Interview with Judi Jewinski

Good afternoon, Judi.

Thank you so very much for meeting with me today.

Oh, thanks for inviting me.

I'm really thrilled.

We're very excited to talk to you.

I'd love to begin just with your family background.

So where did you grow up?

Where were you born?

So I was born in Toronto, which is really kind of funny

because so few people are, it seems.

But my parents were both professors at Queen’s University.

So I grew up in Kingston, and because they were both profs, I ended up skipping a couple

of years of school which put me at a social disadvantage.

Because, for example, I was eight years old in Grade 5, which is when I look

at my eight-year-old grandson, I think oh, no way.

Oh, wow.

So to catch up the time, my mother took me to Europe for three years when I was a kid,

because she was a Francophone and she wanted me to speak French.

So we went to Switzerland, which was where her family had come from,

and we lived in Neuchâtel for the while we were there.

And I went to school with little Swiss kids who spoke French.

And I don't know if you know when people are trying to keep a first language in a context

where nobody speaks that first language.

It's really tough.

And I would, in Kingston, never respond to my mother in French.

Ever. Because it was people oh, gee, where do they come from?

Even though French is a perfectly reasonable language to speak, nobody in Kingston did.

So when I was in Switzerland, the opposite took place.

Nobody spoke English at all.

And I just became a little Swiss kid without realizing it.

However, the English teacher in Grade 9 knew that I was an Anglophone.

And one day, she said oh Judi come up to the front of the class, and please explain

to your little les camarades how we use relative pronouns in English.

And I said, but, madam, we don't have any.

And the horror on her face made me realize oh, I really, I really blew it didn't I?

So I swore to myself I would never be humiliated like that again.

And I read up on relative pronouns, and was surprised to find that, yes indeed, we had them.

I decided to go to the University of Waterloo

because I had an absolutely fantastic English teacher in Grade 13 who was a graduate,

and Waterloo was a very young university at the time.

And it was a good four hours' drive from Kingston, just the right distance

for getting away from home, but being able to get back home if you wanted.

Mm-hm.

So I decided oh I should investigate this university.

And the other wonderful thing was that there was a drama professor whose name was Maurice Evans.

Now this is '69 when Planet of the Apes had come out.

and Maurice Evans had starred in Planet of the Apes.

So I thought, isn't that incredible?

I could be taught by this fabulous movie star.

It wasn't the same Maurice Evans.

But that was okay.

When I got to Waterloo the first time -- I'd never been further west than Toronto ever --

and Dick Knight who is a long time Waterloo person showed me around,

and was utterly charming, and made me feel that Waterloo was the only place for me.

Wow.

So I put it first choice of six.

I had six choices of universities.

And I got offered a spot and I came here in 1970,

in September, which is a good 52 years ago.

Oh, wow.

I'd love to go back to your parents that you said they were professors.

In what fields?

So my father was a professor of biochemistry.

He worked, he was one of the original team working on DNA back in the 50s.

That's pretty exciting.

My mother was a French teacher, so she taught French grammar,

and she taught French literature.

And when I was five -- in those days, you had an awful lot of stay-at-home moms.

You didn't have a lot of mothers who had jobs.

Advanced degrees and jobs.

Especially, right, advanced degrees and positions at universities.

She taught summer school, and she had me sitting in class at the very back doing math questions

for however long the class lasted, I'm guessing, an hour and a half or whatever.

But I'm sure that having had that experience, I had a sense of how to teach --

my mother was a really fine, fine instructor.

What an inspiring role model as well.

She really was.

She was 40 years older than I was, which was so entirely unusual for the time, especially,

all of my other friends' mothers were in their twenties, I think.

So my mother, really, she was more like a grandmother

in that sense with the difference of age.

But she was totally wonderful.

She was amazing.

And she made me comfortable being -- I never really thought much about the disparity

between men and women because my mother was very not controlling at all.

She was, but she was very self-assured.

Did you have any siblings growing up?

No I was, no, I was sort of the lucky only child.

Yes. Did you feel a pressure to excel academically very young

or was that the world you grew up in and very natural?

Well, unfortunately it was the world I grew up in.

I went to, I was in Grade 1 at the age of five.

And Grade 3 at the age of six, because of all the things that I'd been able to do at home

that people weren't doing yet in school.

And, mathematically, I really love math.

My dad was very disappointed, by the way, that I didn't go into maths and sciences.

But I worked with him in biochemistry for a march break when I was in grade 12 maybe.

And he was working on diabetes research, and they had to kill sheep.

But the way they killed the sheep, of course, was you know drugs, right,

it had to be hit on the head with a chisel.

And that I decided I think something else is more interesting.

I was really into drama.

My parents had -- in Kingston, the Domino Theatre is an extraordinary theatre,

little theatre, so I was involved in that and I was in a couple of plays.

When I went to -- My parents put me in boarding school for Grades 12

and 13 because I was a teenager, and they were in their 60s,

and it was very, very hard on them.

But I loved boarding school.

I just flourished and did drama.

I was in a verse speaking contest at the St. Lawrence Centre when I was in Grade 13,

and came home with a signed copy of Raymond Souster poems.

