By MARTY LEVINE
Editor’s note: “Lasting Lessons” presents stories from faculty and staff about an educational moment that made the most impact on their lives — as a student or an instructor, inside a classroom or out, here at Pitt or elsewhere, formal or impromptu, between friends or even at a bad moment — something that challenged or changed them. Look for more Lasting Lessons in future editions of the University Times.
Alvin J. Primack, teaching assistant professor in the Department of Communication, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, and director of forensics and the William Pitt Debating Union
“I used to be terrified of speaking,” Al Primack says. “I grew up through elementary school going to speech therapy. I spent most of my life thinking I was unintelligent and unintelligible.”
Then he took a speech and debate class at Copper Mountain College, in the desert of Joshua Tree, Calif., where Primack was seeking his associates degree, fresh out of high school nearby.
He recalls his first effort: “My anxiety was so bad, when I finished my speech I had to leave the room.” But Prof. Joseph Desantis told him he got a 100 percent on the talk, and Desantis “started providing support. I began winning tournaments.” Primack remembers working the graveyard shift at the local 7/11 while memorizing speeches, and Desantis picking him up at the job at 6 a.m. so he could compete all day in speech contests.
Primack describes his family as “incredibly poor” in their Mojave Desert town, while “various people in my household were dealing with addiction issues.” He was bullied so badly in high school, he says, that he finished the last three years at home as an independent study student.
At Copper Mountain in 2008, he was a first-generation college student and, by then, sometimes homeless, living in an RV at the campground his brother partly managed. He realized he “had to hunker down and concentrate on college.”
But also, he says, “I realized these are problems I wouldn’t be able to solve on my own. There’s often a sense of fear or shame for people to reach out for help,” he added. But it is crucial to do so.
He started to share his personal experiences with faculty and others at the college, who helped him connect with places to sleep and affordable food options — even allowed him to do laundry at their places occasionally.
Most critical, he says, was “the sense that we’re not going through all of these things alone.”
Moving on to California State University–Long Beach in 2012 for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, he soon found Prof. Nicholas Russell, director of forensics — the debate program — who motivated Primack to apply and helped him find need-based scholarships.
When Russell asked Primack about his background, “I wasn’t going to sugarcoat things. He made it feel like I would have a place there, and he made it clear that I was the kind of student he would want on his team.” Russell even found assistance for Primack to go cost-free to a summer debate program for college debaters. “He would take me out to lunch and buy me food. It was things like that that helped me. … I was getting straight A’s when I started to finally focus on school. I was nationally competitive in speech and debate.”
Not all faculty were as helpful or even understanding, he admits, while his living arrangements remained “precarious,” he says. “There were definitely times when faculty weren’t willing to provide the most light accommodations.”
Thus, here at Pitt, “I often think back to those many experiences where I have a student who communicates that they need to miss a meeting or a class.” At one of his first teaching posts prior to Pitt, he remembers one of his students who “dropped off the face of the earth. They eventually came to my office hours and told me they had had a relapse” of alcoholism. “They came to me because they knew I would not judge them. That allowed me to help them to connect with resources, and they were able to get back on board not only with my class but all their classes.”
His goal today is to be a resource for students, and to help them connect with other resources. He hopes that he can help students “even when their life circumstances are getting in the way. I don’t know exactly what they are going through, even though I have been through a lot.” However, he says, “my concern needs to be with the student” first, rather than the missed class or meeting. Adding that universities need to better publicize what help is available to students, he says: “Sometimes I wish people had told me to ask for greater assistance.”
Linda Tashbook, foreign international comparative law librarian at the Barco Law Library in the School of Law
Linda Tashbook still has the textbook, “The Helping Interview,” from her first class with Prof. Sarah Fine in 1986, when she arrived here from Texas to get her master’s degree in library science. “Even though I have long since internalized the mindset I learned in her courses,” she says, “I am still conscientious about this client-centered approach to librarianship.”
Reading Fine’s scholarship had drawn Tashbook to Pitt. Fine’s articles were all about “how to provide an empathic response when somebody comes to the library desk with an inquiry,” since Fine was a psychologist teaching communications and counseling for librarians.
“How to provide an empathic response,” Tashbooks says, is “the lesson that is central to everything she taught. The belief is that when somebody comes to the library they aren’t just looking for information, they are coming to solve a problem. And therefore the librarian should be a helper.”
By most fully understanding a client’s problem, the librarian can provide more useful information from nearby shelves or files or may simply offer “empathy that was supportive and critically important to helping that person through their situation.”
For her first assignment on the first day of her first class with Fine — Behavior and Communications for Librarians — Tashbook had to take more than half a dozen imaginary inquiries at a library front desk and pinpoint the source of information she would offer in response. Among these hypothetical inquiries, authored by Fine, was one from a mother whose college-age daughter had joined a cult.
“I recommended a book about parental guilt to the mother,” Tashbook recalls. “We went over everybody’s answers in class the next day. I was delighted with my recommendations, but Dr. Fine was not” — at least not the recommendation for this poor mother. “In response to my suggestion for the mom, she said, ‘No! The patient is bleeding!’”
The lesson: picking the right resources also means “demonstrating to them that we respected their individual dignity, intellect and humanity.”
Before joining Pitt and attaining her law degree, Tashbook started her career as a children’s librarian in the Carnegie libraries. “No matter the setting I have always applied the methods” taught by Fine, she says. “It doesn’t matter how long the interaction takes because it is time well spent.”
If a law student asks for law books on car accident cases, “I can just point that student to a shelf of books. But if I talk to the student for a few minutes: Are you taking a course? Did someone in your family have a car wreck? Or maybe the student is trying to write a paper and is under tremendous stress to enter a legal writing competition. They need someone to understand that today they have this incredible pressure. The law school has no course focused on automobile law or transportation. ... They need to understand the vocabulary and the court system and the language of the claim (in a civil suit). But on top of all of that they need empathy for the role they have been placed in and the expectations they come under. They have to be the best lawyer, right now.”
Before the Internet, Tashbook says, law librarians used to get more of the public coming in to research a defense after suffering what they felt was an injustice.
“Maybe they have a lawyer and have lost confidence in the lawyer. Maybe they can’t afford a lawyer. They want to fight their case and assert their rights. I need to express to them my appreciation for the horror of the injustice and the layers of this injustice. Not only has this incident disrupted their life” — with emotional pain, and a blow to their status and dignity. “There are layers of feelings. They might feel duped, or … this injustice has taken their livelihood. They need recognition of all of that. All of this goes into helping them solve their legal problem, because you have to compartmentalize the emotion and identify the informational work that has to be done” to end up with a list of evidence a judge might actually consider.
“I kept in touch with Dr. Fine until the year she died,” in 2012, Tashbook says. “I always enjoyed sending her examples of good work I was proud of ... times when I had definitely made the right connection with somebody in the library. By engaging empathically with that person I came to understand some deeply underlying needs.”
“I would tell her, guess what I just did? Because I knew she liked to use examples in her courses ... and I knew it felt good to her that she had sent librarians out into the world who learned what she had taught them to do.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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