April 20-23, 1999.  A week of sad news. (#215)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

Disclaimer: This week’s episode involves major tragedies in which people lost their lives. If this is your first time here, you might want to start with Episode 1 instead. I am not writing this to capitalize on the deaths of others, nor do I want to reopen any emotional wounds. But I strive to make DLTDGB as historically accurate as possible. One of the events described here was very widely reported in the national media. The other involves someone who was not a national celebrity, but this event was widely reported in the media in the region where it actually occurred, and the individual in question has been mentioned by name in previous episodes of DLTDGB. My sympathies to anyone reading this who may have been affected by these events.

Today was starting out like a typical Tuesday.  I woke up in the morning, drove straight down Highway 100 westbound to my student teaching assignment in Nueces, dealt with a lot of kids not paying attention in Basic Math B, hung out in the teachers’ lounge during my period off, taught geometry, and assisted in Honors Algebra II.  Around noon, when the students went to lunch, I drove back to Jeromeville, flipping around on the radio, changing the station when a song I did not like came on.  Usually, if the DJ started talking between songs, I would also change the station, or put on a CD for a song or two before checking the radio again.  Somewhere between Silvey and Jeromeville, my brain had settled into a lull, watching nut orchards and cattle ranches pass by along the mostly straight six-lane freeway, so I was slow to change the station when I heard a song end and the DJ begin speaking in a more serious voice than usual.  As my brain processed the words I heard, I realized that maybe this would not be a typical Tuesday after all.

“Breaking news today out of Colorado,” the DJ began.  “Two active gunmen shooting on campus at Columbine High School in Littleton.  The number of dead and wounded is still unknown.  This is a developing story; we will have more updates later.”  The broadcast then went to a commercial.

I let the commercial play, tuning out anything that was actually said.  This was certainly not the kind of news that one would hear every day.  And I did not want to seem insensitive, but tragedy happens all the time, and this one happened a thousand miles away, so there was not much I could do except go on with my day.

My university classes that afternoon, like all of my classes that year, were full of other student teachers, so of course I overheard my classmates talking about the events unfolding that day in Colorado.  It happened at a school, and school was our world now.  Some had not heard the news yet, and some had heard wild speculation about the number of fatalities.  One news outlet had estimated twenty-five dead and many more wounded, the deadliest shooting to ever occur at an American school.  Although I read the Capital City Record newspaper and the Daily Colt campus paper every morning, I was not one to follow the news constantly around the clock.  That was not really a thing in 1999, before everyone had the Internet in their pockets, and when the news media was just beginning to embrace the Internet as a delivery method for their news.  So I did not really hear any more details about Columbine High School that night.

I did get some good news for me personally on that day, though.  When I got home from class in the late afternoon, the answering machine light was blinking, indicating that I had a message.  I pressed Play and listened to the message:

“Hi.  This is Joe Valdez, principal of Petersburg High School.  We’re interested in interviewing you for the open math position next year.  We can do that Friday at two o’clock.  Give me a call back and confirm that that works for you.”  Mr. Valdez gave the school phone number, and then hung up.

My first job interview.  This was a big deal.  Maybe this would be a good week after all, despite the sad news in Colorado.  I went to bed that night, still unaware of many details of that breaking story, and unaware that something equally tragic and much closer to home would happen that night while I was sleeping.


Of course, the events at Columbine High School were all over the newspaper the next morning.  As I ate my morning bowl of Cheerios and read the paper, I learned more details of what had happened.  Much was still unknown, including the motive of the attack, but the two gunmen were students at the school, and they shot themselves at the end of the attack.  The death toll had also been revised downward; the report was now that twelve students and one teacher had been killed in the attack, still enough to make it the deadliest attack at a school in the history of the USA at the time.

The shooting was on everyone’s mind the next day at school.  After Basic Math B class, I went to the teachers’ lounge, where Sally Stein, Jim Emerson, and Phil Johnson, three other teachers who were on their prep periods, sat around the table talking.  Jim was grading papers while the others spoke.  I got out papers to grade as well.

“These kids have so much negativity in their lives,” Sally said.  “Violent video games, dark music, and all that stuff.”

“And, of course, it’s so easy to get a gun in America,” Phil added.  Go figure, I thought, someone has to make every terrible tragedy into a political statement.  I kept silent, though.

“It’s more important than ever that teachers make an effort to reach out to those students who feel like outcasts,” Jim pointed out.  “Those two shooters were on the fringes of society, angry at all the people who rejected them.”

“It’s kind of scary working at a school right now,” Phil said.  “Especially this one.  We don’t have a PA system, we don’t have phones or intercoms or anything in the classroom.  If something like this happened here, we wouldn’t have any way to warn everyone.”

“I know!” Sally replied.

“I think this might actually get the Board to approve putting phones in the classroom here.  It’s a safety issue now.  I’m going to sign up to speak at the next board meeting.”

“That’s a good idea.”

I paused from my grading and stared off into space, as I do sometimes when deep in thought.  Although the Columbine High shooting had been on my mind a lot ever since I heard about it yesterday, this was the first moment I had ever connected it to my own day-to-day life.  Apparently there were teachers, and probably students, who were afraid to come to school now.  When I was getting ready this morning, it never once crossed my mind that being shot at Nueces High was something I had to worry about.  Theoretically, I could be shot anywhere, while doing anything, and if it was my time to go, there was nothing I could do about it, so I did not live every day in fear of something like this.

That night, The Edge, the youth group at Jeromeville Covenant Church, had their weekly meeting.  Before the kids got there, the staff and volunteers would meet to go over the night.  Adam, the youth pastor, opened by saying, “Wow.  It’s been quite the week, and it’s only Wednesday.”

“Yeah,” added Faith, the paid youth intern.  “I just can’t imagine what all those people are going through right now.”

“I’ve been to Littleton,” Adam said.  “That summer camp in the Rockies where I worked for a few years. Littleton was where I’d go into town to do my shopping, and I went to a midweek small group at a church in Littleton.  It reminds me a lot of Jeromeville.  An upper-middle-class area, a lot of parents who work long hours, and that can make kids feel neglected.  Jeromeville is the same way, with so many parents being busy academic types.  Some of these kids feel neglected, alone, and rejected, and they could easily turn to violence to deal with that.”

“Yeah,” Faith added.  “I’ve never been to Littleton, but I could see that.”

I would learn years later that Columbine High School was actually outside of the Littleton city limits, in an unincorporated suburban neighborhood that was also called Columbine on some maps.  But the Post Office used Littleton as the city name for the school’s address, so all the news reports said that the school was in Littleton.  I had never been to Littleton, or Columbine, or Colorado at all, so I did not know if this technicality would change Adam’s opinion of the area.  I had, however, lived in Jeromeville for almost five years now, and what he said about Jeromeville being the kind of place where something like this could happen certainly seemed plausible.  Hopefully J-Cov, as a church with a strong youth program, could be a place where some of these troubled students could find hope and connection.


I woke up Thursday morning and read the Capital City Record while eating a bowl of Cheerios, as I usually did.  I made a note to go to the store, since the box of Cheerios was almost empty.  Maybe I would get Rice Krispies instead this time.  The front page of the newspaper had more unfolding details about the shooting in Colorado, some of which came from official reports, and some of which was pure speculation, mostly about the gunmen’s motives and connections to the victims.  On page two of the paper, a headline unrelated to the shooting jumped out at me that made me do a double take, to make sure that what I thought I just read was correct: “Paul Sykes, 31, local musician and poet, found dead at home.”

What?  No.  How? I thought.

I continued reading, and looked at the picture with the article.  This was definitely the man I had seen perform four times, and met once.  Paul Sykes grew up in Jeromeville in a family that was very active in the local performing arts community.  He and his siblings spent several years performing in a band called Lawsuit, touring up and down the West Coast, and more recently he had been performing spoken-word shows of his own poetry around the region.  He was found late Tuesday night, his death having been ruled a suicide.

I heard about Lawsuit from an older student four years ago, when I was a freshman.  They always performed at the Spring Picnic.  I saw them at my first two Spring Picnics, then twice more at other shows, before they broke up during my third year.  I loved their music; it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before.

In addition to the news being absolutely heartbreaking, I found the timing of this to be a little chilling.  Shortly after I first saw Lawsuit freshman year, I noticed that Tina Nowell down the hall had their CD, so I made a tape of it.  I bought Lawsuit’s next, and final, album on CD the following year.  Around the time they broke up, I started volunteering with the youth group at church, and I got really into the Christian rock that was popular at that time.  I listened mostly to Christian music for about two years.  Just a few months ago, I had bought a new computer that had the capability to record audio CDs, and I had started making mix CDs of some of the songs I liked from albums that I did not listen to all the way through anymore.  One of my mix CDs had a Lawsuit song on it.  My friend Brennan Channing, a freshman this year, knew of Lawsuit from his older brother who also went to Jeromeville.  Brennan had on CD the same Lawsuit album that I had the copied tape of, so I copied Brennan’s CD and had just recently begun listening to that album again, in CD-quality sound this time.  The Spring Picnic was just a week ago, and I always remembered Lawsuit around that time of year, since their show was the highlight of my first Spring Picnic in 1995.  Suddenly, this music was back in my life in a big way, and just as suddenly, the vocalist was gone.

I sat for a few minutes in silence after I finished my Cheerios.  I eventually got up and drove to Nueces for student teaching, listening to Lawsuit on the way.  I tried to act normal at student teaching, and for the most part I did, but the weight of the thoughts in my head got to me a few times.  Toward the end of geometry class, I instructed the students to work in groups, and instead of walking around and helping them, asking leading questions to informally assess their understanding, I stood in the corner of the room and stared off into space.

“Mr. Dennison?” Kayla Welch said.  I continued staring.  “Mr. Dennison?  Did I do this right?”

Snapping back to reality, I looked at Kayla.  “Sorry,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.  Just a lot on my mind today.”

“I hope things get better.”

“Thank you,” I replied, smiling.  “What was your math question?”

Kayla showed me the problem, where she had to find the volume of a figure made from a cylinder and two cones attached at the end.  I looked at her work and told her that it looked correct to me.


As if the timing of Paul Sykes’ passing was not unsettling enough, when I got back to campus and looked for a place to sit on the Quad and eat lunch, the first person I saw was Brennan.  He was sitting and talking with some of his friends, some of whom were also eating lunch; I recognized one of his friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  “Hey, Greg,” Brennan said, watching me approach.  “Wanna sit with us?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the sandwich I packed out of my backpack.  I tried to think about what to do next.  Do I say something?  Would Brennan have heard the news?  Do I just stay quiet?  After a few seconds, I blurted out, “Did you hear what happened to Paul Sykes?”

“Who?” Brennan asked.

“Paul Sykes.  The singer from Lawsuit.”

“Oh!  No, I didn’t.  What happened?”

“He died.  It was in the paper this morning.”

“No way,” Brennan replied, trailing off, then asking, “The Daily Colt?”

“I haven’t read the Colt yet today.  I saw it in the Cap City Record this morning.”

“That’s sad.  How’d it happen?  He wasn’t that old, was he?”

“Thirty-one,” I said.  “They ruled it a suicide.”

“Wow.  That’s really sad.”  Brennan sat quietly for a few seconds, then mused, “I wonder if this was a hard time of year for Paul.  Because Lawsuit always used to play the Spring Picnic, and now they aren’t together anymore.”

“Could be.”

“Was he still doing music at all?”

“I heard a while back he was doing spoken-word poetry shows, as a solo artist, or something like that,” I said.  “I’m sorry to be the one to bring bad news, especially with everything else that’s been happening this week.”

“Yeah.  What’s it like being at a school this week, after the shooting in Colorado?”

“A lot of teachers are talking about it.  Specifically that Nueces High is an older building with no PA system, and no phones or intercoms in the classroom, so there would be no way to warn everyone if something like that happened there.”

“No PA?  Wow.  When was this school built?”

“The current building is from about 1950, I think I heard.”

“And they haven’t remodeled it to put in a PA?”

“I guess not.  But hopefully they will now.”

“Really.”


That night, I was sitting at my desk, writing out lesson plans and listening to Lawsuit again.  My roommate Jed walked into the large bedroom that we shared and asked what I was listening to.

“Lawsuit,” I said.

“Never heard of ’em,” Jed replied.

“They were from Jeromeville,” I explained.  “They used to play the Spring Picnic every year until they broke up at the end of 1996.  And it was in the paper this morning that the singer died.”

“Oh no.  What happened?”

“Suicide.”

“Wow.  That’s sad.”

“I do have some good news from my own life, though,” I said.  “Tomorrow afternoon, I have a second interview at Petersburg High School.”

“Congratulations!” Jed exclaimed.  “Do you want to work there?  Or are you just going through with the interview for practice?”

“I’m not really sure, honestly,” I said.  “I’ve only actually been to Petersburg twice.  Parts of it look kind of ghetto, but every city has those places, and I haven’t seen the school up close.”

“Where is Petersburg, anyway?”

“South of here.  On highway 42 east of Pleasant Creek and Los Nogales.  Between Pleasant Creek and Stockdale, but much closer to Pleasant Creek.”

Jed seemed to be thinking through everything he knew about the geography of this state, then finally he said, “Oh, okay.  I don’t really know that area well.  But good luck!”

“Thanks!  I’m going to have to miss my student teaching seminar class tomorrow, but the professor said that he understood we might have to miss class for interviews.”

“Of course.  If you’re training students for a specific job, the students need to be able to interview for that job.”

“Exactly!  I’m gonna leave straight from Nueces after student teaching, but I should have time to stop for lunch somewhere.”

“Sounds good.  Hope it goes well.  Hey, would you ever consider moving down south?”

“You mean, like Sand Hill?  Is this coming from your dad?” I asked.  Jed’s father was a high school vice principal at the opposite end of the state.

“Yeah.  He said there are a few schools in his district looking for math teachers.”

“I wasn’t planning on moving that far away, but if I don’t have much luck here in the next couple weeks, and he still has an opening, I’ll let you know.”

“I told him the same thing, that you wanted to stay closer to home, but he told me to ask you.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”


I listened to Lawsuit again the next afternoon on the drive from Nueces to Petersburg, across the Marquez Bridge.  Four years ago, there was a bad accident on this bridge, just after I had driven across it in the opposite direction, coming back to school after Christmas with my family in Plumdale.  My mother heard about the accident on the news and was convinced that I was dead.  I was annoyed with Mom’s excessive worrying, and lack of trust in my driving skills, but on the other hand, anything could happen to anyone at any time.

Tragic celebrity deaths were a sad part of life.  I would learn years later that some of Paul Sykes’ friends and family suspected that his death had been an accident, not a suicide.  I supposed that no one on this side of the afterlife would ever know for sure.  I knew the depths of despair that might lead people to want to end their lives, and I knew the feelings of rejection and loneliness that have led some to commit mass murders in public places, like the two gunmen at Columbine High.  These tragedies always made me wonder if I could have ended up a disturbed mass murderer, or a victim of suicide, had not my friends from freshman year introduced me to the love of Jesus Christ and the hope that he brings.  As a teacher in training, I hoped that my career would bring me opportunities to bond with troubled students and help them find hope and meaning in life, even if I would not be allowed to talk about Jesus directly working in a nonsectarian public school.

Although Paul Sykes was a very minor celebrity at most, I wondered if this was how people of my parents’ generation felt after the untimely deaths of people like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon, or how my dad felt a few years ago when Jerry Garcia died.  Later that year, the Jeromeville Parks Department put a plaque on a small outdoor stage in a plaza downtown, dedicating the stage to Paul. I found it by accident at some point when I was exploring on my bike.  At least there was now something permanent to remember this man and his music.

As a music fan, I have also been through many band breakups in my lifetime, especially since I have been a fan of numerous local and obscure bands over the years.  Some of my all time favorite songs were written and recorded by long-defunct bands that most people have never heard of.  But through all the breakups, lineup changes, and tragic deaths, one thing remains true: great music never dies as long as someone is listening to it.

This is the actual unedited photo of the plaque. I removed the name and put it as a featured image so that the identity of the person in question would not be spoiled to people who saw this post in their feeds.

Readers: Do you have a favorite song by an obscure, long-defunct, and/or forgotten artist? Share it in the comments, and tell me a story about what the song means to you.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Lawsuit – Psychic Woman]

April 17, 1999.  My fifth Spring Picnic. (#214)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 1 Comment

Note to readers: About a month ago, I noticed that I had just finished an episode that was set in early March, and it was early March in real life as well. From that moment on, I have been trying to go back to writing weekly, so that the time of year in the story will stay approximately the same as the time of year in real life. But sometimes, episodes in the story have either more or less than a week passing between them, so it will not always be a perfect match. I may take a week off here and there if it is necessary and appropriate to keep the story matching the actual time of year. Right now, the story has moved a couple weeks ahead of real time, but a lot will happen to character-Greg in the next month or so of his life, so the next few episodes take place less than a week apart, and then the timing will match real life again soon.

I arrived on campus feeling that odd combination of cold and hot that comes after riding a bicycle for two miles on a cool morning.  I wore shorts and a t-shirt, because it was supposed to warm up this afternoon, but at a few minutes after eight in the morning, it was not very warm yet.

I parked my bike at the bike racks outside of Stone Hall, the building that housed the chemistry department.  Its room 199 was the largest lecture hall on campus.  I made a note to remember where my bike was, since Stone Hall was not usually my first stop in the morning on the day of the Spring Picnic.  There was already a long line snaking down from the entrance to 199 Stone, around the building, and south hundreds of feet almost all the way to Ross Hall.  I walked all the way to the end of the line and stood.

Ninety years ago, this campus in Jeromeville was an extension campus of its sister school, the University of the Bay, where students studying agriculture would get experience in the field, in a part of the state that actually had farms.  The school invited the public to a dedication of a new building and a presentation about the research being done there, with attendees instructed to bring a picnic lunch.  The event proved to be so popular that it became an annual tradition, evolving into a huge open house and festival held all across the campus of what eventually became the University of Jeromeville.  The event had been canceled a few times over the years, so today was officially the 85th Annual Spring Picnic.

I took out my guide to events and a pen while I waited in line.  The line did not appear to be moving yet, so it looked like I would be here for a long time.  This was my fifth Spring Picnic, and some of the recurring events I kept hearing about I still had yet to experience.  I had never milked a cow.  I had never put my hand inside the stomach of a cow that had a window and door to its stomach surgically added for research purposes, and I never would, since animal rights activists shut that event down a couple years ago.  And I had never seen the Chemistry Club’s show, which is what led me to arrive early enough this year to stand in line and get a ticket, hopefully.

In the guide, I marked the events that I was hoping to see.  The Math Club would be doing their exhibit for most of the day, so I could go there whenever I had time.  I would probably be able to see part of the parade, even if I ended up seeing the first performance of the chemistry show, since the parade lasted for over an hour. But everything was tentative for now, since I was not sure what time I would be seeing the chemistry show.  There were four performances, and tickets were free, but by the time I got to the front of the line, some of the performances might be out of tickets.  The lecture hall held close to four hundred students, but the line was so long that there were easily more than four hundred people in front of me.

I looked through the list of musical acts performing today.  At my first Spring Picnic freshman year, an older friend told me about a really good local band called Lawsuit.  I saw them that year, and again the following year, and then twice more at events that were not the Spring Picnic.  They broke up the following year, so I knew that they would not be performing, but I had been listening to their music again recently.  My friend Brennan Channing, a freshman with two older siblings who had also attended Jeromeville, knew Lawsuit and let me borrow their CD recently so that I could burn a copy on my computer.

I did see one musical act that I recognized: Carolyn C. Parry, at three o’clock at the Coffee House in the Memorial Union.  Good for Carolyn, I thought.  She made it in the music world, at least she made it big enough to play the UJ Coffee House for the Spring Picnic.

Carolyn C. Parry graduated from UJ last year, the same age as me.  I knew her from chorus, and she also was on the worship team for University Life, the college ministry of First Baptist Church of Jeromeville.  I went to Jeromeville Covenant and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, but I had been to U-Life a few times over the years, and I had friends who went to U-Life.  I knew Carolyn well enough to say hi to.  The last time I saw her, several months ago, she mentioned that she was going to record a CD of original music and was looking into performing small shows like this.  Her appearance in the Spring Picnic program was the first I had heard of this endeavor of hers being successful.

