Tag: education

January 6, 1999. Low expectations, and hiding in plain sight. (#203)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

The hills looked unusually beautiful this morning, I thought as the gas stations and fast food restaurants on the eastern outskirts of Nueces approached.  The sun was just rising, and although this was my third day back at Nueces High School for student teaching after winter break, the first two days had been cloudy.

I had just driven through those hills five days ago.  Brian Burr, my older roommate from two years ago, was long known for throwing great parties. For many years, he had given a party for the New Year back at his parents’ house in Valle Luna.  He was now a student at New York Medical College, but as he had last year, he returned home for the winter break and threw another party.  I did not enjoy this one as much as the previous year.  Not as many of Brian’s friends from Jeromeville, the ones I knew, were there.  Brian spent most of his time catching up with people he had grown up with in Valle Luna, and now that he was twenty-five years old, many of his friends had entered the real adult world and did not have much in common with a student like me.

I brought a sleeping bag, the same one I got for the Moonlight Cove trip a few years ago, and stayed the night on the floor of the Burrs’ living room, along with about ten of Brian’s other friends who were not local to Valle Luna.  Being a light sleeper, I woke up earlier than the other guests, and since I anticipated this, I brought a book to read: The Regulators by Richard Bachman, who was actually Stephen King.  Early in his career, Stephen King had written books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and when the media discovered that the Richard Bachman books were actually written by Stephen King, he staged a mock funeral for his alter ego.  A decade or so later, he wrote two books set in parallel universes with connections between the stories; one was published under his real name, and the other as Richard Bachman. The introduction to the book called it a posthumous work supposedly found among Mr. Bachman’s things by the nonexistent man’s nonexistent widow.  Reading kept me busy for about an hour until Brian woke up.  I left after telling Brian good morning and thanking him for inviting me.

It was around this time of morning on that day, January 1, with the sun just rising, as I left Brian’s house.  I was flipping around on the radio on the way home, looking for a good station, and a few minutes after I left Brian’s house, I heard the song “1999” by Prince.  The song was from 1983, but being that it now actually was 1999, I had a feeling I would be hearing this song many times over the next few days.  I heard it twice more on other stations before I got to Jeromeville that morning.

Now, five days later, I was almost halfway through the school year, and in my student teaching assignment, I had transitioned to a role as the primary teacher in both of my classes.  Basic Math B was doing a lesson on arithmetic and geometric sequences; as was usually the case in that class, the students who paid attention and did their work regularly seemed to understand, and the ones who did not pay attention struggled and did not care.

The other class was called Geometry, but the curriculum that Nueces High used took a more integrated approach.  Some geometry topics were introduced in the previous year’s Algebra 1 class, and some algebra topics were explored this year, particularly those that connect algebra with geometry.  Dr. George Samuels, one of my professors from the University of Jeromeville, was a co-author of this textbook.  The geometry class was learning about lines in slope-intercept form, and Kayla Welch had raised her hand to ask a question about a problem on the homework.  “Write an equation for the graph, then use the equation to find the cost of renting the bicycle for 4.5 hours,” she read.

I talked Kayla through finding the slope and y-intercept of the line on the graph; she correctly deduced that renting the bicycle cost a $12 fee, plus $8 per hour. I continued, “Now we put 4.5 hours into the equation to find the cost.”  I wrote the equation that Kayla had figured out on the board using function notation, f(x) = 8x + 12. “So what do I do to find f of 4.5?” I asked.

“Wait.  What is f?”

“That’s the equation of my function.  F of x equals 8x plus 12.”

“But where did you get f times x?”

“That doesn’t say f times x.  That’s function notation.”

Another student, Andy Rawlings, raised his hand.  “What’s a function?” he asked, confused.

Suddenly, a clear but disturbing picture of the reason for these students’ confusion began to emerge.  “You’ve never seen function notation?” I asked, pointing at the symbol “f(x).”

“No,” several of them replied.

I shook my head in frustration.  “I’m going to have a talk with Dr. Samuels,” I said angrily.

This comment lost them even further; I could tell by the looks on their faces and some confused noises that none of the students had any idea what I was talking about,  Apparently, not only had they not learned about function notation in Algebra I, like I had, but they also forgot that I knew one of the authors of their textbook.  I had told them once that I knew Dr. Samuels before, hoping that they would be impressed, but they apparently were not.  “Never mind,” I continued.  “Let’s start over from here.” I rewrote the equation without the function symbol, “y = 8x + 12,” and asked, “Does this make sense to you?”  The students who usually participated in class nodded and answered in the affirmative.

