn't
it have warning labels?' "
Hmm.
"So, I decided not to do it."
OK, maybe it wasn't such a swell idea. But according to students and
colleagues, it's been one of the few clinkers for Hsiung, 39, during his
decade as a sought-after instructor at Juniata, a serene, 125-year-old
college at the north edge of Huntingdon County, 35 miles east of Altoona.
"He's the best teacher and professor I've ever had in my life," said
sophomore history major Robyn Eastwood, who came from Seattle to the
1,300-student liberal arts college. "He's incredible -- funny and relaxed,
and he has a way of making a classroom feel so comfortable. You just learn
more there."
"He's awesome," said Dan Figueroa, a junior history major from Lebanon,
Lebanon County.
They didn't say "awesome," but the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of
Education seconded the sentiments recently. They named Hsiung professor of
the year for Pennsylvania, their choice from among 20 nominees statewide.
According to nominating letters, Hsiung -- an associate professor "but
just call me Dave," he tells students -- simply connects with his classes.
He's "a model faculty member," Juniata Provost James Lakso wrote.
"He gets the whole class involved. He throws out a question, lets the
class answer for themselves, then plays devil's advocate," said sophomore
Rusty Daubert of Hummelstown, Dauphin County. "Somehow, regardless of the
topic, it's enjoyable."
That, in part, is because almost any session with Hsiung is Anything
Can Happen Day.
A question about the British settlement at Jamestown, Va., led to
another question, then another until the class was mulling the game of
cricket. By their next meeting, the class had cricket rules downloaded
from the Internet, homemade wickets and a Wiffle ball and bat.
"And you see this whole class out on the lawn, playing cricket,"
college spokesman David Gildea said.
In the syllabus for his American Revolution class, Hsiung advises, "on
days marked 'Surprise!', please come to class with anything cool that you
have found that relates to the American Revolution. ... What is the
neatest, most amazing, saddest or sickest thing you can find?"
When the 25 students in Hsiung's Twentieth Century American Wars class
gathered Monday to open the semester, job one wasn't knowing where the
Maginot Line was or who convened at Malta.
First up was knowing each other's names.
When students are comfortable, Hsiung figures, they discuss. When they
discuss, they jump deeper into the subject matter.
So, there they were, Eastwood said, sitting in circles the first day of
class.
"And there's a student at the center of the circle -- they call him
'the bopper,' and he's carrying a rolled-up newspaper, and he's supposed
to bop you if you can't remember somebody else's name first," she said.
A technique culled from Methods of Teaching?
"I learned it back when I was a counselor at a summer camp."
In Hsiung's classes, students can find themselves well beyond the
bounds of campus, crawling through historical records in the aged
Huntingdon County Courthouse or standing on a local hilltop, scouting
surrounding turf to see how civilization left its footprint.
They could be sitting with relatives, coaxing out reminiscences for
oral histories.
"In one class, a student doing an oral history found an uncle she never
knew about," Hsiung said. "Another student said his father never talked
about his experiences in Vietnam, and the student never understood the
effects of those experiences until he got his father to talk."
Students have joined Hsiung in sleuthing a 257-year-old slaying 10
miles down the Juniata River, where an Indian killed local resident Jack
Armstrong and two servants.
Murder? Self-defense? Hsiung and his student gumshoes haven't issued a
final verdict.
"It's the excitement of the hunt," he said. "Students become
historians, not just consumers of history."
"You're going to work, but he makes it fun," said Bruce Burlew, 50, a
junior history and politics major who commutes 30 miles from his home at
Lewistown, Mifflin County. "He has a real exuberant personality."
In a letter nominating Hsiung for the teaching award, former student
Brett Clark recounted Hsiung's lecture on hard-charging Revolutionary War
cavalry officer Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Robert E. Lee's father, the
man who eulogized George Washington as "first in war, first in peace, and
first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Four years after the class, "when other courses and lectures are merely
hazy memories, I can still remember specific points professor Hsiung made
and specific questions with which he challenged the class," Clark wrote.
For Hsiung, the plaudits are nice. They weren't part of the plan,
though.
He grew up in Chicago, the son of parents who came from China in 1947
to study at Michigan State University.
Hsiung never figured on winding up among the 80 faculty members in this
little college. He never even heard of Huntingdon, a town of 6,800 on the
Juniata River and Norfolk Southern Corp.'s main line.
And he certainly never planned to teach history.
When he checked into Yale University as an undergraduate, Hsiung, Class
of '83, was a biochemistry and molecular biophysics major, following his
brother's lead into science. It seemed a good fit; after all, in high
school he was what he calls "a science guy."
"My parents wanted me to be happy, and happy meant a viable job, and
science is a viable job," Hsiung said as he sat in his Juniata office, a
12-by-12-foot front room of a dignified two-story brick house now housing
the History Department.
Then came a lefthand turn on the road to the future. It was a Chinese
history course under Jonathan D. Spence, probably the most prominent
scholar turning Chinese history into English.
"He showed me other facets of history -- the social history, the lives
of historic figures," Hsiung said. "If he had been doing the history of
Austria or Guatemala, I would've been hooked. Science was nice ... but it
didn't light my fire the way history did."
To Hsiung, the history was alive.
"I used to talk to my parents about whether I could borrow the car," he
said. "Now, I was talking to them and finding out there was an uncle who
was a general with Chiang Kai-shek and an aunt who had to slip out of the
mainland and had a little kid that she had to keep quiet."
He wanted to learn history. He signed on with instructors he found
intriguing. And then, he wanted to teach it.
The jump, though, came without classes in education methods. On the way
to his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Michigan, he
honed his teaching style in what he calls "a master-apprentice
relationship" with professors.
Hsiung's doctoral dissertation focused on southern Appalachia and
historical origins of Appalachian characterizations, a topic he went on to
expand in a 1997 book.
And, doctorate in hand, he came to Juniata College.
"It became clear that I wanted to be at a school that emphasized
teaching rather than 'publish or perish.' That's not to say that research
and publishing aren't rewarding, ... but teaching is what gets my motor
running."
And on an afternoon last week, his motor was running.
Twenty-five students were there, and a give-and-take was coming on the
roots of the Spanish American War. But for the moment, Hsiung was on his
way to going 23-for-25 at remembering the first names of his students,
sometimes struggling like a man trying to snatch information from thin
air.
"I had a student who wanted to be called Dog. It was his initials. One
student wanted to be called Prozac," Hsiung said away from the classroom.
"One guy wanted to be Agent Smith, and his name wasn't even Smith. I said,
'It's whatever you're comfortable with.' "
By the time the class is over, Hsiung will have asked enough questions
and questioned enough answers that, instead of having to wring out
responses, he has students vying for floor time.
"It's partly my job to turn them on to the subject," he said. "Life is
more fun, more worth living, richer if you know about the humanities."
Hsiung's students, in turn, have been teaching him about the
humanities, too.
"Yes, they're educating about Limp Bizkit, Everclear, Green Day," he
said. "Or whatever."
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