Welcome back to school, Baylor bears! QuickBIC—now The Mug—is back after a summer-long hiatus, and we hope you are all ready for some top-notch new content that will get your blood pumping and your heart racing.
Before we all went our separate ways at the end of last semester, I sat down for a wonderful chat with the BIC’s most colorful professor, Dr. Emily Glass. We hunkered down in the library where Dr. Glass had been meeting with her rhetoric students to help them with their final papers—ten-page long monsters about complex issues that I did not even want to touch. I hid in the corner while they worked.
Dr. Glass did not seem to have a problem with beating thesis statement after thesis statement into submission. “I do experience pride very viscerally with my students,” she told me once the last freshman had gathered his cowed research paper and left. When they struggle with difficult concepts or schoolwork—like final papers, she said—and then they get it—that is the point of being a teacher, in Dr. Glass’ book. I rushed to scribble down that piece of literary gold, and then jumped right into my next question.
“What are your favorite hobbies?” I asked.
“Well,” said Dr. Glass, laughing a little. “I like to think that I’m capable of engaging with serious grownup things.” (I made air quotes around “serious grownup things,” because what even is that?) “But inside,” she said, “I’m a vortex of frivolity held together in human form.”
It turns out that Dr. Glass’ hobbies are just as fun as her awesome wardrobe. “I’ve made my own jewelry,” she told me while I simmered in jealousy over her creative genes. She also sews, and she has been interested in costume design since she was little, even making her own outfits for the Monster High dolls that she collects. Back in college, she said, she and her friends founded a sword fighting club, and they used to spar with wooden practice swords in the park, which she said was unbelievably fun. (I made a note to check out the fencing club on my own time.)
We talked a little more after that. Dr. Glass mentioned her respect for Socrates, and I mentioned that my Gorgias was buried away, never to see the light of day again. She said that she had crayons and coloring books in her office for world-weary students; I said that I would probably need to drop by sometime.
Finally, we arrived at the last question on my list. “Can you describe Baylor to me in three words?”
Dr. Glass had done some thinking about this one, and tackled it immediately. “Earnestly mission-driven,” she said, with no explanation.
After reading back over my notes, I think that Dr. Glass managed to sum up herself in three words too. Anyone who spends upwards of half a dozen hours a week helping students outside class, or who takes the trouble to smack googley-eyed stickers onto your weekly quizzes, or who has snacks and crayons in her office for students that need them must be earnestly mission-driven about her job, and about turning the kids she teaches into rhetoricians to rival Aristotle.
Thanks, Dr. Glass. We think you are doing a great job.
Chelsea Teague is a junior majoring in professional writing.