Chemeketa Voices

Gold coins:
Marjorie Ferry

Ask Marjorie Ferry why she chose teaching as a career and there’s a chance she’ll give you an unusual answer: Tubifex worms.

Ferry held a work-study job in the experimental psychology lab at Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate student. Her specific job was breeding tilapia and counting tubifex worms that were given out as rewards to fish that were trained to hit targets.

“We had eyedroppers that had to be filled with one, 10 or 100 tubifex worms,” she said.

Fortunately, Ferry had another love … literature. Her love of books started with science fiction, 75-cent paperbacks she’d pick up on the way home from school as a child and thrice-weekly trips to the library to fill up the basket on her bicycle.

“As a kid, I liked the way that science fiction speculates, says, ‘What if this were true?’” Particularly, as I got older, I think I liked the way science fiction uses the other worlds, other planets, other races to talk about problems that we are facing now,” said Ferry.

When she attended Bryn Mawr she adopted majors in French and, later Russian, but it was through literature the world of foreign language really began to open up.

“They’re exciting, too, because in the early days of learning the language, boy I tell you, it’s heavy going.   The dictionary and you, that’s sort of an inseparable couple then, when you finally can start reading it and it makes sense without a dictionary, what a blast,” she said.

After earning a doctorate in Slavic literature from Yale, Ferry followed a boyfriend out to Oregon, which was by far the furthest west she’d ever been from her home just outside of Philadelphia.

“When I got out to Oregon, I was just stunned. It was gorgeous. It had mountains like the ones I had drawn in kindergarten, with snow-topped points,” she said.

She found a job with Willamette University as a one-year replacement for a professor who had recently passed away, but the position ended with the elimination of the college’s Russian major.  She ended up teaching a Russian language community education course in Molalla for Chemeketa before convincing the then-head of the humanities department that she’d make an excellent World literature teacher.

Eventually the response from her students was positive enough that she was hired as an adjunct professor. Ferry’s secret to a successful class is in the “gold coins” she drops into each lecture.

In writing, the trick to keeping someone’s attention is to rise above the message one is trying to convey and impart some bit on knowledge that goes beyond the original intent. Ferry reads a lot of non-fiction about topics that interest her, and she travels as extensively as she can.

For example, when a student in a recent class asked her while owls in literature were often seen as sinister, Ferry was able to offer up the Greeks, who believed that owls were a symbol of wisdom.

“So we talked about that for a minute. Owls are active at night and night has often been seen as a mysterious and possibly evil time.  Or that the Aztecs saw owls as messengers from the evil gods of the underworld,” she said.

She can also speak of personal experiences in communist Russia, her first trip outside the borders of the United States.

“Imagine what Salem would look like if you removed every advertisement,” she said. “A sign that read, ‘buy socks,’ was about as colorful as it got. The city appeared very gray, even though it was beautiful city. We couldn’t figure out why, until we realized that the reason it looked gray is that it didn’t have ads posted all over.  There were signs in the stores, but they would have names like ‘Bakery #6,’ and ‘Shoe Store #7.’”

Her students quickly became fans of her teaching style, but she found the diversity of the student body enhanced many of the lessons she was trying to impart. She’s now in her 27th year with Chemeketa.

“There are students here who have money, there are students who have come out of families with very little, there are students here totally dependent on financial aid and students whose parents are paying their way. There are people here who have their first college experience at the age of 17, and there are people here having their first college experience at the age of 50,” she said. “The oldest person I have ever had in my writing class was 82. I like the mix, and I always have.”

She’s grateful that the classroom has proven to be a symbiotic environment.

“Being a teacher here allows me to do what I like, which is to try to communicate what I have to offer to students and, at the same time, constantly provides me with new stuff I’ve yet to find out about, which I love doing.”

At the very least, it saved her from another fate:

“If I were still counting out tubifex worms I’d probably be blind by now.”

By Eric A. Howald. Have a great Chemeketa story? Send us an e-mail.

Updated May 7, 2008 by Marketing and Student Recruitment.