The rest of the period went on as normal.  After the bell rang, Mrs. Tracy motioned for me to come to her desk.  “They don’t see functions until next year, in Algebra II,” she said.

“I learned function notation in Algebra I,” I replied, genuinely confused.

“You were probably in all the honors classes.  These kids aren’t like you.  We just need to get them through this class so they can graduate from high school.  Most of these kids aren’t going to go to college, and if they do, it’ll probably just be Fairview Community College.  Maybe one of them will go on to a school like Jeromeville.  They aren’t ready for advanced topics like function notation.”

I just nodded, not sure what to say.  “Mmm-hmm,” I eventually replied.

“Just keep things simple.  Get them through your class.”

“I guess.”

“It’s not a bad thing.  You’re doing well so far overall.  Just think about that.”

“I will,” I said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah.  See you then.”


This conversation was still on my mind that night when I showed up to The Edge, the junior high school age youth group at Jeromeville Covenant Church.  We always began the night with a short leader meeting.  The leaders sat in a circle on the floor of the fellowship hall, waiting for Faith Wiener, the intern in charge of junior high ministry whose name was probably amusing to some of the junior high school boys, to start the meeting.

We had quite a bit of turnover in our staff this year.  Adam White, the youth pastor, was still there.  Taylor Santiago, Brody Parker, Martin Rhodes, and Erica Foster were still on The Edge staff.  Hannah Gifford, the girl whom I had personally invited to join The Edge staff last year, had signed on for a second year. Noah Snyder, who held Faith’s position last year, was still on The Edge staff, but just as a volunteer.  Noah, like me, was studying to be a teacher, but for elementary school, and he was doing his student teaching through the other university in this region, Capital State.  Since he needed to focus on his teaching this year, he stepped down from the part-time paid position.  Five others from last year had left The Edge staff for other ministry opportunities. Josh and Abby McGraw had moved on to work with the high school group this year, as had Barefoot James.  Courtney Kohl and Cambria Hawley had both left The Edge to be Bible study leaders with JCF; I was in Courtney’s Bible study.

Since the start of the new year, one new leader, a freshman named Jonathan, had joined the staff of The Edge.  He showed up one Wednesday in October wanting to work with kids, after having been to J-Cov on a few Sunday mornings.  Jonathan’s heart seemed to be in the right place, although he did not act like the typical church kid.  Something about him rubbed me the wrong way.  And tonight there was someone else sitting in on our leader meeting, a taller than average, slim girl with dark brown hair that contrasted with her pale skin and blue eyes.  I knew this girl from JCF, although I had no idea that she would be here tonight.  She looked up and recognized me, so I said, “Hi, Jamie.  Are you going to work with The Edge?”

“Yeah!” she said.  “I’m going to check it out.  I was just thinking about what else I could get involved with at church.”

“Welcome!  It’s good to see you here!”

A few minutes later, when everyone had arrived, Faith called our meeting to order.  “We have a new leader tonight,” she said in her North Carolina drawl.  “This is Jamie.  Apparently you know Greg.”

“Yeah,” Jamie replied.  “From JCF.  And I know Hannah from JCF too.”

“Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, and why you came to work with The Edge.”

“Well, I’m a freshman.  I’m from Ashwood.  I haven’t decided on a major yet for sure, but I’m thinking psychology or something like that.  And I’m looking at The Edge because I used to work with kids at my church back home, and I want to get back into that.”

“Sounds good!  Welcome!”

We went over the order of events for the night, starting with the game we would be playing.  “We’re gonna be doing the leader hunt tonight,” Faith explained.

“I love this one,” Martin said.

“Five of you will be hiding somewhere on the church property, and the kids will be looking for you.  You’ll each have a pen, and the students will have a card, and you’ll initial their card when they find you.  They’ll have five minutes to find as many of you as you can.  I’m thinking Jamie probably shouldn’t be one of the leaders hiding, since the kids don’t know you.”

“Good idea,” Jamie replied.  “That’s fair.”

“The bushes in the back behind the parking lot are always a good place to hide,” Adam explained.  “And I know Martin once hid in the church van and left it unlocked.  Are you gonna do that again?”

“I think so,” Martin replied.

“In a few minutes, when we’re done talking but before the kids show up, you can look around for good hiding places if you need to.  Plus, it’s dark, so it’s easier to stay out of sight.”

During the rest of the meeting, I thought about the layout of the church grounds, trying to think of a good hiding spot.  I had not investigated the bushes behind the parking lot well enough to know if that would work for me.  After the meeting, I walked around outside, looking to see what might offer a reasonable amount of concealment, and I suddenly got an idea for a somewhat nontraditional way of hiding.

