2021 Bender of Twigs

As the director of the language laboratory, Andy is an integral part of the Intensive English Language Center. He is constantly finding, adapting, and upgrading material to help international students improve their English skills in preparation for becoming students at WSU.

Whereas a teacher might teach a class focusing on one skill, Andy's laboratory assignments include all skill areas taught at IELC. On a typical day, some students might be working on reading skills, while others are doing listening exercises or grammar exercises, or writing a journal entry. He prepares and organizes all of these activities on his own as the only lab employee. I have no idea how he does this when there are multiple-level students in the lab at the same time. Since Covid, he has been sending links to students so that they can work from home on days they are not required to be in lab.

He is always open to working with teachers to find material that complements what they are teaching in class. He often finds extra practice for my structure students on whatever topic we are studying. We worked together to create structure tests that structure students take as pretests and post tests in the lab, which frees up two more teaching days.

Andy is the main reason we were able to pivot to Zoom teaching easily. He explained to us how Zoom worked and set up a direct link on our in-house website. All that teachers and students had to do was click on the link to be taken directly to their classes. He has always been available for the panicked emails, phone calls, and texts when there is a problem with Zoom. We couldn't have survived teaching on Zoom without him.

Personally, I am glad to call Andy my friend. I have used him as a sounding board for ideas about classes and as someone to vent to when things are not going well in a particular class. Intensive English would have trouble functioning without Andy. Thank you Andy for your 25 years of service to students and the department.