Mat-Su College professor retiring after 42 years on the job

PALMER — Not many teachers can say they’ve taught three generations of students from one family, but longtime professor Gloria Hensel can.

On Wednesday, April 20, Mat-Su College students, faculty, staff and other personnel — former and current — gathered to celebrate Hensel’s 42 years of teaching at the college.

Mat-Su College Director Talis Colberg was among those who congratulated Hensel on her career.

“She is one of those ideal employees who helps students year after year learn the skills that open the doors to careers,” Colberg wrote in an email. “We are thankful for her service and she will be missed.”

Colberg said Hensel came to the college just two years after the current campus was established, though the institution has existed for 57 years. She started working as an adjunct professor in 1974 and became a full-time faculty member in Computer Information and Office Systems (CIOS) in 1993.

‘One semester at a time’

In her office, surrounded by teacher-themed trinkets and memorabilia from former students, Hensel said she hadn’t necessarily planned to be teaching for so long long.

“It was always one semester at a time … and I never missed a semester,” she said.

After the first five years or so, she said, she was even teaching summer classes, and never stopped.

As a young adult, Hensel said she had wanted to be an elementary school teacher, but after getting married and preparing to have kids decided she would have enough small children of her own on her hands.

“I thought … ‘Do I wanna be with somebody else’s children all day, and come home and be with children more?’ I just thought adults would be a nice diversion,” she said.

Hensel soon found she enjoyed teaching older students, whose maturity better translated to motivation.

“Adults are so motivated,” she said. “Doesn’t mean you don’t have to prod ‘em a little bit, but if they’re putting out money for it they’re usually more interested in achieving what they’re supposed to be achieving.”

Culture shock

Hensel was born and raised in Maryland, where she attended Columbia Union College as a young adult. There she met her husband, who asked her to go on an adventure to Alaska with him. One year, he told her, and if she didn’t like it, they’d go back to the East Coast.

Suddenly Hensel was faced with a decision she never thought she’d have to make.

“I said I’d never move to Alaska,” she said. “In high school I had a friend who, it was her dream to go to Alaska, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s my nightmare.’”

But Hensel agreed to embark on the journey after her new husband prepared a place for them in The Last Frontier.

The first time she came to visit, she was not impressed.

“He said, ‘Well, this is Palmer,’ and I said, ‘Where?’” Hensel recalled.

At the end of January 1973, while her husband was building their house and she was back East with their first child, Hensel received reports of high winds in the Matanuska Valley, which her husband confirmed with an eye-bugging story about a flying barn.

“The windstorm was so bad it picked it up off the slab and moved it over quite a ways,” Hensel remembered him telling her.

The wind also blew out the driver’s side window out of her husband’s truck, she said, which did not encourage her.

But the house got built and her husband obtained a contract for a high school teaching job, so she made the move as planned. A year went by and she still didn’t like it, she said — he told her she just had “a bad attitude.”

Reluctantly, she stuck it out for another year, and by that time, Alaska had begun to grow on her.

“You fall in love with it,” she said.

Paying it forward

Hensel soon fell in love with teaching at the college level as well, finding satisfaction in the success of her students — especially those who start school thinking they’ll never finish or that they’re not smart enough.

“We’ve had some that have gone from that scenario to getting their master’s degree and that, that’s just the icing on the cake,” Hensel said.

Pattie Schultz, who was once a student of Hensel’s and now works in the college’s Skill Center as a CIOS training and development assistant, said Hensel was the reason she decided to continue her education after high school.

“I was ready to give up and she wouldn’t let me,” Schultz said.

Schultz ultimately graduated cum laude with an Associate of Applied Science degree, thanks in part to Hensel’s efforts, she said.

“She wants (her students) to pass so she’ll sit there for an hour and explain (something) to you,” Schultz said. “She takes the time to help you understand.”

In teaching, Hensel said, that’s just par for the course.

“I would’ve quit a long time ago if I didn’t enjoy it,” she said.

Hensel said she plans to officially retire at the end of the summer, and in the meantime can be found sewing, reading or taking her paddleboat out for a spin in local lakes.

“You’re not going to get rich materially, but I think there’s a lot of wealth to gain in the friendships that you develop and the success that you see in others,” she said. “It’s beyond what you can really measure in money.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.