The line slowly inched forward as I continued reading through the guide, marking events that I might want to check out.  I had been to enough Spring Picnics by now, though, that I knew that part of the fun was specifically not making a detailed plan in advance.  So much happened simultaneously during the Spring Picnic that it was impossible to see everything, and I enjoyed wandering around and seeing whatever I happened to find.  Between the exhibits about the research done on campus, food booths, sporting events, performances, and demonstrations, there was always plenty to discover during the Spring Picnic.  For now, though, I was stuck in this line, although not many of the events had begun this early.

The line at least seemed to be moving.  Every few minutes, I took a step forward, and I could see people leaving the front steps of 199 Stone, presumably with tickets in hand.  The people around me looked like a mix of students and non-students, and some students were with their families.  The Spring Picnic was a big enough event in this part of the state that it attracted people not otherwise affiliated with the campus, and some families came to visit their students for the occasion.  My parents and brother had come for last year’s Spring Picnic, but the wandering around and exploring part did not seem to appeal to them.  UJ always hosted a major track and field invitational on the day of the Spring Picnic, and my cousin Rick Lusk was on the track team for North Coast State University, so my family and I spent about two hours at the track, watching Rick’s two races and talking a lot with Rick’s parents while we waited between his two races.  Aunt Jane had given me the times that Rick would be running today; I planned to watch just one of them, whichever one fit in better with the rest of my schedule for the day, and say some quick hellos to the Lusks, but nothing that would require waiting there for two hours.  As I had explained to Aunt Jane over the phone, though, I could not plan any more specifically until I knew which of the chemistry show times I got tickets for.

The 9:00 chemistry show had already begun by the time I reached the front of the line, and I saw a sign saying that tickets for the 10:30 show had already been distributed.  “Are there any left for the 12:00 show?” I asked.

“Just a few left,” the guy handing out the tickets said.  “How many did you need?”

“Just me.”

“You’re good, then,” he said, handing me a ticket.  I put the ticket in my pocket and proceeded to Kerry Hall to see the Math Club’s exhibit.  I could get that out of the way early, since it opened earlier than many of the other exhibits, and it was near the route of the parade that would be starting at 10:00.  By the time I finished the math exhibit, the parade should be starting.

“Greg!” I heard a girl’s voice say as I approached the tables outside the front of Kerry Hall, about five minutes after I got my chemistry ticket.  I recognized Natalie Reese, a math major who was a year younger than me, at a table with polyhedron-shaped bubble wands, demonstrating different patterns formed by the films of soap in the wand, although bubbles blown from these wands always end up round.  “What’s up!  Welcome back!”

“Thanks,” I replied.  “I didn’t really go anywhere, though.  I’m still here, in the student teaching program.”

“Well, I haven’t seen you all year!  How’s student teaching?”

“It’s a lot.  But it’s going okay.  We had the job fair on campus this week, and now I’m just waiting to hear back from those school districts, for second interviews.”

“Good luck!”  Natalie turned to the guy running the table next to her and asked, “Mike?  Do you know Greg?”

“No,” he replied.  “Hi, Greg, I’m Mike.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Greg graduated last year.  He helped me through Math 168.”

“I’m sure you would have done fine without me,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Natalie replied, laughing.

I continued looking at the Math Club display and the adjacent Statistics Club display.  Everything was mostly the same as last year.  I said goodbye to Natalie, Mike, and a few other familiar faces, and walked toward the west side of the Quad, where the parade was about to start.

The most memorable part of the parade was the float for the university’s MBA program.  The students, as they did every year in the parade, wore tops of business suits with boxer shorts, carrying a sign that said “Cover Your Assets.”  I always chuckled at that.  But this year, when the float was about fifty feet past me, something broke on the float, and it stopped.  The students all stood around, trying to tell each other what to do, but no one seemed sure what actually needed to be done.  I overheard a man sitting next to me point out that this was typical of students studying to be business managers, that all they could do was delegate instead of actually fix the problem.  I laughed.

The MBA students did eventually figure out how to get their float moving again a few minutes later, and I sat for a while longer, watching floats and decorated cars go by representing student clubs, local businesses, community organizations, and local political figures, occasionally broken up by marching bands from various high schools and colleges from around the region.  I had a ticket for the 12:00 chemistry show, Aunt Jane had said that one of Rick’s races was supposed to be at 1:40, and Carolyn C. Parry’s show started at 3:00.  In between those three scheduled events I had plenty of time to wander around exhibits, exactly the way I wanted the Spring Picnic to turn out.  And I did wander.  I learned about the university’s experiments in making square-shaped tomatoes, easier to pack in boxes.  I saw a display about different types of soil in this region.  And I learned about diseases that affect common plants used in landscaping.


The chemistry show was one of the biggest disappointments I have ever experienced at a Spring Picnic.  It was not exactly bad, just definitely not worth the hype.  For one thing, I arrived ten minutes before the start of the show, but the room was already so crowded that I had to sit way in the back corner, after climbing over six other people.  The show began with attention-getting explosions on stage, chemical reactions causing bright lights and colored smoke, or as I preferred to think of it, the fun part of chemistry.  But the rest of the show was fairly routine to someone who had taken a full year of freshman chemistry.  I had seen many of the same demonstrations in class at some point.  Definitely not worth waiting in line for almost an hour this morning.  At least I knew in the future that I could skip this event in future Spring Picnics.

By the time I got back to the Quad, I had an hour before I had to go meet the Lusks at the track.  I saw a table where Nu Alpha Kappa, the fraternity for Latino students, was selling carne asada tacos; I stood in line for about fifteen minutes and bought two.  I walked to an empty area of the Quad and began eating.

“Greg,” I heard a familiar voice call out.  I looked up to see Brianna Johns walking toward me, holding a slice of the really good pizza from the Coffee House in the building right next to us.  She wore khaki shorts, white canvas shoes, and a green-gray tank top that seemed to match the color of her eyes, as anything she wore in any shade of blue or green seemed to, for some reason.  I thought she looked hot.

“Hey,” I said, smiling.  “How’s your Spring Picnic going?”

“Fun!  I was watching the parade earlier with Chelsea and Morgan, but Morgan went to go meet her parents, and Chelsea has lunch plans with Tim.  So I’m just hanging out for a while.  Are you here by yourself?”

“Yeah.  My parents came last year, and they didn’t really enjoy it all that much.”  I wondered about Chelsea and Tim having lunch together.  I had seen the two of them together a lot recently, and the way Brianna had worded her reply made it sound like they might officially be a couple now.  I was always last to figure these things out, but I did not want to ask and reveal how out of the loop I was.  “You want to sit down?” I asked.

“Sure.”  Brianna bent over and sat cross-legged on the grass across from me.  “Where’d you get those tacos?” she asked.

“Over there,” I replied, pointing.  “The Latino fraternity is selling them.”

“Nice!  They look yummy.”

“You have Coffee House pizza, though.  Also very yummy.”

“True!  What do you have planned for the rest of the day?”

“My cousin runs track for North Coast State.  He’s here at the track meet, so I’m going to go say hi to them later.  And then at 3, I’m seeing…” I trailed off, trying to remember if Carolyn and Brianna knew each other.  “Did you ever know Carolyn C. Parry?  She was my year, and she was on the worship team for U-Life.”

Brianna thought for a second.  “I don’t think I did.  I only went to U-Life a couple times freshman year, and that was a long time ago.  She’s here today?”

“Yeah, as a performer.”

“Performer?  Like, she’s playing music?”

“Yes!  I knew her from chorus.  The last time I saw her was last summer, I went to U-Life since they still meet in the summer, and she asked the group for prayer, because she had an opportunity to record a CD of some songs she wrote.”

“That’s so cool!  I might show up to that!  Where is it?”

“Three, at the Coffee House stage.”

“I’m supposed to meet up with one of my friends from last year, but if I’m not doing anything around that time, I’ll check her out!”

“Awesome!” I exclaimed.  Brianna and I continued talking for about half an hour, catching up on her classes, my job hunt, and our respective Bible study groups with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  When it came time to go see Rick run, part of me wished that Brianna could come with me, and that we could continue talking, but I also knew that if Aunt Jane saw me with a girl, she would immediately tell Mom, and I would never hear the end of it.


As I should have suspected, but did not think about until it was too late, the track meet ran late, and Rick’s race did not start until much later than scheduled.  I had plenty of time to tell the Lusks all about my year of student teaching and the disappointing chemistry show.  Rick was a little disappointed in his time in the 400 meter race, but I thought he looked respectable.  Rick’s sister Miranda, who was just finishing her last year of high school, made the trip with the rest of the family.  She had more of a reason to be interested in Rick’s track meet this year, because she would be joining Rick at North Coast State next year, also running for their track team.

Since the track meet was running late, I cut it close getting back to the Coffee House, arriving just a few minutes before Carolyn was scheduled to start playing.  Fortunately for me, the Coffee House stage was running late as well, and Carolyn was still setting up and tuning her guitar when I sat at an empty table at 2:59.

Carolyn looked up and surveyed the crowd.  “Greg!” she said, waving to me.  “You made it!  I’m setting up, but I’ll talk to you after the show, okay?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Carolyn’s music was exactly what I expected.  It was just her and an acoustic guitar.  She opened with a song about all the changes that come in life, but God staying the same through all of it, a good message for someone in that transition period between student life and adulthood.  In between songs, sometimes she shared stories about what inspired the songs.  One of the songs she performed was for her best friend, and one was a thought she had after hearing a really good sermon at church, for example.  Her music definitely had a Christian influence, but without being overly preachy or exclusive.  She closed the show with a beautifully upbeat song about chasing her dreams.

I walked straight to Carolyn’s table after the show closed.  “I would like to buy the CD, please,” I said.

“Great!” she replied enthusiastically, taking my money and handing me the plastic case.

“Great show.  I really liked it.”

“Thank you so much!  Thanks for coming!  So what are you doing this year?  Are you still in Jeromeville?”

“Yeah.  Doing the student teaching program, teaching math at Nueces High.  And right now in the middle of applying and interviewing for jobs in the fall.”

“Like, real teaching jobs?”

“Yes!  I’m nervous.  But through all this change, God remains the same, just like your song says.”

“Yes!”  Passing me a clipboard, Carolyn continued, “Sign up for my email list.  That way you’ll always know when the next show is.  And are you going to the Under Heaven Festival?  Have you heard about that?”

“I’ve heard some people talking about it, but I’m not really sure what it is.”

“Some people from U-Life and from Jeromeville Assembly of God got together to do this.  It’s a Christian music and art festival in Capital City, next month.  I’m going to be playing there; that’s my next show up this way.”

“Sounds good!  I’ll probably be there, then!”

“Do you know Sarah Masen?  She’s headlining.”

“I have one song of hers on a mixtape that we handed out to the youth groups at J-Cov.  ‘All Fall Down.’  It’s a good song.”

“She’s really good.  So make sure you stay for her show.”

“I will!

“I need to talk to these guys, but it was really good seeing you!  Hopefully I’ll see you next month?”

“Yeah!” I said as Carolyn turned to some people who appeared to be friends of hers.  I looked around the room, noticing that Brianna had never shown up, and then left the building, walking south across the Quad. (Brianna did ask me about Carolyn’s show the next morning, though, when I saw her at church.)


An important part of the Spring Picnic was the Battle of the Bands, where marching bands from Jeromeville and several other universities around the region meet on the shore of Spooner Lake, next to Marks Hall, and take turns playing songs late into the night until they are out of songs that they know.  After Carolyn’s set, I walked to Spooner Lake and watched the bands play for about an hour and a half, then walked back to where my bike was parked (near Stone Hall, I remembered) as the marching band from Capital State’s rendition of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” gradually grew softer behind me.  These marching bands always seemed to play the songs I would least expect to be set to a marching band arrangement, but that was part of the fun.  I was not much of an Alanis fan, her voice was annoying, but if I had to pick a least annoying Alanis song, it was that one.

It would be fun if Carolyn became a girl rock superstar like Alanis Morissette.  Carolyn had a way better voice than Alanis, that was for sure, and her lyrics were more appealing to me than those of Alanis.  It was exciting to think that I was at one of her first shows.  Maybe that would be a claim to fame someday.  Seeing music at the Spring Picnic just did not feel the same after Lawsuit broke up, but maybe now Carolyn would be the new musical act to look forward to seeing every year at the Spring Picnic.

Readers: I probably asked this before, but tell me about an annual event in your area that you look forward to every year.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

And if you follow me on Instagram, I don’t post often these days, but I’ll be sure to post pictures of this year’s Spring Picnic, later this month.

[Alanis Morissette – You Oughta Know – warning, song contains explicit language]

April 13-16, 1999.  Job interviews and unsettling coincidences. (#213)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: While something similar to the events in this story surrounding the band Watching the Geese actually happened to me, Watching the Geese is not the actual name of a band that played worship music, as far as I know. I used Keith Green’s original 1982 recording of the song mentioned in the story for this episode’s song. Neither Mr. Green, who was deceased by 1999, nor any of his band members had any connection to the events that inspired this story.

“Hey, Greg,” Mr. Bowles greeted me as I walked into his classroom at the start of fourth period.  This was the class that I was just observing and helping as part of my student teaching; I was not going to take over and start teaching the class.  It was in the room next to Mrs. Tracy’s geometry class that I had taken over, so I usually got to Mr. Bowles’ classroom before most of the students.

“Hi,” I said.

“How are you?”

“Kind of nervous.  The education job fair at UJ is this week.  I’ve never interviewed for teaching jobs before.”

“You’ll do fine.  You really know your stuff.  You’ll get a job wherever you want,” Mr. Bowles said reassuringly.

“I hope so,” I replied.

Mr. Bowles’ class was Honors Algebra II, full of strong academic students who were mostly very nice and well-behaved.  One student from this class, a sophomore girl named Colleen McKinney, sat in the desk next to where I sat, and she was always especially friendly toward me.  Today, as I was headed to my usual seat, Colleen asked, “Did you say you’re going to the education job fair at Jeromeville this afternoon?”

“Yeah.  All of us in the student teaching program signed up to be interviewed for jobs.”

“My dad is going to be there.”

“Oh yeah?  He’s a school administrator?”

“Yes.  For Petersburg School District.”

“Oh!” I said.  “I’ll probably see him, then.  I applied there.”

As Mr. Bowles taught the lesson, I sat there, processing what Colleen just said.  She attends Nueces High, so presumably she lived in Nueces.  Why, then, did her dad work in Petersburg?  Petersburg was forty miles away from Nueces by road, with a toll bridge in between. Did people actually commute that far?  Or were Colleen’s parents divorced, and she lived in Nueces with her mom, and her dad lived in Petersburg?  I never did find out, but over the years I came to learn that many school administrators did in fact live far from their jobs, possibly because they wanted privacy from people in the community who disagreed with them, and also because their jobs paid well.

Interestingly enough, this was not the first weird coincidence that had happened recently involving Colleen’s family.  A couple weeks ago, she asked me what I was doing for spring break, and I mentioned that I was not going to be able to visit my parents like I usually did, since my classes at the university did not have the same spring break.  Colleen asked where my parents lived, and when I started to explain to her where Plumdale was, since most people did not know, she replied, “I know where that is! My Grandma McKinney lives right near there, in Gabilan.” I mentioned this to my mother, who grew up in Gabilan and seemed to know everyone whose family has been there for a long time.  Mom said that she knew of two McKinney brothers when she was growing up, David and Reuel; I found it interesting that both McKinneys had Old Testament names, but one name was much more common than the other these days.  Mom said that she hoped Colleen’s dad was David, because one of Mom’s childhood friends knew the McKinneys well and always used to say that David was cute and Reuel was ugly.

It bothered me the way Mom always said things like that.  To Mom, commenting on people’s appearance was a big joke, but it was hard to get what Mom said out of my head when I actually had to interact with that person. So, that afternoon at the job fair, when I saw the names of the people who would be conducting the interviews, and I read “Petersburg School District – Reuel McKinney, associate superintendent,” I tried hard to focus on the task at hand and not blurt out anything about him being the ugly brother.  I was about to meet this man face to face, and he may have the power to determine my fate for the following school year.

I did not find Reuel McKinney particularly ugly, but I was a guy, so I did not know what Mom and her friends considered cute or ugly back in the 1960s.  He called my name and introduced himself; I shook his hand and followed him to his table.  When we sat down, I asked him, “Aren’t you Colleen’s dad?”  Although I was not going to say anything about his past connection to my mother, I figured that Colleen seemed to like me as a teacher, so it might help my chances of getting a job if I had approval from a family member of his.

“Yes,” Mr. McKinney replied, looking confused.  “How do you know my daughter?”

“I’m a student teacher at Nueces High.  I’m helping out in her math class, with Mr. Bowles.”

“Oh!”  Mr. McKinney looked at my résumé, and continued, “Student teacher, Nueces High.  I see that now.”

“Yes.  She told me that you would be at this job fair.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Mr. McKinney said, smiling, looking at his notes.  “Let’s get to the important questions.  Tell me how you go about planning lessons.”

“I tend to start with what’s in the teacher’s edition,” I explained.  “I outline what I’m going to say, what problems I’m going to work out, any important definitions the students need.  But I’ll make changes if I need to, from what I’ve noticed in class.  Sometimes I can tell what I need to spend more time on by the things they struggle with in class, and on their homework.  And I also use that to decide which homework problems to assign.”

Mr. McKinney nodded as he wrote something down, then he continued, “Tell me about your philosophy of classroom management.”

I took a deep breath, knowing that this was not my strength as a teacher, but maybe speaking in theoreticals, I could make it sound like I knew what I was doing.  “When a student isn’t doing what he or she is supposed to, first I make sure to communicate clearly to the student what they should be doing.  If the misbehavior continues, we have a room at Nueces High where we can send students who need a time out from the classroom.”

“Room Two,” Mr. McKinney said.  “I’ve heard about that.  Petersburg High doesn’t have that currently, unfortunately.”

I thought quickly, then said, “In that case, the next step would probably be something like after school detention.  And when it gets to that point, I’d contact home to make sure the parents know what is going on.  And if the student is still misbehaving after these more minor interventions, then I’ll send them out on a class suspension, and call home again.”

“Makes sense.”  Mr. McKinney took some more notes, then continued the interview.  He asked for my own self-assessment of my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher.  I said that my strength was the subject matter itself, and my weakness was that I tended to wait a little too long for behavior problems to correct themselves without intervention, and I was learning that they usually did not.  He also asked how I assign grades, and how I work with students who have special needs to make sure their needs are met.  When the interview ended, I shook his hand again and told him, “Tell Colleen I’ll see her tomorrow.”

“I will,” he replied, smiling.


After a few more interviews, I went home and ate dinner, knowing that I had papers to grade at some point tonight.  After dinner, I sat at my desk and looked through my CDs, trying to decide what to listen to while I worked.  On top of my CD shelf was a disc that did not belong to me, by a band I had never heard of until a few days ago called Watching the Geese.  Darius Curtis from church had just come up to me Sunday after the service, handed me the Watching the Geese CD, and said, “Here.  You have to listen to this.  It’s so good.”  I thought this was odd, since Darius had never talked much with me about music, let alone given me music to borrow.  I listened to it once Sunday afternoon; it was worship music, the type that might be sung in church, and Darius was right, it was pretty good.

I put the Watching the Geese CD in the drive on the computer and began the process of making a copy of the CD, something that I had just acquired the ability to do a few months ago when I bought this computer.  The process took a long time; I had to wait for every song to copy to the computer’s hard drive, then remove the disc, replace it with a blank one, and wait for the computer to write the songs that were now saved on its hard drive to the blank disc.  At the speed of a typical home computer in 1999, the whole process took around an hour, giving me plenty of time to get papers graded while I wanted.  But I was in a mood to procrastinate, so I did not get out my papers to grade right away.

