In Memoriam
Stephen Kent Tollefson
Senior Lecturer, College Writing Programs
UC Berkeley
1949-2015
Steve Tollefson, a writer, teacher, and trainer of teachers for more than 40 years whose influence on the community of the University of California, Berkeley, was so profound that he was affectionately known as “Mr. Teaching,” died on June 5, 2015, after a sudden illness.
He was born on February 19, 1949, in Missoula, Montana, to a family with a legacy of writing. His father and grandfather were both Lutheran ministers who crafted weekly sermons, and his great-grandfather, a Norwegian educator and farm owner, wrote a book chronicling a long visit to America in the late 1800s. Thus good writing was a family expectation as well as a family tradition. In high school Tollefson excelled in speech and debate, as well as in acting and singing on stage. As he wrote in an essay for the San Francisco Chronicle, “I learned from my mother the joy of memorizing poems, and wanted to see that passed on to younger people, who are not pressed to do it much anymore. So I teach a freshman seminar at UC Berkeley called Reading and Reciting Great Poems in English. The final exam consists of each student reciting 50 or so lines to the class. Cheat sheets are acceptable, because this is not to be a pressure-filled situation. It’s pizza and listening to people recite lines that (usually) they’ve chosen because those words have had an impact on them.”
Though he lived most of his adult life in California, the wild country of Montana fed his imagination and contributed to his appreciation of the beauty to be found everywhere in nature. He loved growing things, finding and photographing wildflowers, and sharing the secrets and beauty of the wild places in the Bay Area. Every summer Tollefson returned to Swan Lake, the family gathering place in Montana.
Tollefson is the only person ever to have been selected for both the prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award (1984) and the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award (2010). Added to this was the Berkeley Citation, the campus’ highest honor, which Tollefson received in 2011.
In written support of Tollefson’s nomination for the latter honor, Kevis Goodman, another Distinguished Teaching Award winner and past chair of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching, noted: “It is clear to many of us that no single person has done more for teaching excellence and—just as importantly, teaching enjoyment—on campus during these last four decades. His influence has shaped individuals, small groups, large groups, the Berkeley community, and even teaching institutions beyond California.”
Professor Christina Maslach, who gave Tollefson the “Mr. Teaching” appellation, wrote “He is the bedrock of the teaching enterprise at Berkeley.”
“I don’t know how I ended up where I am; it just sort of happened,” Tollefson said on the occasion of receiving the Berkeley Citation. “I’ve had this wonderful, amazing career.”
Tollefson earned his bachelor’s degree in English, with distinction, from Stanford University in 1971, and his master’s degree in English from UC Berkeley in 1973, at which point he began teaching with the University’s Subject A program. He continued in the English graduate program for a few more years but soon turned to teaching full-time. “I quickly discovered that I was a better teacher than a grad student,” he said.
Over the years, Tollefson taught and helped develop many classes in freshman composition and research, upper division courses in creative writing, and other seminars. He was among the founding faculty members in 1992 when the former Subject A program became the College Writing Programs (CWP), and he was critical in helping to establish CWP as the vital program it is today.
“It’s really cool,” Tollefson said in 2012, “to have a real writing program that makes available all kinds of different courses in writing. Students gobble them up.”
Of his colleagues (and himself), he added, “We want [students] to have something to say [in their writing]. But the other thing that works in College Writing is our enthusiasm for the subject of writing. Everyone is so thrilled to be doing this, and thinks it’s so important, that it rubs off on the students.”
His own enthusiasm certainly did. Appreciative former students were legion. One of them, Regina Kim, who was in the last group of students Tollefson would teach in spring 2015, wrote the following on her blog as part of a posthumous appreciation:
“Energetic, hilarious, and insightful, he was everything you’d want in a professor….He was extremely smart and knowledgeable about his craft. Anyone who’s ever been a student of his could tell how excited he was to share it with a new batch of writers every semester.”