So that peaked my interest in poetry.

And, of course, all teenagers write poetry, don't they?

I thought I was a brilliant poet [laughing].

And then you look back and think.

And then I look back at those poems, and I think oh, some of them aren't bad.

But my husband is a poet, and his poems are, yeah.

Are beautiful?

Mm-hm.

Oh, that's amazing.

Well, that brings us, so I'd love to know -- you said you had this drama teacher in high school

that was influential and encouraged you.

Did that lead you into English, or why did you choose English?

So, English, because it was an English teacher who also did drama.

and who also wrote poetry.

She was an amazing woman, and I have always hoped to find her again,

but I think she got married and name changes and all of that.

But she was amazingly encouraging.

And because it was a boarding school, we had a very small English class.

So we did unusual out of the way kinds of studies.

We read Heart of Darkness in Grade 12 where you read it in second

and third year perhaps at university.

So I was really, really well prepared to go into English.

But first year first year Arts at Waterloo still, and I still love this way of spreading

of having students take English or something like English.

But having a whole variety of courses that are available to them,

so that they can decide once they get to university if they really want to be in whatever.

I took one English course with Grace Logan who became the Director of Arts Computing

until she retired a number of years ago.

She was an amazing teacher -- 8:30.

Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

So often on Fridays, it was really really hard to get to class but she did English 101

which was the canon from Beowulf all the way up to the present day.

And it was great.

And we finished with modern poetry.

And so poetry was always something I really liked.

But in my second year, I took a grammar course because there was one,

it was called The Use and Abuse of English, and it was offered

at the second year level to -- it was English 240.

So I couldn't have taken it in first year, but I found my I found my niche.

It was absolutely 'the' course for me, and I realized 'that' is what I want to do.

I want to analyse sentences, I want to understand how everything is put together.

And a course like that taught me how to do that.

That was at Renison College, and that was 1971 and the professor's name was Harry Tuyn.

T-U-Y-N. He was of Dutch origin but he had taught in England,

and he had a fabulous British accent, and he had a fabulous British sense of humour too.

He was a friend of a famous actor, and I can't remember his name.

But he was just a smart man and his wife was in class with us,

which was quite funny but she adored him.

She sat next to me, and she invited me for dinner one night,

which was how wonderful being invited to the home of a professor.

I got to the front door of the house, I had taken a taxi,

because I lived in the villages, and he lived off campus.

And I didn't know anything off campus because the beauty

of Waterloo is everything's right here.

You don't have to go off campus if you don't want to.

Well, somebody answered the door, and it was my French professor from the year before,

who said, "Mademoiselle, I recognize you.

What are you doing here?"

I said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Did I get the address wrong?

I was invited here by Harry Tuyn and his wife for dinner.

He said, "Oh, that lunatic," he said [chuckle].

And, you could imagine, I think I was 19, sitting there, "Why?"

"Oh, he lives out back and he lives in this little shed,

and I can't imagine why he would've invited you for dinner."

Well, my jaw dropped, and then laughter, everybody,

it was a joke, they were having me on.

Oh, and the rest of the evening was just fun and wonderful,

and I felt totally part of the family.

Oh, wow.

It was at that point that Professor Tuyn said to me, you know, if you want a career

in English, English as a second language, is something that is brand new to Canada.

And it really was true, we didn't even have English as a second language on campus,

we had some international students, but not very many.

I think most of them were grad students.

And then Harry Tuyn said to me, well you know,

I teach a conversation class for staff members on campus.

It's something the Dean of Arts pays me $200 to do as a side thing.

He said, if you wanted to take half of that class, I could teach you how

to approach second language teaching.

So, of course, you're going to have to get better at grammar because one course,

even if it was a year course, is not enough to be better at grammar.

So, that's what I did starting in ‘72, I worked with him.

He was amazing, and helpful, and he was such a wonderful mentor.

I was really lucky.

Meanwhile, on campus, I decided in my third year, yes,

drama I loved, but my future was in teaching.

And so I asked the English Department if I could switch into English, but I had only two courses

at that point, and usually it's your second year where you start getting involved in your major.

So I was going to end up having to take essentially two full years of English courses

if I wanted to graduate with a BA in English.

I thought, okay, well, I like English.

And Harry Tuyn has a number of courses I can take including some senior English

grammar courses.

And then there's linguistics, of course, and I was interested in that.

So I went wholeheartedly into English and specialized starting in year, basically year three.

Professors who were very important to me there,

Neil Hultin taught Linguistics he also taught Folklore,

and that was an amazing course as well.

And then Harry Logan who is Grace Logan's husband was a linguistics professor at Waterloo.

And I loved the courses he taught.

He was really thorough and he taught me how to parse sentences to the nth degree,

and parse parts of sentences, and parse parts of words.

And all of that was really helpful in teaching English.

And English as a second language, I would imagine, as well.

That's right.

That's right.

The more words, the more complicated the meaning.

That's right, and understanding all of where it comes from, and the logic of it.

And we even played around a little bit with phonics,

and phonemes and things like that as well.

So that all really made sense when I started grad school here.

