My Brief Career as a Full Time Teacher

 

My Brief Career as a Full Time Teacher

After a few weeks I received a letter that shattered my hopes. My application had been rejected – not for lack of qualifications, but because of a security problem. Crestfallen, I quickly applied for an undergraduate teaching position. I had a couple of offers, largely because math instructors were hard to come by at that time. I began teaching at Randolph Macon College in late August.

That brief teaching experience was enlightening in that I learned some math that I had not previously studied, and I learned some things about myself. The math was Statistics. I had never taken a course in Statistics, although I had studied some probability theory in my algebra classes. But this was a basic one-semester course geared toward Economics and Psychology majors. I had no problem teaching it to myself by staying one chapter ahead of the students. It seemed simple compared to the abstract math that I had recently been subjected to.

I taught two first year algebra courses. One was the regular first year course. It met the usual three times per week. The other met five times per week, because it was a make-up course for those with low algebra scores on their college entrance exams. I was surprised that there was such a slight difference in the performances of those two classes. Perhaps the students in the make-up class just tried harder.

I also taught a one semester course in Ordinary Differential Equations, which was similar to the one that I had taken at Roanoke College. Teaching this course, as well as the Algebra classes, was satisfying because it was good to get back to the world of definite, applied mathematics after fighting my way through the jungle of the abstract.

This was not my first teaching experience, and it would not be the last. I had taught undergraduate algebra during my second year at UVa, and later I taught several advanced mathematics extension courses at NASA Langley.

But before that school year at Randolph Macon was up, I had come to the hard conclusion that I would never be entirely happy with the life of a teacher. That realization was a disappointment, to say the least. It had seemed to be my only reasonable option, after failing to qualify as a chemist, a physicist, or a researcher at NACA.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like teaching. I had found some ways to make the math more easily understandable to the students, and I could see their progress by their test performances. The head of the math department was happy with my work. I liked the other professors. But I didn’t respect the administration, and I despised dealing with a mama who thought her son should be given special treatment. The pay was inadequate, and it didn’t show much promise of increasing rapidly. That was a major consideration, because I had a wife and daughter to support.

However, there was another factor that outweighed all of the other considerations. Except for the inadequate pay, I felt that I was a success as an instructor, but I wasn’t happy in the position. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem for a long time, but it finally hit me one day when I was mentally reviewing the Algebra lecture I had given that day. I had concluded with a remark something like, “It’s not possible for us to cover everything in this book in the time available, so we’re going to skip the rest of this chapter, because that material is of lesser importance.” It was true that we couldn’t reasonably cover all of the math in that thorough textbook, but that remark about which material was less important was based solely on my own experience with what was most helpful in advancing to higher math classes. I honestly didn’t know what an engineer or scientist might need in a real-world situation. I wanted to know, and I felt that I could know if given the chance. I now knew that I would never realize my potential in the teaching profession, and that I would never completely respect myself if I settled for something that didn’t force me to strive for a goal beyond my present capabilities.

Without applying, I was offered a couple of higher paying teaching positions. But before I committed myself to either, I wrote, out of desperation, to LRC (Langley Research Center) and requested that my application be reconsidered. In a couple of days, I received a phone call from the head security officer at Langley. He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, “Why don’t you come down here, and we’ll see if we can’t get this thing straightened out?”

We set up an appointment, he straightened the matter out for me, and I was offered a position. And, to this day, I feel deep gratitude for that kind, patient man, who enabled me to escape further consequences of having made one dumb teenage smart aleck remark.

It was like a miracle. They had accepted me, not only in spite of my prior security history, but also in spite of the fact that I had almost zero qualifications for aeronautical research. I soon learned why they accepted me. This was a period of burgeoning work in aeronautical engineering. The war had demonstrated the importance of air warfare, and as a result it became necessary for our nation to develop the most advanced fighters, bombers, and spy planes. Jet propulsion had become practical. That technology had made possible rapid advances in both military and commercial aircraft design. University programs in aeronautical engineering couldn’t meet government or private company requirements. But LRC had an immediate problem. The air force had commissioned Arnold Engineering Company to build a research center at Tullahoma, Tennessee, and that company had raided the research staff at Langley by offering high salaries and by exploiting the fact that one could have a nice home in or near Tullahoma for about half the cost of a comparable home on The Virginia Peninsula.

But there was another factor that accounted for the fact that I had been chosen out of a number of other minimally qualified applicants. It happened that a certain Dr. Katzoff had been interested in a problem concerning the corrections that need to be applied to wind tunnel data to compensate for the error introduced by the fact that the flow is confined by the wind tunnel walls and so varies somewhat from open air conditions. He was an assistant division chief, and consequently had too many executive duties to permit him to focus on the problem himself, so he had worked with a young man with some math background, with the plan that he (Dr. Katzoff) would explain the problem and offer suggestions for attacking it but leave its actual solution to the young engineer. After months of zero progress, and considerable frustration, he looked for someone else to solve the problem, and saw that possibility when he read my resume.

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