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Tollefson served in many other capacities on campus. For years, he was faculty development coordinator and then director of the Office of Educational Development (now the Center for Teaching and Learning), through which he oversaw the Distinguished Teaching Awards, New Faculty Teaching Lunches and Newsletters, the Presidential Chair Fellows, and the Lecturer Teaching Fellows Programs, among many others. He regularly served as a judge and emcee for the annual student and staff writing awards. Beginning in 1985 and 1997, respectively, he also initiated UC Berkeley’s Summer Reading List for New Students and the annual Berkeley Writers at Work forums in the Morrison Library where he interviewed Cal faculty from many disciplines about their work as writers. These programs, spearheaded and shaped by Tollefson, have continued, further measures of his legacy.
Bob Jacobsen, dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Letters & Science and professor of physics said: “I’m not a writer…but what little writing ability I have I owe to Steve….He took me under his wing…and he did what he did for people across the campus. With generosity and with humor and with patience, he took me from being the campus’s second-worst writer to being its third-worst writer. And I owe him.”
Over his career, Tollefson published numerous articles, essays, and short stories in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and academic journals, always presented with his customary wit, style, and insight. He also published several influential books on writing and teaching, including the collection What Good Teachers Say About Teaching: Essays from Berkeley (1995); Grammar Grams I (1989) and Grammar Grams II (1992); Shaping Sentences: Grammar in Context (1985); and Reading and Writing About Language (1980).
In fall 2015, his family, friends, and colleagues gathered in the Morrison Library for that semester’s Berkeley Writers at Work to celebrate his life and service to the campus with readings from some of his writing, a fitting tribute. Among his pieces featured that day was his 2001 essay, “Teaching Writing as an Amoral Act,” which includes the following passage:
“I believe that being able to write (and write well) and being able to analyze the writing and speaking of others is a way to power. But by power I don’t mean power over others; rather, I mean the ability to function well, to succeed at a job or a profession, and to help change our world for the better. And I fall into the camp of those who believe that literacy is a necessity for a democracy to function well.”
In a 2012 interview about the College Writing Programs, Tollefson said of writing, “To me, it’s everything about life.” He then added with his customary self-deprecation, “I get a little messianic.”
Tollefson is survived by his spouse, John Bunch; two brothers, Val and Greg Tollefson; his sister-in-law Mary Ann Tollefson; nieces Kristin Tollefson and Jenny Tollefson; nephews Sander Tollefson and Gregar Chapin; and by the thousands of grateful students, colleagues, and friends whom he taught how to write, read, teach, and live well.
Jane Hammons
Michael Larkin
John Levine
Gail Offen-Brown
Victoria Robinson
2019
He was born on February 19, 1949, in Missoula, Montana, to a family with a legacy of writing. His father and grandfather were both Lutheran ministers who crafted weekly sermons, and his great-grandfather, a Norwegian educator and farm owner, wrote a book chronicling a long visit to America in the late 1800s. Thus good writing was a family expectation as well as a family tradition. In high school Tollefson excelled in speech and debate, as well as in acting and singing on stage. As he wrote in an essay for the San Francisco Chronicle, “I learned from my mother the joy of memorizing poems, and wanted to see that passed on to younger people, who are not pressed to do it much anymore. So I teach a freshman seminar at UC Berkeley called Reading and Reciting Great Poems in English. The final exam consists of each student reciting 50 or so lines to the class. Cheat sheets are acceptable, because this is not to be a pressure-filled situation. It’s pizza and listening to people recite lines that (usually) they’ve chosen because those words have had an impact on them.”
Though he lived most of his adult life in California, the wild country of Montana fed his imagination and contributed to his appreciation of the beauty to be found everywhere in nature. He loved growing things, finding and photographing wildflowers, and sharing the secrets and beauty of the wild places in the Bay Area. Every summer Tollefson returned to Swan Lake, the family gathering place in Montana.
Tollefson is the only person ever to have been selected for both the prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award (1984) and the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award (2010). Added to this was the Berkeley Citation, the campus’ highest honor, which Tollefson received in 2011.
In written support of Tollefson’s nomination for the latter honor, Kevis Goodman, another Distinguished Teaching Award winner and past chair of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching, noted: “It is clear to many of us that no single person has done more for teaching excellence and—just as importantly, teaching enjoyment—on campus during these last four decades. His influence has shaped individuals, small groups, large groups, the Berkeley community, and even teaching institutions beyond California.”
Professor Christina Maslach, who gave Tollefson the “Mr. Teaching” appellation, wrote “He is the bedrock of the teaching enterprise at Berkeley.”