The students began to trickle in. I overheard a girl wearing a shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch admiringly pointing out that Jonathan was also wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt. “Yeah, I like their clothes,” he said. “They’re kind of expensive, but that’s my style. I can’t help what I like. And people complain about how they use sweatshops, but I just like to think I’m giving some Third World kid a job.”

Calm down, Jonathan, I thought. No one cares about your style that much. And do 13-year-old kids really think about Third World sweatshops? I walked to the other side of the room and watched some boys playing basketball on the small-sized basketball hoop and backboard attached to the wall.

After the students had arrived, Adam called them all to attention.  “Tonight, we’re going to be playing the Leader Hunt game.  If you’re hiding, stand up.”  Faith, Hannah, Martin, Taylor, and I all stood up.  “These five leaders will be hiding somewhere on the church grounds, and you have to find them.  While they’re hiding, the rest of us will read you the announcements.”

I walked outside with the others who were hiding.  “Where are you hiding?” Faith asked when we were far enough away from the building for students not to hear.

“I was thinking, I’ll just hide in plain sight,” I explained.  “I’m going to sit on the bench at that bus stop over there, looking in the opposite direction, and act like I’m waiting for the bus.”

“That’s a great idea!  Do you think it’ll trick anyone?”

“Probably not many, but it’s funny.  Unexpected.”

I walked to the bus stop as Faith went to find a hiding place in the other direction.  I was not even sure if the buses ran at this time of night.  The local buses in Jeromeville were jointly run by the city government and the student association, with schedules meant to accommodate university students traveling to campus.  Another bus agency, called Arroyobus, ran local routes in the two other cities in Arroyo Verde County, as well as commuter buses between those two cities and other cities nearby. The Arroyobus route connecting Jeromeville and Woodville also stopped at this bus stop.  I knew nothing of the Arroyobus schedule, but I assumed that a bunch of youth group kids in their early teens also knew little about bus schedules, so they not be suspicious of seeing someone waiting for a bus at 7:30 at night. This would not affect the legitimacy of my hiding place.

Jeromeville was relatively quiet at night.  Most of the noise I heard was just from traffic passing by on Andrews Road.  Andrews was a fairly busy street, and across the street a little to my left was a large shopping center anchored by a grocery store. Just on the other side of the shopping center was Coventry Boulevard, the major east-west thoroughfare in the northern parts of Jeromeville.  This time of year, it was already dark by the time The Edge began, but the church grounds were illuminated by lampposts, and there was a streetlight not far from me, so with all of that, plus the non-hiding leaders keeping watch, it was safe for these students to run around the church property at night looking for leaders.

I heard voices as the students left the fellowship hall to start looking for us, but it sounded like most of them were headed in the opposite direction from me, toward the parking lot in the back.  I looked to my right, south on Andrews Road away from the church property, then I turned and looked to my left, slightly more visible.  I did not see any students coming, but I did see two young men on bicycles wearing white dress shirts, ties, and name tags.  Jeromeville was one of the most bicycle-friendly places in the United States, so seeing people riding bicycles at night was not at all uncommon here, but these two were too well-dressed to be students.  This could only mean one thing, which was confirmed when the two of them approached me and one of them asked, “Excuse me, sir?  We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions while you’re waiting here for the bus.”  He was now close enough that I could read his name tag: ELDER SIMMONS, THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.  The words “Jesus Christ” were larger than the other words, just as they were on signs at their churches and logos on their promotional materials.

I had mixed feelings about Mormons and the Latter-Day Saints church.  They all seemed like nice people who favored traditional family values.  But from what I knew, they believed in additional Scriptures besides the traditional Old and New Testaments, and much of what I had learned about the Bible in the last few years seemed to suggest that there was no true Word of God beyond the Old and New Testaments.  I had Mormon cousins, because my grandpa on the Dennison side divorced Dad’s biological mother when Dad was a child and married into an LDS family.  I had only met those relatives a few times, but I always got along with them.  I had Mormon friends in high school, including Jason Lambert, who was in a lot of classes with me.  Jason and I once had an extremely liberal history teacher who we used to like to argue with.  More specifically, Jason liked to start the argument, because Jason was a lot more confrontational than me, and a bit cocky as well.  Jason was a great guy, but he rubbed me the wrong way sometimes.  Kind of like how Jonathan rubbed me the wrong way, with his Abercrombie & Fitch shirt and giving kids jobs in sweatshops. Maybe I should tell Elder Simmons to go get Jonathan to join the LDS church.