Okay. And I had read that you had potentially considered working for the federal government,

but then, you decided to pursue.

Well, I hate to say that in 1973, the very best job for a summer student was working

for national revenue because the job started on the 1st of May and it kind

of petered out by the end of august.

So, how good was that.

Plus it paid government wages, and I was fortunate because I was bilingual.

And they also had some kind of skills test which was very much like all those IQ tests I'd done

when I was a kid, and so I've had no trouble with those.

And they offered me a position starting at $2.27 cents an hour when minimum wage was way less.

And within a month and a half, I was up to $5.25 cents an hour,

which was unheard of money for a student.

I was -- I spent a lot of it [laughing] that summer.

But I still had enough to pay my tuition for the last year I was to be at school.

And I was set to go back the following year when I finished my fourth year.

And I actually at that point thought I was going to graduate,

and go on to teachers college, that was the kind of goal.

Having worked again for national revenue, they had asked me at the end of my first time there,

at the end of my third year, they said we'd love to have you work full time.

I said, but I haven't finished my degree yet.

I'd like to do that first.

And so they understood, of course, they were very understanding.

They said well, you come back next May, and then you can have this job.

Well, by next May, I'd met my husband, and he had convinced me to do a master's degree here

because he was doing a master's degree.

And, yeah, that was okay.

I phoned Ottawa and said forget it.

I'm staying in Waterloo, and I Actually never left Waterloo after that.

I applied for grad school, was accepted.

Harry Tuyn and Harry Logan both wrote me really lovely letters,

and then there was the question of a TA.

Well, the awkward thing that happened when I came for orientation

as a grad student was I hadn't taken enough courses to graduate with my BA.

Oh.

Who knew, right, I didn't go asking advisors stuff,

which is funny because when I eventually became an advisor of students,

I was always hugely careful to make sure they had everything they needed to graduate.

All the requirements.

But there was no problem because I was already registered,

and taking Harry Tuyn's special fourth year grammar course which was the icing on the cake.

And they said, oh yeah well, you can take that course.

And you take that course, and you can graduate in '75, which was fine, okay.

But then there was this question of do I get a TA or not.

Fortunately, that was the beginning of the English 109 writing courses.

Mary Gerhardstein and Ken Ledbetter, together, were developing a program first of its kind

on campus to teach students how to write which was a really good idea.

And so I was one of the first of the cohort of teaching assistants assigned

to helping students practice their writing.

So, as a grad student I think this may still be true,

you're supposed to work 10 hours a week maximum -- 25 hours a week.

But 25 hours a week because you were planning, and preparing, and it took like 10 hours

to prepare for a half hour class, for heaven's sake, because you wanted to be ready

to answer any question that ever came up.

My grammar background really helped because I was able to tell students how to punctuate,

and help them understand how sentence variety really made a difference.

I had taken a course from Ken Ledbetter in my fourth year.

Actually, it was a grad course in the summer.

But we had to write essays and, of course, I could write essays quite well.

I had always been able to write well.

And I got a good grade on the paper, but Ken had written at the bottom,

"You really need to learn to punctuate."

I'm sorry?

I'm in Honours English, I know how to punctuate.

And then I read up on it and realized I didn't have a clue what punctuation was.

And it's a very structured kind of exercise, if you understand, if you understand the exercise,

and what punctuation really is supposed to do.

So that was another one of those oh, my goodness, my dear,

you really don't know what you're talking about, that helped me a lot.

Good potential for a learning opportunity.

Well, after one term of English 109 Mary Gerhardstein said we've got these international

students and they're really struggling in this course.

We really need to do an English 109.

For the time period, the Z designation I guess was okay.

So we had English 109 section Z, that was for international students.

And because I had the experience with Harry Tuyn,

I was invited to actually teach this course while I was doing my masters,

officially, by this point.

And I loved it.

It was just really fun to do.

And the students really enjoyed it.

And I loved knowing what I was doing most of the time.

And, again, it was a lot of hours, right?

Because well, we had textbooks, thank goodness,

I had the textbook Harry Tuyn had used which was a British textbook.

We didn't have any North American textbooks at the time at all.

And, I really depended on a few of the language textbooks that I had been working

with to organize and present classes.

But by the time I had finished my MA, I was working on an – an MPHIL [inaudible] at the time,

and thinking about going to grad school.

But there was no place in Canada to do a PhD in that.

Oh, interesting.

I was going to have to go to the States.

And I mean I was married.

By that point, you were married?

Yeah, I was not going to the states for a couple of years to get a PhD.

And nobody was asking me for one.

In fact, mostly, there were people on campus, a lot of people who were distinguished teachers

who didn't have a PhD because in those days, you didn't have to have it as long

as you were considered an expert in your field.

And at this point, I have been kind of designated an expert.

Prentice Hall asked me in the 80s to do a textbook for English language teaching

because we had the Vietnamese refugees the boat people in the end of the 70s,

and all of a sudden, everybody was paying attention

to English as a Second Language Teaching.

We started the first association of English language teachers in this area, was 1979,

and we had to have 25 people sign up to be an affiliate of the Teachers of English

as a Second Language Association of Ontario, TESL Ontario.

