-: I'm a person that believes that
we are all called to something.
If you had told me 30 years ago that I would be
in front of you speaking to you right now
as a professor here at West Conn
I would have told you that that was not on my radar.
Things develop over time.
I enjoyed doing what I did as a probation officer,
and it was interesting that at the end of
one the training sessions when I was a probation officer,
the deputy director of the agency
came up to me and said to me,
"George, you did a wonderful job.
"It's very sad that you're not gonna
"be with us much longer."
And I looked at him and I said,
"What are you talking about?"
And he said to me, "You've got a gift to teach.
"You're gonna realize that someday soon
"and you're gonna be going into academe."
And sure enough, a couple of years later
I was offered a job here teaching full time at West Conn.
Funny now things work.
I think the most difficult thing for me about teaching
is when students fail and they have a difficult time
accepting that they're failing
and have a hard time pulling themselves up
by the bootstraps.
I think it's fair to me to say
that not everyone who walks into the college classroom
is gonna walk out with a university degree.
It just doesn't happen that way.
So the saddest thing and the most difficult thing for me
is to see a student who's really, really trying
that just can't pass the academic rigor.
And we do have a certain level of academic rigor.
We have a rather high level of academic rigor
in our department, and as I say,
in this business we give our people guns and bullets,
so we wanna make sure that they're absolutely prepared
and can be the best that they can be.