Instead, I opened the case of the Watching the Geese CD and took out the booklet with the credits.  I glanced at the photo of the band and began reading below that.  Watching the Geese was the worship team employed by a large Christian retreat center called Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp.  I had never been to Sugar Pine Lake, but I had seen it on a map, in the mountains east of Ashwood, probably about a four hour road trip from here.  I had listened to the CD twice now; Watching the Geese had two vocalists, one male and one female, as well as the usual guitar, bass, and drums.  After I read the paragraph detailing the band’s connection to Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp, I continued reading.  The male vocalist was named Jonathan Torres, the female vocalist was named Cindy Houck, the guitarist was–

I did a double take as I felt a jolt of adrenaline rush through my body.

I looked at the band photo a second time, at the short, slightly chubby blonde girl standing second from the left.  It was not a great photograph, and it was small on the page, but yes, that was definitely Cindy Houck, crossing paths with my life now a third distinct time.

Twelve years ago, I was in fifth grade, living in Gabilan. I was part of a pull-out program at my school where, a couple times a week, the students who were identified as gifted would leave their regular classes for about an hour for special enrichment activities.  The group from my class often did things together with the fourth grade gifted students, and a friendly blonde girl from the fourth grade gifted group named Cindy Houck would often smile and say hi to me.  I was just starting to get over my girls-have-cooties phase, and while I never knew Cindy well, I always found her friendliness comforting, in a world where most kids were mean to me for no reason.

A few years later, I moved from Gabilan to Plumdale, about ten miles away, in a different school district.  When I was in tenth grade, I was looking through the yearbook and found Cindy Houck in there as a freshman.  Our elementary school normally fed to Gabilan High, so she must have coincidentally also moved some distance to the north at some point.  We had a class together the following year, but I never said anything about having known her in elementary school, nor did she acknowledge that she knew me.  I always found strange coincidences like this unsettling and disturbing. Also, my years in elementary school were not happy ones, and I wanted to put all that behind me, even though Cindy was not part of the bad memories of elementary school.

I never knew what happened to her after high school.  Apparently she was now working at Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp, on the worship team.  And for some reason, Darius Curtis had just felt an overwhelming urge to lend me this particular CD after church last week so I could listen to it.  I did not know whether Cindy had grown up in a Christian family or found Jesus later in life, but if she had grown up Christian, that might explain part of the reason she was nice to me in elementary school when most people were not.

But what would I do with this information now?  I ended up doing nothing.  I never really knew Cindy that well, so if I were to attempt to contact her at Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp and tell her that I heard her band’s music, and I remembered her from two separate times in my life, that would probably not be received well.  But it made me wonder if I was going to keep crossing paths with Cindy every six years or so.


The following afternoon, I had more job interviews.  Dr. Van Zandt had canceled our afternoon seminars on the days of the job fair, so that we could have time for all of our interviews.  My first one on that day was with Nueces School District, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the interviewer’s name: “Martin Garrett, principal, Nueces High School.”  The principal of the school where I was already student teaching.  A familiar face.  Then I got a little nervous when I saw the names for my next interview after that, with Blue Oaks School District: “Ralph Stevenson, principal, Granite Lake High School; Maria Vasquez, vice principal, Blue Oaks Middle School.”  I sat in my chair, uncomfortably trying to figure out what to say to Mr. Stevenson, how to figure out whether he remembered me, and if so, how to avoid the obvious sensitive topic, when I heard Mr. Garrett call me.

“Hello, Greg,” Mr. Garrett said after sitting at the table opposite me.  “Good to see you here.”

“You too,” I replied.

“I can kind of skip the first question, since I already know you.  So let’s get right to it.  Describe to me what a typical day looks like in your classroom.”

“Students walk in, and I have a problem on the board for them to work on while I take attendance.  Then I take questions on the previous day’s homework, or sometimes I’ll have a problem from the homework that I know I want to go over. In the classes that use the CRM curriculum, there will already be an exploratory problem in their book for them to do, so I have them try that problem and discuss it in groups.  Then we discuss as a class, and they write the important information in their notebook.  For the rest of the period, students work on more problems, discussing them with each other, and I’ll walk around watching what they’re doing, and asking questions to get them to discuss their learning.  This also gives me an idea of what they might be struggling with. The classes that don’t use CRM, I tend to use a similar structure.”

“Okay,” Mr. Garrett replied, taking notes on a clipboard.  “Tell me about your classroom management strategy.”

The interview with Mr. Garrett was relatively predictable; by now, the second day of the three-day job fair, I was starting to notice that most of these interviewers asked very similar questions.  At the end of the interview, Mr. Garrett gave me a look that suggested unfortunate news.  “What can I say,” he said.  “You’re doing a great job at Nueces High, we’d love to hire you, but we don’t have any openings for math this year anywhere in the district.”

I nodded sadly.  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I said.

“We’ll keep your application on file if anything opens up, but I just want to be honest, it’s not likely at this point.”

“I understand.”

Mr. Garrett shook my hand and said that he would see me tomorrow.  I went back to the waiting room, feeling a little discouraged, thinking about my upcoming interview with Blue Oaks School District.  Blue Oaks was in the foothills about forty miles east of Jeromeville, but I had just learned recently that the neighboring community of Granite Lake was in the same school district as Blue Oaks.  From what I knew, Granite Lake was a fairly affluent community; that might be an interesting place to teach, with parents who likely valued education, but rich parents could also be demanding, and there was no way I could afford to live in Granite Lake.

“Greg?” a man asked, walking into the waiting room.  I did not recognize him right away, but it had been a long time, and I never really knew Mr. Stevenson well. I mostly only remembered the name, and the thing I had heard about him after the fact.  I stood up, walked toward the man, and he introduced himself, saying, “Ralph Stevenson.  Nice to meet you.”

“You too,” I said, a little nervously.  So far he showed no indication that he remembered me.  Back at the interview table, his colleague, Mrs. Vasquez, introduced herself.  Mr. Stevenson had a copy of my résumé right in front of him, he had access to all of the pertinent information, so I decided to just say it now, while giving no hint that I knew something that may not be public knowledge.  “Didn’t you used to be at Plumdale High?” I asked.

Mr. Stevenson looked at me for a few seconds, slightly surprised.  He looked down at my résumé, then back at me, and smiled.  “Yes!” he replied.  “Wow.  That was a while ago.  I was vice principal there.  I see you went to Plumdale High?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly, I don’t remember you, but, let’s see, if you were class of ’94, then I would have left after your freshman year.  And you probably weren’t the kind of student who got sent to the vice principal’s office very often.”

“Right,” I said, nodding.  Not entirely true, but it would probably be good to let him keep thinking that.  I tended to deal more with my school counselor than with Mr. Stevenson on my bad days.

The questions I got from Mr. Stevenson and his colleague, Mrs. Vasquez, were again similar to what the other school administrators had been asking me.  After the interview, they said they would be in touch, and I thanked them.  As I began to walk back to the waiting room, I had a fleeting thought very out of character for me.  I imagined myself pulling Mr. Stevenson aside, looking him in the eye, and telling him, “Listen, Ralph.  I know why you aren’t at Plumdale High anymore.  You resigned after it got out that you and Mrs. Anderson were having an affair.  Do your bosses at the district office in Blue Oaks know this?  If you don’t want them to find out, then you better offer me a job.”  Of course, I would never do anything like that.  Blackmail was not a good job-hunting strategy for someone just beginning his teaching career.  And technically I had no proof of Mr. Stevenson’s past; I had heard this secondhand from an older student a while after Mr. Stevenson left Plumdale High.  I never had Mrs. Anderson as a teacher in high school, but I knew her better than I knew Mr. Stevenson, and I totally would not have put it past her to have an affair with a supervisor.  I dismissed this thought and returned to the waiting room, to wait to be called by my next interviewer, one Mr. Robert Harbison of Jorgensen High School, next to Tyler Air Force Base, just outside of Nueces and Fairview.


A couple days later, I was driving to Nueces for student teaching, listening to the Watching the Geese CD.  I heard Cindy Houck’s voice sing “There Is A Redeemer,” harmonizing with her bandmate Jonathan Torres.  This song sounded like a classical hymn, but according to the liner notes of the CD, it was originally recorded in 1982 by Keith Green, a Christian singer whose name I was vaguely familiar with.  I thought back to all the strange coincidences that had happened to me recently.  I had an interview with Mr. McKinney, whom my mom’s childhood friend had had a crush on many decades ago.  I also had an interview with Mr. Stevenson, the supposedly disgraced former vice principal of my own high school.  And both of these connections to me, as well as my connection with Cindy Houck, happened back in Santa Lucia County, a hundred and sixty miles from Jeromeville.  

I did not cross paths with Cindy six years later, as I had wondered if I would.  As of now, I have not heard from her, or heard her name anywhere, since borrowing Darius’ CD of Watching the Geese.  I did not see Colleen McKinney or her dad again after that school year, and I never saw Mr. Stevenson again.  But I have had many other strange coincidences happen in my life.  It seems that, while I can remove myself from emotionally unhealthy situations, I can never expect to completely run from my past.  Somehow, somewhere, someone or something from the past would always catch up to me.  I did not have to let uncomfortable moments in the past define me anymore, but I also could not ignore the fact that they happened.  “Jesus, my redeemer, name above all names,” Cindy and Jonathan sang through my car speakers.  Jesus was my redeemer, and he could redeem my uncomfortable past and give me a future, hopefully involving a job at one of the school districts that had interviewed me this week.

Readers: Have you ever unexpectedly met up with someone from the past in an unusual situation? Or has there ever been anyone in your life who keeps reappearing unexpectedly every few years? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Keith Green – There Is A Redeemer]

Late March – Early April, 1999.  Preparing for job interviews. (#212) 

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

“Becky?  Kayla?” I asked, as I walked past their desks.  “Can I talk to you for just a minute after class?  You’re not in trouble, and I can write you a pass in case you get to fourth period late.”

“Sure,” Kayla replied.

“Okay,” Becky added.

The bell rang about five minutes later, and as the students filed out, I gestured for Becky and Kayla to come talk to me.  After everyone left, I said, “I didn’t pass back your homework today for a reason.  I’m putting together a portfolio of student work, so that when I apply for jobs next year, I can show what my students can do to the people who would decide whether or not to hire me.  I’m going to copy your papers with your names covered up, and then give them back tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”

“Sure,” Becky said.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Kayla said.  “Why are you applying for a new job?  Are you leaving Nueces High?”

“I’d love to stay here if I can,” I explained.  “But I’m just here for this year, as part of my student teaching class at Jeromeville.  I’m going to apply for a job here, but Mrs. Tracy said that she doesn’t think any of the other math teachers are leaving, so they might not need a new math teacher here.”

“Oh,” Becky said.

“I hope you stay here!” Kayla exclaimed.  “You’re a good teacher.”

“Thank you so much!  Let me write you two passes, so you have time to get to class.”  I grabbed two pieces of scratch paper and wrote and signed notes for each student excusing them if they arrived to class tardy. Then I headed two doors down the hall to Mr. Bowles’ classroom and his Honors Algebra II class I was assigned to observe and assist in.

The last day of class for winter quarter at the University of Jeromeville was approaching, and I had a big project due for the seminar class with Dr. Van Zandt and the other math student teachers.  For this project, we had to put together a portfolio to bring to the job fair in April.  Representatives from school districts all over the state would be coming to Jeromeville on three consecutive afternoons next month, where they would be conducting preliminary interviews for open teaching positions.  Our portfolios were to include our résumés, letters of recommendation, undergraduate transcripts, score reports from the basic skills test that all teachers in the state needed to take, and samples of student work.  Becky and Kayla had approved of my use of samples of their work, as had the only two students from Basic Math B first period who still had an A in the class.  I was a little nervous asking them, I did not want any of them to think I was being weird wanting to copy their work.  But, fortunately, all of them approved.

I chose Becky because she had been making a great effort lately to improve her grade, and it had paid off.  She had a D+ on her second quarter report card, and currently, late in the third quarter, she was getting a B.  I was not sure of what had caused the sudden improvement in Becky’s work, if her parents saw her grade and were pushing her harder, or if she took the initiative herself to bring her grade up.  It was possible that she was just naturally having an easier time with the material, although this did not entirely explain her success.  The College Ready Mathematics curriculum used at Nueces High used a technique called spiraling.  Material from previous lessons and chapters continued to appear in homework assignments, as well as quizzes and tests, for the rest of the year.  Becky got an A on the previous unit test, even successfully answering problems from the two units before that one, so she was doing something differently compared to earlier in the year.  Kayla, a consistent B student, I had chosen for my portfolio for a different reason: she had unusually clear and legible handwriting that would look good when showing her work to others.

I had already written my résumé.  I did not like it, I never felt comfortable doing things that felt like selling myself, but writing a résumé was sadly necessary in this world of job hunting.  I had been told repeatedly that a résumé is just a foot in the door, to make oneself stand out enough to get a job interview.  I was not sure if I stood out, but I tried to include as many things as I could to portray myself in a positive light.  I mentioned my research internship in Oregon from a couple years back.  I mentioned that I had worked as a math tutor with the Learning Skills Center on campus.  I also had a section on my résumé where I listed various computer-related experiences.  I said that I had experience coding in C++.  I had taken an entire class two years ago on C++, and with technology in education being one of the big fads of that day, this may catch the eye of some human resources employee somewhere.  I also wrote that I had experience coding web pages in HTML, even though my experience was very minimal, just enough to make a silly personal website, and to post the Dog Crap and Vince stories with pictures.  That may come in handy for designing a simple, straightforward school web site eventually.

I also had dreaded for a long time asking for letters of recommendation.  Dr. Van Zandt told us that he would be writing letters for all of us in the program, but most job applications require at least three letters of recommendation, and having even more than this might prove useful in case one of the letter writers were to say something honest but unflattering.  I had had so many bad days as a student teacher that I was afraid to know what Mrs. Tracy and Ms. Matthews would say about me in their letters of recommendation, but I asked them for letters anyway since they were most familiar with my teaching.  Mrs. Tracy had finished hers first, and as I read over what she wrote for the first time, I felt a wave of relief to see that it was positive.  Mrs. Tracy’s letter began with the typical introduction, explaining that I was a student at the University of Jeromeville School of Education assigned to her geometry class as a student teacher.  She continued with more specifics:

As a high school teacher with twenty-five years of experience, I have observed numerous positive teaching traits with Mr. Dennison.  First, he has an excellent command of the subject matter, and is knowledgeable and confident in mathematics.  This has allowed us to work on teaching and classroom management skills.  Second, he is always prepared for class with lessons, examples, and testing materials.  He patiently works with students, correcting them gently in a positive way while building understanding of the problem.  Also, Mr. Dennison accepts criticism well and welcomes suggestions on improving his teaching.  He sees this as a challenge to help himself become a better teacher, which is a rare quality in a student teacher beginning his career!

Mr. Dennison is showing noticeable improvement in the areas of timing lessons and classroom discipline.  He is learning to create a disruption-free environment and maintain control of the classroom.  With experience, he will continue to get better in this, as we all do.

My experience working with Mr. Dennison has been positive.  I believe that he will be a positive asset to any school faculty.

A few days later, I got a similar letter from Ms. Matthews, the master teacher for Basic Math B.  It was shorter, but mostly made the same points about my command of the subject matter and preparation, as well as still improving on things like discipline.  Thankfully, she left out the part about the time I left the students unattended for a couple minutes.  I felt that this letter put me in a positive enough light to include in my portfolio.

Just in case I needed a fourth letter, I had sent an email a few weeks ago to Dr. George Samuels, the math professor who two years ago had first encouraged me to go into teaching.  Dr. Samuels was the co-author of a high school textbook series that was widely used around the state, and when he first asked if I had ever considered teaching, he mentioned that the field of education needed more strong mathematical minds teaching students.  Having a letter of recommendation from a familiar name in the world of math education might help make my application stand out.

Before I left Nueces High that day, I made copies of Becky and Kayla’s work, as well as the two assignments from students in Basic Math B.  I covered up their names as I ran everything through the copy machine.  I wished that I had one of Becky’s assignments from a few months ago, so that I could have shown in my portfolio how much she was improving, but I had no reason to think to save one of her papers back then.

I checked my email when I got back to the house, and Dr. Samuels had written to me to say that his letter of recommendation was done, and that I could stop by his office this afternoon to pick it up.  As I walked down the hall toward his office, I passed the office of Dr. Thomas, my other favorite professor, and wondered if I should have asked her for a recommendation as well.  I had not asked, since I already had four people lined up, and of my two favorite professors, Dr. Samuels worked more closely with secondary education than Dr. Thomas, so his recommendation might carry more weight.  But if any of the letters I had were too unflattering to include in the portfolio, I could then ask Dr. Thomas for one.  The portfolio assignment was due in a couple days, but the job fair was still a few weeks away, and there was no requirement that the portfolio include the exact same letters of recommendation that I would give to the people who were hiring.

Dr. Van Zandt’s portfolio assignment was not just an academic exercise.  The UJ School of Education allowed students to keep placement files, with all of our résumés, transcripts, and letters of recommendation in one convenient place, to send out with job applications.  I would be able to reactivate this placement file at any time in the future that I was applying for a job in teaching.

For the upcoming job fair, I would submit all of the necessary paperwork to the School of Education Placement Office.  I had a list of all the school districts who would send people here to UJ to conduct interviews.  Some districts listed exactly what subjects and grades they had open positions for, but many used the hiring pool method, where they kept job applications on file regardless of what positions were open, and they contacted applicants as needed.  Most of the school districts coming to Jeromeville for the job fair were from the northern half of the state, with a few from farther away.  I had to turn in a list by the end of the week saying which school districts I was applying to, and the Education Placement Office would come up with a schedule of when each district would interview me.

I had been reading through the list of school districts that would be attending, trying to decide where to apply.  Casting a wide net, sending a lot of applications, would be a good idea, although each one required filling out paperwork, and some asked for a cover letter.  I also had ruled out several places I did not want to work.  For example, I had the impression that the Capital City School District included a lot of rough schools in run-down urban areas.  Not really the kind of place I was interested in.

I did apply to most of the school districts in the suburbs of Capital City; suburban communities seemed more like what I was used to.  Some of these communities had their own school district, some school districts included two or three distinct communities, and some cities and communities were split between multiple school districts.  Control of public schools in this state was highly localized, and local school districts were completely independent of city councils and county boards of supervisors, which led to this patchwork of school districts of widely varying sizes.

The school district for Jeromeville was not attending the job fair, but I did apply to most of the school districts adjacent to Jeromeville: Woodville, Silvey, and of course Nueces.  I also applied to Fairview, just south of Nueces.  Tyler Air Force Base was located between Fairview and Nueces, and it had its own school district, which also included a few surrounding neighborhoods and rural areas; I applied there too.

I applied to a few other places that were a little too far to commute: Silverado, across the hills west of Fairview.  Riverview and Petersburg to the southwest, across the lower part of the Capital River.  Positas, about another twenty miles south of Riverview over some low mountains.  To the southeast, down the Valley, I applied in El Monte and Ralstonville.

When I turned in my list to the Education Placement Office, I was given applications to fill out for each school district.  On these applications, my information typically needed to be filled out neatly within small spaces on the paper, and my handwriting was messy enough that filling out these applications by hand would probably not impress those who would be offering me a job.  Fortunately, I found a typewriter in the office at Nueces High that was free for teachers to use, so I spent two entire prep periods that week carefully typing my information into all of these applications.

Later that week, during the student teaching seminar, Dr. Van Zandt announced that our letters of recommendation were ready.  I waited nervously as he passed out the letters.  He handed me my letter, and I read it, anxious at first, but unable to hide my smile as I read more.  This was by far the most positive and glowing letter of recommendation that I had ever received for anything.  After the opening paragraph, in which he explained the nature of the program I was in and his role as the supervisor of the program, he continued to write about my qualifications.

Mr. Dennison has had a variety of experiences student teaching at Nueces High School, including Geometry, Basic Math B, and Algebra II Honors.  His experiences have allowed him to teach students with many different academic abilities and socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.  As a student teacher in the UJ certification program, Mr. Dennison has studied strategies for teaching students whose home language is not English, and he has practiced these strategies in his student teaching.