And we had most of those people come right out of the writing clinic --

we called it the clinic in those days -- but the writing clinic where I had been working

as an advisor for English as a Second Language.

I got my MA in '77 and was supposed to go then to teachers college in Toronto,

so I could teach ESL in high school,

and I taught at the University of Toronto for the summer.

And the supervisor there said, "Why are you going to teach English as a Second Language

at the high school level, when you've been teaching at university?"

I said, "Well, I don't know."

And so I thought well, okay, I'll think about it.

At that point, Ken Ledbetter offered me this position once a week on Fridays to come down --

because we were living in Toronto, my husband was doing his PhD at U of T --

come down once a week on Fridays, and help the writing clinic staff understand English

as a Second Language Teaching.

So I was delighted to say okay, I'll do that.

I found myself teaching a stint at the DeVry Institute of Technology teaching every morning

from eight to nine writing to people who wanted to be engineers -- more technical engineers.

And then suddenly in September my very dear professor Harry Tuyn had a stroke.

Third week of September 1977.

And Susan Bryant who had been working at the writing clinic, but whose husband taught

at Renison had said, Well you know, Judi can teach that course.

She's taught it before.

And so they asked me if I would be willing to fill in for Harry Tuyn while he recovered.

And the classes were at 10:30 Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:30 to, I guess,

10:30 to noon. Well I taught in Toronto until 9:00.

And I got in my little Volkswagen Beetle and beetled down the 401 Tuesdays and Thursdays.

To teach the course.

I was never late, which my husband says I have a heavy foot,

and I expect that's probably true.

But so I taught at Renison starting officially in '77.

And then Harry never was able to teach again.

So, I just kept teaching at Renison.

They expanded the number of courses they offered, and it was perfect,

because I was teaching part-time, because I was now the writing clinic manager on campus.

And that was a 20-hour a week stint and I fit in my teaching at Renison around that.

No children, so lots of time to do whatever I needed to do to be ready for both those.

And I started teaching at Wilfrid Laurier part-time as well,

because we were we had bought a home that we wanted to buy, move up, and we did that.

In 1981, we bought a house out in St Clements, really great house.

It was, are you ready for how much it was -- [Chuckle] $48.000.

Oh, my goodness.

But that was 1981.

We just paid a cash to mortgage, and just assumed it.

And then in November that year, we had to remortgage.

Right.

1981. Yes, 21 and 3/4 percent interest.

I mean people walked away from their houses.

Lots of people did.

But my husband and I just took on extra teaching [chuckle].

I was teaching four nights a week which I can't imagine, but still no kids.

So --

But still that's heavy.

It was a heavy load.

But my husband was teaching at Laurier.

And at that time Laurier was trying to develop an English as a Second Language program, too.

So they offered me there the opportunity to develop a summer program.

And so I developed a summer program for Laurier, where they would invite people from out

of the country to Laurier for the summer.

We had a six-week program.

It ran only two years because it wasn't a money maker.

And it wasn't a money maker because you have to pay people salaries,

and you have to do everything right.

At least, nobody had realized how much it could possibly cost to run something like that.

Well, it was so new.

It was so new.

Exactly. And meanwhile in 1982, I had my first child.

And I really, I just didn't have the energy or the time to devote to that kind of program.

And without a leader who was doing things on the cheap,

because I wasn't taking a huge salary for it, that just died.

And that was okay.

I had my teaching job at Renison, and I'd given up the Writing Centre by that point

because I mean there's only so much time in a day.

And I had signed the contract with Prentice Hall to do the book, to do the book.

So I did that from '82 to '86.

It took me four years to put it all together.

And Prentice Hall published English Made Easy in 1987.

And that was your first book?

That was my first book.

Yeah, not the last.

Not the last.

I'd love to go back a little bit just to know your thoughts on what the University

of Waterloo was like when you were here as a student.

Was it as muddy as they talk about in the early days, or by that point, the university was quite big?

But the mud and dreams was over by the time I got here.

The dreams were really very much there. The Faculty of Arts was a solid faculty.

Really good instructors, good people, lovely people, really open.

The best part for me was the fact that there was a Dean of Women.

In those days we needed a Dean of Women, and there was an associate dean of women Issy [Isobel] Mackay

who also spent her career at Waterloo,

and we were on committees together way back in the beginning of the 2000s.

She had a 15 minute interview with every single first year student female on campus.

Every single student.

It was and I remember her 15 minutes with me.

I've never forgot she was so interested in what I was hoping to do at Waterloo

and what Waterloo could do to make things wonderful for me.

I mean we do that now as a matter of course, but in those days, people just didn't do that.

You went to university, and you sucked up whatever kind

of awful experiences you might have.

And there were Dons in Residence and I became a Don for two years,

in the last two years of my bachelor's degree.

But in those days too, you know, one of the pieces of advice -- I have to say this --

I think one of the pieces of advice we gave to students was which professors you didn't want

to have classes with because they were a little too --

they were prone to taking advantage of students --

I mean we kind of understood that what the world was like.

And look at the world now.

