It’s nine minutes, 38 seconds into the last class Joan Deppa ever taught at Syracuse University and she’s having technical difficulties.

The teaching assistant put his hand on his forehead. Deppa said she’d have to email the website creators — again. A girl in the third row chuckled and said, “Every time.”

Problem fixed, Deppa kneeled in the seat of a chair, leaning over its back, her face six inches from two students. She questioned them: Was the conjunction on the board subordinating or coordinating?

The students laughed nervously, said they didn’t know.

Deppa stood up from her chair and walked to the front of the classroom.

“I’m going to miss having students to pick on,” she said, smiling.

Deppa is retiring from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to continue refining her interactive grammar textbook. Deppa taught COM 101: “Practical Grammar for Public Communications” — otherwise known as “Grammar Slammer” – and the search for her replacement is ongoing. It will be an outside hiring, Newhouse dean Lorraine Branham said.

But it’ll be hard to replace 31 years of experience. She is the teacher upperclassmen ask underclassmen if they’ve had yet, she’s the first teacher to bring her dog to Newhouse and her interviews have been dubstep-remixed on YouTube.

“When I was 18-years-old, I made a conscious decision,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what prompted it, but I decided I can’t live a boring life.”

**

Deppa moved to Paris in 1967 and taught herself French. She covered the Arab-Israeli War and Parisian fashion shows. She interviewed Rainier III a Prince of Monaco, covered student riots on the Riviera and profiled an American expatriate who hid French revolutionists in her chateau after the Germans invaded during World War II.

She liked traveling on assignment. Whenever editors sent her somewhere for a story, she returned with three more story ideas. She became one of the first women ever to cover the Olympics.

While at the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, she met the United States’ first-ever Olympic luge team. They offered her a ride in their sled, but she declined.

“Mama didn’t raise a fool,” she said.

In those travels, she discovered an incentive to improve her grammar.

An Italian magazine bought one of her articles. After translating, Deppa saw the magazine missed a few words, but got the general idea. She realized better grammar and less slang meant easier translations for foreign publications. More articles sold, more money came in. When she moved to London, the copy girl agreed to use Standard American English rather than Standard British English because they sold more stories that way.

“I wouldn’t have thought of that way at the time,” Deppa said. “But I had to clean up my act, because I knew this is not going to translate.”

**

After paper production in Paris, the men went out for drinks.

Deppa doesn’t like drinking a lot – she’s only been drunk once in her life – so she often stayed home and went earlier to work than her hungover colleagues. She recorded radio news updates and sent them to London, the paper’s headquarters.

Soon, Ray, the bureau chief, found out. He didn’t like women on the radio, Deppa said, but couldn’t fire her because London liked the new voice. Wherever she went, Deppa faced sexism. In New Jersey, bosses asked her to do copy boy errands. In Chicago, male writers refused to help her. Once, she assigned tasks to a man in the office who she out-ranked and he demanded an apology for disrespect.

“I could tell,” Deppa said, “People wanted me to apologize for being a woman.”

But she wouldn’t. Ray, who controlled radio pay, compensated Deppa less than her male counterparts, pocketing the difference.

Deppa waited.

When a man from headquarters arrived to check on the branch, Deppa joined the staff for post-work drinks.

During the evening, she mentioned Ray’s short-changing practices. Headquarters relieved Ray of the power to pay radio employees. Deppa started earning as much as the other men in her office.

“I mean,” Deppa said, grinning, “You don’t mess with me.”

**

Deppa had demands.

“I told (SU) flat out,” Deppa said. “If you’re not getting computers, I’m not interested.”

Newhouse bought a few, but then she tried an Apple product.

She told the Apple campus representative: “If you will give us your most high-end computers, a scanner and a printer, then we will do something that knocks your socks off.”

Deppa convinced SU to match Apple’s pledge of $30,000 in equipment. Newhouse had its first lab.

“She always came down bubbling over about new technology she used in class,” Barbara Fought said. Deppa mentored Fought, a broadcast and digital journalism professor, when Fought arrived at Newhouse 21 years ago. “When I came here… I thought everybody at Newhouse used technology, so I dove right in to keep up with the Joan Deppas of the world.”

Deppa created a class merged with students from the School of Information Studies’ and Newhouse to produce a user-friendly, high-tech website. She started a campus debate on the sanctity of the Internet when she encouraged one student to advertise on the Internet in the mid-1990s. She made interactive exercises, with self-taught coding skills, for her grammar students.

“This place has been her life,” Fought said.

**

Deppa looked out into the classroom. Only eleven of the 106 chairs were occupied.

She asked another question, about participles, and no one answered.

She looked around, smiling.

“Sometimes,” she said, laughing, “I feel like I’m teaching English as a second language.”

Earlier that day, Deppa sat in her office, behind a desk heaped eight-inches high with papers. A dozen coffee mugs — some dusty, some half-full — are scattered among the shelves with grammar books, multilingual dictionaries and three pictures of her dog, Lolly.

“Home,” she says about her office. “My dream would be to find if they could find a little cubby that I could hide in around here. But I don’t want to stay too long in one place. It might get boring.”

Deppa’s teaching about phrasal verbs when she looks over her shoulder and notices the time. She sighs.

And then, her final words for the last students she’ll ever teach at Syracuse:

“Have a goodnight,” she says. “Have a good life.

“The clock on the wall says it’s time to go.”

Published on May 7, 2015 at 8:00 am

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