Richard Bedient, Professor of Mathematics (Philippines, 1970-72)
Traveling through the developing world isn't, especially for those accustomed to five-star lodging. But for Professor of Mathematics Dick Bedient and his wife Betsy, threadbare 75-cent-a-night hotel rooms didn't faze them a whit. Of course, the year was 1972, and the Bedients had just completed a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, where home had been a grass house on stilts with neither running water nor electricity. With their thirst for adventure not fully sated, the two took the long way home, visiting Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kabul, Istanbul, Agra, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Katmandu, Delhi, Athens and Vienna. And the amenity-free accommodations suited them just fine.
Bedient had met his future wife as an undergraduate at Denison University in Ohio. During the next two years he earned a master's degree in math and tied the knot. A year into their marriage, the Bedients joined the Peace Corps together, celebrating their next two anniversaries in Bayawan, a village on the Philippine island of Negros.
"We joined the Peace Corps to travel and see other cultures," he says. "It was an opportunity to do something useful and help people who actually needed help." Unlike volunteers in the 1960s, many of whom were given vague assignments under the "community development" rubric, the Bedients, who served from 1970 until 1972, were tasked with concrete jobs as teacher trainers — he in math and she in English as a second language.
"Earlier volunteers would arrive and be told, 'Here's your village. Now figure out what's broken and go fix it,'" Bedient explains. "But when we came along, the campus culture had shifted toward viewing that as cultural imperialism." As a result, Peace Corps assignments became better defined, and by 1970 education-related assignments were increasingly common.
As a teacher trainer, Bedient was charged with conducting year-long math workshops for elementary school teachers in his district. He wasn't supposed to teach them math per se, which they presumably knew already, but was instead to provide pedagogical training to make them better teachers. Local principals had been asked to send their strongest teachers to Bedient's workshops since they, in theory, would be best suited to take the improved methods back to their own schools and share them. "Some principals understood what was supposed to happen and sent me their best teachers," Bedient says. "But others sent me weak teachers who didn't understand the math. So I had to spend a fair bit of time teaching math rather than teaching them how to teach math." Bedient also worked to convince the teachers of a basic educational premise we take for granted: that getting students to discover the laws of arithmetic through experimentation would be more effective than teaching them through rote memorization, as was the custom.
When asked whether he made a difference, Bedient pauses. "I think I helped a handful of teachers," he says slowly, "but whether they're still using the new teaching methods and passing them along to others I have no idea." What's more important, he adds, is the impression he left on the people with whom he interacted on a daily basis. "Given the times we live in, having Americans anywhere in the world doing good things makes a difference. The more people who know individual Americans, the better."
Bedient began teaching at Hamilton in 1979, a job he describes lovingly as his "first and only" teaching job in the United States. "Since I came to Hamilton," he says, "one of the bigger changes I've seen is an increase in student involvement in volunteer activities. I spend a lot of time with students during office hours, and a huge number of them are involved in HAVOC [Hamilton Action Volunteer Outreach Coalition]. Those really committed to that program are those I end up talking the most with about the Peace Corps."
