2002 Glass-Kreuter Award Winner

Dr. Sharon Brown is winner of the 2002 Glass-Kreuter Great Teacher Award, which was presented by Associate Dean Marvin Glockner. Below is the text from his introduction.

Sharon Brown was figuratively born and raised or at the very least nurtured at Stony Brook. She earned a BA in English with honors in 1975, began the MA/LS and ultimately completed an MA in English in 1981 and a Ph.D. in English in 1990 with distinction. She has been the recipient of several scholarships, fellowships and awards. Her background includes editorial board membership on such journals as the North Atlantic Review as well as authorship of many articles and presentations at professional conferences. Sharon has taught in both public school and college settings including Polytechnic Institute, Dowling, Touro College, Old Westbury and Stony Brook. She has taught Survey of Poetry, Environmental Literature, Literature of Slavery, The American Family in Literature, Literary Analysis, Composition in the Core Humanities as well as Supervision of Student Teachers. Professor Brown has done some post-doctoral research on the effectiveness of methods used by student teachers in the teaching composition. However, Sharon's primary focus has been The American Literature of Travel, a study of the relationship between travel literature and 19th century American fiction. The resulting work has provided a fresh insight pertaining to novels by Melville, Howells, Twain, and James.

As dynamic as Professor Brown has been in the classroom, her entry into teaching via the Internet has been almost cataclysmic. Our Electronic Extension Program students love Sharon Brown. More than a few have majored in Brown taking every course she has offered. Professor Brown has also mentored students through the Project Seminar online. Her classes are constantly filled with additional students clamoring to be admitted beyond course capacity. Her love of the subject matter has had an almost hypnotic effect on her students. More than a few have mentioned to me that Dr. Brown's courses have influenced them to become teachers of English. It gives me great pleasure to present the Glass-Kreuter Great Teacher Award to Sharon Brown.

May 2002 Commencement Keynote Speech

Delivered by Professor Sharon Brown

Good morning. I am happy to be here with all of you.

The day before I was asked to deliver this speech, one of my students, Gina Sigismondi-Palasciano asked me whether I thought it would be worthwhile for her to attend the SPD convocation. Without hesitation I replied: "Yes! You'll love it. You'll get to come up on stage to receive your degree. And they have a delicious buffet afterward. And there's usually a great speaker whose words are engaging and heartfelt and brief enough to be appreciated." When I told her this, I had no idea that Dean Edelson was going to ask me to be the speaker! I never would have promised the great speaker part, Gina, if I'd known that! And, I'm not sure that I am going to be engaging, but I am speaking from my heart, and I will try to keep it brief.

I have been attending SPD ceremonies for about a decade, listening to the speakers, watching the graduates walk across the stage, lighthearted, glad to be done with their degree, filled with relief and joy! Every year an energy fills the room that I love sharing. I usually sit right there to get a good view of the bright smiles as the graduates return to their seats, and I feel a transfer of good feelings a sense of accomplishment. But this year, this time, instead of the view from the audience, I am honored to stand here looking out at the whole group of you, able to take in all of you at once, a meadow of faces glowing with fulfillment, all those caps and gowns symbolizing your hard work, the attainment of your goals. And the view is wonderful. You look great! And the family and friends some of you have brought with you look fabulous too! You should all give yourselves a round of applause!

When Gina asked me about today, she wanted to know if it would be "family-friendly." I guess I convinced her that it would be because she said she was going to take the day off and bring her kids, her parents and some friends too. She emailed: "I have been at this since my little one was one and a half and my son was 5. I have left them with a baby-sitter for many nights. I always told them that I was going to school. I often wondered if they thought I was going out dancing. I thought it would finally be nice for them to see that I really was doing something worthwhile."

