Calvin News

Calvin College professor of English Mary Ann Walters is a 36-year teaching veteran who still loves nothing better than being a student.

Two decades ago she spent a year-long sabbatical in New York City as a student at an acting school. A decade ago she spent three months studying in Britain at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, one of that country's most prestigious drama academies. She not only studied the stage, but also took singing lessons -- "remedial singing lessons," she says with a wry grin -- and mastered the rudimentaries of such skills as fencing and tumbling. And for the past four years or so Walters has been a regular student at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Grand Rapids, learning the art of ballroom dancing.

"Watching someone else teach," she says, "can be one of the best things there is. I love watching a good teacher work. It feels right."

Perhaps not coincidentally, Walters's colleagues and former students at Calvin say the same things of her. One colleague said that "the most obvious characteristic that one notices is her enjoyment of life -- her need to enjoy life though adventurous learning," adding that "her students find this attitude contagious."

Adventurous learning -- and teaching -- has made Walters -- a lifelong Grand Rapids resident -- the 1999 winner of Calvin's Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching -- the seventh such honoree dating back to the award's inception in 1993 by then-president Anthony Diekema. (The first honoree was Walters' long-time English department colleague Ken Kuiper, recently deceased).

She will receive the award tonight at a Faculty/Board dinner on campus being held in conjunction with two days of winter meetings by the Calvin Board of Trustees.

The award includes a one-of-a-kind medallion and provides the winner with a significant financial stipend thanks to the George B. and Margaret K. Tinholt Endowment fund, set up at Calvin by an anonymous donor in honor of George Tinholt, a former member of the Calvin Board of Trustees.

Walters' first love is drama. The recent resurgence in all things Shakespeare only proves what she has been espousing for the last three decades for her love for the Bard has never slackened. A confirmed Anglophile she has made numerous trips to the United Kingdom, several in her role as director of Calvin's Semester in Britain program.

She loves Shakespeare because she loves words. And she loves the sound of the spoken word. In her Shakespeare classes the students always have to act, despite generally being non-theatre students with a GenX aversion to performance.

"I need for the students to have the words ring in their heads," she says, "and the only way that can happen is for them to perform. Students ask me ‘will we have to memorize these scenes.' And I say ‘Of course. There's no other way for it to be done.' When the words are in them Shakespeare comes alive. I never loved Shakespeare until I acted it, read it aloud, made it physical. I didn't learn that until years after college."

At the conclusion of this January's Interim class on Shakespeare she and her students used the final day of class to see the film "Shakespeare in Love" at a Grand Rapids movie theatre. She often has her students study a play and then attend it live or watch it on video. "Studying the play and then not watching it," she says, "is like reading recipes and not eating."

Walters also has brought words to life for her students in a class that often is the bane of a liberal arts education -- written rhetoric, also known as freshman English. When she came to Calvin in 1962 -- just a year out of graduate school -- Walters taught four sections of introductory English B including lots of grammar. After over three decades of grammar instruction she admits with a look that is equal parts pride and embarrassment that she can diagram a sentence with the best of them. But, in her introductory English classes, rules take a back seat to what she calls "the taste of language."

She says with a smile that each week during the course of the semester -- some 12 weeks in all -- new rules are tossed out. Pressed for examples she brings up such junior high staples as "Never start a sentence with the word ‘but'" and "Never write in sentence fragments."

"It's nonsense," she says. "Some of the best writers use fragments or start sentences with the word ‘but.' Students come into the course and they're tied up in knots. I'm surprised they can put a single word on paper with as much as they have to worry about. It's like trying to do gymnastics in a straightjacket."

Walters also has breathed new life into the words of English 101 via innovative collaborations between her classes and local senior citizens. Each semester she partners each of her students with a senior citizen. During the course of the semester all of the assignments for the class revolve around that partnership and by the end of the semester the Calvin students all have written biographies of their senior partner based on weekly visits and interviews. At the semester's conclusion the class and seniors come together for a party -- which replaces the formal final exam -- and the Calvin students present the seniors with a bound biography.

"The partnership has been a lifesaver," Walters says. "It makes the words real. The students are writing with a clear purpose and audience. They're writing someone's life story. Their assignments are not abstract themes that I've come up with. They're people's lives."

Over the years that personal touch has been a Walters' hallmark. 

When she leads the Semester in Britain program she often administers what she calls "a walking exam" for her students. At the end of the semester she takes each student, individually, for a stroll around the grounds of the campus. And for an hour they discuss what has been taught that semester. In some ways it takes more time than a traditional exam. But, says Walters, it's worth it. "It moves education into a little different realm," she says of the Socratic approach. "It's not the student spitting back up the things that have been swallowed during the semester. It's a dialogue. Walking helps us think. But it also helps us maintain some distance -- we can look at things other than each other. Yet we have eliminated the distance sometimes created by bluebooks and desks and a classroom."

Creating community is another of Walters' strong suits. She assigns her students to support groups. They help each other with their papers and offer support to one another. If a group member misses a class the others calls to find out why. They learn to depend on and trust each other. Said a colleague: "She nurtures a community spirit among students better than any teacher I have ever known."

She also nurtures a spirit of kindness and humility. Her comments on papers exhibit both direct feedback and a sly sense of humor. To a student not getting to the point in a paper she=s been known to write: "You're driving too slowly here." She says with a chuckle: "Guys love cars and they respond to car metaphors." Students respond to both her instruction and her example.

One student wrote of Walters: "Her most unusual power as an educator comes from the fact that her own life so clearly exemplifies that learning is something a person does all her life with joy." Another simply said: "She uses her field to teach about life."