{"id":7773,"date":"2011-09-19T15:12:29","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T19:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=7773"},"modified":"2022-09-28T15:43:02","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T19:43:02","slug":"math-and-motorcycles-one-english-professors-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2011\/09\/19\/math-and-motorcycles-one-english-professors-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"Math, motorcycles: English prof’s journey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Scott<\/a>

Scott Geisel teaches creative writing at Wright State, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in English. He has published several short stories and edited a literary magazine and an anthology, and teaches English students the tricks of the trade.<\/p><\/div>\n

If you had met Wright State University English professor Scott Geisel while he was in high school, you might not have immediately pegged him as destined for a life in academia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI skipped school a bit,\u201d admits Geisel, who says he was also a bit of a prankster and wore his hair and beard long and wild.\u00a0 \u201cI learned to shoot nine ball and bought a couple of junk bikes.\u201d Working on and riding those junk bikes was one of the major reasons Geisel missed out on classroom time at local Stebbins High School.<\/p>\n

Still, he got good grades and went on to a vocational school, where one of his teachers encouraged him to take the SATs. \u201cI was a junior,\u201d says Geisel, \u201cand I was like, \u2018I don\u2019t know what the SAT is.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSee, no one in my family had gone to college,\u201d says Geisel, \u201cand no one really knew how to get there and no one expected you to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he did take the SAT, Geisel did well enough to garner several scholarship offers and attended the tiny Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terra Haute, Indiana. That was where he studied physics and where he realized he didn\u2019t actually want to be a physicist.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t excite me,\u201d he said. \u201cI was good at it. I\u2019m good at peeling potatoes, but it doesn\u2019t excite me. I\u2019m good at math, it doesn\u2019t excite me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halfway done with his physics degree, Geisel hopped on one of his infamous junk bikes and roared off across the country.<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t a stranger to long motorcycle rides\u2014while his peers were studying at Stebbins, Geisel had often been riding the highways and byways of America and hiking on the Appalachian Trail. On one memorable occasion, he had ridden all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa.<\/p>\n

Geisel headed southeast to Virginia Beach to visit a friend on his naval base. Security was not tight; Geisel got on base by holding his driver\u2019s license upside-down and mingling with a crowd of naval personnel.<\/p>\n

\u201cI slept in their bunks, ate their food\u2026I took a jacket home,\u201d Geisel confesses.<\/p>\n

There were a few close calls. One day while bodysurfing, Geisel lost the keys to his motorcycle on the beach.\u00a0 His friend was supposed to be on duty that afternoon, so a rapid search for the keys ensued. When they were finally found, an even more frantic motorcycle ride got Geisel and his friend back to base in time.<\/p>\n

Geisel finally abandoned military life when he was awakened in the middle of the night so he could slip out of the barracks before bed checks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI slept in the woods a few nights after that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Geisel had to give up his adventuring when he met the girl who is now his wife. Pam was the same girl he had crushed on in high school, but he says at the time \u201cshe was not noticing guys with motorcycles and long hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

He finally convinced her to give him a shot, and their first date was on the Fourth of July. He took her for strawberry milkshakes, on the back of his motorcycle, of course.<\/p>\n

Pam was the one who asked Geisel what he was going to do for the rest of his life\u2014she wasn\u2019t sure that riding a motorcycle around the country was a viable career.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe says \u2018what are you going to do?\u2019\u201d Geisel recalls. \u201c\u2019Are you going to hang out the rest of your life?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That was when Geisel found his true passion \u2013 he wanted to study writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo when I was in my late 20s,\u201d he said, \u201cI finally went back and did what I was supposed to do. With physics and math stuck in my head.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, Geisel teaches creative writing at Wright State \u2013 the same school where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in English. Now, he does work that excites him every day. He has published several short stories and edited a literary magazine and an anthology, and teaches eager English students the tricks of the trade.<\/p>\n

Though he used to commute to campus on a motorcycle, he has since traded it in for a car. Geisel said that Pam told him that the most important thing was for Geisel to come home safe at the end of the day, so he \u201cparked the bike for good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you had met Wright State University English professor Scott Geisel while he was in high school… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":35135,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[722,711,336,725,4863,747,715,719],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-faculty-staff","category-features","category-home-news-sidebar","category-humanities-and-cultural-studies","category-liberal-arts","category-news","category-special-categories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7773"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35137,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7773\/revisions\/35137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}