Husband and Wife Team at ENMU Key to Each Other’s Success

In the following interview with Drs. William “Bill” and Gillian Andersen, the husband and wife discuss teaching at ENMU, their family, their hobbies and many other subjects.

Q.  What is your current position and responsibilities?

Bill: Professor of Physics

Gillian: I am an instructor of English, and this semester I am also teaching a report writing course in communicative disorders.

Q.  Where did you meet, and when and where did you get married?

B/G: We met in choir (church) in Lexington, Kentucky. We married there in December of 1986.

Q.  What attracted you to each other?

B: Her love of education, and her stubborn pursuit of it despite circumstances stacked against her.

G: Bill was a gentleman, and I appreciated that from the first. He opened doors for me, pulled out my chair, and treated me with kindness. He also loved music and learning (two things that are very important to me).

Q.  When did you begin working at ENMU?

B: The fall of 1995.

G: I came to ENMU in the fall of 2002.

Q.  What do you each like most and least about your jobs?

B: I use an electronic polling device that allows me to see how well the class is able to apply physical ideas as I discuss them in class. I enjoy the effort of putting together a storyline that is as simple and motivated by experience as possible. This frequently sends me to back to physics literature centuries old.

Occasionally, a student will ask a question or make a contribution which deepens my understanding of physics. Most recently, my understanding and pedagogy was forever changed when a student informed me about a Mythbusters episode which was applicable to Newton’s laws of motion. The episode deepened my own understanding about the definition of the concept of force. I now show this episode in every class I teach.

What I hate about my job are the administrative details and paperwork.

G: I was born with a pen in my hand. I am completely in love with language; my job gives me opportunities to design materials that will help students, and that thrills me.

I do get frustrated if I perceive that a person does not want to try; there are times when I think that students lack confidence, and that makes me sad.

Q.  How does physics (for Bill) and the study of English (for Gillian) contribute to students having a more successful future and understanding the world? What do you like personally about your field?

B: Physics is the science of motion. It therefore supplies a foundation for many sciences. Many of the more recent profound insights into biology, for example, are based in physics.

I am continually delighted by the fact that physicists study both the profound and the quotidian. Physicists want to find out how quantum gravity works and why spaghetti typically fractures into more than two pieces when bent beyond the breaking point.

G: Language is the key to so many doors. If you can read and write, you can learn (even if you do not have a formal learning environment). My great hope is that students leave my classes with strong writing skills.

Q.  Besides your day-to-day responsibilities, what other professional activities or groups are you involved with?

B: For the past decade, I have spent five weeks every summer helping direct asteroid orbit research at the New Mexico Tech campus for the Summer Science Program. For more than half a century, the Summer Science Program has brought talented teenagers from all over the world together for an intensive experience in the practice of science.

The resulting observations are archived at the Minor Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

G: To be honest, I am a person who likes to be at home when I am not working. I am not huge on groups or clubs.

Q.  Where were you working at before you came to ENMU and what did you do?

B: I spent some time as a post-doc at the University of Kentucky, teaching at the University of Louisville, and at a small college in Iowa.

G: I did a number of things before I came to ENMU. I was a welder in the Army Reserves, worked as a telephone operator and was a homemaker.

Q.  What do you think about ENMU and Portales?

B: Having grown up in the Corpus Christi area, I am at home anywhere in the Southwest. The bad thing about Portales is that nothing happens here; the good thing is that nothing happens here.

G: At first it was tough for me to live here. The lack of trees and real seasonal changes made my residency a foreign experience. We raised our children here, though, and now I happy here (great memories). In the end, it is your family who makes a home (not the place).

Q.  Where did you attend high school and what activities were you involved in?

B: I attended Ingleside High School in Texas. I played trumpet in the concert, marching and jazz bands.

G: I did not attend high school, but earned a GED.

Q.  Where and what are your college degrees in?

B: I have a BS in physics from Baylor University and a Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics from MIT.

G: I have a BA in English (1989, University of Kentucky); a BS in communicative disorders (1999, ENMU); and both an MA (2002), and a Ph.D. (2014) in technical communication and rhetoric from Texas Tech University.

Q.  What is your ultimate career goal, or at least fantasy career?

B: My idea of heaven is an eternity of working on old physics and trying to figure out new things.

G: I would love to work in editing; I am truly good at that and enjoy doing it when I get the chance.

Q.  What are your hobbies?

B: Playing violin; I participated in the local string orchestra through December of 2017; unfortunately, we are no longer able to work together (not enough members).

G: I play a little acoustic guitar and I love to sing, too!

Q.  What have been your happiest moments?

B: This question reminds me of an experience at Baylor University. A group of students studying Moses were relating “mountain top” experiences in their own life. Each story was met with affirmation.

I related how I had spent a couple of years in sixth and seventh grade trying to figure out what the speed of light had to do with time dilation. At one point I was applying algebra to a thought experiment I had read about in “Relativity for the Million” by Martin Gardner. I was stuck on finding the third side of a triangle given the other two sides. After relating my impasse to my best friend, he told me about the Pythagoras theorem.

The feeling this invoked in me is indescribable. The other students did not seem to appreciate this epiphany. I didn’t get along with most students at Baylor.

G: There are a number. Getting married was incredible. Having children was a different kind of experience that made me fall in love all over again. In terms of personal accomplishments, my college degrees are all special.

Q.  Where were you born and raised and what were your interests as a kid?

B: I was born in Fort Worth and adopted by a family living in Corpus Christi. My life as a physicist began at four or five years of age when my mother made the mistake of telling me that falling cats always land on their feet.

With the assistance of another little friend, I hurled a large cat into the air. I could not understand why the cat’s owner was upset since this cat landed on its feet.

G: I was born in Washington, D.C.; at the time, my family lived in Maryland. In 1960, we moved to Philadelphia where I lived until I reached my early 20s. I loved sledding, and with all the snow in Philly, there were usually opportunities to do that. I liked to read and I always had a deep love of language.

Q.  Please tell us about your own family?

B/G: We have a small family, but we enjoy just hanging out together. Sometimes we go to the movies (the Star Wars films have been family favorites).

Q.  Besides career goals, what else do you hope to accomplish?

B: I am trying to learn Russian. I developed a fondness for Russians through my friend and collaborator, Sergey Alexandrovich Khodykin. Sadly, he is no longer with us.

G: I want to do more personal writing. I am actually a fair poet (something I did as a child, too). I would also like to learn more about music.

Q.  What gives your life the most meaning?

B: I have affixed on the noteboard in my office these words of James Clerk Maxwell: “He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must keep the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday’s work, lest he fall into despair, nor tomorrow’s, lest he become a visionary, not that which ends with the day, which is worldly work, nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his actions.

“Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of To-day a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises, because the present is given him for a possession.

“Thus ought Man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it.”

G: Hands-down my family is the most important thing in my life. When I am with them, I feel happy and whole. I am so blessed to have them.

Q.  Do you have a general philosophy of life?

B: My approach to life and physics can be summed up by the words of the physicist John Wheeler: “Everything important is, at bottom, utterly simple.”

G: Life is tough for everyone, but we have an obligation to use the gifts we were given to enrich not only our lives, but also the lives of those around us. There is no excuse for not trying.

(Interview by Wendel Sloan)