Mr. Dennison is a strong mathematics student with a great deal of mathematical knowledge.  He graduated with honors, with a 3.95 GPA, and received the UJ Department Citation for Outstanding Academic Achievement.  Mr. Dennison is the strongest mathematics student I have ever had in ten years of supervising this program.  He plans his teaching well, and has developed a variety of instructional strategies.  He is skilled at using computers, including experience in the classroom with software such as Excel and The Geometer’s Sketchpad.  He is willing to try different teaching approaches, and he understands the importance of being organized and prepared.

Mr. Dennison enjoys teaching and values the power of mathematics for students.  I am pleased to recommend Gregory Dennison for a teaching position in mathematics.

Wow, I thought after reading Dr. Van Zandt’s letter.  That was quite the positive recommendation.  Maybe I had a better chance of getting a teaching job than I thought I would.

I was in the odd situation that I did not get a spring break that year, because UJ and Nueces High had different weeks off.  During UJ’s week off, I still had to do my student teaching every day at Nueces High in the morning, but then I was free for the rest of the day.  The following week, Nueces High was off, and Dr. Van Zandt canceled the student teaching seminar for some of the days, since we were all teaching at schools that had that week off.  But two new classes for spring quarter started that week, so I had each of those classes twice during the week in the afternoon.  Even with that schedule, though, those two weeks were less stressful than usual, since I had half the day free each week.

During that time, on the days when I had student teaching in the morning, I took some day trips after student teaching was done, to places I was not very familiar with but had applied for jobs.  I wanted to get a feel for what the schools and neighborhoods were like.  One day I covered Silverado, Fairview, and Tyler Air Force Base, or at least the adjacent neighborhoods since I could not get on base.  Fairview was a bit rougher than I expected, but the area around Tyler Air Force Base seemed okay, and I would probably get a lot of supportive parents at a school with a lot of military families.  Silverado seemed like a wealthy area.  It was in a well-known wine growing region, the kind of place that attracted rich tourists on day trips for wine tasting.  I was not sure that I would be able to afford to live in Silverado on a teacher’s salary.

On another day, I headed south to drive around Riverview, Petersburg, and Positas.  I had only been to Riverview and Petersburg once each, and only to Positas a few times, and I had never seen any of those cities other than from the freeway.  Riverview and Petersburg were rougher than I expected them to be, although each city, Riverview especially, also had newer neighborhoods that seemed nicer and better kept.  Positas looked more like a normal suburb, but it was home to technology jobs, and a research laboratory run by the same public university system as UJ.  I was not sure how this would affect the culture, if I would feel out of place teaching the children of technology big shots, or if that background might produce students who appreciated the importance of learning mathematics.

I had plenty of new music to keep me busy during those trips.  I had recently bought two new albums on CD: R.E.M.’s Up, and the self-titled album from Sixpence None the Richer that had “Kiss Me” on it.  That song was rapidly becoming a guilty pleasure of mine, and the rest of the album was good too.  R.E.M.’s newer stuff was not terrible, but it was definitely different from the R.E.M. hits I had grown up with in my teens.  Some songs were more electronic sounding than what I was used to from R.E.M.  In addition to playing these albums multiple times in the car, I also listened to some of the mix CDs I had been making.  None of those places I went was far from Jeromeville, but none of them was particularly close either, and with all the time I spent driving around in each city, getting a feel for the areas and seeing all the high schools and middle schools up close, those two trips had me away from home for several hours each time.

When the seminar class began again, the same day that Nueces High started school again after spring break, Dr. Van Zandt gave us all our schedules for the upcoming job fair.  Each interview time slot was only fifteen minutes long, spread out among three afternoons as people’s schedules allowed.  I took a deep breath as I read the schedule.  This was starting to feel real.  I cast a wide enough net that I had fourteen job interviews, now scheduled with an actual date and time just a little over a week away.  It felt undeniable now that the next stage of my life was arriving in a hurry.

Readers: When did you realize that you were growing up, and a new stage of your life was coming? Tell me about a time like that in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[R.E.M. – Daysleeper]

March 11, 1999.  Not a typical Thursday. (#211)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

Jeromeville, being a university town, had an abundance of pizza places. Plenty of national and regional chains had locations in Jeromeville, even though the local culture frequently made a lot of noise claiming to be against chain stores.  The pizza place that most people heard about often in Jeromeville was called Woody’s, on G Street.  Woody’s was good pizza, but in my opinion only the second best pizza in Jeromeville.  The best pizza in Jeromeville was right on campus, at the student run Coffee House.

After I got home from student teaching at Nueces High School that day, I went straight to campus on my bike. So far, today felt like a typical Thursday during Fake Spring, sunny with a high of 78 degrees outside, and I felt like treating myself.  I parked my bike and walked into the Coffee House, on the west end of the Memorial Union building.  I bought two slices of pepperoni pizza, grabbed a copy of the Daily Colt, and went to find a spot on the Quad to sit on the grass and eat.  I read the paper as I ate, enjoying the feeling of warm sunshine on my skin, and the view of girls walking by wearing fewer clothes than they were a couple weeks ago when it was twenty degrees cooler and raining.

Just as I finished eating, I sensed someone standing near me.  I looked up to see a guy I had never seen before.  He appeared to be of Middle Eastern decent, with average height and build, very dark hair, and an olive complexion.  “Hi,” he said, handing me a flyer.  Confused, I took his flyer and read it, becoming even more confused as I did so.

IRANIAN STUDENT CLUB
at the University of Jeromeville
Every Thursday night, 106 Wellington
For more information: 555-0177

“I’m sorry,” I told the young man standing next to me.  “I think you have me confused with someone else.”

“No, you don’t know me,” he said.  “I just thought you might be interested in our club.  So you can meet and hang out with other Iranian students.  Check it out tonight, maybe?”  I just stared at him, not sure what to say, as he continued.  “I’ll see you later!”

“Have a good one,” I managed to blurt out, still not quite understanding what had just happened.  Apparently this guy thought I was Iranian.  To my knowledge, I had no ancestors from Iran.  That was a new one for me; in this part of the United States, I was often mistaken for Mexican because of my dark brown, almost black, hair, but I had never been mistaken for Iranian before.

I got up a few minutes later to throw away the paper plate from the pizza.  As I walked toward the nearest garbage can, I spotted Brianna Johns walking toward me.  She was with Jill, a girl from Brianna’s year who also went to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and a third girl I did not recognize.  Brianna wore denim shorts, flip-flops, and a pale bluish-green shirt that seemed to match the color of her eyes.  The last few times I saw Brianna, she was wearing some shade of blue or green, and it always seemed the same color as her eyes.  It was probably an optical illusion, I did not seriously believe that her eyes were changing color, but that was just another part of why I found her really pretty, in a friendly, down-to-earth, all-American girl-next-door kind of way.

“Hey, Greg!” Brianna said.

“Hi!” I replied.  “What’s up?”

“We’re going to give blood!  You wanna come with us?”

In the two seconds that followed, my mind kicked into gear, processing something that I was not at all expecting to hear.  Normally, when I saw my friends on campus and asked them what was up, I got answers like “going to class,” “studying,” “meeting a friend,” or “procrastinating.”  Not once had I ever been told “going to give blood.”  But before I could finish processing this response, my brain began processing another thought: here I was, standing face to face with an attractive friendly blonde girl, who was attempting to invite me to something.  So, therefore, I spoke out loud the only correct response: “Sure!”  I proceeded to drop all of my plans to spend the next hour catching up on reading, and I followed Brianna, Jill, and the other girl to wherever they were going to give blood.  I did at least remember to drop my greasy paper plate in the next garbage can I found.

While the other girls talked, my mind continued processing what was happening, now that I had committed to donating blood.  I remembered reading an article in the Daily Colt a few days ago that the local blood bank would be doing a blood drive on campus soon.  These blood drives happened twice a year, typically.  Usually I ignored them; giving blood was just never something I did.  I had nothing against giving blood, I just had never done it before.  I wondered what I was getting myself into, but before I said anything out loud, I realized that I had to keep my blood donation inexperience a secret.  Brianna might think that it was weird for me to be so quick to tag along to give blood when giving blood was an unfamiliar experience to me.

“How was your day?” Brianna asked me, snapping my mind back to reality.  It looked like we were headed to Freeman Hall, a building next to the Memorial Union that usually hosted performances and concerts.

“Not too bad,” I replied as she opened the door and the four of us walked inside the building. “Something weird happened right before I saw you, though.”  I told her about the guy who invited me to the Iranian Student Club.

“Really?  He thought you were Iranian?” she laughed.  “I guess I can kind of see it.”

“I guess, but it was just unexpected.  How was your day?”

“Nothing special.  Just had class.”

“Yeah.  I had student teaching this morning.  No major incidents.”

“That’s good!”

“A lot of students in Basic Math B just aren’t doing their work, though.  That’s frustrating.  Of course, if they did their homework, they probably wouldn’t be in Basic Math in the first place.”

“That’s true.”

I followed the others to a desk where employees of the blood bank were checking identification and signing us in.  I was moved to a desk where I was asked questions about whether I had engaged in certain risky behavior or traveled to certain parts of the world which might have infected me with bloodborne diseases.

Next, I was told to wait in a different part of the room.  Freeman Hall had removable seating, and a large section of seating had been removed to make room for the necessary chairs and equipment for up to five people to be giving blood at any given time.  All five chairs were in use; people sat at each chair, with needles in their arms and blood slowly filling plastic bags.  A phlebotomist sat or stood near each of them, monitoring the equipment.  My mind registered the irony in the fact that I had only shown up to give blood because I wanted to talk to Brianna, and I had hardly done that at all, and now she was nowhere to be found.  I was a little relieved when she walked up and sat next to me a few minutes later, shortly afterward joined by Jill and the third girl, whose name I still did not know.

I looked at my watch.  1:21.  “How long will we have to wait?” I asked.  “I have class at 2:10, all the way in Academic Building VIII.”

“You’ll make it,” Brianna said.  “We’re the only people waiting right now, and they checked you in first.”

“Good.”

“What class do you have?”

“It’s the daily seminar with the other math student teachers, where we talk about what’s going on in our classes, and sometimes the professor shares things related to working in education.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard!”

“Yeah. We’re going to start working on portfolios soon, so we can send them with résumés when we’re applying for jobs.”

“That’s right! I remember you saying that. Do you know anything more about where you’re going to apply?”

“Not really. I kind of want to stay nearby, but I’ve heard that Jeromeville public schools are a hard place to work.  A lot of the kids’ parents are university professors, and they have a reputation for being demanding.”

“That’s true!  I could see that!”

“So I’ll probably apply to as many schools as I can all over this part of the state.  If I get a job close enough to Jeromeville, I can stay here and commute.  I’d love to stay at Nueces High, if they’ll hire me.”

“That would be fun!” Brianna said.  “Then I can still see you at church and stuff.”

“Greg?” one of the phlebotomists called out.

“I guess it’s my turn,” I said.  I followed the phlebotomist to a large chair, the kind that one would find in a doctor’s office.  She put rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab and felt my arm, looking for a good place to put the needle.  When she found a good place, she spread the alcohol, and inserted the needle.  I winced as I felt the sharp metal pierce my skin, but it really did not hurt that badly.

“Have you done this before?” the phlebotomist asked me.

“No,” I replied.  “First time.”

She placed a rubber ball in the hand on the same side where the needle was.  “Squeeze this.  Moving your hand, using your muscles, that helps the blood flow faster,” she explained.  I did as she said and looked at the transparent tube coming out of the needle.  It quickly filled with thick deep-red blood.  The tube led to a bag at the other end, made of thick transparent plastic.

It took several minutes to get a full pint of blood.  When the bag was full, the phlebotomist clamped the tube, then removed the needle and placed a bandage on my arm.  I looked at my watch and saw I still had plenty of time to get to class, but apparently I was not done.  “Next, just go over there,” she said.  “They have snacks.  You’ll rest for a while, so you can recover.”

“Okay,” I said.  I felt fine, but I did what she said anyway, walking to a cluster of chairs around a table that had Oreo and Chips Ahoy cookies, crackers, and fruit.  I grabbed five Oreos and started eating.

“Feeling all right?” the man supervising this area asked me.  He handed me a sticker that said, “Hug Me: I Donated Blood Today.”

“Yes,” I said.

“We still want you to wait here at least five minutes, just in case.”

“Got it.”  My watch said 1:37, so I would make it to class in plenty of time if I stayed for five minutes.  I could stay twenty minutes and still get to class on time, and if they let me do that, that would mean more cookies and hopefully more time to talk to Brianna.

I was just removing the top from my fourth Oreo when Brianna sat next to me.  “You feeling okay?” she asked.  “You’re a big guy; you probably don’t pass out when you lose a pint of blood.”

“I feel fine.  By the way, what are your plans after you finish?  You’re a bio major, right?”

“Yes!  I want to go into research, so grad school.  No idea where.”

“That sounds intense.  I used to just assume I wanted to go to grad school.  But I went to Oregon to do a math research internship two years ago, and I realized I didn’t like it.”

“Good to realize it now!  Why didn’t you like it?  What is math research, anyway?”

“Proving new theorems.  But everything that’s easy to visualize and understand was proven hundreds of years ago, so it’d be about really weird, abstract stuff.”

“That doesn’t sound fun,” Brianna said.

“It wasn’t.”

“Being a teacher is probably a good choice for you, then!”

“Yes!”


After classes were over that day, I rode my bike home, parked it in the back, and walked back around the front, unlocking the door.  I heard video game music and battle sound effects coming from the living room in the back of the house, where Jed’s PlayStation was connected to the TV.  “Hey, Jed,” I called out.

“Hi, Greg,” Jed called back from the same part of the house as the video game music.  Jed had just recently bought the adventure game Final Fantasy VIII and had been spending almost all of his spare time playing it.  Its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII, now considered one of the greatest games of all time, had been Jed’s game of choice previously.  I tried Final Fantasy VII a few times, but it was extremely complicated, and I was just too busy to get fully immersed in a game of that magnitude.  I had not tried playing Final Fantasy VIII yet; it had only been released a couple weeks ago.  Jed had told me recently that he was planning on staying in Jeromeville over the summer and working as many hours as he could at the Coffee House on campus, so the PlayStation and Jed’s games would be here over the summer as well.  Maybe then I would have time to try Final Fantasy VIII.

I walked to my room, put my backpack down, and sat at my desk.  I peeled the back of the “Hug Me” sticker and stuck it on the frame of the bed loft.  I turned on the computer and waited for it to start up, then I connected to the dialup Internet in order to check my email.  I heard the familiar sounds of a phone call dialing, then the screeches of connecting to the Internet, then several seconds of silence as my messages downloaded, then a click as the modem disconnected from the phone line, and finally a ding that indicated new messages.  I looked up to see how many messages I had: one, from my mother.

From: peg_notbundy@aolnet.com
To: “Gregory J. Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:36 -0800
Subject: Re: hi

Hi!  How’s teaching going this week?  Any fun stories from the classroom?  I was talking to Aunt Jane today, and she said that she has a book that really got her through when she was a new teacher.  It’s called The First Days of School, or something like that, and I don’t remember the author’s name off the top of my head, but I think it was a Chinese sounding last name.  She said she thinks she has an extra copy that she can give you.  Have you heard of that book?

I knew that book.  The First Days of School, by Harry K. Wong.  We talked about that book earlier in the year in the seminar for student teachers, but it was not required reading for the class, so I did not own the book.  I had the impression that the book had some things that would be helpful to new teachers, but others that seemed to apply more to a different world than the one in which I would be teaching.  For example, I remember flipping through that book and seeing Dr. Wong quote anecdotally a teacher who visited her students at home early in the school year to get to know them better.  I just could not see that going over well in any scenario other than one where the teacher taught a self-contained elementary school class in a quaint small town where everyone knew each other.  Wherever I ended up teaching, I would most likely have far more than one class, many of the students would come from rough backgrounds, and a significant number would come from families that did not speak English.  But I would be gracious and accept Aunt Jane’s kind gift.  There was probably some useful information in there.  Aunt Jane, my mother’s younger sister, was a veteran small-town kindergarten teacher, and she had been excited for me ever since I decided I wanted to go into education.  I appreciated the encouragement and support.  I continued reading Mom’s message.

Mark’s last basketball game of the year is on Saturday, an away game against El Ajo High.  Mark’s team had an ok season, finishing in fifth place out of nine teams in the league.  The coach has been starting him the last few games, so that’s exciting.  If he keeps playing how he is, he’ll probably be a starter next year as a senior too.

I read an obituary in the paper this morning for a 22-year-old girl named Sandra Soto who died in a car crash.  She went to Plumdale High a year behind you.  Did you know her?  That name sounds familiar.  She was on Highway 11 heading back to school at Central Tech after being home in Plumdale for the weekend.  That’s so sad to pass away so young.  She was pretty.

I’m going to go for a walk.  It’s nice here.  Do you have nice weather?  Have a great rest of the week!

Love, Mom

I blinked.  I read the ending of that message again to make sure I actually read that right.  I did.  Then I went emotionally numb.  Sandra was really gone.

I had not seen Sandra in over four years, and I had not thought of her in quite some time.  We did not know each other well outside of school.  She was a cheerleader, and a dancer, and she dated football players.  Not exactly the crowd where a reclusive academic like me would hang out.  But I did know her.  We had Spanish class together when I was a senior and she was a junior, and she was always nice and friendly toward me.  And now I would never see her again.

I was not exactly sure how I was supposed to react to news like this.  Was it a bad thing that I was not crying?  Although I felt saddened by the news, the truth was that I had not thought about Sandra in a long time, and this news would not change my day-to-day life much.  But later that night, as I worked on homework and graded papers that I had collected, I kept thinking about poor Sandra.  Her life was just starting, and now it was needlessly cut short.

I had a thought when I finished my work for the day.  Jed was still in the living room playing video games, so if I wanted a quiet moment to myself, now was my time.  I pulled the Plumdale High 1994 yearbook off of my bookshelf; I just kind of wanted to make sure I remembered what Sandra looked like, one last time.  Before I got to the page with her picture, though, I found something interesting in the beginning of the book that I had forgotten about: Sandra signed my yearbook that year.  

Greg,
You’re a really sweet & very funny guy that I got to know this year.  Hope you had fun in Spanish class. Good luck in the future. I know you’ll do great!  Just let everyone see the true & funny you.
Love, Sandra Soto

These words were still on my mind as I drifted off to sleep that night, thinking about death as this very unexpectedly atypical Thursday came to a close.  Sandra would now be forever remembered by her loved ones as she was in her early twenties.  She would never grow up and have a family of her own, but she also would never become bogged down by adulthood and the tedium of real life.  How would I be remembered?  Would I be anyone’s favorite teacher?  Would anyone discover all the stories and poems I had written over the years and get them published, leading to my posthumous renown as a literary genius?  Or would I just pass into obscurity and everyone would just get on with their lives?  Was my time coming soon, or would I live to old age?  Would the blood that Brianna and I gave today help someone else live longer?  If I did make it to old age, would I have a family of my own to remember me, or would I die alone?  I did not know.  But what I did know is that Sandra had believed in me.  She knew I would do great, and she encouraged me to show everyone my true self.  Maybe that was what I needed to do, to figure out who I really was, and to be unafraid to hide that.  Do it for Sandra.

Readers: Have you ever given blood? Tell me in the comments what it was like for you.

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[Fastball – The Way]

March 5, 1999.  Bowling with freshmen. (#210)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

“When my brother went here, he used to go see this band called Lawsuit,” the voice behind me said as I stood around after Jeromeville Christian Fellowship ended, looking for people to hang out with.  “I was listening to their CD in the dorm earlier with my door open, and this guy down the hall heard it and said, ‘What is this?  I’ve never heard anything like this, but it’s good!’  I don’t even know if Lawsuit is still together.”

