I''m completing my academic Career at Estrella Mountain Community College. Being the first person to move onto this Estrella Mountain Community College campus means I've practiced my profession here more than 15 years. May practice make perfect.

I must have taught more than 3000 students since I average about 180 students per semester and have graduated at least 750. Anywhere I go I run into people who say "Hello Dr. Bradley" to which I reply "Hi, how are you doing" since I usually haven't a clue as to his or her name. So far no one has threatened my life.

I am more a trainer than an academic. My introduction to this craft was training mechanics to fix International Harvester Combines. That foundation lingers. To me the teaching and learning process is about people quickly and easily becoming able to perform practical and complicated tasks. I know I am doing the right thing when students have fun in class then leave able to make their dreams come true.

I have had a lot of teachers. "You open more than books, you open minds." Danessa Garcia gave me a plaque thus inscribed as she introduced me to her son and parents after graduation. Danessa was one of the first persons to earn an Associate of Applied Science Degree in Organizational Management. Danessa was a powerful teacher. Danessa opened my mind.

A little background. Being in the right place at the right time in 1988 resulted in me becoming The Maricopa Community Colleges Occupational Program Specialist. Faculty were being "laid-off" because only half as many students were enrolling in business, computer and management courses in 1988 as had enrolled in 1978. Almost no one was graduating with a career-field degree. Crisis made it possible to create meaningful change.

The flexible Organizational Management at Estrella Mountain Community College was the dream of a big-picture woman named Bertha Landrum. Bertha believed making courses relevant to current employment requirments, making it necessary for faculty to compete for students and making it possible for each student to attain his or her personal career goal would be good for students, their families, their community and their college. Moving from the Maricopa District Office to Estrella Mountain Community College in 1992 made it possible for me to actualize Bertha's dream. Recently I learned the flexible Organizational Management program has had the fourth highest number of graduates in the entire Maricopa Community College district each year for the past four years.

The Organizational Management program consists of Academic, Job Training and Management courses: Complete all three to earn a degree. Prior to Danessa's graduation I concentrated on guiding students towards completion of the six Management courses it takes to receive a Certificate in Organizational Leadership. Danessa was Assistant Manager for a large corporation where a baccalaureate degree was the ticket to the executive suite. Danessa needed more.

Knowing Danessa's dream made it clear I needed to help people do more than earn a six-course certificate. Dale Parnell, former President of the American Community College Association, forcefully explained why quality career advisement is important. According to Dr. Parnell, students who have a serious career goal do better in college than students who lack such a goal -- even if they keep changing their minds.

Danessa wakened in me the need to help each student identify his or her personal "Career Potential Position -- the one job he or she must have before death if they hope to get into heaven." I now do my best to help every Organizational Management program major create a vision of themselves in a career that makes it possible fto express their personality by doing what they enjoy most and do best.

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Knowing who one is, is important because each career has a personality just like each person has a personality. As anyone who has ever had me as a professor knows, the reason jokes about absent-minded professors are funny is that, that characterization describes me. But this personality works for me because of the career field in which I live. Majors now use my interactive on-line Career Development Program to learn who they are, what they like doing most and what they are best at doing.

Doing is as important as knowing. Many people envy the sense of self that comes from being a medical doctor. However, this prestigious profession loses some of its glamour when one realizes many medical doctors are "on-call" 24-7 most of their life making it very difficult to have a normal family life and that working intimately with sick people makes one often ill as well. There is no substitute for real life experience. In other words I teach students to dream of themselves in their Career Potential Position, to draft a Career Development Plan that will make their dreams come true and to then try it out. So yes, I like teaching but what I love is helping people win at the game of life.

Most of us remember a teacher who taught us something that changed our lives. What most students do not realize is that learning goes both ways. Danessa Garcia was the motivating force behind much of what I now do for my majors and myself. College is really about "making dreams come true."

I was open to Danessa's lesson because an Industrial Psychologist named Dr. Rupert Evans was my mentor. He taught performance was a function of both attitude and ability. As a University of Illinois professor, and consultant to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, it was he who insisted on inclusion of a career development component into vocational education programs. He did this because training people for soon to be obsolete jobs inhibits development of human potential and is therefore bad national policy. Career advisement and informed self-determination are the foundations of every course I teach.

In October 1995 Estrella Mountain Community College faculty gathered in MON253, were shown an Internet Browser named "Mosaic" and told, "There's a revolution going on all across America as we speak."

By May 96 all my lectures were converted to HTML and made accessible on-line, in-class and to students outside of class. Going on-line made it possible to bring real-time, real-world information into the teaching and learning process -- something none of us was previously able to do. Now Estrella has Blackboard.

Blackboard makes it possible for busy students with full-time jobs to keep up with their classmates even if they must miss class. Because all my content is now on-line Blackboard also makes it unnecessary for my students to purchase textbooks, which decreases their degree-related debt. Placing formative assessments on-line for students to complete on their own makes it unnecessary for me to write, reproduce, handout, collect, grade and return quizzes which frees time for me to perfect my courses, advise Organizational Management majors and improve the quality of the Organizational Management Program. I now have time to meet with students face to face. The Internet and Blackboard have humanized the teaching learning process.

There are too many mentors to thank: Paul Elsner whose dreams I have been trying to make come true. Dr. Wayne Ramp who encouraged me to become more than an academic. Stephen Shriver who taught me the top-level management point of view and business ethics. Bertha Landrum who taught me the value of asking questions and listening for answers. Reverend Eugene Lebever who taught me most of the theology I absorbed. Dr. Roger Yohe whose enthusiastic embrace of all things technological rescued me from obsolescence.

Now all I can do is pay all the gifts I have received from the above and thousands of colleagues, family and students forward by mentoring as many youth as I can reach in my waning years.