“I don’t know how I ended up where I am; it just sort of happened,” Tollefson said on the occasion of receiving the Berkeley Citation. “I’ve had this wonderful, amazing career.”
Tollefson earned his bachelor’s degree in English, with distinction, from Stanford University in 1971, and his master’s degree in English from UC Berkeley in 1973, at which point he began teaching with the University’s Subject A program. He continued in the English graduate program for a few more years but soon turned to teaching full-time. “I quickly discovered that I was a better teacher than a grad student,” he said.
Over the years, Tollefson taught and helped develop many classes in freshman composition and research, upper division courses in creative writing, and other seminars. He was among the founding faculty members in 1992 when the former Subject A program became the College Writing Programs (CWP), and he was critical in helping to establish CWP as the vital program it is today.
“It’s really cool,” Tollefson said in 2012, “to have a real writing program that makes available all kinds of different courses in writing. Students gobble them up.”
Of his colleagues (and himself), he added, “We want [students] to have something to say [in their writing]. But the other thing that works in College Writing is our enthusiasm for the subject of writing. Everyone is so thrilled to be doing this, and thinks it’s so important, that it rubs off on the students.”
His own enthusiasm certainly did. Appreciative former students were legion. One of them, Regina Kim, who was in the last group of students Tollefson would teach in spring 2015, wrote the following on her blog as part of a posthumous appreciation:
“Energetic, hilarious, and insightful, he was everything you’d want in a professor….He was extremely smart and knowledgeable about his craft. Anyone who’s ever been a student of his could tell how excited he was to share it with a new batch of writers every semester.”
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Tollefson served in many other capacities on campus. For years, he was faculty development coordinator and then director of the Office of Educational Development (now the Center for Teaching and Learning), through which he oversaw the Distinguished Teaching Awards, New Faculty Teaching Lunches and Newsletters, the Presidential Chair Fellows, and the Lecturer Teaching Fellows Programs, among many others. He regularly served as a judge and emcee for the annual student and staff writing awards. Beginning in 1985 and 1997, respectively, he also initiated UC Berkeley’s Summer Reading List for New Students and the annual Berkeley Writers at Work forums in the Morrison Library where he interviewed Cal faculty from many disciplines about their work as writers. These programs, spearheaded and shaped by Tollefson, have continued, further measures of his legacy.
Bob Jacobsen, dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Letters & Science and professor of physics said: “I’m not a writer…but what little writing ability I have I owe to Steve….He took me under his wing…and he did what he did for people across the campus. With generosity and with humor and with patience, he took me from being the campus’s second-worst writer to being its third-worst writer. And I owe him.”
Over his career, Tollefson published numerous articles, essays, and short stories in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and academic journals, always presented with his customary wit, style, and insight. He also published several influential books on writing and teaching, including the collection What Good Teachers Say About Teaching: Essays from Berkeley (1995); Grammar Grams I (1989) and Grammar Grams II (1992); Shaping Sentences: Grammar in Context (1985); and Reading and Writing About Language (1980).
In fall 2015, his family, friends, and colleagues gathered in the Morrison Library for that semester’s Berkeley Writers at Work to celebrate his life and service to the campus with readings from some of his writing, a fitting tribute. Among his pieces featured that day was his 2001 essay, “Teaching Writing as an Amoral Act,” which includes the following passage:
“I believe that being able to write (and write well) and being able to analyze the writing and speaking of others is a way to power. But by power I don’t mean power over others; rather, I mean the ability to function well, to succeed at a job or a profession, and to help change our world for the better. And I fall into the camp of those who believe that literacy is a necessity for a democracy to function well.”
In a 2012 interview about the College Writing Programs, Tollefson said of writing, “To me, it’s everything about life.” He then added with his customary self-deprecation, “I get a little messianic.”
Tollefson is survived by his spouse, John Bunch; two brothers, Val and Greg Tollefson; his sister-in-law Mary Ann Tollefson; nieces Kristin Tollefson and Jenny Tollefson; nephews Sander Tollefson and Gregar Chapin; and by the thousands of grateful students, colleagues, and friends whom he taught how to write, read, teach, and live well.
Jane Hammons
Michael Larkin
John Levine
Gail Offen-Brown
Victoria Robinson
2019