This caught my attention.  I had not heard anyone speak the name Lawsuit in years.  Whoever this was, I had to give him the bad news that they broke up two years ago.  But if this person lived in a dorm, he was probably a freshman, not one I expected to be familiar with a defunct local band.  But he mentioned learning of them from an older brother.  I turned around, and suddenly it all made sense; the speaker was Brennan Channing, a freshman who indeed had two older siblings who had also attended the University of Jeromeville.  Christian, two years older than me, had been involved with JCF when I first started attending in my second year, and Haley, my age, had broken my heart the year after that.

“I hate to be the one to break the bad news, but Lawsuit broke up,” I said to Brennan.

“Oh, bummer,” he replied.  “You know them?”

“Yeah.  I saw them play the Spring Picnic my first two years here, then I saw them twice more after that.”

“Do you know why they broke up?”

“I don’t know the details.  But, wait.  You said you have a CD of theirs?  Which one?”

“The one with the pink cover.  Emergency something.”

“Emergency Third Rail Power Trip,” I said.  “Would you let me borrow that sometime?  I made a tape of someone else’s CD my freshman year, and now that I have a computer that can copy CDs, it would be nice to have it on CD.”

“Sure!  Are you coming bowling tonight?  I have my bike, I can go back to my room and get the CD and then give it to you at bowling.”

“I haven’t heard anything about bowling.  Am I invited?”

“Sure!  Jesse said to invite anyone.”

Many of the freshmen involved with JCF I did not know well, but I saw someone standing nearby wearing a name tag that said Jesse.  That was probably him.  None of my friends at JCF closer to my age had mentioned hanging out afterward, so apparently I was going to meet some younger students tonight.  “Sounds like fun,” I said.  “I’m in.”

“Jesse!” Brennan called out.  “Greg is coming!”

“Nice!” Jesse replied, turning to me.  “I’m Jesse.  I don’t think we’ve ever officially met.”

“I’m Greg.  Nice to meet you.”

“You’re a senior, right?”

“Actually, I graduated last year.  I’m in the student teaching program now.”

“Nice!  You’re gonna be a teacher?  What grade?”

“High school.  Math.”

“Math was always my favorite subject.  I’m a civil engineering major.”

“Nice,” I said.  “I don’t usually get people reacting positively when I say I studied math.”

“I get that.”

A total of eleven people ended up gathering to go bowling.  Brennan left on his bike to go get the Lawsuit CD for me, telling us that he would meet us there.  The only other student I knew in the group headed to the bowling alley was Lacey Kilpatrick, who came to the X-Files watch parties at the De Anza house sometimes.  She and Marlene, one of the other regulars at the X-Files parties, knew each other in high school.  As we walked toward the bowling alley, I repositioned myself within the group so that I was next to Lacey.  “Hey,” I said.

“Hi, Greg!” she replied.  “How was your day?”

“Not too bad.  The usual.  What about you?”

“I turned in a paper.  So I’m glad that’s over.”

“I get that.”

“Do you go bowling a lot?” Lacey asked.

“Not really a lot.  But sometimes.  I took the bowling class here sophomore year.”

“There’s a bowling class?”

“Yeah.  A half-unit PE class.”

“And you learn how to bowl?”

“Yeah.  By the end of the class, I was better than I was at the beginning, at least.”

“I’m not good at bowling,” Lacey said.   “But I have fun with it!”  My friends and I used to go bowling a lot in high school.”

“Having fun is what’s important.  I’m not really good at controlling the ball.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, for one thing, I learned in bowling class that you’re supposed to use a ball one-tenth your body weight.  That would be about 21 pounds for me.  They don’t make balls that heavy.  And even the heaviest 15- and 16-pound balls are really hard for me to control.”

“Can you try a smaller ball?”

“I remember toward the end of the bowling class, I went back to using a little bit smaller ball,” I said. “I probably will again tonight.”


The University of Jeromeville had a bowling alley on campus, an unusual feature for a university.  It was open to the public, being the only bowling alley in Jeromeville.  Even more unusual was the fact that it was underground.  A door in the Memorial Union building next to the campus store led to a wide stairway going down, ending in a large room called the Memorial Union Games Area.  In addition to sixteen lanes of bowling, the Games Area featured a couple of pool tables, as well as some coin-operated standing video games and two pinball machines.

After we paid, I walked over to the balls and looked for one that was not the heaviest one available.  I grabbed a 13-pound ball with finger holes drilled wide enough to fit my large hand.  We needed two lanes for a group our size, so when I got back to our lanes, I asked, “Which lane am I on?”

The Memorial Union Games Area still used paper score sheets, on which Lacey was currently writing everyone’s names.  “You’re on lane 8,” she said.  “With Stephen, Ngoc, Brennan, Emma, and Jesse.”

I noticed that Brennan had just arrived and was sitting in one of the seats for lane 8.  “Hey, Greg,” he said to me, handing me the Lawsuit CD.

“You found it,” I replied.  “Good.  I’ll give it back to you next week at JCF.  Does that work?”

“Sure!”

Many bowling alleys of that era used computerized score systems, but the MU Games Area still used paper score sheets, and most of the time when I came here, I kept score, because the people I was with just expected me to know how to keep score for bowling.  Apparently I just gave off that impression.  I did know how to keep score, but tonight I was relieved to see that Jesse was already sitting in the chair at the scorekeeper’s table.  That would give me one less thing to pay attention to, so I could concentrate on bowling, and being social when the opportunity arose.

Brennan got a spare on his first frame, and I was up after him.  I hit seven pins on my first roll, and two of the remaining three on the second roll.  I went to sit back down, a little disappointed in myself for not getting the spare, although nine was certainly not a bad first frame for me.  I bowled a strike on my second frame, eight on my third, and then two strikes in a row.  I pumped my fists into the air excitedly as I turned to sit back down.  Our group had two separate games going, but the players did not appear to be separating themselves; everyone sat on either side of the scorekeeping seat and ball return machine, regardless of which lane we were bowling on.  I sat in an open seat on the lane 7 side next to Lacey.

“Good job!” she said.  “Two strikes in a row!”

“Yeah.  And another one earlier in the game.  I’m doing better than usual.  And strikes score more when you get them back to back.”

“That’s right,” she replied.  “No strikes for me.  I got three on my last frame.”

“But are you having fun?  That’s what counts!”

“Yeah!  So what’s that CD you’re borrowing from Brennan?”

“A local band from Jeromeville who broke up a couple years ago, but Brennan knew them from when his brother went here.  I saw them four times.  I made a tape from my friend’s CD freshman year, but I have a CD player in my car now, and a computer that can burn CDs, so I’m going to copy Brennan’s CD.”

“Nice! What do they sound like?”

“Not like most other bands I’ve heard,” I explained.  “Like rock with horns.  I’ve heard them called ska, but they don’t really sound like other ska bands.”

“Interesting!  I’m up.  I’ll be right back.”  I watched as Lacey stood up, took her ball, and walked to lane 7.  The ball slowly rolled down the lane, headed to the right corner, knocking over one pin.  Lacey grinned at me sheepishly, and I smiled back, feeling kind of bad and hoping that she did better on her second roll.  I had seen Lacey around all year, at JCF, at church, and at the X-Files watch parties, but we had really only had a real conversation once before.

Lacey had better luck on her second roll, landing just off the center pin and knocking down seven more pins.  I clapped as she returned to the seat next to me, which was still open.  “Good job!” I said, putting my hand up to give her a high five.

“Thanks!” she replied enthusiastically.

“What’s your major?  Did I ever ask?”

“Psych, and I was going to do a Human Development minor.  But now I think I’m going to switch and have Human Development be my major.  I’m thinking of being a teacher too, but for younger kids.”

“That’s great!”

“Like probably second or third grade, ideally.  If I get my choice.”

“Yeah.  You don’t always get to pick what grade you want; it just depends on what’s open when they hire you,” I explained.  “But the longer you stay at a school, you can switch grades when something you want opens up.”

“That’s true.”

“Greg!” I heard Brennan call me from lane 8.  “Your turn!”

“Make it three in a row!” Lacey exclaimed.  I smiled as I walked to the other lane and picked up my ball.

I stood, holding the ball, looking at the pins down at the other end of the lane.  In bowling class, I learned to release the ball to the right of center and spin it just enough to hook back and hit the center pin at the angle.  But I always either put too much spin on the ball or not enough.  So tonight, as was usually the case, I had not been standing as far to the right as my bowling teacher had recommended, attempting to err on the side of not enough spin.  I hoped that those adjustments would cancel out and still lead the ball to hit the center pin just to the right, with enough spin to ricochet and hit all of the pins.  I straightened my arm in front of me, swung it back, and approached the lane, releasing the ball just as it came forward.  It rolled down the lane, slightly to the right of center, then began to curve back toward the center pin, the 13-pound ball moving faster than the 16-pound balls I had used the last few years usually did.  The ball hit the pins with a mighty crash; all ten pins flew upward and fell on the lane.  I turned around to loud cheering from everyone in my group.  All eyes were on me now; if they had not seen my roll, they would have heard the loud crash of the pins.  Three strikes in a row, or in bowling slang, a turkey.  Brennan high-fived me, as did Lacey, walking over from the other lane.  Someone else had taken the seat next to Lacey, so I sat in an open seat next to Brennan.

“Well done,” Brennan said.  “Three in a row.”

“Pretty sure we know who’s going to have the top score for this game,” Jesse said from the scorekeeper’s seat.

“I can’t remember the last time I had three strikes in a row,” I said.

“Do you know your best score of all time?” Brennan asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “When I took the bowling class here a few years ago, the best I ever did was 178.  I used to go bowling with my friends from high school sometimes, and one of them, Melissa, she told me that same year that she bowled 178.  For both of us, it was our best game ever.  So we went bowling the next time we saw each other, and you couldn’t have written the ending more perfectly.  We were both bowling great games, and she finished with 179, and I finished with 180.  So that’s still my highest score ever.”

“Really?” Brennan said.  “You both beat your personal bests, and you won by one?”

“I swear.  It really happened that way.”

Lacey, who was just returning to her seat after her turn, in which she hit a total of six pins, overheard the end of my story.  “Did you just say you’ve bowled 180 before?” she asked.

“I said that was my personal best, not by any means my average game,” I explained, “but yes.”

“Wow.  Are you beating that now, with those three strikes in a row?”

“It’s possible, if my game ends strong.”

“Well, good luck!”

Brennan got his ball and walked to the lane.  He hit nine pins on the first roll and completed the spare on his second.  “This is one of my best games ever too,” he said as I stepped up to find my ball.  “Two strikes and three spares.”  Brennan looked at the score sheet that Jesse was filling out as I waited for the pin setting machine to finish placing the pins.  Once this finished, I positioned myself just as I had before.  I tried the best I could to recreate what I had done the last three frames.  As I released my ball, I watched it roll down the lane in much the same trajectory as my previous ball.  Like the last one, it hit the lead pin at an angle with a loud crash, sending all ten pins tumbling.  I turned around, and Brennan and Lacey and all the others in our group cheered loudly.

“Whoa!” a guy on our lane named Stephen Giordano exclaimed.  “Did Greg just get another strike?  How many is that now?”

“Four in a row!” I shouted excitedly.  “Five total for the game.”

“That’s pretty impressive, man.”

“Thanks!”

I looked at the score sheet.  Since the score for a strike depended on the bowler’s next rolls, my score for this frame was uncertain, but a little quick math told me in my head that the lowest score I could get for this game was 125, and we were only in the seventh frame.  But by the ninth frame, my status of being the clear highest score on our lane was in question.  Brennan had bowled two strikes in a row following his spare in the seventh frame, and my streak of consecutive strikes had ended at four when I hit eight pins in the eighth frame and was unable to complete the spare.  I took a deep breath as I approached the lane with my ball, the pressure now on for sure.  I took another deep breath and sent the ball sailing down the lane, just as I had many times already tonight.  The ball hit the lead pin from the right, not quite as hard as some of my strikes before, but I breathed an excited sigh of relief as I watched all ten pins fall.  My sixth strike of the game overall.  I pumped my fist high.

But even this was not enough to be assured of the highest score on our lane.  Brennan bowled another strike in the tenth frame, positioning him for an exceptionally high score.  The strike in the tenth frame earned him two bonus rolls, which he did not bowl well, finishing with an excellent score of 175.  “My best score ever,” he said to the group, then turned to me and added, laughing, “Beat that.”

I looked at the score sheet.  Stephen Giordano finished with 122.  Ngoc, a thin Vietnamese girl whom I had seen around but never met before tonight, had a streak of luck at the end of the game, bowling strikes in the ninth and tenth frame, plus a third consecutive strike in her first bonus roll.  After a string of bad frames in the beginning of the game, this sudden outburst of strikes gave her a respectable final score of 99.  If I hit no more pins, my score would be 159.  I had a strike in the last frame, so essentially this roll and the next would count twice.  Eight pins would tie me with Brennan at 175.  A strike or spare would give me a chance to beat my all time best score of 180, depending on the bonus rolls.  Of course, all of this was just a friendly game, but the competitive side of me still felt intense pressure.  I went through my usual motion, released the ball, and got excited when I saw pins fall with a resounding crash, but the excitement dampened as I saw one pin in the left corner still standing.  I had beaten Brennan and was guaranteed the highest score of the six of us on this lane, but picking up this spare would give me 179, and I would then need only two pins on my bonus roll for my best game ever.

The approach I had tried for most of the game would not work here.  If the ball reached the pins where I had been aiming most of the game, it would sail past the empty space where these pins had already been knocked down, missing the one I needed to hit.  So I stepped to the left before my approach.  I watched in anticipation as the ball rolled down the lane, farther to the left than the last one.  It grazed the side of the one standing pin with just enough force to knock it over.  Everyone cheered.  I considered turning to the others and telling them that I needed two pins on the last roll to have my best score ever, but I decided not to.  Bragging about one’s own accomplishment during a sporting event felt like bad luck.  Two pins.  All I needed was two pins.  I took the ball back, but my hand slipped as I released it, sending it far to the left of center. The ball stayed out of the gutter and hit three pins on the left, giving me a final score of 182.

“Not my best roll,” I laughed as I walked back to my seat.  “But still my best total ever.”

“What’d you get?” Lacey asked excitedly.

“182.”

“That’s awesome,” Brennan said.  “We both had our best nights ever tonight.  I kind of wanted to save the scoresheet, but you earned it.”

“Thanks so much,” I replied.


We bowled a second game after that.  I scored 121, not nearly as good as my first game, but still fairly decent for me.  I brought the score sheet with me to campus Monday morning, went to the coin-operated copy machine in the library, and made a copy of the score sheet.  I gave it to Brennan the next time I saw him, at which time I also returned his Lawsuit CD.

To this day, that 182 game is still the best game I have ever bowled.  I taped that score sheet to my wall in my bedroom, where it hung for another two and a half years.  I do not bowl often these days; I probably average around 100 on the rare occasion once a year or so when I do go bowling, and I have not gotten anywhere close to 182 since then.

I wondered if I looked out of place being a twenty-two year old university graduate hanging out with a group of freshmen.  Lacey in particular I knew was even younger than most freshmen.  The address and phone list from 20/20, the young adult ministry at Jeromeville Covenant Church, also had birthdays on it, and Lacey’s birthday had caught my eye: “10/20/80.”  All multiples of ten.  Something about the rhythm of those numbers made my mathematical mind happy.  But if Lacey was born on October 20, 1980, that means that she would have still been seventeen when classes started in the fall, and she would have just turned eighteen a couple weeks earlier when I met her at X-Files in November.

I was probably overthinking this.  It just felt weird having friends born in the 1980s, now that many of my friends from my undergraduate years, who were born in 1975 and 1976, had graduated or would do so soon.  I had also had a bad experience recently with my unrequited crush on Sasha Travis, also a freshman born in 1980.  But Lacey and Brennan and Jesse and Stephen and the others did not seem to have a problem including me in their bowling night tonight.  Some of my friends had graduated, but I was still living in Jeromeville and taking classes, and now I was making new friends.

Readers: Do you like bowling? Tell me about it in the comments.

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February-March 1999.  Math baseball. (#209)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

As I drove home from student teaching on Highway 100 east, I could not help but notice that something felt different about today.  The uncomfortable cold that I had often felt walking from the classroom to the parking lot was not present today, and while I would not call the air particularly warm, it was comfortable, around seventy degrees.  Often around this time of year, the weather would turn sunny and pleasant for a week or two; this Fake Spring would be followed by more wet, cool winter weather for a while.  Today felt like it could be the start of this year’s Fake Spring.  The orchards on the side of the highway were blooming, and the vibrant green grass of the pastures stood out against the blue sky.

I decided to try something different today.  When I got home, I left the math textbook on my desk and put the textbook for the string cheese class in my backpack.  But instead of getting on my bike, I walked toward Andrews Road.  And when I reached Andrews Road, instead of waiting at the bus stop, I continued walking south, toward campus.  I crossed Andrews Road at Redbud Drive, across the street from the elementary school where we had filmed a few scenes for the Dog Crap and Vince movie last year, and took a zigzag path through a quiet, tree-lined residential neighborhood, eventually leading to Elm Street.  I was pretty sure that I had never been on this street before, and if I had, it was not one that I traversed often.

I turned south on Elm Street and crossed West Eighth Street at a light.  The stretch of Elm Street that I was now on, between Eighth and Fifth, was unusual in that it had no intersections for about a third of a mile.  Neither Sixth nor Seventh Street extended this far west.  I had read in the local news that some residents of this street had petitioned the City Council for more streetlights, because it gets unusually dark at night.  Their petition was rejected, because of the Jeromeville City Council’s pathological obsession with feeling like a small town, despite the fact that Jeromeville had a population of well over 50,000.  According to Jeromeville’s elected officials and their ilk, as they would say, streetlights would bring traffic and crime to the area.  I found this laughable; I grew up in the real world, and I knew that it was dark streets, not bright ones, that attracted crime.  But I had no concerns walking this street early in the afternoon on a sunny day.

I crossed Fifth Street, which was also the border between the city of Jeromeville and the University of Jeromeville campus, at another light.  Directly in front of me was a field used for recreational sports; I walked at a slight angle across the field until I reached Colt Avenue and continued south until the street narrowed to a bicycle path near Stone Hall and Ross Hall, where my undergraduate chemistry and physics classes had been.  Education classes were in the confusingly-named Academic Building VIII, a little ways past Ross Hall.  The name became even more confusing when considering the fact that Academic Buildings II, III, and VI existed, but Academic Buildings I, IV, V, and VII did not.  I wondered if the missing numbered buildings had existed at one time, but had been renamed after wealthy donors who wanted their names on those specific buildings.  Academic Building VIII was about two miles from my house, and it had taken thirty-two minutes to walk there.  Not bad, especially on a nice day like this.

Today was my long day of classes.  First I had the seminar with the other math student teachers.  I had nothing too significant to report.  Dr. Van Zandt talked a little bit about our upcoming portfolio project, where we would put together a portfolio of work from this year to go with our résumés and letters of recommendation, and this would be submitted with job applications.  In April, the University of Jeromeville School of Education would host a job fair right here on campus, where school administrators from all over the region would come to Jeromeville to conduct job interviews with student teachers.  I needed to think about what I could include in my portfolio.  It was overwhelming to consider that, in a couple of months, I would be applying for actual jobs as a teacher.  I was hoping that I could just get hired at Nueces High.  I was having a good year student teaching there, and Nueces was reasonably close to Jeromeville that I could still live in Jeromeville and stay involved at Jeromeville Covenant Church.

Next, after a quick bathroom stop, I walked down the hall for the string cheese class.  The class was officially called Reading In Secondary Schools, and as the title suggested, we learned about how reading skills integrate into classrooms of subjects other than reading or English.  All these years later, the thing I remember the most from this class was string cheese.  The class met once a week for three hours, from 3:10 to 6:00.  Because of this difficult schedule, Dr. Austin, the professor, gave us a snack break in the middle of the class, with each of us responsible for bringing something once during the quarter.  Early in the quarter, someone brought string cheese for the snack break, and it was such a hit with everyone that someone would make sure to bring string cheese every week.