“Oh, sorry,” I said to Elder Simmons, realizing that my mind had been wandering for a few seconds, and that I had never replied to him.  “Actually, I’m not waiting for the bus.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.  I’m hiding from a bunch of kids.  I’m a youth group leader, at this church.”  I subtly emphasized those last two words as I motioned toward the buildings of Jeromeville Covenant Church behind me.  My experience had been that LDS missionaries tend to seek people from outside the church entirely, and they leave me alone when they find out that I attend a church.

“That sounds like fun,” Elder Simmons replied.  As he said that, a girl named Katie Hunter, from a family very active in the church, walked up to me with two of her friends.  They all handed me index cards.

“I found you, Greg,” she said.  “Sign this.”

“I see how the game works now,” Elder Simmons observed aloud.

After I signed the cards, the girls ran off to look for other leaders.  “I’ve been working with this group for about two years now,” I explained.  “One Sunday, that girl’s older brother came up to me out of nowhere and asked me if I would take him and his friend to McDonald’s.  We hung out all afternoon, and my friend heard about it and said I should be a youth group leader.”

“That’s a great story.”  A few other kids came up to me with their cards, and after I signed them, Elder Simmons continued, “I’ll let you get back to your game, then.  Here’s my card; you can let me know if you have any questions about our church.  Or you can come visit us; we’re on Eighth Street, down here and then turn left.” He handed me a card with his contact information on it.

“Okay,” I replied, with no intention of actually contacting him but wanting to be polite.  “Thank you.”

“Have a great night!” the other LDS missionary said.  They continued down the road on their bikes.


At the end of the night, some of the leaders talked about how the Leader Hunt game went.  Most of the students eventually found me at the bus stop.  The majority of them missed Martin in the church van.  I told Martin and Taylor about the LDS missionaries, and they thought that was funny.

That night, as I tried to sleep, I said a prayer for Elder Simmons and his friend.  I thanked God that they had some knowledge of Scripture and the truth.  I prayed that God would reveal the full truth to them, and that they would know Jesus Christ personally.  Only God knew for sure whether Elder Simmons and his friend were true believers in their hearts; it was not my place to judge.

My mind kept drifting again to earlier that morning, to what Mrs. Tracy had said about her students at Nueces High.  She did have a point.  I had a lot of classes in high school that were mostly honor students, and I had spent the last four and a half years taking classes at a relatively prestigious university, where virtually all of the students had been honor students in high school.  I was not used to students who were not in advanced classes, and I did have to remember that not all of my students would be going on to college.

The way I saw it, though, that was no excuse for low expectations.  Even if not all students were college bound, all students should at least know about the options for their future, so that they can be in control of their futures as much as possible.  The best teachers should be approaching their classes from the point of view that everyone can succeed, and I hoped that I would never have such a negative view of my students’ collective future as Mrs. Tracy had that day.  And I genuinely did believe that function notation was an Algebra I topic, which Geometry students would have seen before, because that was how it was in my own schooling.

The new year was almost a week old at this point.  I was really hoping for a good year.  For the most part, 1997 and 1998 had not been bad, but each one had had a few major letdowns.  I was not expecting 1999 to be perfect, by any means, but I was hoping that my life would continue on an upward trajectory.  This whole training to be a teacher thing was giving more clear meaning to my life, and if all went according to plan, by the end of the year I would be a paid full-time teacher with a classroom of my own, full of fun teenagers who called me Mr. Dennison.  Maybe then I would finally feel grown up.

Readers: Was there a best calendar year in your life so far? Tell me about it in the comments.

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December 4-7, 1998.  My first conference for teachers. (#201)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

“Are you doing anything this weekend?” Mrs. Tracy asked me, as I packed up my things after my period student teaching in her classroom ended.

“The Shorehaven conference,” I replied.

“Oh, that’s right!  That’s this weekend!  I haven’t been to that in a few years.  Is this your first time, as a new student teacher?”

“Yeah!  I’m kind of excited!”

“Have you been to the Shorehaven conference grounds before?  Didn’t you grow up around there?”

“Yes.  Plumdale is about thirty miles away from Ocean Grove.  I’ve been to Ocean Grove many times, but not actually on the conference grounds.”

“It’s beautiful!  You’ll love it!”

“That’s good.”

“Have a great weekend!  I’ll see you Monday!” Mrs. Tracy said.

“You too!”


A couple months ago, in our student teaching seminar, Dr. Van Zandt told us about an annual conference bringing together hundreds of mathematics teachers from all over the northern half of the state.  He encouraged us to attend, even though the event was at Shorehaven Conference Grounds in Ocean Grove, a three hour drive from Jeromeville each way.  We would have to pay our own expenses, but since my parents lived just thirty miles away, I could stay with them and avoid the cost of either a room at the conference grounds or an overpriced touristy hotel room in or near Ocean Grove.

