William Larsen, a distinguished lecturer in English, still remembers the first paper he ever marked up as a teacher.
It was a test in his second period social studies class in the New York City high school where he began his career. Larsen marked up the paper the same way he does now, with color coded comments that fill up the margins and with detailed feedback in every blank space.
“I saw one person look at the grade, and then throw it in the garbage,” Larsen said. “I was heartbroken, and I was angry. I picked it out and I saw one of the people leaving and I asked them if they knew Debbie Williams. They said yes and I told them to tell her to read it and then she can throw it away.”
After 46 years of teaching, not much has changed in how Larsen runs a class and in what he expects from his students. Since he made the shift from high school teaching to university lecturing in 1990 when he entered as a Ph.D. student, Larsen has stuck to the same basic principles of how to run a class.
“The people who I had as teachers, who were the teachers that I liked the best and learned the most from, are the same people who made me work the hardest,” Larsen said. “My 5th grade teacher Mrs. Stein. She made you work hard, but you had fun.”
Larsen knows that he has a campus reputation of being the New Yorker, but instead of taking it as a negative, Larsen decided to embrace this persona.
“When I first came here, I had to decide. I have a pretty good ear, so I could have lost the accent on purpose,” Larsen said. “But I realized, no, this is part of the cache that I’ve got. I’ll be the New Yorker.”
The “New Yorker” has built a larger than life reputation for himself; there is even a student-created Facebook fan club devoted to his quirky habits.
“I first met Dr. Larsen in his screenplay writing class in the fall of 2014, and he terrified me,” Katherine Christian, senior in English, recalled.
Although Christian admitted she went in expecting the worst, about a week into the class, she decided it was one of the best classes she had taken at UT.
Larsen has a lecture style that involves a lot of energetic, high volume discussion and outbursts, but Christian said this is just part of his charm.
“It doesn’t really feel like he’s lecturing,” Christian explained. “It feels more like he’s having a conversation with you.”
While his gruff persona is slightly unintentional, the personal connection that Larsen puts into teaching is not.
As a distinguished lecturer, Larsen is not a professor on the tenure track — so unlike professors who split their time between teaching and publishing, Larsen is hired fully to teach.
Lecturers are given four classes to be full-time, compared to professors’ two classes. Despite this heavy workload, Larsen said he enjoys making contact with as many students as possible.
Although teaching wasn’t always his professional ambition, Larsen said he found a passion for it during his undergraduate education in political science at Notre Dame. Instead of graduating when he was supposed to, he got into the secondary education program and signed up to be a student teacher to stay longer and take more classes.
“I was going to go to law school, but I was burnt out as a student. I was tired of classes, so I thought, ‘Alright, I’ll teach for a few years.’ As I used to say to classes, ‘I’m still waiting to figure out what I want to do when I grow up,’” Larsen said.
After a few years of teaching social studies at New York high schools, Larsen went on to get his masters in English, both to be a certified teacher in two areas and as an opportunity to pursue his lifelong passion for writing.
After 20 years of teaching in high school and two recommendations from college professors that he pursue a Ph.D., Larsen finally made the leap. He applied to 19 schools, and eight or nine offered money.
“Out of those, four gave me the most money: UT, Hawaii, Kansas and Purdue. So I called Hawaii first,” Larsen laughed.
The cost of living there proved infeasible, however, and Hawaii recommended he call Tennessee next. The people he spoke to on the phone for UT were so nice he never called the other schools. Without visiting the area once, Larsen signed on to the program and prepared to move.
Now it’s Larsen’s 26th year at UT, and he’s decided teaching is what he’s meant to do.
“I don’t know if I’m good at it or not,” Larsen admitted. “I have no idea. I can’t answer that. Students have to answer that. But it’s been fun.”
His main goal remains capturing students’ attention, and forcing them out of their academic comfort zone.
“I realize the thing is don’t put a grade on things; it’s discouraging enough to look at all the marks,” Larsen said. “People don’t want to write. They don’t like writing, and they want to get it over with as quickly as possible. Now more and more, it’s harder than ever because everyone texts and everything is short. It’s almost like the world is learning journalistic writing. ‘Bam, bam, boom, over.’ But that’s not academic writing; you have to explain.”
Whether it is a film class or a screenwriting class, Larsen said he wants students to find a connection with material without stressing over their GPA.
“What can you do to make things relevant to people?” Larsen asked. “Even when I’m teaching the film classes, it’s like okay we studied this thing, this thing and this history thing, but how can you hook this into your own life?”
Ultimately, the students themselves, outside of their abilities, remain Larsen’s biggest concern.
“Mostly I want them to find something where they can look in the mirror, and say ‘Hey I’m not as plain and ordinary as I thought I was,’” Larsen said. “That’s the one thing about being harder. People will tell you that ‘I’m glad you didn’t just say, ‘Oh this was nice.’ When you say it’s good. That must mean it’s good.’”
