Gilda Feldman

Professor

“I love it here! I feel like I’m working at the United Nations at SMC. We have an incredibly rich diversity among all our people.”

Her road to becoming an instructor at SMC began with an explosion. “I was in graduate school in English at UCLA when Watts blew up,” explains Gilda Feldman of her teaching ‘bath of fire’ in the 1960s. “I and a couple of others in the program just had this strange feeling: What’s the relevance of Milton when this is going on in the world? So we ‘Three Musketeers’ ran down to LAUSD and said, ‘What can we do for you?’ They put us in a crash course for intern teachers, and we all ended up in the same inner city middle school.” Alas, that was not the last ‘interruption’ in Gilda’s plans to become a professor.

“I taught for about nine years back in the 80s, then I took time off, had a child, and wrote a few novels and nonfiction books,” she recalls. “The hiatus was a lot of fun, but it sure wasn’t easy to make a living.” But the days of scrambling would appear to be over now that Gilda is on the full-time faculty at SMC. “Santa Monica is a lovely, small city with a pretty liberal attitude, and SMC fits right in with it. The College is a very warm, people-oriented place where I’ve felt very welcomed.”

Gilda says that she feels one of her strengths as a teacher is her “endless fascination with people. The great teachers I’ve had have all had sincere respect and curiosity about people. So it’s a great privilege for me to teach,” she continues. “And what I’ll give my students is the feeling that they’ll have more power over their own learning. I want my students to find their own voice as writers,” she adds. “And I want my Reading students to get beyond the print and realize that reading is really a relationship you’re making with another person.”

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