The schedule included a keynote address on a Friday night, breakout sessions and vendor booths all day Saturday, and two large group speeches on Sunday morning.  Some of the breakout sessions included materials given out to attendees; I had to choose two of these in advance, because of the limited supply of materials.  After I sent my registration form and fees, I received my name badge and tickets to the two ticketed sessions in the mail.

The Shorehaven conference, officially the “Western Mathematics Council Education Conference – North, Shorehaven,” was held annually on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I had no education classes on Friday afternoons, so after I came home from student teaching on that Friday morning, I spent the rest of the afternoon packing.  I only needed two changes of clothes, but I packed an extra change of clothes as I always did.

I left Jeromeville around two o’clock and took the slightly longer route home down the Valley.  On a Friday afternoon, the more direct route through Los Nogales and San Tomas would lead me directly into the middle of massive traffic snarls.  I arrived at my parents’ house around five; Mom said she would have dinner ready for me.  She made chicken and mashed potatoes.  Since this was a work trip, I made sure Mom knew that I only had an hour at most before I had to leave for the conference.

The drive had been cold and gloomy.  The gray December sky that had been above me so far on this trip had turned completely dark by the time I left my parents’ house, except for a faint glow in the east where the moon was rising behind the clouds.  I drove south on Highway 11 and turned at the south end of Plumdale onto Highway 127 west.  Five miles down the road, in Carsonville, Highway 127 merged with Highway 2 south and ran parallel to the coast.  Carsonville was near the mouth of the Gabilan River and its fertile surrounding valley, so here the highway ran a few miles inland, surrounded by farmland.  I drove over a few low hills across the cities of Marine Beach, Seaview, and Santa Lucia, then exited on Highway 86 west toward Ocean Grove.

This stretch of Highway 86 was a twisting two-lane road that climbed a thickly forested hill, but since it was dark, I would have to wait until morning to enjoy the view.  After a few miles, the road widened and became Cypress Avenue.  When I saw Cypress Middle School at the corner with Sycamore Avenue, I turned onto a side street and looked for a place to park on the side of the street, finding one about a block past the school.

The conference was so large that it took up three locations within about a mile and a half of each other: the actual conference grounds on the beach, this school near the top of a hill, and Ocean Grove High School in between.  The Friday keynote address was at the middle school, the two Sunday talks were at the conference grounds, and the Saturday breakout sessions and vendor tables were at all three locations, with the local school district donating its buses to be used as shuttle buses between the three sites..

Cypress Middle School was an old building, probably from the early twentieth century.  To my knowledge, middle schools were a newer concept around here; this building looked like something from the era of when only elementary and high schools existed.  I wondered if this school might have originally been an elementary or high school. I walked inside, where two people sat at a table with boxes full of tote bags.  “Hi,” one of them said.  “Do you have your name badge?”

“Yes,” I replied, handing it to her.  She looked through a very long list, found my name, and handed me a tote bag.

“Enjoy!” she said.

Apparently I got a free tote bag for attending this event.  I was not expecting that.  The bag was black, with a yellow logo printed on it, some kind of repeating fractal design with spirals.  Above it was printed the slogan “Mathematics Is Beautiful,” and below it, “Western Mathematics Council 1998.”

I carried the tote bag as I followed signs to the theater.  Cypress Middle School was a two-story building, with a strange layout; in order to reach the theater, I had to climb to the second floor, go around a corner, and then go back down a different set of stairs.  The theater was large, with probably around a thousand seats, not typical of any theater found in any middle school I had seen before.  I was almost certain now that this building had once been the local high school.

When I arrived, the theater was only around a quarter full, and I did not see anyone I recognized.  I took a seat and looked through my tote bag to see what was inside.  An updated catalog of courses, including last minute changes and corrections.  A note pad, with the conference logo and dates of upcoming conferences from this year through 2002.  A lanyard and plastic sleeve in which to put my name badge.  A pencil and pen.

The speaker was a curriculum director for some school district in the suburbs of Bay City.  He was talking about the importance of cultural diversity and how students from different cultures respond to various scenarios in school.  I tuned out about halfway through, because I had heard a lot of this in one of my education classes, and this was a hot-button issue in those days that I did not completely agree with.  Every student is different, yes, and as a teacher I should be familiar with my students enough to recognize that some will react differently to school settings than others.  But assuming that students will be a certain way because of their cultures, or the colors of their skin, to me seemed like just racial stereotyping all over again.


