LINDA: And then the other piece of it is they are -- they need five elective credits at the 200 level.  Well, how were they going to get those?  These were individuals who can't come on campus.  And at that time, we didn't have distance 200 level courses. 

So I thought, hmm.  And I'm very much a face-to-face kind of person, and I've always taught, so I've been teaching since 1977.  Oh, my goodness.  That's -- that's an amazing thing to admit.  Almost 30 years.  But I've always enjoyed face-to-face in classroom, but in 1993, because of the degree, I realized that I had to stretch myself.

And with that, I said, well, hmm, we are going to have to start teaching by distance.  And the computer was a little different, because we had some element of face-to-face, but now we were going to cut all of those ties, students weren't going to be coming in, and it would be all -- at that time distance was just telephone. 

So I looked at maybe where we could go and what would be an appropriate course.  And I had been asked to do a medical terminology course on the Bethel campus for a couple of students who were doing something different, and I started to look at that and realize that the whole arena of communication, that's been one of my -- I guess, one of the core things I believe in is -- is how to communicate with one another, and that medical language was a piece of the puzzle that could be improved upon. 
So in 1993, '94, I started the first distance course in medical terminology.  And I approached it from the view of, once again, not just looking at a word and memorizing it, but there was a -- supported materials at that time to look at. 

And again, it sounds so funny to talk about it because I'm thinking now, of course, it's the only way we would do it, but at the time it's taking medical words and looking at the prefix, the suffix, the prefix at the beginning of the word, the suffix ending, and the word root, the combining form in the middle.  And sort of taking words and exploring them and helping people to see it. 

And I found a good textbook that helped me and started teaching the course, and I thought, how can you have a dry, boring course like medical terminology and do it by telephone twice a week for 15 weeks and be successful.  I was just really, really stretched to make that. 

And between a good textbook, materials that I used, a quiz method that I developed by distance, and my belief that words are stories themselves, we just had fun with it.  And my belief is that even by distance, you need to engage the students.  So my goal was to call on every student at least three to five times during the class. 

So what I loved about distance is that people could be in their pajamas and having a cup of tea and learning. 

And you know, we would start with things like suffix endings like itis.  Inflammation of.  And I would say, okay, think of an itis.  You know, tonsillitis, appendicitis, conjunctivitis, gingivitis, and then we would look at the body system that that term was looking at.  You know, whether it's a conjunctiva of the eye, the covering, you know.
 
And then we started -- I started to actually research, you know, what was the origins of words.  Because it's Greek.  It's Latin.  And they didn't have to know that those were Greek or Latin terms. 

And we did, as we said, okay, everyone, think of being -- you know, let's go back 3-, 4,000 years, and you're men, because women didn't do this, and there's a body on the table and you start to carve it up.  And you name it for the world around you.  And certainly within our elements out here, people have carved up seal and walrus and, you know, caribou, moose, and they've got the parts all named. 

KAREN:  Right. 

LINDA:  We just don't know.  And the language is English.  The language is coming from roots of, you know, Latin and Greek, and we started to look at that and you can laugh about them. 

Uvula, that little thing hanging down in the back of your throat, U-V-U-L-A, if that's not the oddest looking word, you don't even know how to say it.  You know.  And so -- and we just laugh about it.  It means little grape. 
That's all it means, it means this little grape. 

Coccyx, which is your tailbone, C-O-C-C-Y-X.  Well, there's another -- I mean, if I were Yup'ik and I came across that word, I'd go, what? 

And in our program, we have not made them learn all of the medical terms, but they will see them on doctors reports, they will see them in their world.  So we teach them to say tailbone, but by learning the words, and just laughing and letting go, it meant the beak of a cuckoo bird.  That's what that term meant.  So we just were able to explore language and learn it. 

And I ended up teaching that course for 10 years by audio conference each -- once a year, and health aide -- I mean, it was wonderful.  Health aides enjoyed it and wanted more of that as part of basic, but basic is so full in its curriculum, it really is sort of a supplementary course.