I'm thrilled to see the progress.

And you can actually really see -- there hasn't been enough progress for a lot of people.

But the progress from for 50 years I think is still amazing, really.

We don't think about where we came from to today.

Because where we came from, you had to allow guys

to be jerks especially if everybody had been drinking.

I mean it was just, that's what the world was like.

That was the expectation, yes.

So when -- yes.

But so the women took kind of care of each other by the time, would watch out for --

We absolutely -- and that was what the female Dons did, is we took care of the 48 kids

on our floor, and we made sure that things, bad things didn't happen to them.

Or if they did, we knew what to do.

Yeah, that was really important, and that was kind of a mentoring thing, too.

Because you're a third or fourth year student, and you have first and second year students.

We didn't know anything in first year, we thought we were so smart.

So grown up.

So grown up.

So much freedom.

Oh I have a 13-year-old granddaughter.

And I look at her, and I think oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Everything feels like the beginning of knowing so much more, right, when you're 13,

you think you have the world kind of at your fingertips,

and you don't know what you don't know until you know it.

And actually, in my thirties, I thought I knew pretty much everything.

I really did.

I remember doing a workshop with Issy for mature students, because we had a category

in those days of people defined as mature students who hadn't gone to university

at the 18-year-old stage, but were coming to it in their 30s and 40s.

We ran a six-week workshop which introduced them to what it was like to be in a class.

I was the professor responsible for teaching how to write a short essay.

Geoff Hayes who is a history faculty member in history here even now was a beginner

at that time, and he gave a lecture.

I had given a workshop on taking notes, so that they knew how to take notes in the lecture.

Then they wrote an essay based on the lecture and then we marked it.

And, of course, it was all to be very encouraging and to assure people

that there were people who would help if they ran into trouble.

That was Issy was the director of mature students services, and she was she was amazing.

She was amazing.

And it sounds like she was ahead of her time in the way she approached --

Oh, that was the thing I loved about Waterloo is that well,

certainly from my parents, who were at Queens.

None of that was happening at Queens.

And friends of ours at Wilfrid Laurier -- well, Wilfrid Laurier which was Waterloo Lutheran

until 1973, I had visited there because I'd actually loved Waterloo when I came,

and I thought well, maybe if Waterloo doesn't take me,

maybe Laurier or Waterloo Lutheran will.

And I thought oh no, this is just like boarding school.

I'm graduating from boarding school, I'm going to Waterloo because it was very modern.

And the wonderful thing about my English degree was that it wasn't a traditional English degree.

A traditional English degree is an English literature degree.

And with Harry Logan as my sort of mentor to do my BA, well he helped Gordon Slethaug,

who's still a member of faculty here,

Gordon Slethaug was director of grad studies at that time.

And I had really wanted to do language.

They didn't have rhetoric and professional writing in those days either.

But they worked it out so that I was going to be able to do language-oriented papers

in response to the courses I was taking.

And it was just it was tailor made.

It was tailor made for me.

I mean it.

What's not to love, right.

That flexibility to pursue what you were passionate about.

That's right.

But they still didn't let me get my BA until I had my 20 courses.

Oh my goodness.

Do you remember what your favourite course was when you were in your graduate studies?

Well, the graduate linguistics course with Harry was really lots of fun.

But I really enjoyed a Canadian course that I took with Stan McMullen

because he had allowed me to do a comparative analysis

of Marie-Claire Blais comparing the English and the English translation of the French original.

And I did it line by line, and it was an incredible difference

that I realized you can't get the subtleties of French, not the language so much,

but the subtleties of the culture just don't translate the same way.

And it was it was a real eye opener, so that was wonderful.

I love the work I did for what turned out to be -- well, it was called a cognate essay.

But it was a 250-page essentially a thesis, nowadays. yes where I analysed 10.000 words

of running pros from the Brown Corpus -- now computers were just getting to be exciting.

You could have a corpus of text made available to you, and so I did an analysis

of 10 different styles of writing, and it was just, it was super eye-opening I loved it.

It was just great to do that kind of work, and I put the Beatles White Album

on in the background, and just analysed away every night.

Focussed [chuckle].

But it wasn't all work like that

as a grad student I had organized poetry readings on campus.

And we and because I really enjoyed Canadian studies, and we had Irving Layton.

I drove Irving Layton down in my Volkswagen Beetle from Toronto

so he could give a poetry reading.

And John Newlove.

Joe Rosenblatt, you know Governor General's Award Winner, came to Waterloo.

And, of course, they didn't have huge crowds.

They had people in attendance but it was just utterly wonderful to have that experience,

and they were so generous with their time too.

It was just, and I don't think we paid them very much.

An honorarium, barely.

I really think it was dinner.

Yes, dinner and a drink.

Yeah [chuckle].

So did you feel this sense of a small community and a close knit community?

Absolutely, in a context where math and engineering were big deals,

one of the selling points for Waterloo for me had been

that on campus you had two women for every seven men.

So, when you're 18, you say oh, I could probably meet my husband here.

And of course, engineers were everywhere, because --

in fact when I was in first year, I loved playing football.

I loved the fact that we had flag football for women on campus.

