Portland State Magazine Spring 2016

SPRING 2016 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 5 A sign of the times AMERICAN SIGN Language is the fourth most popular “foreign” language taught at Portland State, with the number of courses more than doubling in the past five years. Jonah Eleweke, pictured here, is a full-time instructor. As at many colleges and high schools across the country, ASL fulfills Portland State’s foreign language requirement. In just the past year, the number of Portland public high school students enrolled in ASL has increased 245 percent. Why? “It seems there are a lot of personal reasons,” says Jennifer Perlmutter, chair of the PSU World Languages and Literatures Department. “Many students hope to work with deaf children, or have deaf relatives or they themselves are losing their hearing.” However, if they think ASL will be easy, Perlmutter warns that with its own grammar, syntax and lexicon, ASL is just as difficult to learn as any other language. pa r k b l o c k s TONY WOLK , professor of English who teaches in Portland State’s Freshman Inquiry program, still rides his bicycle to work as he has done since 1969. He also bakes his own bread and regularly plays tennis—all factors, he says, that have kept him vibrant throughout a long career at Portland State. Wolk recently celebrated his 50-year anniversary at PSU. The feat is unprecedented; no one has worked at the University longer than Wolk. He came to PSU in 1965 as a professor of Renaissance literature and writing. He broadened his focus to science fiction and has co-taught classes with renowned Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin. He is as comfortable teaching Dante as he is teaching about science fiction author Philip K. Dick. An avid writer, Wolk is currently at work on his 15th novel. His time-traveling fantasy Abraham Lincoln, A Novel Life was the first book published by PSU’s Ooligan Press. Wolk says he likes PSU’s working class roots and teaching returning older students. However, since 1993, he has spent half of his time on campus teaching the multi-disciplinary Freshman Inquiry course, which all incoming freshman must take. Some of his students are the children and grandchildren of students he’s had in the past. “Teaching is one of the few places where you can quickly have an impact on others. I’m thrilled I became a teacher.” Fifty years of teaching