At the start of each class, Dr. Austin, passed out a handout with the outline for the class, so we could take notes.  I was intrigued by the final topic on today’s outline.  Usually, at the end of class, Dr. Austin would demonstrate some kind of technique that could be used to stimulate classroom discussions.  For today’s outline, though, the final segment of the class just said one word, not a word I expected to see on this class outline: “Baseball.”

By the time we reached the “Baseball” part of class, it was 5:17pm, and I was full of string cheese and potato chips.  I had also eaten a banana and a bunch of grapes, because fruit made my snack healthy and that was totally how nutrition worked.  Dr. Austin passed out a two-page article for us to read as he explained that Baseball was an activity for classroom discussions.  Our tables were arranged in a U-shape around three walls of the classroom, and as we read the article silently, Dr. Austin placed four empty chairs in the middle of the classroom in the shape of a diamond, positioned like the four bases on a baseball field.  

“So I have some questions about the article that I prepared on cards here,” Dr. Austin explained.  “We’re going to take turns being the batter, and the batter will answer the question and build on the last batter’s discussion.  I’m just going to go around the circle, taking turns.  Mike, you’re up first.  What is the author saying about the use of reading materials in classrooms?”

Mike, a student teacher from the science program, looked at his copy of the article and replied, “Reading material in classrooms needs to be age-appropriate.”

“Good,” Dr. Austin said.  “You can go to first base.”  Mike sat at the chair in the first base position as Dr. Austin continued, “Melissa?  Anything to add?”

Melissa Becker, from the math student teaching program, said, “He said here that not all students are ready for grade-level reading material.  So it’s important to make accommodations for students who aren’t.”

“Good.  So you now go to first base, and Mike, advance to second base.”

I continued watching, answering a question myself when it was my turn, as we moved from one base to another.  I also tried to think about how to adapt this for a math class.  We did not read and discuss articles in math class, obviously.  But maybe I could have students answer math problems in order to advance on the bases.  I could work with this.  I had walked to campus today, but I did not feel like walking home two miles in the dark.  I took the bus home, thinking about making Dr. Austin’s baseball activity into a math activity the whole time.


About a week and a half later, after much planning, I walked from the teacher’s lounge at Nueces High to Judy’s classroom, ready to try my new idea in my actual student teaching classroom.  I arrived to the classroom a few minutes early and put signs on the four walls, labeled “First Base,” “Second Base,” “Third Base,” and “Home.”

“You have a test tomorrow, remember,” I announced to the class.  “Today we’re going to try a new activity I learned from one of my professors.  It’s called Baseball.”  At the mention of baseball, a few excited gasps and murmurs arose from the class.  “Everyone get out a sheet of paper,” I instructed them.  I had discussed my idea with Judy earlier this week, and she suggested having everyone do the problems on paper, whether or not it was their turn at bat, so that I could collect the papers and grade it like an assignment.  This gave every student an incentive to participate.

After I explained the rules of the activity and answered students’ questions, I shuffled the cards that had the students’ names on them and picked one.  “Andy,” I called out.  I had prepared slides in advance with problems like those from the upcoming test, and stacked them in random order.  Andy Rawlings looked up as I put one of these problems.  “Find x,” I told Andy.  “Everyone else, you find x too.  Write your work on the paper.”  Andy solved the problem without much difficulty, using cosine to find the missing side length in a right triangle.  “Go to first base,” I said, pointing at the sign on the wall.  Andy got out of his desk and stood at the First Base sign.

Next I called on T.J. McDuff, a quiet freshman whose proficiency in mathematics many of his classmates did not recognize.  He had the only perfect score on the last unit test, and when the students were comparing their scores with the others sitting near them, many of T.J.’s neighbors in the class seemed surprised that he got a perfect score.  I put another straightforward problem with trigonometric ratios on the screen, which T.J. solved correctly.  He walked to first base, and Andy walked to second.

I called Kayla Welch next, and put a problem on the screen that was a little more complicated, requiring the inverse tangent to find an angle measure.  Kayla thought about what to do, tried something on her calculator, and sheepishly said the wrong answer.  “Sorry, that’s incorrect,” I said.  The next card was Eduardo Ortiz.  I said, “Eduardo?  Same problem?”  Eduardo answered the problem correctly, and moved to first base, advancing T.J. and Andy to the next bases.

Angelica Maldonado raised her hand, and asked, “Mr. Dennison?  What’s the object of this game?”

“We’re just practicing the kind of questions that will be on the test?”

“Are we keeping score?”

“Mostly just for fun.  You want to try to get on base and get your teammates home.”

“We should play in two teams, against each other,” Andy said from where he stood on third base.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.  “This is my first time doing anything like this, so I’m open to hearing your suggestions.  Maybe I’ll do things differently next time.  Let’s continue what we’re doing today, and you can tell me your thoughts at the end of the period.”

I continued running the baseball activity as I had planned, calling on students and giving them practice test problems, as the students walked the bases around the classroom.  But even before the period ended, before I asked any of them for suggestions, I knew that Andy was right.  Baseball was meant to be a competitive game.  Dr. Austin’s suggestion might work well for classes where students discussed articles that they had read.  But mathematics was not this kind of class.  Math had problems to be worked out with correct answers, which did not always lend themselves to the kind of discussion that Dr. Austin had led in his activity.  For next time, I needed to turn this into a competitive activity with two teams, and I needed to keep score.


A few weeks later, the geometry class was preparing for a test on surface area and volume.  Two days before the test, I began class by saying, “I thought about some of your suggestions for the baseball review game, and I think this is going to be more fun.  First, you’re going to be competing against each other.”  I pointed with my finger, making an imaginary line down the middle of the classroom, then pointed to one side, and then the other, as I said, “This side of the room, you’re batting first, and this side, you’re fielding.”  Some students reacted excitedly to this as I continued.  “I’m going to call on one person from each team to answer the same question.  If the team that is batting gets it right first, then the batter gets to go on the bases, like last time.  But if the fielding team gets the question first, then the batter is out.  And after three outs, we switch which team is batting and which is fielding, just like in real baseball.”

“I like this game better,” Andy said excitedly.

“I hope you will.”  I pointed to my stack of overhead projector transparencies, on which I had written the questions, and continued, “Also, the questions are either singles, doubles, triples, or home runs, depending on the difficulty of the question.  I have put the questions in random order.  And you can get help from your teammates, but if you get help, it counts as a walk.  You only go to first base, and the other runners don’t advance if they don’t have to.  But if you get the question on your own, before the fielding team, you get to go however many bases the question is worth.”

Andy spoke up again.  “This is gonna be fun.”

“I’m glad you think so,” I said, “but please don’t talk when the teacher is talking.”

“Sorry.”

The first problem in my stack of slides was a straightforward one about finding the volume of a triangular prism.  T.J. answered correctly and advanced to first base.  Next, I put up a word problem, involving a solid block of metal that had to be melted down to make cylindrical coins.  “How many coins can you make from this block of metal?” I asked.  After working for a few minutes, Andy answered correctly for the fielding team.  “One out,” I said.  Turning to Andy, I added, “Good thing you got that one, because it would have been a home run.”

“Aww,” several members of T.J.’s team said.

T.J. did score when a teammate answered the next question correctly for a triple, but the fielding team got two correct in quick succession after that for the second and third outs.  The runner stranded on third went back to his desk.  I continued calling names and giving questions; the batting team got enough questions right to load the bases, but the fielding team had answered two right for two outs.  “Kayla batting, Eduardo fielding,” I called.  The two of them walked up to the chalkboard, and I put a problem on the screen, to find the volume of a shape that looked like a truncated cone, with the tip cut off.

Eduardo stared at the problem and started writing some calculations on the board for finding the volume of a cylinder.  He quickly raised his hand for me to check his answer.  “Incorrect,” I said.  He looked confused, having not figured out yet that a truncated cone was not a cylinder.  The circle at the top was smaller than the one at the bottom.

Kayla, meanwhile, had written the formula for the volume of a cone, but when she realized that the figure was not a cone, and also not a cylinder, she called on her teammates for help.  Andy and Angelica ran up to the board to help Kayla.  Andy copied the truncated cone to the board and drew dotted lines above it to fill in the missing part of the cone. “Subtract the volume of the big cone minus the small cone that’s missing at the top,” he said to Angelica and Kayla.  They began working on this excitedly, but paused a few seconds later when they realized that they did not know the height of the missing part.  The three of them whispered to each other, trying to figure out what to do, but keeping it quiet enough so that Eduardo and his teammates would not hear.  Eduardo had also asked for help, and his team seemed to get stuck at the exact same place.  I watched the whole thing, wondering if anyone would figure this out.

Suddenly, maybe thirty seconds to a minute later, I heard furious scribbling on the batting side.  Angelica had drawn a right triangle, representing the axis, radius, and slant height of the cone, with a smaller right triangle embedded inside where the missing part would be.  She had labeled the missing height “x” and was solving a proportion to find the missing height, something that we had covered extensively in an earlier chapter of the textbook.  She ran to her desk to get a calculator as Andy stood in front of the board, making sure that the other team could not see the breakthrough that they had discovered.  I turned and looked at Judy, who smiled and nodded at me.  She clearly seemed to have a positive impression of my skills at getting the class to participate and work together, at least today.  Score a win for the student teacher.

Kayla, Angelica, and Andy enthusiastically raised their hands.  “Mr. Dennison!” Kayla called out.  I looked at their work and said, “That is correct.”  Kayla’s entire team erupted into applause.  “That’s only a walk, since you had help, but the bases were loaded, so the runner scores from third.”  

Kayla’s team scored once more, and that score of two runs to one held to the end of the period.  “One more thing,” I announced.  “I put all of the problems for today on a worksheet.  So, the paper you’ve been writing on today, staple it to this worksheet, and any problem from the worksheet that you didn’t do in class today, that’s your homework.  I passed out the worksheet as the students packed up their things.

“I liked this baseball game better than the last one,” Andy said.  “You should do this every time we have a test.”

“Yeah!” Kayla added.


In my decades of experience teaching, as I write this, I have been made to attend many training sessions and professional development workshops.  A significant number of them have dealt with the topic of reading and writing in subject area classrooms.  And, almost always, these sessions have something in common: the presenter will say something like, “And you can use these techniques in every subject area classroom.  Except math.  I couldn’t find an example of how to use this in math class.”  In some years, the school where I was working focused schoolwide on reading, or writing, and I was required to do certain reading and writing activities in my math class.  It always felt so forced and inauthentic.

I have continued leading games for the students to review for tests throughout my career.  Over the next few years, I would refine the rules of Math Baseball to allow for more scoring.  I also included a feature where, if the player got the question right on the first try without help, the team got to draw a card with the name of a special baseball play on it, like Double Play, or Sacrifice Fly, or Stolen Base.  These could be used on future plays.

I also experimented with other games; some were more successful than others.  Early in my paid teaching career, in addition to Math Baseball, I also started playing Jeopardy!, based on the TV game show, to review for tests.  And I modified Math Baseball slightly to make Math Football, where the questions were worth different numbers of yards based on difficulty, and I kept score like in football instead of baseball.  I have also continued my idea of making a worksheet with all of the problems, and then assigning whichever problems were not already done in class for homework.  Most of the time, students enjoyed these games, although some definitely got into it more than others.  These games tend to be something that students remember about my class for years to come.

At the time, when I was student teaching, the Math Baseball experience felt like an indication that things were starting to come together.  I had found something to do in my role as a teacher that engaged the students in a way that they enjoyed.  The job fair was coming soon.  I would have an opportunity to present these successes to people looking to hire new teachers, and by the fall, I would be employed as a teacher in a high school somewhere, playing Math Baseball with a new class of students.  Hopefully they would enjoy my teaching as much as Kayla and Andy and Angelica seemed to.  All of those years of confusion, coming to Jeromeville with no clear idea of what I wanted to study, the rude awakenings in classes that were more difficult than I expected, the disillusionment with mathematics research after that summer in Oregon, all of that was behind me now.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about something you have done, for a class or for your job, that went really well.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

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February 12, 1999.  My master teacher made me cry. (#208)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

Last month, when the new semester at Nueces High School started, some students changed their schedules.  In third period geometry with Judy Tracy, one of the classes I was assigned to for student teaching, eight students left over the first week of the semester.  I asked Judy why everyone was leaving, and she said that the school had a very open policy about letting students change their schedules.  “Sometimes they just don’t like the teacher. Or they want to be in class with their friends,” she explained. “Personally I think they shouldn’t let students change just to be with their friends, or with another teacher.”

“They don’t like the teacher? So these students switched out of this class because they don’t like me?”

“No!  Well, we don’t know.  We don’t have to ask them why they changed,” Judy explained to me.  “Also, some of them might have wanted to change one of their other classes, and it didn’t work out with their schedule unless math class changes too.  So it might have nothing to do with you.

“Hmm,” I said.  I still felt like all of this sent a message that some students did not like me.  It was discouraging.

One new student did transfer into the geometry class, a sophomore girl named Angelica.  She seemed like a decent student.  Judy had her in a different period the first half of the year, and she got a B.  Kate Matthews’ Basic Math B class got two new students this semester.  One was a loud redhead named Brittany who often made jokes about smoking marijuana.  I was not sure what the chances were that I would have two red-haired stoner girls in the same class, but it was pretty much the last thing I needed to deal with.  Marie, the other red-haired stoner, did not seem to talk often with Brittany, but I made sure to seat them at opposite ends of the room, just in case.  The other new student was a teaching assistant, not a math student, a senior named Kara.  I usually had Kara do routine tasks like passing back papers, when I needed her to, but I often did not have much work for her to do.  Nothing in my teacher training had really prepared me to have a TA.  And because of that, I had a misunderstanding that led to one of my worst days of student teaching.

Everything seemed normal when I left for Nueces on that Friday morning.  Monday was the Presidents’ Day holiday, so the youth group kids from church were leaving at noon for Winter Camp.  I had lots of fun at Winter Camp last year, but this year I was not going. I would not get back from student teaching in time, I had class this afternoon, and I had a lot of studying to do this weekend.

I arrived at Nueces High just three minutes before the first bell, much later than I wanted to.  Police cars and tow trucks were clearing an accident on the freeway, and traffic slowed down for a while.  Also, approaching a school a few minutes before the start of the day always creates a traffic mess, as students and their parents all drive to the school at the last minute. I parked in my reserved spot and rushed to Kate’s classroom, at the opposite end of campus from my parking spot.

“Where were you?” Kate asked when I walked in.  “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Sorry.  There was an accident on 100, and traffic was backed up.”

“The bell is about to ring.  I’m going to head to the work room.  Do you have everything under control?”

“I think so,” I said.  I did not yet realize that I did not have everything under control.  I wrote today’s assignment on the board, took attendance, and then realized that I had a problem.  When I was attending school at Plumdale High, we would listen to the announcements read every day over the public address system.  This was the norm in 1999, as it still is in schools today.  But Nueces High currently occupied a building constructed in 1950, and there was no public address system.  The morning announcements were printed on paper, and placed in each teacher’s mailbox, to be picked up when we arrived at school that morning.  Since I had mostly taken over first period Basic Math B, I had been getting the announcements from the mailbox and reading them to the class myself.  Kate would sometimes spend time in the teacher work room, leaving me to myself in the classroom.  I liked that level of independence; it made me feel like a real teacher.  But, since I had arrived late today, the only thing on my mind was to make it to the classroom on time, so that I could get class started.  I had not taken the time to stop by the office, and now, as a result, I had no announcements to read.

I started to panic.  The announcements must be read.  Students must know this important information.  This aging campus also had no phones and no computers in the classroom, so I had no way of getting a message to the office that I needed the announcements.  I looked around the room, trying to stay calm, when my eyes fell on Kara.  Of course.  She could help here.

“Kara,” I said.  “I forgot to get the announcements from my box in the office this morning.  Can you keep an eye on the students?  I’ll be back in two minutes.”

“Sure,” Kara replied.

I jogged from the portables in the back, across the outside of the smaller of the two permanent buildings, and into the office, grabbing my copy of the morning announcements.  I turned around to jog back when I heard Ms. Matthews’ voice call out, “Greg!  Who’s watching the students?”

“Kara is in there.  I’m going right back now.  I forgot to get the announcements.”

“Don’t ever leave students unsupervised in the classroom!” Kate said, almost shouting.  “Go!”

I turned and ran back to the classroom.  Ms. Matthews seemed really upset.  I did not see it as that big of a deal.  When I was in high school, I had teachers occasionally leave their rooms unlocked at lunch with students inside.  I could remember at least one time when the teacher actually had to go to the office during class time, and he left the class unsupervised for a few minutes.  When I got back to Kate’s classroom, everything seemed in order, and Kara and the other students were sitting in their seats waiting, so I calmly read the announcements.  After that, I continued presenting the lesson and walking around while the students worked.  Kate returned about ten minutes before the end of the period and sat at her desk.  I could see a hint of disapproval in her expression.

The bell rang, ending the period, and students left the classroom.  The campus of Nueces High was so large and spread out that students had a long eight-minute passing period between classes.  This gave Kate plenty of time to lecture me after the students left, while her second period students trickled up to the closed door and waited outside.

“You can’t ever leave students unsupervised,” she said sternly.  “It’s not safe.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I forgot to pick up the announcements, I was running late because of the accident on the highway, and I didn’t know what else to do.  I figured–”

“Why didn’t you send Kara to pick up the announcements?”

Of course there was a simple solution.  At least there would have been, for someone experienced with working in schools and having a student TA.  But that was not me.  “I didn’t know she was allowed to leave class,” I explained.  “I didn’t think of that because I’ve never had a student TA, I’ve never had experience with student TAs, and no one ever explained that to me.”

“What if something happens to one of the students?  And if you leave students unsupervised, they’re going to steal things off the desk and destroy things in the classroom.  Someone could have stolen your stuff out of your backpack.  Did you ever think about that?”

“Obviously not!” I said, irritated and close to tears.  “I’m sorry.”

“You’re lucky nothing happened while you were gone,” Kate said.  “Don’t ever leave students unsupervised again.”

“I know.”

“I need to let second period in.  And you probably have work to do.  Just remember, you have Kara as your TA.  You can have her do things like that for you.”

“I know,” I said.  I grabbed my backpack and walked to the teacher work room in the office, tears clearly visible now, hoping that no students who knew me would see me crying.  I sat at the table in the teacher work room, grabbed a nearby box of tissue, and let the tears come, no longer trying to hold back.

With no class assigned to me second period, I had gotten to know some of the other teachers with prep time second period, since they were often in the work room at the same time I was.  Two of them were there when I arrived, an older woman named Sally Stein who taught English, and a middle-aged man named Jim Emerson who taught science.  “Are you okay, Greg?” Sally asked as I cried and blew my nose.

“No,” I blubbered.  “I messed up.  And Kate yelled at me.  Well, not yelled.  Scolded.”

“What happened?” Jim asked.  “Kate understands you’re still learning.”

I took a deep breath, trying to compose myself.  “I got here late because there was an accident on the freeway and traffic was slow.”

“You were in an accident?” Sally asked.

“Not me.  The accident happened before I was there.  But traffic was slow because they were still clearing it and a lane was blocked.”

“Oh, okay.  I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Since I got here late, I forgot to stop at the office and get the announcements.  When I realized that, I ran up to the office with students in the room.  I didn’t think it was that big a deal, since I was only gone two minutes maybe.”

“Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea,” Sally explained.  “But it sounds like Kate could have handled it better.”

“I had teachers leave the room unlocked at lunch sometimes when I was in school.  And once my teacher went up to the office for about five minutes in the middle of class,” I explained.  “Maybe I’m just not cut out to be a teacher.  Most of the students in that class have bad grades.”  I grabbed another tissue and started crying again.

“Greg?” Jim asked.  “Do you want to go for a walk with me?  Would that help?”

That was not the reaction I was expecting, but at this point, a chance to talk this out with someone one-on-one sounded appealing.  “Sure,” I said.

“Sally, will you be here to watch our things?” Jim asked.

“Yes,” she replied.  “Go walk.”

Jim and I walked across the parking lot out toward Buena Vista Avenue.  “You were probably in honors classes when you were a student,” he said. “Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Your teachers who left students alone in the classroom, they probably knew that you were good students who behaved, so they trusted you.  And I don’t want to sound judgmental, but most students aren’t trustworthy that way.”