My floor won two, two cups, two trophies over the four years I played.

And I met my first boyfriend on campus in a football game, we were playing football.

That was my favourite sport.

And so we got to be good friends -- three or four girls, and this floor of guys.

It was North E, in what was called Village 2.

Ron Eydt was the Warden, Mike Vatcher was our tutor, and we played bridge together.

I loved playing bridge, played bridge probably more

than I should, but I kept up with my papers.

But we also played Jeopardy.

Jeopardy was at 12:30 Monday to Friday.

Art Fleming was the host, and the entire room was packed with people playing Jeopardy,

and we all shouted out the answers.

And in second year, we picked our courses, so that we could have

that 12:30 slot available so we could play Jeopardy.

The poor professor who had their class scheduled --

Right, well.

We were a bunch of students from all over.

So I don't think anybody had empty seats.

But, Jeopardy and bridge those were, and football were my big things.

Really a sense of community that you felt here.

Absolutely.

So Village 2 at the time, Ron Eydt Village now.

Village 2, the floors were very close, and we did all sorts of things.

Renison was a close community too.

My best friend in third year was a Don at Renison, and I got to know sort of the community

of Renison, not only because of Harry Tuyn, but because of her.

I remember going bowling with a bunch of floor kids and being a lousy bowler.

I just never bowled again [laughing].

I did want to speak to you about the changes that you saw at Renison, because, as you said,

you've been so you were at the school for a while.

And for 45 years you taught at Renison University College.

Yes.

What were your initial impressions, I guess, when you joined Renison?

Well, when you talk about a sense of community, it was a community.

The principal, when I was hired in 1977, was brand new.

He was Ian Campbell came from Concordia University, he was the Dean of Arts there.

And Renison had undergone some issues with staffing, and he was bound and determined

to bring everybody together as a community.

And so probably in October, and I'd been teaching there three weeks,

he had a faculty dinner that was a formal sit down a good old British dinner

with enough cutlery to boggle the mind, and all sorts of different glasses,

because there was sherry, and there was wine.

And it was an amazing feast.

And we all sat together in a u-shaped arrangement in the dining hall

at Renison, and got to know each other.

And I still have, I mean I still have my best friends are from those very days like from '77.

The Bryants were there, Michael Smyth who I replaced as administrative dean back in 2008.

He was there.

Michael Bird, the former Principal Donald G. M'Timkulu.

We all got to know each other really, really well.

And we were small enough faculty that Ian had parties regularly.

And we were all really a big happy family

which is what Renison still is except it's so much bigger.

It's so much bigger.

The English Language Institute, which I founded,

is now bigger than Renison was when I in the 70s.

Can you talk about the founding of the institute, and the background to it, please?

So Gail Cuthbert Brandt became Principal of Renison in 1992,

and that was her, it was really her dream.

Ian Campbell had been our principal for 15 years.

And when he retired, he had been talking to people about establishing an English language,

because we had the only English language program on campus.

Students went to Conestoga College college for spoken English,

but the writing was all done by us when they got here.

So at any rate, because of our expertise in writing, Gail said well,

there are people who've got expertise in teaching and speaking.

Let's see if we can't develop a program.

Well, the first year the English Language Institute started was 1994.

There were four students who doctoral students in Optometry actually, I believe.

And one instructor who was an expert in writing, and arranged activities

for them sort of around the classes.

But it was really that was a pilot project.

I had been I was on sabbatical.

Well, my husband's sabbatical.

I was on a leave in '94 because that was when we went to Paris and studied with Samuel Beckett.

But when I got back, Gail said I'd really like to see this get off the ground.

Let's try for something for next year.

So, together with John Vardon who was the original instructor,

we put together a program for 1995, there were 11 students.

It was more writing than speaking and the students got a lot out of it

because they were intending to go to university.

But it wasn't fun.

Well it was -- sorry, it was fun, but it was -- it wasn't.

It was tedious?

It wasn't fun.

There weren't great wonderful activities around it.

But that year a woman walked into my office and said I'm doing my teaching degree at Brock.

And I really would like you to be my mentor, and I was teaching writing at the time.

I said well, I don't even know if I teach enough courses for you to be you know, to count.

I said but, oh why not?

And I thought this is my opportunity to be a mentor,

just as Harry Tuyn had been a mentor for me.

Her name is Tanya Missere Mihas.

She's the Vice President of Community Education at Renison now.

She's wonderful, she was wonderful.

She walked in, and I thought wow, you're wonderful.

Why don't you and I do this course?

We'll do this summer program.

She wasn't married at the time, didn't have children, obviously, yet.

I had two kids but they were 14, and 12, or 13 and 11, something like that.

So they became the summer help, right, and we had 11 kids in the program.

And we did a whole weekend activities.

We did five hours of classes during the day, we had evening programs.

And we, I mean it was all purely volunteer on most of our parts.

We got paid but not for you know, 20 hours a day.

Because that's kind of what it took to put the whole thing together.

But by the time we did that, by the time we got to 1997,

all of a sudden we were getting 40 students in the summer program, and it was a success.

