TESTAMONIALS
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Ingeborg Walther Remembering Frank At the sort of professional gatherings where “introductions” take place – those first five or ten minutes when we go around the room introducing ourselves so that we can take stock of just who else is present in the room and what it is they do – Frank would always say: “Frank Borchardt, German teacher.” Never once did I hear him refer to himself as “professor,” or “scholar of early modern European literature.” With Frank, this was by no means (false) modesty – Frank was not a particularly modest person. Frank genuinely thought of himself first and foremost as a teacher, and he was proudest of the fact that, unlike many of his distinguished peers, he also taught his beloved “Baby-Deutsch” (his term for Elementary German). Of course, I suspect that he also introduced himself in this manner as a sort of gleeful provocation to the others in the room, for whom language teaching was something of a less than high-minded occupation. Frank also loved to poke and provoke. But he took his teaching seriously. He kept current with the scholarship of teaching and learning, and often contributed to it himself, particularly in the area of computer-assisted learning. Thus I was astonished when he sat in on the graduate seminar I taught my first year at Duke on second language acquisition and foreign language pedagogy. He claimed to have learned a lot from me, but it is I who benefited most, from the questions he posed, the books and articles to which he referred me, and from our occasional arguments about pedagogy. More than once he would make a claim that I thought senseless or even a bit silly, only to remember it months or even years later with little light-bulbs going off in my head realizing, aha, Frank was right! The first question Frank asked at my job interview had to do with the difference between “training” and “education.” It is a question to which I have returned again and again in my own scholarly work and practice. In fact, it is a question which has become central to issues of higher education in the United States. For Frank – one of the most educated people I have ever known – language teaching in particular was more than the training of a discrete skill. In his “Baby-Deutsch” classes he often held forth on art, music, architecture, history – all in the form of great stories and life lessons. I was never quite sure how his students were learning to speak (he did not do communicative drills!), but it was always Frank’s students who were inspired by him to take advanced courses, become majors, study, work, and live abroad. Frank also made his students memorize German poetry – lots of it, in nearly every class he taught. If they groaned, he told them this might one day get them the job with the 6-figure salary. Lo and behold, this indeed came to pass with at least one student, who years later reported to Frank that he had the opportunity to recite a Rilke poem in a job interview with an executive at a major German financial institution. And he got the job! Frank loved to “torture” his students in this manner. He loved poetry, and he loved music, especially that of Mahler, Schubert, and Schumann. One of the last things he said to me was that he wanted to “torture” everyone by having them think of him for 5 minutes every time they listened to the music of Schumann. I know I certainly will!
Ingeborg Walther, Duke University
Remember meeting on the “Bremen” as we set sail for Germany on our German Government Grant, both spending the year 1960-61 in West Berlin at the Free University? Remember loading up on cheap books in Communist East Berlin and diving into the cultural scene there?
When we returned you gave my life a new direction. On a bet you lured me to Hopkins, saying that even with a degree in Sociology I could charm my way into Germanics. And suddenly I found myself teaching and loving it. It became my life’s vocation. You were an inspiration, a friendship I valued.
Thank you, my friend.
Eva Mader,
Cordially,
Carlos Astroza Hidalgo
Frank and I were not close friends during our secondary school years. As sophomores he elected the German concentration and I the Greek. My choice had less to do with love of the ancient classics than with a tenuous grasp of the most fundamental I concepts of math and science, both of which subjects were pursued more extensively and rigorously in the German sequence Frank had chosen.
I knew, of course, that even then, Frank was a man of varied and passionate interests. His portrayal of complex Shakespearean heroes in the roles he played for Regis Dramatic Society productions was a source of wonder to all his classmates, and every conversation with Frank was inormed by a lively humor and by eclectic interests unusual for a high school student.
I remember, in particular, a Saturday entrance exam for eighth grade aspirants to Regis that Frank and I both volunteered to proctor, During the test I scuttled up and down the aisles, trying to strike a pose evenly composed of the nun most deeply feared in the test-takers’ elementary school classrooms and the Mr. Chips-like lay teacher they might expect to meet at Regis. Frank walked serenely among them, reading quietly from Eliot’s Waste Land, looking neither right nor left as he navigated the rows of desks. He was a man among boys (myself included), but he talked also animatedly and knowledgably to me at the break about his opinions of both the Beatles and the Yankees,
Mike Murray, Tampa FL
A Duke Medical student, Tom Clark, created a scripting language for creating drill and test questions, first for the mainframe and then the PC. Dr. Borchardt was awarded a grant from the NSA to make this program-- CALlS (computer assisted language instruction system) more flexible and to add foreign character sets. CALlS was available to anyone in academia who wanted a copy. In the days of the simple EGA and VGA video adapters, a PC that could display 512 foreign characters with an editor that even supported right-to-left editing passed as a miracle. CALlS was a simple scripting language that made it possible to provide the appearance of artificial intelligence in feedback to students. An instructor with a good knowledge of the student could anticipate answers, right and wrong and provide Custom feedback for each of them. “Wildcards” and logical operators such as “AND” and “OR” greatly reduced the amount of programming that went into a lesson that could prompt a student to make a better guess next time. Dr. Borchardt presented this software throughout the US and abroad. It was widely used in the Department of Defense and in high schools, community colleges and universities throughout the US and the world.
Dr. Borchardt was very interested in the use of neural networks to solve problems of natural language such as speech recognition and artificial intelligence. Under his direction, research associates worked to reproduce the work of others and to advance this field. It was a dream of his to see computers programmed to learn and to use probabilistic rather than deterministic methods of problem solving. The processor power of the PC in the mid 80’s made this a difficult if not impossible task, But glimpses of light such as tile network that guessed “der” for the gender of the noun “Sprung” gave him hope. (For non-German speakers, words ending in “ung” are usually feminine, not masculine as is “leap.”) In the years since, this technology has been applied in areas as diverse as medicine, horse racing, and finance.
Dr. Borchardt saw all of his employees as his children. This was mostly good. But did sometimes seem like a burden. He demanded so much, saying “mehr Arbeit macht freier.” He worked most holidays and sometimes became testy when his employees celebrated Memorial or Labor Day somewhere besides at their desks. His insistence on doing all of the driving to places like Baltimore, Atlanta, and Vienna prompted me to remark to him once that he was the only person who got any sleep when he drove. At the same time, he was fiercely loyal to us and did everything that he could to advance our educations and careers. The hospitality that he showed us in his home was a joy. Working with him was an opportunity that shaped my career and made me eternally grateful to him.
Dr. Borchardlt was a frequent guest at our home. He would bring a bottle of white wine and grill me about my work in computer-based training. He gave us white stars he brought back from China as Christmas tree decorations. We made several visits to Jugtown together, especially after Thanksgiving when multiple potters would open up for a big Saturday. Dr. Borchardt loved buying pottery and talking others into purchases that they were unsure of.
Bert Wolf, Durham NC
I would like to nominate a professor for the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. After reading through the list of recipients from previous years, I am shocked to see that he has not received the honor already. In my eleven years of prep school and four years at Duke, he is the finest combination of teacher, mentor, and friend I have ever encountered.
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