By Amanda Valentovic
Staff Writer
A seasoned veteran as head of the classroom, Professor Chuck Anderson did not originally plan on becoming a teacher.
“I sort of fell into it,” said the writing studies and composition professor. The first of his 57 years of teaching were as a high school English teacher. “My wife and I were vacationing on Long Island and Southold High had an English teacher who quit in September, so I took the job,” said Anderson.
The teaching job became the first of many, and turned out to be a profession Anderson truly enjoyed. “I mostly enjoyed the kids, I enjoyed the people,” he said. “I don’t see how you can be a teacher and not like people.”
Anderson has been at Hofstra for 25 years, teaching writing and English courses, and sometimes classes in the Honors College. Before he was here, he taught at community colleges as well as graduate school classes at the School for Social Research.
“I’ve been knocking around for a while,” the 82-year-old professor said. “I’m planning on teaching until I’m 90 – that’s my cutoff date.”
For 10 years, Anderson was also the editor of “Fire News,” a monthly fireman’s newspaper on Long Island. One of his many hates include is that of an author. Anderson has had 13 books published. “You can’t just talk about writing, you have to be a writer,” he said.
His books cover multiple genres and topics – from a writing textbook, to newspaper editorials, to a series of fictional golf mysteries. The former series follows two retired teachers who start a detective business to fund their golf playing.
“I write those for fun,” Anderson said. “The thing I like about fiction is the creative line. You can go anywhere with it. You don’t have to worry about citing sources and checking facts.”
Anderson currently has another book about poetry in the works. “It’s based on conversations I had with one of my sons who’s a physics teacher,” he said. “It’s called the ‘Physics of Poetry,’ where I talk about the common denominator between physics and poetry.”
In the classroom, Anderson continues to teach topics that he enjoys. “Most of the time I come up with stuff that interests me personally,” he said. In the last decade or so, Anderson said he has become very interested in the environment. His reading and writing assignments often focus on environmental topics such as global warming and biodegradable material. However, Anderson believes the topic of what he is teaching is not as important as teaching itself.
“I came to the realization that my job is not to teach topics, but to teach students,” he said. “My job is to make them think better, make them better writers, make them more concerned with the environment. If I do those things, then I’ve done my job.”
When he is not busy writing or teaching, Anderson has several other hobbies he enjoys. He has done a lot of hiking in the past, indulging himself in his interest in the environment. He has spent a month on the Appalachian Trail with some friends and his son, hiking through the South and Northeast. “And obviously I like playing golf,” he said. “Or else I wouldn’t be writing golf mysteries.”
To students aspiring to be writers, Anderson has some advice – just to read and to write. “I would tell them to just write,” he said. “It can be a blog, it can be a journal, it can be all kinds of things. Even if it’s not published, just write about your life and what excites you.”