In those days, when I slept at my parents’ house, I was usually on a school break, so it was a little difficult to wake up at 6:00 to get ready.  I wanted to lie in bed for a while Saturday morning, but I had to get up and get dressed, because I had a ticket for an 8:00 session.

Highway 86 was much more beautiful in the light of the rising sun, with views of the ocean from the summit of the hill.  I parked near where I had parked the day before at Cypress Middle School and walked to my session.  It was about algebra tiles, small plastic blocks used to model simplifying, factoring, and expanding algebraic expressions.  This session came with a free sample of three-dimensional algebra tiles, which could be used to model expressions with exponents up to the third power, whereas traditional flat tiles could only be used for the second power.  I could see where this would be a useful manipulative, but it seemed like it would take a long time to teach students how to use them, long enough that I was not sure it would be useful.

I had an hour and a half until my next session, so next I walked around the vendors in the school cafeteria.  I took lots of business cards, pamphlets, and free samples of pens and pencils as sales professionals tried to convince me to buy calculators, classroom manipulatives, and computer software.  As a student teacher, I was not in a position to make a large purchase, but I was interested in knowing what was out there.  I spent money once that day, and it happened when I turned a corner and saw a booth selling mathematics-related t-shirts.  I knew I had to get something.

“Do you have the quadratic formula shirt in an extra large?” I asked, pointing to the shirt in question. “I’m teaching that right now, actually.”

“Let me look,” the man behind the table said.  He looked through a box and pulled out a shirt in my size.  “We only have it in green.  Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said.  I paid him and put the t-shirt in my tote bag.

After I finished walking around the vendor tables, I left the cafeteria through the back door, which opened right onto a street running behind the school.  I got on the next school bus to arrive and rode through the neighborhoods of Ocean Grove, a little over a mile down a gently sloping hill, to the main conference grounds.

I had never seen the Shorehaven Conference Center up close, and it was absolutely beautiful.  About twenty-five old wooden buildings, many with stone chimneys, were scattered among coastal cypress and live oak trees, with the beach just beyond a row of dunes at the west end of the conference center.  The north side of the grounds held dormitories, with exhibition halls and meeting rooms on the south side.  I found the room for the next session on my schedule, where I sat listening to a veteran teacher speak on creative ways to keep students engaged in learning.  I wondered if any of that would work for the difficult students I had in Mrs. Matthews’ Basic Math B class.

Next, I climbed a hill to a large exhibition hall, an imposing wooden structure with a stone façade in front and tall paned windows.  The catalog said that there were more vendors in here, but a quick look around showed me that these vendors were mostly textbook publishers.

“Are you adopting?” one saleswoman asked me as I approached her table.

“Huh?” I asked instinctively.  Adopting?  Like adopting a baby?  That did not make sense in this context.  I was not sure what she was asking.

“Is your school adopting this year?” she repeated.

I still was not sure what she was talking about, so I said, “No.  I’m just looking.”

“Can I tell you about our program, so you’ll remember us in your next adoption year?”

“Sure,” I said.

As she began to explain the features of the textbook that she was selling, I inferred from the context that “adopting” is educational bureaucrat jargon for selecting and buying new textbooks and curriculum.  As I flipped through one of her books, she explained that this was an integrated curriculum.  “So, instead of having algebra one year and geography another year, you get it all combined.  We don’t have a geography book, but if you do our three-year core high school curriculum, you get all the material for a year of geography.”

I nodded, more confused than ever.  This was math, not social studies.  Why would there be geography in this textbook?  Was this curriculum so integrated that these textbooks taught math and social studies? I did not see any maps in the book I was flipping through, just math.  “So can I sign you up for anything?” she asked

“I’m not ready to get anything now.”

“That’s okay.  Here’s my card.  Contact me when your school is adopting.”

“Thank you.  I will.”

“Enjoy the weekend!”

“Thanks!” I said.  As I walked around the room, about two minutes later it occurred to me that all of her talk about geography was actually about geometry.  I reached into my tote bag, found her business card, and threw it away; no student needs to learn from a textbook published by a company whose sales representatives do not know the difference between geometry and geography.

I finished walking around the publishers’ exhibits shortly before noon.  I had a session at 1:00 back at Cypress Middle School, and I was picking up a box lunch at the school.  But instead of waiting for the next shuttle bus, I decided to walk.  I followed the same route I had taken on the bus, walking out the main entrance, across Shorehaven Avenue, and straight down Sycamore Avenue to the school.

Ocean Grove is a great town to take a walk.  The neighborhoods closest to the beach have no sidewalks and curbs, just beautifully kept up old houses among large cypress, pine, and live oak trees, some covered with Spanish moss.  I saw squirrels climbing trees and birds flying by.

