University Times

“Lots of visuals can trigger all kinds of writing,” says Pitt-Titusville’s Cindy Andes. And, if her premise is true, students in her English classes should spend little time staring at a blank sheet of composition paper.

The long-time assistant professor of English and humanities herself is a visual — on a recent summer afternoon a blast of chartreuse and electric blue, all the way up to the bright green hat covering her blonde hair.

“I’ve got that artist mindset,” she said. Her office, every bit as covered with creativity as she is, contains a conglomeration of books — from children’s stories to scholarly works; toys, posters, photographs, original artwork and many of the props and teaching materials she uses in her classes, scattered across nearly every flat surface in the room.

Once a college art major, Andes shifted to English “because the professors were more fun, more entertaining, than art professors at that time.” The small set of watercolor paints she carries in her purse bears witness that the visual arts remain close to her heart, should her attire alone fail to make the point.

The veteran instructor — she’s been teaching at UPT since 1972 — said she started incorporating visuals into the classroom early in her teaching career.

Word pictures came first, then the tangible objects followed. Among the earliest is her telling of the “polygamy and the three bears” tale as a generative device to help students organize essays: The thesis statement is the papa bear, the topic sentences at the paragraph level are the mama bears who are supportive of the papa bear. And the other points — the baby bears — each are supportive of their own mama.

She recently was reminded of the power of imagery when former student David Hanig, who’d taken her English class in the early 1970s, reconnected with her this year. Hanig’s daughter Lauren, a freshman at UPT, was scheduled for a class with Andes, which moved Hanig to dash his former professor a brief message — with a nod to the past. “The bears still live,” was part of his lighthearted offering. He admits that while he hadn’t thought about the bears in decades, the image quickly came back to him.

Andes said she still uses the bears in her basic composition classes and can allow her constructive criticism to follow with comments such as “This papa doesn’t have enough mamas” or “This baby doesn’t go with this mama,” simplifying the explanation for novice writers.

“It’s kind of an embarrassing thing, but if you give them something to hang onto, they don’t have to worry about structure,” she said.

Hanig, who has bachelor’s degrees in speech and hearing science and in public administration and a master’s degree in public administration, now manages the city of Johnstown’s emergency operations center. And while writing skills don’t play a big role in his current job, he said that with three college degrees, he must have managed to learn to write a decent paper or two.

“It’s obvious having that is important in future success in your career and college,” he said, attesting to the benefits of having a good writing teacher early in one’s college career.

Over her years in the classroom, Andes has added visuals as a way to engage her students.

“An English class can be so dull and boring,” she said. “You really work to make it more palatable.”

First-day students in her writing and composition class walk in to find their professor dressed in a brightly colored skirt printed with bold, almost life-sized hyenas — a treasure found in a Palm Beach thrift store. “It is just wild,” she says of her ice-breaking attire.

The skirt is a way to draw out a short descriptive piece in the initial class. “It forces description,” she explained.

“I tell them I don’t want them to say English class was dull and boring at the college level,” she said. “They come in so tense; they’ve heard so many stories about college English. I want to disarm them the first day.”

But it’s not all hyenas and laughter. She couples the exercise with an essay on “how to flunk out of college” as a sobering counterpoint.

Throughout each semester, she finds ways to accompany the intangible world of words with objects to engage her students.

When reading Kevin Carroll’s book, “Rules of the Red Rubber Ball,” of course she has red rubber balls in three sizes to illustrate. In her Women in Literature course, in which students read Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Miss Brill,” she dons an antique fur piece apropos to the elderly main character.

A stuffed panda and bamboo go with her to English composition class to illustrate Lynne Truss’s punctuation usage book, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.”

“No one says ‘That was a wonderful grammar lesson, it was so exciting,’” she explained, still pleasantly surprised that a book about grammar could become a best seller.

For an assignment in which students write about life lessons, she brings a glittery quilted lobster wall hanging and typically enlists the campus president to discuss his personal milestones and examples of when making a change was necessary. The lesson: You have to shed your shell to grow. “Crustaceans have to shed; so do college students, who have to experience things they’ve never experienced before.”

Her stable of props is growing continually as she seeks visual ways to spark students’ creativity.

“I’m always looking,” she said.

—Kimberly K. Barlow