So we went from four students to 11 students, and then another 11 students, and then 25,

and then 40, and then it we never stopped.

Off and running.

And Gail was totally supportive all along.

She did absolutely everything I asked her to do to make it happen.

And, yeah, now we have the English Language Institute at Renison

which does the English language training for the whole university, for everybody.

That's amazing.

And yeah, and it started with four students.

And your children [chuckle].

And well, actually, my older daughter was a program assistant once we had a lot of students,

she was a Don in residence for the summer.

And she eventually went to university and became a public school teacher.

Didn't last long, because she met a wonderful man who she married, and she has four children,

and she writes in her spare time, when she has spare time.

But I have great souvenir scrapbooks from those days when we had this program.

And my younger daughter, Danielle, taught me a fabulous lesson when she was 12.

And I was I think asking her why she was totally capable of speaking proper English at home.

But that when I heard her with her friends she would say stuff like, "I shoulda went."

I'm saying, "How is that?"

And she said, "Well, I speak two languages, mom.

Mom talk and kid talk."

And I thought, "Oh, she's absolutely right.

Where did I get off of thinking you were supposed to speak an academic kind

of English just because we're an academic kind of family, right?

As a preteen.

Absolutely.

It was totally, well, she told me off [laughing].

And she is now working for the Government of Ontario working on Elections Ontario.

And she uses both her English and her French because our kids grew up bilingual.

Yes, that's a great advantage.

It was.

It is, it still is.

So, my message to anybody who has an opportunity to have kids growing

up bilingual, not to shut any doors.

Because you know, in 1995, when we had the referendum,

I took my kids to see what voting was like.

And in the voting booth I had them read the questions with me in English and French.

And in English, I voted one way, and in French, I voted the other.

It was just totally amazing because of the way it was put.

And the French one said, "Do you accept or maybe the English one said, well,

one of them said, "Do you accept X, Y and Z?"

The other one said do you agree?

And of course I can accept things that I don't necessarily agree with for the good

of whatever, and that was a huge shock.

So, yeah.

Well, that was very fascinating.

I'd love to know the big changes that you saw at Renison during your time there?

So from a faculty that was very small, I think 11 people in total at the beginning,

it's now a college full of departments.

There's the Department of Culture and Language Studies,

the Department of Social Development Studies.

There's the School of Social Work.

But there's also the English Language Institute which is its own institute.

And so it's just grown [chuckle] which means which means you don't have the closeness

that you're able to have -- for all the time that Ian Campbell was there,

the turnover was, there wasn't turnover.

People started at Renison and stayed there until they retired,

which is essentially I guess what I did.

And there are still colleagues of mine who are there, who've been there since the 90s.

And but of course all sorts of new people, too.

And they fit in in a beautiful way.

Founder's Day at Renison are enormous affairs now.

Ian Campbell started Founder's Day back in the 80s, I think, or late 70s, early 80s.

And you went because, gosh, if you didn't go [chuckle] the place was empty.

Whereas now, it's huge.

Oh, that's amazing.

And would you say the student body changed?

Were they -- the typical student in the early days as compared to today?

Well, okay.

So 60s and 70s, we were, I remember going to classes barefoot.

And we smoked in class, for heaven's sake up until --

whew, you smoked in class for the whole 70s, for sure.

People would say ooh, it's yucky, but everybody smoked.

There were some radicals in the mid-70s, I mean we're all you know --

Experimenting.

Well, when you're in your twenties, you think you can change the world.

Little steps, right?

But we were out there demonstrating [chuckle].

But students still wanted to have successful careers.

Originally university wasn't supposed to get you a career.

It was supposed to expand your horizons and make you a smart,

wonderful person who would be a member of a community.

But the goal was not to get you a job, although co-op was certainly for people who had,

I mean co-op, wasn't there for art students.

I was going to ask you for Renison co-op.

And not until the 80s, did we start talking, there was a program here called Applied Arts.

I can't remember quite what it was.

It was the precursor for the Arts and Business program, and that was unusual

for arts programs anywhere, because art students didn't have co-op.

And you could take this program and you could have a co-op component to your arts degree,

which was also -- I know it's a cliche to say Waterloo is innovative.

I mean we've been being innovative for an awfully long time.

But we really are.

The thing for me, Waterloo is always at the front edge of new things, and trying new things.

And people worked hard together to make those new things work.

And, for example, Peter Swan and the East Asian Studies program at Renison.

That began at the end of the 80s, and it was a brand new thing for us.

The people who taught Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are still friends today.

And it was that kind of a family climate.

You were constructing something good and new for everybody.

Building something new together.

Yes.

Awesome.

Oh, I love that.

I love that because there's an energy behind that, when you're working

with people on something new or something.

I do think innovative is the right word, it's cliche for a reason [chuckle].

Well, that's right.

We know what cliches are.

Cliches are things that have been said over, and over, and over, and over, and over.

But the fact is that Waterloo does keep reinventing itself.

And so, therefore, I mean, okay, find a different word,

but innovative does make good sense that way.

Yes. If you were to think of another word what would that word be?

Ooh.

I know, I'm putting you on the spot.