The walk to the school was a little over a mile.  About a third of the way there, a curb appeared on the side of the street, and parts of the street now had a paved sidewalk as well. This neighborhood looked more like a typical well-kept older suburban area, the trees not quite as dense or tall.  The overcast December sky that had hung over my trip home yesterday had given way to a beautiful blue, cool and breezy but sunny with no clouds in sight.  This part of Sycamore Avenue ran along the top of a ridge, and a few times during my walk, while crossing a street, I could look to my left down the cross street and see the dark blue ocean far off below me, with the faint hazy outline of the Lorenzo Mountains even farther away across the Santa Lucia Bay.

When I arrived at the school and walked to the table where the lunches were being distributed, I saw Ron Pinkerton, Melissa Becker, and Ryan Gaines from my student teaching program sitting at a picnic table.  I sat with them after I got my lunch.  “How’s your day been?” Ron asked.

“Good so far,” I said.  “I have a session here at 1 about teaching fractions.  The Basic Math B class is doing things with fractions right now, and a lot of them don’t get it at all.  Then back to the grounds to hear Howard Jacobsen at 4. He wrote the textbook that Ryan and I use for Basic B at Nueces High, and I also used one of his textbooks in high school.”

“Howard Jacobsen will be good,” Ryan said.  “I’m not gonna make it, though.”

“We’re gonna go check out the vendors inside,” Melissa said a few minutes later after she and the others finished their lunch.  “Have you been in there yet?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I got a quadratic formula t-shirt.”

“Nice!  I’m going to Howard Jacobsen, so I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Have fun in there.”

After the session about fractions, I now had some new ideas on how to make the students visualize what fractions really meant.  Now I had to take another shuttle bus back to the grounds.  The walk was pleasant, but I did not particularly want to walk that far a second time today.  When I arrived at the grounds, I walked toward the beach and found a nice big rock to sit on.  I closed my eyes for a bit, but I was not positioned comfortably enough to fall asleep, even with the soothing low roar of waves breaking as background noise.

As the time for Howard Jacobsen’s talk drew near, I started walking in that direction.  The room was mostly full when I arrived, just in time, but I saw Melissa, and she had saved me a seat next to her.  “Thanks,” I whispered to her.

Mr. Jacobsen did not look much like I imagined.  I recognized him from the “About the Author” page in the Basic B textbook, but he was older now.  He was shorter than average for a man, and his head, with slightly bushy gray hair and a mustache, looked too big for his well-dressed body.  But once he began speaking, I was instantly fascinated.  “Every year,” he explained, “I keep an eye out for stories in the news that I can use in my classroom.  Here are some of my favorites for this year.”

Mr. Jacobsen showed a photo on the projector of a drawing of a normal human, with marks showing his height at six feet, then next to him a drawing of a giant baby, also six feet tall.  “Babies do not look like miniature humans,” he explained.  “Their different body parts grow at different rates.  So if you scale a baby up to six feet tall, it looks different from an adult man.  I used this illustration last year when I was teaching proportions.”

Next, Mr. Jacobsen put a photograph on the projector of a man dressed like Elvis Presley jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, and a table showing the number of professional Elvis impersonators in various years.  “So this article was talking about the rapid growth in the number of Elvis impersonators since the time of Elvis’ death.  You could easily tie this into a lesson about exponential growth.”  He next showed a page of equations on the projector and added, “Here we calculate that, if the growth rates continue, by the middle of the twenty-first century, every human being on Earth will be an Elvis impersonator.”  Many people in the audience laughed, including me.

After an hour of such examples, when the talk ended, I said goodbye to Melissa, who was headed to dinner with some of the others from our class.  She invited me, but I had plans to have dinner with my parents.  After Melissa left, before I went home, I walked up to Mr. Jacobsen at the front of the room and nervously said, “Mr. Jacobsen?”

“Yes?” he replied, turning around.

“Hi.  I don’t know you.  My name is Greg Dennison, I’m a student teacher from Jeromeville, and one of the classes I’m student teaching is using your Survey of Mathematics textbook.  And I used your geometry textbook myself eight years ago when I was in high school.  I just wanted to say I love your textbook writing style.”

“Thank you!” Mr. Jacobsen replied, sounding genuinely pleased.

“I love the way you creatively work in so many other topics and find ways to connect them to math.  Just like what you were talking about today.  It’s very unique, and that’s why your textbook stood out to me all these years.”

“Thank you so much.  That’s what I try to do.  It was nice meeting you, Greg.”

“You too.  I’ll probably see you next year if you’re here again.”

“I should be!” he exclaimed.  “I look forward to it!”