I hope you don't mind my sharing this, Gina. I thought about making up something, but I couldn't replace your words, the real thing, with something contrived to show how I feel about all of you -- filled with respect for the work you've done and the sacrifices you've made to earn your degrees. Some of you took a course a semester, working for five or more years. Some of you raced like athletes through two or three semesters loaded with courses to complete the degree or certificate requirements in a year. Either way, you made sacrifices -- you spent time on campus listening to lectures, taking tests, doing research, preparing group presentations. You spent time at home reading textbooks, writing papers, studying for tests, researching on the Internet and, some of you, taking courses from home through the Electronic Extension. Many of you worried about the project seminar and ultimately found that you were able to accomplish more than you expected; you found that your abilities to gather information, organize your ideas and express yourself in writing were greater than you thought. When I teach project seminar, I often witness this kind of personal growth, and it fills me with satisfaction, knowing that I help my students complete what they set out to do. But I am only able to do this, to have this satisfaction, because you put the effort into it. You are a wonderful group, bringing strength, determination and intelligence to each class. You are a body of students willing to spend those evenings at school instead of "going out dancing," not to mention all the missed episodes of "Boston Public," or "Friends" or "The Osbournes" or the dinners or the bedtime stories that took place while you were sitting under fluorescent lights in classrooms or libraries, or trying to get work done at home while family and friends were beckoning.

If you were songwriters or artists, you'd play the song now, for your friends and family, or you'd show them the painting, and they'd know what you've been working on: a song composed note by note, a work of art, stroke by stroke, parts of it in collaboration, parts created in isolation, all applied toward the final goal of creating the work that would be recognized as yours. But it's harder to share what you've put into graduate work. Life is hectic, family and friends have the rush of the world to contend with, just like you do, and conversations about research you've done, papers you've written, teachers and fellow students you've met, don't get to happen the way you'd like them to. Things you want to share, discussions you want to have, somehow don't take place. We no longer bring our tests home to be signed, as we did when we were 14, and our husbands or wives, our parents, our friends, our children, it seems to us, sometimes have no idea how much we've put into it all.

But I want you to know, you are sharing with them what you've accomplished, and you are sharing it everyday, because whether you realize it or not, earning this degree has formed you into someone different, more professional, than you were when you started. I don't mean only that you are now able to pop M.A. or M.P.S. after your name. I am talking about how educated men different from uneducated men: "as the sculpture differs from the clay." This may seem a bit exaggerated to you, but in essence, in regard to one's self-image and sense of accomplishment, I agree. Our degrees offer us a definition of ourselves: professionals embracing a world of scholarship as opposed to being lost to its light. By coming through this program, you have expanded your base of knowledge, you have exercised your reasoning and analytical skills, you have increased your depth of understanding about many topics you probably never would have thought of exploring otherwise, you have sharpened your ability to communicate, and you have flexed those biceps of patience and responsibility by accepting and satisfying innumerable requirements for one teacher after another and those set forth by the department as a whole. All this has transformed you, strengthened you, improved you. So, simply by being yourself, the work you have done is evident to others everyday.

Some of you sit here with total satisfaction and the conviction to never take another course again. Others (probably only a few of you at this point) are already looking into further graduate study. And I can tell you from experience, having coming this far, you may find that you are hooked -- I know that many of you are teachers yourselves, but I predict that most of you will also find yourselves, over and over again, as students, because your desire to learn will not stop, the need to exchange ideas with peers, the pleasure of sharing knowledge -- these things bring brightness into our lives, encouragement, and a sense of community. I say that I speak from experience because, as Dr. Glockner noted, I began my graduate work in this department, way back when it was called CED, continuing education. I go that far back. In 1979 I got a B on my project seminar paper (back then they were graded). I'd written a very involved study of the Long Island aquifer system, and I was floored by the grade. It was the lowest grade I'd gotten in  a graduate class. I rebounded by going on in a doctoral program in American literature and never again wrote another science paper. But I kept reading about scientific topics, until I got to the point of planning a course called Environmental Literature, and it is now my favorite course to teach. And I think it all began with that project seminar!

You never know where the work you have been doing will lead you! The love of learning never stops, nor should it, as William Butler Yeats wrote: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." I wish every one of you the best, today and always, and hope you are all going forth from this graduation with that fire lit in you, ignited by sparks of knowledge, ablaze with the desire to keep the flame burning! Congratulations!

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