“That makes sense,” I replied. “Especially those Basic Math B students first period. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s okay.  We were all new teachers once, learning to do this.  We all have good days and bad days.  Don’t beat yourself up.”

“I’m trying.  It’s just been so hard lately.  The students can be so mouthy.  And yesterday only four of them turned in their homework.”

“That sounds like a typical Basic Math class,” Jim replied, chuckling.  “But don’t think of yourself as a bad teacher. I overheard some of my students yesterday talking about how much they love your class.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  It was Stacie Edwards and Kayla Welch.  They were lab partners a few days ago, and they were talking about you. I don’t think they’re in Basic Math, though.”

“Kayla’s in Judy’s geometry class that I took over.  And Stacie is in the honors Algebra II class with Mitch Bowles that I’m helping out with.”

“Well, they think you’re a great teacher.  So focus on that instead.”

“I’ll try.”

“Hey, can I pray for you?” Jim asked.  “Are you comfortable with that? I know Josh McGraw told me you both go to the same church in Jeromeville.”

I was vaguely aware from reading announcements that Jim was the advisor for the student Christian club that met weekly at lunch.  Someone to pray with sounded like exactly what I needed right now.  “Yes,” I said.

Jim stopped walking and gently laid a hand on my shoulder.  “Father God, I thank you for bringing Greg here to Nueces High.  I thank you for all that you are teaching him about education, and his future.  Please, now, give him comfort on this difficult day.  Remind him that it is okay to still be learning.  Help him to move on from this and come out stronger on the other side.  I pray for the rest of his classes today, that he will have positive experiences with the students, and that he will know that he is making a difference in their lives.  I pray that you will continue to put him in the right place, giving him the words to meet these students where they are, and to show them the kind of love that Jesus shows us.  I pray that you will speak to him, and remind him that he is a beloved child of God.”  I nodded as he continued, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

I looked up and took a deep breath.  “Thank you,” I said.

“We should head back now, to make sure we get there in time.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Nueces High was a couple hundred yards behind us now; we were across the street from the fast food restaurants that students frequented for lunch.

As we turned around, headed back to the school, Jim asked, “Which church do you and the McGraws go to?”

“Jeromeville Covenant.”

“Okay.  I’ve heard of that one.  I know some people in Jeromeville, but they go to First Baptist.”

“I know where that is.  I know some people who go there too.”

“My family and I go to Grace Baptist Church, on Nut Farm Road.”

“I don’t know that one off the top of my head.”

“It’s good.  It’s been around for a while.  We’ve been going there since we moved to Nueces, in 1982.”

“That’s good to be a part of a community for that long.  I’ve only been at J-Cov for a little over two years, since the fall of my junior year as an undergrad.  I grew up Catholic, and I went to Mass at the Newman Center before that.”

“Interesting.  Have you had any problems with your family, with you leaving Catholicism?”

“Not really.  Mom has always had the attitude that other Christians follow the same Jesus too.  Grandma was a little uneasy at first, since she’s always been much more traditional.  But… Are you familiar with the Urbana convention for Christian students, in Illinois?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“I went to that in ’96, and Mom told me that Grandma was worried that I was running off to join a cult.  But then Grandma told that to one of her old lady friends, and that lady said that her son went to Urbana in the ’60s, and suddenly Grandma was okay with it, knowing that her friend was okay with it.”

“That’s funny.  Your grandma sounds nice.  Do you see her often?”

“Yes, whenever I go see my parents in Plumdale, every few months.  Grandma lives in Gabilan, less than ten miles from Plumdale.  She’s 78.  And Grandpa just turned 81.”

“I like that part of the state.  My wife and I take weekend getaways to Santa Lucia a couple times a year.”

“Nice.”

As we stepped back on campus, Jim said, “It’s almost time for class.  Will you be okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks for listening.  And praying.”

“Any time.  Let me know any time you need to talk.”

“I will.”

When I walked into Judy’s classroom for geometry, before class started, she asked me if I was all right.  Apparently she noticed that I had been crying.  “I had a rough morning,” I explained.  I told her briefly about everything that had happened.

“Don’t let it get to you,” Judy said.  Then, lowering her voice, she added, “Just between you and me, Kate isn’t always the nicest person to be around.”

“I see,” I replied, chuckling.


The rest of that class went just fine, as did fourth period assisting in Mitch’s class.  When I got to the car to drive back to Jeromeville, that song that says “I want to push you around” was on the radio.  Maybe Kate wanted to push me around, to make me feel like a bad teacher, but I just needed to make sure I did not let her.  I made a mistake today, but I would learn from it, and I would come out the other side a better teacher, knowing more about how the world of education worked.

I had Jeromeville Christian Fellowship that night.  Eddie Baker, my friend who graduated with me last year, was now on staff part time with JCF.  He got paid to be a leader for the group, being supported by contributions from individuals and churches the same way that full-time missionaries are.  It was his turn to speak tonight, and he spoke about John 4, when Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman at the well.  “The Scripture says that Jesus ‘had’ to go through Samaria.  But if you look at a map of Jesus’ route, he does not have to go through Samaria at all.  He went out of his way to go to Samaria, because he knew that he had work to do there, to talk to that outcast woman.”

After JCF ended, I walked around the room to talk to people, and I told Eddie, “I was kind of on the receiving end of a moment like that today, being the outcast who got prayed for.”  I went on to tell him about everything that had happened at school today.

“Wow,” he said.  “God put that other teacher in your life so that your paths would cross at this very moment, when you needed him.”

“Yeah.  I guess so.”

“And maybe someday you’ll be like that, being just the person a student needs.  You can’t really pray with students in public school, but you can be like Jesus to them without openly praying.”

“Yeah.”

“Or maybe you’ll find yourself praying with a new teacher who is struggling, like what happened to you today.”

“Yes.  I like that perspective.”

I worked at one other school later in my career that did not have a public address system, and in seven years I never once forgot to pick up the announcements from the office in the morning.  My career as a teacher has not been easy.  I had many more rough days, and I will have many more before I retire.  That was just how life worked.  I felt like a screw-up sometimes.  I felt like a bad teacher sometimes.  But I also had many good moments.  I just needed to remember to focus on the positive, do the best I could, and not beat myself up for not being perfect.  And I needed to remember to look for those moments like Jesus had at the well, or like Jim had with me today, or like I had with my friends freshman year when I blew up after a bad day and they prayed with me.  Maybe I was going to be exactly the positive influence that some outcast out there needed.

Readers: Has a teacher or supervisor ever made you cry? Or have you ever been in that role and made someone else cry? Tell me about it in the comments, if it isn’t too painful to talk about.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

February 3-7, 1999.  Burning CDs on the new computer. (#207)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

I sat hidden on the third floor of the library on a dreary, drizzly Wednesday afternoon, reading the textbook for the string cheese class (technically called Reading in Secondary Schools).  All of the tables in the Memorial Union were full when my class got out, and instead of circulating, waiting for someone to get up so I could share a table with strangers, I decided to walk back across the Quad and try one of my other favorite study spots.  The massive four-story library building encircled a central courtyard; it was a curious mashup of architectural styles, owing to its history of being added onto multiple times.  Two sections of the building, on the second and third floors, had windows overlooking the courtyard, but the wall was about three feet thick in these spots, so the windows were recessed from the rest of the room. This gave me a place to park myself for the afternoon, reading from the textbook and highlighting main ideas.

Around 4:30, it dawned on me that it was Wednesday, and I had to go to church tonight for The Edge, the junior high school age youth group for which I was a volunteer leader.  If I walked as fast as possible right now and then ran to the bus stop once I was out of the library, I might catch my bus and get home in time to eat a quick dinner.  I quickly packed and headed for the stairs, skipping the sometimes slow elevator.  I passed a bathroom but chose not to use it, in the interest of saving time.

I caught my bus about a minute before it pulled away from the curb, but by the time I got home, I had to pee so badly that I was almost shaking.  I had a hard time putting the front door key in the keyhole accurately, and as soon as I got the door open, I went straight to the bathroom, the one in the back of the house attached to the large bedroom that I shared with Jed.  When I finished, I walked to the living room and checked to see if anyone had checked the mail.  Someone had, and it was all junk.  Jed was sitting on the couch, playing Final Fantasy VII on his PlayStation; with him here in Jeromeville and his brother back home, they could no longer share a gaming console, so Jed had gotten his own for Christmas.

“How’s it going,” I said to Jed, tired from the long day, knowing that I only had less than an hour to gobble down something quick for dinner before it was time to leave for The Edge.

“Hey, Greg,” Jed replied.  “You noticed those boxes in there for you, right?”

“What?  Where?”

“In the bedroom,” Jed said, gesturing toward the bedroom.

I was expecting a package later this week.  This would have been an unusually early delivery.  Besides, I just walked through the bedroom; how did I miss two large boxes?  Did my overwhelming desire to use the bathroom blind me to my surroundings?  I walked back to the bedroom, and sure enough, someone had placed on the floor next to my dresser a large box, roughly a cube close to two feet on each side, with another slightly smaller box on top of it.  Both boxes were white, with black spots on them in a pattern reminiscent of a cow, with the green corporate wordmark “Gateway” printed near the top of each box.

Gateway was a computer manufacturer, headquartered in an industrial park in South Dakota, near the Iowa state line.  The cow-patterned box was a corporate trademark of Gateway, referencing the company’s location in a part of the United States known more for farming than technology.  Gateway was one of the first computer manufacturers to offer customizable home computers, and I had recently placed an order for one.  The email that I had received from Gateway gave an estimated delivery date of February 5, but here it was, only February 3, and my new computer was here.

And I would have to wait another four hours to open it, because of The Edge.

I put on a jacket and walked to the church; it only took about five minutes, and by now the drizzle had stopped.  Adam White and Faith Wiener were already there, since both of them were church employees, and Noah Snyder, Taylor Santiago, Jamie Dodson, and Martin Rhodes had arrived before me, with the other leaders trickling in over the next ten minutes.  I tried to focus on what Adam was saying during our meeting, but I kept thinking about how much I wanted to get home and set up the new computer.

“Greg?” Adam said, snapping my attention back to reality.

“Huh?  Sorry.”

“Prayer request?”

“Sorry I wasn’t listening. My mind has been elsewhere, because I had a new computer delivered today.”

“Nice!” Noah said.

“Exciting!” Jamie exclaimed.

“What kind?” Taylor asked.

“I had it custom built from Gateway.  Windows 98, with a CD burner.”

“Awesome!  Now you’re gonna copy all your friends’ music collections?”

“I’ll probably do a little of that, honestly, but I’m also excited about making mix CDs.  Pick out just the right collection of songs to fit a certain mood.  And I need to get a CD player for the car, so I can listen to them on the way to work.  So I guess my prayer request is that everything will work okay when I take it out of the box.”

“Yes,” Adam agreed.  “That’s important.”

We went around in a circle, praying for each other, as we always did before the students arrived.  When we opened the doors, some students were already waiting outside, and others gradually trickled in as they got dropped off over the next ten minutes.  I walked around, saying hi to the students I knew.

I walked around the room, watching students run around, shoot baskets, and just talk to each other.  The cacophony of noise overwhelmed me a little, but I was used to it by now, after having done this every week for two years.  I heard someone call out, “Greg!” I turned; the voice belonged to an eighth-grader named Phillip.  He was standing against the wall talking to three other boys named Stephen, Alex, and Gavin.  These three boys were among those who seemed to have taken a liking to me.  Two years ago, some boys from the youth group invited me to go to lunch with them after church, and this led to me volunteering as a leader.  Noah always said he thought it was funny how the students chose me as a youth leader, instead of me having chosen to volunteer on my own.  Those boys had moved on to high school since then, though, and now I usually ended up with Phillip, Alex, and Stephen in my small group at the end of the night, when we would discuss that week’s Bible lesson.  Gavin was in my group too if he showed up; he only did around half of the time.

“What’s up?” Phillip asked me.

“Guess what showed up at my house today?” I replied

“What?” 

“Two large cow-colored boxes.”

“A new computer from Gateway?” Stephen asked excitedly.

“Yes!” I replied.  “With a CD burner.”

“More like ‘Gay-way,’” Gavin remarked snidely.

What? I thought.  That was rude.  What was wrong with Gateway?  Did they have a bad reputation among the tech savvy?  I had always heard good things about Gateway.  Maybe Gavin came from one of those snooty families who worshiped Apple products and found all other computers to be inherently inferior.  Or maybe he was affluent enough to afford all of the latest high-powered gadgets, better than any ordinary computer I could afford.  I ignored his comment, but just to be safe, I did not mention the new computer to anyone else that night.


I got home from The Edge around 9:30.  As soon as I walked in, I heard Jed from the other room say, “Time to unpack the computer?”

“Let’s go,” I replied.  I walked to the bedroom as Jed followed, with Sean and Brody, our other housemates, close behind.  Apparently unpacking my computer would be an event of great importance for the whole house.

I opened the first box, the one containing the actual computer.  “It’s small,” Jed pointed out.  It was definitely smaller physically than my current computer; when I was building the computer, the size option was called “mini-tower,” which seemed fine because the full-sized “tower” option was much larger than the computer I had currently.  But the “mini-tower” was smaller than I expected.  No big deal, though, as long as it worked, and besides, that meant it would take up slightly less desk space than the current computer.

Also in this box was a keyboard, a mouse, a power cord, and a telephone cable for connecting to dial-up internet, which was unnecessary since the one I already had worked just fine.  I unplugged my old computer and monitor and moved them out of the way, under the table.  I put the new computer on the table, turned sideways so that I could access the ports for connecting cords in the back.  I plugged the keyboard, mouse, and phone cables into the back of the computer, then pushed the power cord down behind the table, but I did not plug it in yet.

I unpacked the instruction manuals and installation discs that remained in the first box.  “Look at this,” I said.  “It came with two blank CDs.  So I can start burning CDs right away.  That’s good, because I probably won’t have time to buy blank CDs until the weekend.  I don’t even know if any store in Jeromeville carries blank CDs.”

“Is the other box a monitor?” Sean asked.

“Yes.  A little bigger than this one.”

Next, I opened the second box and carefully lifted the bulky cathode-ray tube screen onto the table.  I plugged it into the back of the computer and screwed it finger tight; computer monitors in those days used the blue VGA D-type connector with the two screws to hold it in place.  Finally, I inserted the power cord into the back of the monitor and plugged in both the computer and monitor.  I turned on the computer.  “Here we go,” I said.  Jed made an exaggerated face of excited anticipation.

I waited excitedly as I heard the new computer whir to life.  The Gateway logo appeared on the screen with various power-on self test messages scrolling across the bottom, then the screen went blue with a message proclaiming “Welcome to Windows 98 Setup.”  I then did a lot of waiting, and a little bit of typing when I was prompted to enter the product key from the certificate of authenticity, set the date and time, and provide other such information.  When Windows 98 was finally finished setting up, about half an hour later, Jed applauded.  Sean and Brody joined in.

“So what’s the first CD you’re gonna burn?” Brody asked.

“Probably a mix CD of old songs from albums that I don’t listen to all the way through much anymore,” I explained.  “But that’ll have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s getting late.”

“Aww.”

“I do want to get my email set up, though.”

“I’ll let you get to that, then.”

“Glad everything works,” Sean added.  The others went back out to the living room.

Setting up my email was straightforward.  I had a message from Michelle923, an Internet friend from Michigan whom I had been talking to off and on for a while.  She was just catching me up on her last few days, so I replied, doing the same.  Everything on this computer worked beautifully and ran smoothly.  Suck it, Gavin, I thought.  I wanted so badly to keep fiddling with the computer, but I knew that I had student teaching and class tomorrow, and I was starting to get tired, so I powered down the computer and headed to bed.


I did a fairly good job of focusing on what I had to do Thursday morning at Nueces High.  The students in Basic Math B were their usual selves; a few of them were still trying, but the rest sat there and did nothing.  In geometry, we discussed ratios and similar triangles.  When I got home, instead of heading to campus right away as I usually did, I installed the software to burn audio CDs.  I did not have time to actually make a mix CD yet, though, if I wanted to get to my class on time.  This would give me time to contemplate what songs to put on it, which I did during the bus ride to campus.

I came straight home after class.  No one else appeared to be home, unless Brody or Sean was sleeping in another room, and I preferred this.  I did not want the others watching over my shoulder as I burned my mix CD.

This computer did not have nearly enough hard drive space to hold thousands of songs, as the computers I would have in the 21st century would, nor did it have any currently installed means to use a compressed file format like MP3 to store music.  So, with this particular hardware and software, I had to save all the song files one at a time in uncompressed form, write them to the blank CD, and then delete all of these files from the computer, since they took up a significant amount of space on the hard drive.  This all seemed quaint compared to the technology of my later adulthood, but it was much better than the alternative at the time, which was making mixes on lower-quality audio cassettes.

For the last couple years, although I still listened to mainstream pop-rock and classic rock on the radio, I had mostly only been buying CDs of Christian music.  I had a number of CDs from the last few years that I rarely listened to all the way through these days, so my plan was to start by making a mix CD of greatest hits from these albums.  I took these discs out of the CD shelf and put them on the desk next to me.  Aerosmith’s Big Ones.  Hell Freezes Over, the Eagles’ four comeback songs and live reunion album.  Pearl Jam’s Ten.  Cracked Rear View by Hootie and the Blowfish.  Crash by the Dave Matthews Band.  The Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite.  Soundgarden’s Superunknown.  The untitled EP from the now-defunct Jeromeville local band Lawsuit.  Classic Queen.

The new computer had two optical drives.  One was a read-only drive that read both compact discs and the higher-capacity digital video discs; in addition to computer software on those discs, it could also play music CDs and video DVDs.  I had no video DVDs, since this was a very new technology at the time.  The second drive could both read and write CDs, but the reading speed was much slower on this one, so I put each of the music CDs I had taken from the shelf into the read-only drive, one at a time, to copy the songs I wanted from each to the computer.  A blank CD could fit 74 minutes of audio, and as I arranged the songs in the order I wanted, I noticed that I would have to cut something in order to fit on the CD.  I deleted Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” from the list of songs to record, leaving fifteen songs on the disc.

I put the blank CD in the CD writer drive and clicked Burn.  And now I waited; a progress bar popped up a few minutes later, estimating a little over half an hour to finish the disc.  I did not want to risk opening other windows on my computer while it was working, since any disruptions to the computer could possibly cause the disc to fail.  Recordable CDs could only be used once, so if the recording failed, the entire disc was useless, except possibly as a coaster.

The blank CDs that came with the computer came with cases and paper sleeves, for writing the contents of the disc.  I took this paper out and began writing the track list.

Mix 1

1. Hotel California – Eagles
2. Amazing – Aerosmith
3. Hold My Hand – Hootie & the Blowfish
4. Black – Pearl Jam
5. Dude Looks Like a Lady – Aerosmith
6. Two Princes – Spin Doctors
7. I Want It All – Queen
8. So Much To Say – Dave Matthews Band
9. Black Hole Sun – Soundgarden
10. Let Her Cry – Hootie
11. Useless Flowers – Lawsuit
12. Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong – Spin Doctors
13. Under Pressure – Queen featuring David Bowie
14. Not Even The Trees – Hootie
15. Take It Easy – Eagles

When the disc was done burning, I wrote “Mix #1” on it in permanent marker, then put it in the CD player on my stereo.  I pressed Play, and a few seconds later, I heard the familiar opening notes of the Eagles’ 1994 live acoustic version of Hotel California coming through the speakers.  Perfect.  It worked.  I turned on the old computer, now under the table, and began using floppy disks to copy files from the old computer to the new one, as I listened to Mix 1.

Jed came home somewhere in the middle of “Two Princes.”  He walked to the bathroom attached to our bedroom, and by the time he was out of the bathroom, the next song, “I Want It All,” had started.  “Wait a minute,” he said.  “That’s a different singer.  Is this your mix CD?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed.

“Awesome!  Would you be ok with me using it sometime, if I ever need to burn a CD?  I can buy my own blank CDs.”

