Germanna Community College English professor Tim Trask owns more than 40 Hawaiian shirts. He wears them to class daily to bring about a more relaxed attitude in the classroom. Trask even did his master's thesis on the Hawaiian shirt culture. DAVE ELLIS/ The Free Lance-Star Visit the Photo Place

Shirt obsession: This tropical teacher puts students at ease

Germanna instructor makes a statement with Hawaiian shirts.

By KRISTEN DAVIS
The Free Lance-Star

Date published: 9/18/2005

The airy garments covered in palm trees and big blooms make him approachable, says 36-year-old Trask, and they make others comfortable.

Each morning, he puts one on and heads to Germanna Community College, where he teaches English.

Around campus, Trask is known as the instructor who wears Hawaiian shirts. He has at least 40 of them.

Most are in his closet. Some hang on his office wall like art. He likes to look up from his desk and see them there, all bright and happy. They make bad days seem a little better.

But there’s another reason for the the uniform. Trask says the Hawaiian shirts put him on a more even plane with those in his class.

“I know my students are more comfortable when I’m wearing them,” he said, and they’re more likely to speak up in class.

The shirts also serve as a kind of visual aid in Trask’s writing classes.

At the beginning of each semester, Trask explains that effective writers write on topics they’re interested in. Then he points to his attire and tells students the story of his master’s thesis.

While in graduate school at the University of Arizona in 1998, Trask went into a department store in search of something cheap and comfortable to wear.

He spotted a $4 Hawaiian shirt on the discount rack. Trask snatched it up. He liked the hibiscus print and the airy, casual feel of the shirt.

He wore it so much he decided to by another Hawaiian shirt. And another.

Soon, Trask was wearing them almost all the time.

He was an American studies major, focusing on folklore and pop culture. His original plan—to write about a living history museum—had fallen through.

Trask told the professor he would pen his master’s thesis on the expressive culture of Hawaiian shirts.

Why, he wanted to know, was a shirt bought in Arizona and made in Korea considered Hawaiian? And how had the shirt-wearers become synonymous with laid-back and anti-authority?

The point, Trask tells his students, is that he took something that interested him and wrote a 62-page thesis about it.

“And I got to go to Hawaii for research,” he says. “It was a happy accident.”

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Date published: 9/18/2005