That is really on the spot.

I have not given that any thought.

Responsive is a good word.

And responsible.

The two together, I think.

But that doesn't include the innovation, and the creativity, and the and the energy.

Because yeah there's a lot of energy.

One of the things I have to say I regret about nowadays is that when we were a young faculty,

we really believed that there was never a clock on us.

I mean that was the 25 hours a week when you were supposed to be working 10.

Well, you had 10 hours maybe in the classroom, but how did you get there?

You never put a clock on it.

Just as when you write a book, you don't sit there and say well,

I'm only going to spend a hundred hours on this thing, and then it's done.

No. You put in what you need to do to make it work, and that was the founders

of the university, and the founders of the colleges, the initial faculty members were

in it together, and totally enthusiastic about building something that students would love.

It's still true today that students are very happy, generally speaking, certainly at Renison.

I can't speak for the students across campus.

But certainly the ones I had in my classes were always very happy to be listened to

and to be welcomed into your office, even though they didn't go to office hours very much.

But if they ever needed somebody, they knew where to go,

and I think that spirit is still part of it, too.

It's still there.

When I was working for the provost, I really got to know the other faculties,

because I was responsible for English competency around the campus.

And there were pilot projects in every faculty.

Mostly it started with the associate deans.

And I knew the associate deans from my stint at Renison, in the dean's office, they were all,

to a person, totally committed to this university.

That's what I really loved, and senior management too.

The associate provost, the academic vice president --

everybody really, really cared what happened.

And so, and I have to mention also the Centre

for Teaching Excellence is an amazing unit on campus.

It started as TRACE way back when I was in the Writing Centre.

TRACE was Teaching Resources and Continuing Education --

everything jammed into one unit, tiny unit.

Now look at continuing education, and look at --

Yes, it's grown.

-- Distance education, and all of that.

But all across campus people cared about what the students came away with,

that they were well prepared for the future, really.

And people accepted, in the 21st century, people began to accept it,

you don't stop learning to write when you graduate from high school

because really you are writing all your life.

So having support for that is vital. When the writing centre here on campus began to go

out to students instead of having an exam which forced students to come to them.

It made all the difference for everybody.

Can you say how?

Well, one of the things, of course, was that Waterloo really believed

that the English Language Proficiency program, or exam, the exam --

let's talk about the exam for a bit -- worked.

Because it identified students who are weak.

Okay, yes it did do that.

And in engineering, the correlation between students who are weak in writing and students

who are weak in engineering was incredible.

But it wasn't, it wasn't that, it was just these students were weak.

And writing an exam to single them out, especially in orientation week,

which is supposed to, which was a lot of fun for a lot of students,

and then wake up on Wednesday morning and go and sit in the pack and write an exam, you say whoa,

what kind of message are we sending there?

And so when we started talking about it among ourselves, and, specifically,

because of the Gordon Stubley Language Competency Committee Report,

people said, yeah, there's a better way.

And when you look around, you say,

other universities didn't have exams, do we really need an exam?

Couldn't we take a look at building communication

into courses throughout from first to fourth year?

Why not? And when we said why not?

We said well, yeah, of course we can.

So we created these pilot projects in math, for example.

You say, "Math?

There's writing in math?

But they had an introductory accounting course, that was a perfect fit for a writing component.

And we had students write, and we helped them with the writing.

And they were better

at the end, and we could point measurably to improvement.

And in engineering the same thing.

In fact, across all the faculties.

And now we've got really good communication programs everywhere, and everybody acts, as if,

oh yeah, this is perfectly normal.

Yes.

And it is.

And we're glad to see it.

How do you think the need was identified?

So, basically, there was a lot of grumbling about the English Language Proficiency Exam.

But more importantly, the Writing Centre, wasn't able to accommodate lots of people

because there were all these students who'd failed the exam who had to go.

We were very pleased to get support for grad students who never wrote an exam

but grad students were welcomed into the Writing Centre at the beginning of the 21st century.

In fact, we developed an entire program for grad students starting in 2003,

because otherwise it was okay, well you're here, good luck [laughing].

And then why not help them with speaking, and writing, and presentation skills?

We were hearing a lot of grumbling about even faculty members who couldn't speak English well enough

as people said, couldn't speak English well enough to make themselves understood in class

and a lot of complaining about that.

That's fair enough.

If you can't understand your instructor, well, what are you going to do?

So we began to look at ways of helping them.

Now we back in the 70s, when I was a grad student, we had a program for grad students,

we had volunteer tutors, volunteer tutors who were grad students

who spoke English as a first language.

And we paired them up with students who were from all over,

and that was really a wonderful help for them.

The international student office took that over, and began offering tutoring

and conversation partners way back in the 80s, early 80s.

Yeah, that developed out of the grad student program.

But there wasn't anything specific for grad students in terms of presentation skills,

and so on until the beginning of the 2000s.

We did that as a kind of a practice, well, pilot project.

The dean of grad studies was very helpful, and paid for all of that to happen,

and then in 19 -- not 19, in 2006, we did a study to see whether there was improvement

of abilities across campus -- perceived abilities.

Perceived abilities.