“Sure.  Just let me know first, to make sure you aren’t tying up the computer when I urgently need it.”

The song ended, and the next one, “So Much To Say,” began.  “That’s so cool,” Jed said.  “You can really make every CD your own, exactly the songs you want and none that you don’t want.”

“I know,” I replied.


For the rest of Thursday night, I graded geometry homework from Mrs. Tracy’s class while continuing to use floppy disks to transfer files from the old computer to the new one.  That Saturday, I made an overnight trip home to my parents’ house in Plumdale.  I brought the old computer with me and dropped it off in my parents’ attic.  It would stay there until 2010, when Mom and Dad dropped it off at one of those charity fundraisers where someone collects old electronics and gets paid by some organization for disposing of them properly.

A couple years earlier, Mom had gotten me a computer game, Beavis and Butthead: Virtual Stupidity, based on the popular cartoon of the same name.  It would not run on my old computer.  I asked Mark, my seventeen-year-old brother, if I could take it home with me; after all, it was technically mine, and now I had a computer that could run it. My brother had not played it in a while, so he was okay with that.  Also, I said that, if it worked to do so, I would copy the game onto a blank CD and give the copy back to him next time I saw him so he could have his own copy.  I also asked my brother if I could take the Super Nintendo console and games back with me.  Now that Jed had his PlayStation in the house, I wanted to be able to play video games too.  Mark had the newer, faster Nintendo 64 console now, so he was okay with me taking the older console home with me.

On the way back from Plumdale, Sunday morning, I took a short detour through Willow Grove and stopped at the Fry’s Electronics superstore.  Fry’s was a small chain of very large stores scattered throughout the western United States, and some of the buildings had unusual themes to their architecture.  The one in Willow Grove was shaped like a pyramid and had an ancient Egyptian theme.  I bought two ten-packs of blank CDs, a Sony Discman portable CD player, and a CD wallet to store discs in the car.  Most cars back then had cassette players, but no auxiliary audio port, so the Discman came with an adapter shaped like an audio cassette, but with a wire coming out of it that plugged into the Discman, to run the sound through the cassette player.  The Discman could be powered either by batteries or by plugging into the 12-volt cigarette lighter outlet in the car.  I opened the box for the Discman and connected it to the cassette player and the lighter outlet, and listened to Mix #1 as I drove north on Highway 6 toward Jeromeville.  After playing the entire CD, I played it again; it was the only CD I had with me in the car, since this was my first time having a CD player for the car.  I got home while track 7, “I Want It All,” was playing for the second time.

Over the next decade or so, I made dozens more mix CDs, and occasionally after that as well.  Some contained songs all meant to fit a certain mood, given major events going on in my life.  Some had songs from a certain time period.  One mix CD I called “Where Did All This Music Come From,” after I made some Internet friends in the early 2000s whom I often traded MP3s with, leaving songs on my computer for which I could not remember who had sent them to me or where I got them.  I also used the CD burner to copy entire albums from friends sometimes.  Although I am not proficient in any instruments, listening to music has always been a big part of my life, tied closely to memories and changes I have seen in the world over the decades, and these mix CDs have helped me connect with those various times from my life.

I know that there is one discrepancy between the playlist in the story and the one in the photo. While this is based on a true story, I take liberties with the details sometimes, and I changed the playlist in order to be consistent with a time earlier in the story when I took some liberties with the details.

Readers: Do you enjoy making playlists? Tell me about some of your experiences making playlists (or mix CDs, if you were alive in the late 1990s and early 2000s).

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

February 1, 1999.  Three-dimensional graphs, a pretty girl, string cheese, and Delaware. (#206)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

In the mathematics education program at the University of Jeromeville, students were assigned to two classrooms for the year, one for students on grade level and one for students below grade level.  After spending the first couple of months observing and assisting the classes, we would gradually begin taking on more responsibilities in the class, so that by January we would be doing all of the teaching and lesson planning for those classes.  I was doing that now for Basic Math B with Ms. Matthews first period, and for geometry with Mrs. Tracy third period.

Starting at the halfway point of the year, each of us in the program added a third class to just observe and assist, but with no plans to take over that class.  So in addition to the other two classes, I was now attending Algebra II with Mr. Bowles fourth period.  This kept me at Nueces High until around noon, an hour longer than I had before.  On my first day in Mr. Bowles’ class, I noticed that a few of the students already seemed to know who I was, presumably because they had friends in one of my other two classes.  For example, one blonde freckle-faced girl from Mr. Bowles’ class, Stacie Edwards, was best friends with Kayla Welch, one of the more memorable students from Mrs. Tracy’s class.  Stacie seemed to take an instant liking to me.

“Mr. Dennison?” Stacie asked.  “Can you help me with this?  I don’t get this at all.”

Today Mr. Bowles had demonstrated how to graph a linear function in three dimensions.  I remember being Stacie’s age and seeing a lot of my own classmates struggle with this, mostly just because of the difficulty of drawing a three-dimensional surface on two-dimensional paper.  “I remember how to graph lines,” she said, “but why is there this third axis going diagonally?”

“It’s not diagonal,” I explained.  “It’s three-dimensional.  There are three variables, x, y, and z, so we need three axes in three dimensions. Imagine it coming out of the paper.”  I pointed to Stacie’s pencil pouch and asked, “Can you grab me two pens or pencils out of there?  I want to show you something.”

“Sure,” she replied, handing me a pen and a highlighter.  I picked up the pencil she already had on her desk and held the three writing implements carefully in my hand, arranging them mutually perpendicular to each other.  “These two are the ones that look like a two-dimensional graph on the paper, and the one that’s drawn diagonally is this one.”  I awkwardly gestured with my few free fingers to the third axis, coming out from the other two at a right angle.

“Oh!” Stacie exclaimed.  I see!  It’s like when you draw a box, like this, and you have to make these sides diagonal so it looks 3-D.”  Stacie sketched a three-dimensional box in the margin of her paper.

“Exactly!” I said.  I reminded her how to find the intercepts on each axis, and then I told her to connect these three points to make a triangle.  “Instead of a line, like a two-dimensional graph, the graph of a linear equation in three variables is a plane, a flat surface that goes on forever.  And it’s the flat surface that contains this triangle.  So if you imagine that this triangle goes on forever in all directions, then any point on that flat surface, you can plug into the equation and it’ll be true.”

“I think I kind of get it now!” Stacie said, smiling.  “Thank you!”

I looked up and continued walking around the room.  I noticed that Mr. Bowles had been watching our entire interaction; he smiled and nodded.

The bell for the end of fourth period rang a few minutes before noon.  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” I said to Mr. Bowles.

“Yes!” Mr. Bowles replied.  “Good job today, Greg.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

Although this varied widely from place to place, back in my parents’ generation in this part of the world it was common for a high school to have an open campus.  Students were allowed to leave campus as long as they made it back in time for class, so students would go off campus for lunch sometimes.  By the final years of the twentieth century, open campi were less common, because of concerns over student safety and students misbehaving in the community.  When I attended Plumdale High as a student in the early 1990s, it was a closed campus, although it would not have mattered much since Plumdale High was in the middle of a field, two miles from the nearest restaurant.

Nueces High still had an open campus in 1999; a few fast food restaurants were within walking distance from the school, and some older students would drive farther into town to lunch.  As I walked to the parking lot, I saw groups of students leaving the school for lunch.  Tim Rich and Matt Hernandez, two lovable loudmouths from my class with Ms. Matthews, saw me going to my car.  Tim asked, “Where are you going for lunch, Mr. Dennison?”

I was confused for a minute, because I was not going to lunch.  It took my brain a few seconds to process the fact that Tim was unaware of my schedule as a student teacher.  “I’m not going to lunch,” I said.  “I’m only here in the mornings.  In the afternoons I have classes back at Jeromeville.”

“What classes are you taking?” he asked.

“Classes where you learn how to be a teacher!” Matt explained.

“Yes.  That’s exactly it,” I said.  “I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Enjoy your lunch.”

“Bye, Mr. Dennison!” Tim shouted as he followed Matt to his car.


I took the bus to campus that day, since it would be dark by the time I got home.  The bus arrived around 1:30, giving me half an hour to kill before my class.  “Woo-hoo-hoo, it’s all been done, woo-hoo-hoo, it’s all been done,” I quietly sang to myself as I walked across the street from the bus stop to the Memorial Union.  I had heard that song in the car on the way home, and it had been stuck in my head for the entire bus ride.  I liked that song.  A few days earlier, Mom had sent me an email, just catching me up on her last couple days, and she had written, “I heard this new song on the radio the other day.  I forget what it was called, but I liked it, except in the chorus there’s this annoying ‘woo-hoo-hoo’ part.”  That was all I needed to know exactly what Mom was talking about; I replied, “That song you heard, could it be ‘It’s All Been Done’ by Barenaked Ladies?”  Mom replied in her next email that that was in fact the song she was thinking of, and I laughed that I knew it just from the lyrics “woo-hoo-hoo.”

I grabbed a copy of the Daily Colt with the intention of reading it and doing the crossword puzzle before I had to walk to my class, but secretly hoping that I would run into some friends instead and be able to hang out with them before class, which happens sometimes in the Memorial Union Coffee House. When I got there, I looked around, wondering if I was going to have to sit at a table with a stranger, since I did not see any empty tables at first glance.  As I walked across the room, scanning for an empty seat, I spotted a familiar head of curly blonde hair sitting alone at a table, eating a bagel.  With my luck, she was probably saving the table for some kind of private meeting, but it was worth asking.

“Brianna?” I asked.  “Can I join you, or are you saving these seats?”

“Greg!” Brianna replied.  “Go ahead!  I’m meeting Chelsea at 2, she has class until then, but you can stay here until then.”

“That’s perfect,” I replied. “That’s when I have class.”

“Great!  Did you have class this morning?”

“I have student teaching every morning,” I explained.  “At Nueces High.”

“Oh, that’s right!  I knew that.  I forget sometimes, you have a different schedule.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m old.  I graduated.”

“Oh, come on,” Brianna chuckled.  “You’re not that old.  You just graduated last year.  You’re, what, twenty-two?”

“Yeah,” I answered.  Brianna was nineteen, a sophomore.  I wondered sometimes if I was too old to be hanging around younger students, but so far it had never seemed to be a problem.

“How long is the student teaching program?” she asked.  “Are you done after this year?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed.  “During spring quarter, we’re gonna learn about putting together portfolios for job applications.  And there will be a career fair here on campus, where school districts around the state will have preliminary job interviews.”

“That’s exciting!”  Brianna took a bite of her bagel, and then said, “I saw Jed Wallace a few minutes ago.  He sold me this bagel.  He’s your roommate, is that right?”

“Yeah.  He started working here at the beginning of winter quarter.  He seems to like it.”

“Are you guys going to live together again next year?”

“We haven’t really talked about it.  Our house is owned by an individual, not one of the big corporate apartment complexes, so we don’t have to follow the same schedule that the others in town follow, where everything goes up for lease March 1 and they’re all full by March 15.  Jed is your year, and Brody is a junior, so they’ll still be in town.  Sean is graduating in June, so we’ll have to fill his spot.  And as for me, it’ll all depend on whether I get a job close enough to commute from Jeromeville.  I might, I might not.  Hopefully our landlord will be okay with me not knowing until May.”

“I hadn’t even thought of that, you looking for a job.  So it sounds like you want to stay in Jeromeville if you can?”

“I could go either way.  I really like it at Nueces High, and if they have a job for me next year, I’d like to stay there.  But that’s no guarantee.  I have a community here in Jeromeville, and I’m involved with enough things at church that it feels like home now.  But I’m not gonna limit my job search to here.  Maybe I’ll find somewhere I like better.”

“That’s a good idea.  Keep your options open,” Brianna said.  “Chelsea and I are going to live together next year.  That’s what we’re meeting to talk about.  My roommates this year are making other plans for next year, and some of hers are too.  I hope we can get a house, and not have to live in an apartment again.  We’ve talked to Morgan and Jill about looking for a house together.  We might have room for more than four, depending on how big of a house it is.”

“That would be nice.  Good luck with that.”  After a lull of a few seconds, I asked, “So how was your weekend?”

“It was good!  Didn’t do much.  Just caught up on studying.  And laundry.  How was yours?”

“It was good.  I was at the De Anza house yesterday.  They had a men-only football championship game party.”

“I heard about that.  What was up with that?  Why was it only for men?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I didn’t make the rules.  And I didn’t really care who won, Denver or Atlanta.  I just know I was excited to watch the game with those guys again.  Three years ago, it was on the weekend of the pro football championship that I first met Eddie Baker and the housemates he had then.  That weekend changed my life.”

“Aww.  That’s sweet.”

“Yeah.  Now that I think about it, I think Eddie and John Harvey are the only ones from that house who are part of the De Anza house today.  And they didn’t live on De Anza then.  They were on Baron Court in south Jeromeville.  A lot of JCF groups lived right near each other that year, on Baron or around the corner on Valdez Street.”

“I see.  Is that why there was no X-Files watch party last night?  Because of the men’s football party?”

“Not just because of the party, because of the game in general.  X-Files wasn’t on last night at all.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

“So are you done with class today?” I asked her.  “Just waiting for Chelsea?”

“I wish.  I have English at three.”

“You’re still gonna get home before I do.  Monday is my long day of class.  I have my student teaching seminar at 2, and then after that a three-hour class on Reading In Secondary Schools.”

“Reading?  But you’re gonna teach math, right?”

“Yes.  This is a required class for secondary teachers of all subjects.  Students have to read in every class, so we learn how reading affects all subjects.”

“That makes sense.  Did you say three hours?” Brianna asked, incredulously.

“Yeah.  So I’m on campus until 6:00.  I only have this class once a week, though.  I don’t know why they didn’t do three one-hour classes or two hour-and-a-half classes, like literally every other class ever.  But I don’t make the schedule.”

“I would probably fall asleep in a three-hour class, unless it was, like, a lab or something.”

“This is the first time I’ve had a three-hour class that wasn’t a lab.  But there’s a snack break halfway through, so that’s nice.”

“That’s a great idea!” Brianna exclaimed.  “Does the professor bring the snacks, or do you have to bring your own?”

“The professor brought the snacks the first week, then everyone had to sign up for one future class meeting to bring snacks to share.  My turn will be next week.”  I trailed off, then wondered out loud, “I wonder if there will be string cheese this week.”

“String cheese?”

“The second week of the quarter, the first time students brought snacks, someone brought string cheese.  It was such a huge hit with everyone that every class meeting since then, someone has brought string cheese.  It randomly became a tradition.”

“That’s so random!  I love it!  I wish I had a class where I got to snack on string cheese!”

I looked at my watch and noticed that it was time for me to leave for class.  I said, “I should get to class now.  I hope you and Chelsea figure out your living plans.”

“Thanks!  Have a great day!  I’ll see you Friday at JCF?”

“Yes!  If not sooner.”

“Of course!”  Brianna waved as I stood up; I waved back as I walked toward the exit.

I opened the door and stepped out onto the Quad.  I saw another familiar face, short with brown shoulder-length hair and blue eyes, walking toward me, toward the door I had just exited from.  “Chelsea!” I called out.

“Hey, Greg!” Chelsea replied, smiling and looking up.  “How are you?”

“I’m just headed to class, but I saw Brianna in there.  She’s waiting for you.”

“Oh, good!  We’re gonna talk about rooming together next year.”

“That’s what she told me.  That’ll be nice.  I’ll see you Friday?  At JCF?”

“Yeah!  I’ll probably be there.”

I continued walking across the grassy Quad, along a row of decades-old oak trees with branches soaring above me, stepping on the remains of acorns that had dropped months ago.  I enjoyed my conversation with Brianna.  She was cute, and friendly, and as far as I knew, for reasons I did not understand, she did not have a boyfriend.  At least there was no guy that was always around her, as far as I could tell.  She seemed like the kind of girl that would be popular with guys. I thought about hypothetical future conversations with her as I walked to class.


I finally walked into my front door around 6:20 that night, so full of crackers, cookies, and string cheese that I did not even bother making dinner.  Jed was sitting at the desk in the large bedroom that we shared.  As soon as I sat down and turned on my computer, he said, “Guess what happened at work today?”

“I was talking to Brianna today, and she said she went through your line. But I have a feeling this is something else.”

“Yes, something else. A guy reached into his pocket to pay.  He was trying to make exact change, and he apologized, because he thought he gave me a Canadian quarter.”  I nodded, knowing now where Jed was going with this.  “After I rang him up, I said, ‘Oh, by the way, that wasn’t a Canadian quarter.’  The guy goes, ‘Huh?’”  Jed reached over to the non-Canadian quarter, still sitting on his desk, and dramatically flipped it across the room to me. I carefully caught it in mid-air and looked at it.

The United States Mint made some changes to the design of the quarter-dollar coin for 1999, and Jed and I were talking about this a few weeks ago.  Every year from 1999 through 2008, the design on the back of the quarter would change every ten to eleven weeks, with a total of fifty different designs being minted in the upcoming ten-year span.  These fifty different designs would represent the fifty states of the United States.  I looked at the shiny, unscratched 1999 quarter that Jed had just flipped to me.  The front had the same bust of George Washington that I had seen on quarters all my life, but some of the mottos and printing normally on the back of the coin had been moved to the front, and the date of minting was missing from the front.  The back of the quarter said “Delaware 1787” at the top, with the date of minting, “1999,” at the bottom.  The inscription “Caesar Rodney” appeared on the back, next to a figure of a man, presumably whoever this Mr. Rodney was, riding a horse.  Above the horse’s hindquarters was the inscription “The First State.” Since Delaware was the first state to ratify the 1787 Constitution, the same Constitution still used today, Delaware’s quarter design was the first one minted, with the other twelve original states to follow in the order that they ratified the Constitution, and the rest following in the order that they were admitted to the Union. Canada’s quarter was the same size as a United States quarter, with a caribou on the back, so it was understandable that Jed’s customer, unaware of the recent changes in United States coinage, might have mistaken Caesar Rodney’s horse for the Canadian caribou.

“Nice,” I said after admiring it for a minute.  I flipped the quarter back to him.

“And we’re gonna get forty-nine other cool designs over the next ten years.”

“I know!”

“Who was Caesar Rodney?  Do you know?”

“I’ll look it up.  I was going to dial up to check my email.”  I connected my computer to the dial-up Internet, but instead of going directly to my email, I opened a Web browser and went to the website for the U.S. Mint, the government agency responsible for coins.  I clicked on the link for “50 State Quarters” and scrolled down to read about the designs.  “Looks like he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence,” I said.  “He made a long ride on horseback from Delaware to Independence Hall in Philadelphia just in time to vote in favor of the declaration.”

“That explains the horse,” Jed remarked.

“Yes.  Hopefully I’ll get one soon.  I’ll start paying for everything in cash so I get change back.  I don’t see change every day at work, like you do.”

“You’ll find one soon.  And if I start getting a bunch of them, I’ll save one for you.”

“Thanks!”


A few months later, I was browsing at the now-defunct Borders Books, the one that had been so controversial when it was first planned.  I found the same series of blue cardboard coin collecting folders that I had used as a child, with slots to save one coin from each date and mint mark.  The publisher of these had made a new one this year for the state quarters; I bought it that day.  By then, I had saved several of my own Delaware quarters, as well as a couple of Pennsylvania quarters.

I graduated from the University of Jeromeville last June, and many of my friends from my year who also graduated had moved away.  But I was in the unusual situation that, last year, as a senior, I made a lot of friends with freshmen.  That was how I knew Jed, and also how I knew Brianna and Chelsea.  A large group of freshmen got involved with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship that year, and most of them would be in Jeromeville until at least 2001.  So if I did end up getting a job within commuting distance from Jeromeville, I would still have some sense of a group of friends here in Jeromeville for another few years.  And I was involved enough at church that, at the time, I thought I would have been perfectly content to stay in Jeromeville forever.  Of course, life never seemed to work out exactly how I expected, but those are stories for another time.

Readers: Do you collect anything? Tell me about it in the comments.

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