Rochester, NY

I feel like things are starting to wrap up - and not just because Marriner has been serving for more than 5 years! We have forced the issue, it turns out - Marriner took a new job. No, he did not do that to get out of figuring out what will happen to our family after he’s released! It was actually quite a surprise to our family. I will explain. No, there is no time, I will sum up. :)

Back in the fall, Marriner mentioned one night that he was starting to feel like he should consider a job change. There wasn’t any reason, there wasn’t any problem at work or any discontent with our circumstances. Just a feeling that he should move. He spent some time exploring some various options, he applied for a job at NSF that he didn’t get, and the whole thing felt a bit like trying to find a light switch in a dark room. But in November, he ran into an old contact who worked at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) and mentioned his interest in looking at other jobs. That was, it turns out, where the light switch was. It still took a long time to find it, though! Marriner talked to the Dean of NTID, and he wanted to bring Marriner out for an interview. Unfortunately, finals and winter break came, which meant a month of nothing. We went up to interview in January. Then we waited for a really, really long time.  I remember one evening back in March, when one of the kids asked if we had any news. I said we didn’t, and it would probably be better for his mental health if he stopped asking so much. Thus came the quote I’ve been wishing to share on Facebook ever since: “I don’t want mental health, I want answers!” We finally got an offer in April, but some negotiation was needed to make it something we could accept. That took another really, really long time. The final, accepted offer came this week. Now that we can finally tell people about it, we’re exhausted emotionally from all the waiting, uncertainty and suspense, and none of us really wants to talk about it any more! Ha!

The job is very exciting, though! He’s going to be a professor (associate professor, at that!) of Mechanical Engineering. He’ll be teaching in ASL! I will explain a bit about NTID. They are a federally funded college that is housed at Rochester Institute of Technology (which, interestingly, is a private university. Weird.) If a deaf student wants to major in a technical field, they can go to their local university and have an interpreter for their classes. Or they can go to NTID, where all the professors and staff know ASL. Gallaudet is the sister (rival??) institution for students going into humanities/social/business fields. NTID is technically a college of RIT. Currently, NTID offers associates degrees within the college. If you want a 4 year degree, you would spend the last 2 years of your degree “cross registered”, taking your classes at RIT. You’d have an interpreter in class, and NTID professors nearby to provide support. One thing you can see from this system is that advanced degrees in STEM are challenging for deaf people. Right now, none of the other faculty in the ME department at NTID have PhD’s. So they are pretty excited to have Marriner coming. Hopefully, he’ll be able to get a graduate program going and mentor some PhD students (which the current faculty can’t do). And it sounds like at least some of his teaching load will be mentoring and tutoring cross-registered students. Doesn’t that sound like an awesome job?!? At least, it is for Marriner, who has wanted to work more with students for years.

So, Marriner is making a jump from Federal Defense research to deaf education. Which will probably still involve defense research…hopefully… :) Christine, meanwhile, is making a jump from Seminary teacher to…the unknown. Sometimes, the idea of leaving the stressful and annoying things of life behind sounds pleasant. Sometimes I forget how awful packing your whole house up and driving it somewhere new is. But leaving my seminary job is what brings me tears. I loved teaching. I loved my class. I wanted to give them the consistency and full effort that more affluent areas get, but has been a struggle for our ward. I feel like I’m abandoning them. Interestingly, the only person I know in Rochester is the seminary teacher there. She’s amazing, and also not moving. :) Anyway, that’s the hard part of this move for me. I’m sure the Lord has great things in store, but I don’t know what they are yet. All I can see right now is the things I’m leaving. I hope my seminary kids know how much they’ve really meant to me this year. 

So, what does this all mean? I guess it means we get to stay involved with the Deaf community. That’s exciting! They don’t have an ASL branch in Rochester, they have a deaf group in a hearing ward. What is it going to be like to be in a hearing ward, but trying to keep up our ASL? Well, easy for Marriner, maybe trickier for the rest of us! I’m sure both the deaf and the hearing culture will be a little different there, and we’ll have to adjust to that. And what about Lige, who is working on his mission papers? Will he go with us, or will he stay here and keep his job until it’s time to go? There’s a lot up in the air. But one thing that’s not up in the air is what happens to us after Marriner is released. :) 

The stress this whole process has caused on our family was....sorta a lot. Well, it turns out that Lillian found a positive outlet for her stress, and she wrote a song that tells the whole story. And it was so good, we decided to sing it. So here is Lillian's creation, "We don't talk about New York" . We were sad that Lige had to work the night we wanted to record it, but we had so much fun singing this version, and nobody messed up too bad....so we kept it. :)

I’ll share a funny story from Marriner’s interview, that I’ve been saving up for 4 months. :) They had him teach a mock lecture, and invited a bunch of students to evaluate him. As they went to the lecture, they explained that they had an interpreter there. Marriner was surprised, he’d been doing fine without one so far. They explained, “Well…sometimes students are sort of hard to understand, they don’t sign as clearly….” When Marriner walked in and scanned the room, he actually knew most of the students there already. Either they’d interviewed to intern with him, or he’d interviewed them in the WRP program (a government program that helps people with disabilities get federal jobs. Marriner has done mentoring interviews with deaf students for the program for several years now.) One of the students was a girl he was trying to recruit to NRL at that moment! She gave him some raised eyebrows and a little grin. :) They all started chatting and greeting one another, and after about 15 minutes, the interpreter said, “So, I guess you don’t need me?” and was dismissed. Anyway, he got a job, so I guess they were impressed. 🙂

One of the most exciting things in this process was back in March, when we started seeing news reports of a total solar eclipse taking place next April. We looked at the path, and you would not believe it, the eclipse travels RIGHT. OVER. ROCHESTER. Like, we're smack in the middle of the totality path. We watched the last big solar eclipse in Douglas, WY, at Marriner's sister's house. We happened to be coming home from a trip to Utah, and decided to stop there and spend a couple of days to see it. It was SO COOL! Such a blast. I really never thought I'd get to do that ever again - and now, it's going to pass right over my house!! I don't know exactly what this house will be like, but anyone who wants to come out, we can figure out accommodations. :) Hopefully without resorting to tents in the yard in April!

Here's the map, courtesy of NASA: