From the Director's Chair

Greetings

Funny, I remember it well.

Picture yourself as a young professor finishing a Psychology 101 lecture to 350 freshmen. You normally pace back and forth across the full length of the 100-foot-wide auditorium stage while delivering your lecture, but this time you feel anchored to the left corner of the stage, far away from the podium, as the lecture ends. Today's lecture, on behavior modification, seems to really engage these typically distracted students. With adrenalin pumping from your success, you entertain comments from the cluster of students gathering with beaming smiles in front of you. The rest of the students in the lecture hall aren't dashing out to the next class, but instead hang around chatting and looking at the stage and giggling.

" We did it!" one horn-rimmed-spectacled student laughs out loud.

" You did what?" you quiz back.

" Well, you were a few minutes late, so we all agreed before you got here to try a behavior modification experiment on you," he explains.

A young woman continues, "Our goal was to get you to deliver your lecture standing exactly where you ended up. Every time you moved toward this corner of the stage, we all took notes and looked as attentive as possible."

A third student adds, "Whenever you moved away, we stopped note-taking and acted
distracted or bored."

Clark Kent finishes, "It took most of the lecture, but look where you ended up . . . right where we wanted you. And you were giving a lecture on reward theory!"

I was one of those students, and that was a psychology lesson I will never forget. I am sure our young instructor will remember it, too. At a mini-reunion many years later, I met a classmate from that very lecture and he recalled the outrageous fun we had pulling that prank. We chuckled almost as much at discovering that we both had started out as physics majors and eventually majored in psychology.

Do you recall a funny moment or episode from your college days? Did it teach you something? The educative power of humor and fun is astounding. Many of the best-planned lectures and lessons fade away in our memories. But certain events -- frequently those laced with fun and humor -- tend to persist. Why? Perhaps it's because we enjoy retelling stories. Perhaps it is something deeper than that. But I believe that the fun of storytelling is key.

In recent letters and events, I've asked for stories of success, for stories of traditions, for stories about favorite faculty and for other stories. I continue to collect them. Yet it seems to me that when alumni gather, they most love to share humorous anecdotes from the past and often take turns telling their stories for hours at a time.

Do you have a special tale to tell? Please share your favorite college-humor anecdote (250 words or so) with us. E-mail it to me at rheck@binghamton.edu, or mail it to the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations, Binghamton, New York 13902. We hope to publish some of the best, and to use all the stories as reminders of the rich past shared by all our alumni.

Regards,

Richard Heck, your alumni director