Another break in "the cloud"...
Feb. 24th, 2009 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpIn between pages of work, I decided to once more unlimber the old search-fu and see if I couldn't find out whatever happened to the professor who was Chairman of the Slavic and Germanic Languages Department at SUNY Stony Brook back when I was an undergraduate (superseniors are undergraduates, right?)
I had never had any luck in previous essays, and I had forgotten how relatively common his name was, so with a sense of déjà vu, I added "Slavic" to the search string, because of his academic title and the fact that he had created a Slavic Cultural Center in Port Jefferson, not far from the campus. This time, my search hit the nail squarely on the head. There was my guy, up there at the top of the search results page.
The only problem is, it was an obituary, which is probably why the search worked this time.
Ed Czerwinski had a reputation at Stony Brook for giving just about everyone who enrolled for his classes an A grade. It was rumored that students who never showed up and never handed in any work got Bs. So, the six-credit Intensive Elementary Russian course he was teaching during the second half of my junior year was just the thing for me, an engineering major, who needed 6 credits of humanities to satisfy a graduation requirement.
The rumors about Ed's grading turned out to be overly optimistic. By week 3 of his course, I had pretty much stopped going to class, so as to concentrate on the important things in my academic life, like electrical science, fluid dynamics, and lab.
That week, he somehow managed to buttonhole me in the library. He told me that, in his opinion, having me in his class was an inspiration to the other students, and that my absence was having a deleterious effect on the group. Further, while he normally didn't care about who attended or did not attend his class and wasn't a big fan of the grading system, he so much as threatened me with a C if I didn't straighten up.
I straightened up.
I will probably have more to say soon about Ed Czerwinski, who died at the age of 75 a little over four years ago, on February 16, in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Cheers...
I had never had any luck in previous essays, and I had forgotten how relatively common his name was, so with a sense of déjà vu, I added "Slavic" to the search string, because of his academic title and the fact that he had created a Slavic Cultural Center in Port Jefferson, not far from the campus. This time, my search hit the nail squarely on the head. There was my guy, up there at the top of the search results page.
The only problem is, it was an obituary, which is probably why the search worked this time.
Ed Czerwinski had a reputation at Stony Brook for giving just about everyone who enrolled for his classes an A grade. It was rumored that students who never showed up and never handed in any work got Bs. So, the six-credit Intensive Elementary Russian course he was teaching during the second half of my junior year was just the thing for me, an engineering major, who needed 6 credits of humanities to satisfy a graduation requirement.
The rumors about Ed's grading turned out to be overly optimistic. By week 3 of his course, I had pretty much stopped going to class, so as to concentrate on the important things in my academic life, like electrical science, fluid dynamics, and lab.
That week, he somehow managed to buttonhole me in the library. He told me that, in his opinion, having me in his class was an inspiration to the other students, and that my absence was having a deleterious effect on the group. Further, while he normally didn't care about who attended or did not attend his class and wasn't a big fan of the grading system, he so much as threatened me with a C if I didn't straighten up.
I straightened up.
I will probably have more to say soon about Ed Czerwinski, who died at the age of 75 a little over four years ago, on February 16, in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Cheers...