I skipped the Sunday morning sessions and got back to Jeromeville around lunch time on Sunday, as I had planned.  I had some reading to do for my classes.

Dr. Van Zandt was at Nueces High School on Monday, to record his student teachers there and make observations.  He observed me in Mrs. Tracy’s class third period, but he did not know that I had a little surprise planned for the class.

I wrote “ax2 + bx + c = 0,” the general form of a quadratic equation, on the board.  “The first problem for today is going to walk you through how to get x by itself, to solve this equation,” I said.  “Work on that in your groups, fill in the blanks, then we’ll talk about it together.” I walked around, helping students get unstuck as Dr. Van Zandt pointed a video camera at me and took notes.  After most of the responsible students had successfully gotten x alone by completing the square, thus deriving and proving the quadratic formula, I wrote the formula on the board.

“And I also brought a little study guide for you,” I said.  The students watched as I took off the sweater I was wearing, revealing my new green quadratic formula T-shirt underneath.  Dr. Van Zandt’s camera captured all of it, including the students’ reactions as they laughed and cheered.

“Where’d you get that, Mr. Dennison?” Andy Rawlings shouted out.

“I went to a conference this weekend.  They were selling math shirts.”

“I love it!”

I wore the quadratic formula shirt many times the rest of that year, and the students all seemed to react positively to it.  Once I wore it to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and a younger university student saw it and said, “The quadratic formula!  I remember that from high school!”  His response puzzled me; as a mathematics major, the quadratic formula was not something to be remembered in the distant past and forgotten, but something fundamental to the way the universe worked.  I supposed that many people did not see it that way, though.

I went to the Shorehaven conference a total of twelve times from 1998 through 2014.  I  made the walk from the conference grounds to Cypress Middle School at some point every time I went, because that was such a beautiful, peaceful place to take a walk, with all the trees surrounding the conference grounds, and the waves breaking on the adjacent beach.  I have not been in over a decade at this point; the other mathematics teachers at my current place of employment usually do not go, and the school district only sends instructional coaches to that conference.  I did go to the adjacent beach once since then, in 2024 while driving around with my mother on a visit home.  I may return to the conference someday, though; I still have well over a decade ahead of me before retirement.

Readers: Is there an annual event, work- or school-related or otherwise, that you attend every year, or attended every year for a long time? 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.

August 24-25, 1998.  My first days at my student teaching assignment. (#190)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 13 Comments

I pulled out of my driveway on Monday morning and drove down Acacia Drive to the stop sign at Maple Lane.  I turned right on Maple, left at the traffic light onto Coventry Boulevard, and then left again at the second light onto the ramp for southbound Highway 117.  After four years of traveling by bicycle and bus to classes at the University of Jeromeville campus, just a mile from my house, this year would introduce a new experience to my life as a recent university graduate: commuting.

Highway 117 passed through Jeromeville below ground level.  I drove past the ramps for West Fifth Street and Davis Drive, crossing under those streets along with two pedestrian crossings and one street with no access ramps.  The highway then ascended to ground level just south of Jeromeville and merged with Highway 100, the major east-west freeway of this region.

On my right, between the road and a fruit orchard, I saw a sign listing distances to upcoming cities to the west.  Silvey 6 miles, Nueces 16, Bay City 70.  Starting from my house, the commute would probably be around nineteen miles each way if Nueces was sixteen miles from this point.  I could definitely handle a commute of nineteen miles one way every day, especially with good music on the radio.  These days, it seemed like every time I turned on the radio, I kept hearing “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith.  It was a sappy power ballad composed by Diane Warren, who was best known for pop music, not rock.  It was still a pretty good song, though, and it was admirable that a band that had been around for almost three decades could still make big hits.  Maybe I should have this perspective on my life, instead of worrying about getting older now that I was twenty-two years old.

Jeromeville was in the middle of a very long valley that ran mostly north to south, a flat interruption of the mountains that made up most of the western United States.  Nueces was on the western edge of this valley, just below the foothills of a ridge rising about two thousand feet, which I could see ahead of me now.  The sun rises early in the morning this time of year, and the morning light coming from behind me in the east illuminated the ridge enough to see the dark green oaks and bushes growing among the tan dry grass.

On my left, the small city of Silvey interrupted the farms and orchards and cow pastures, but on my right, the agricultural land continued until I reached the Nueces city limits.  The second Nueces exit was Highway 6 coming from the north.  I weaved through the traffic coming from Highway 6 to get into the right lane, so I could take the next exit, Buena Vista Avenue.  This street ran parallel to the freeway; I headed west toward the old part of Nueces.

Nueces was a city of eighty thousand, larger than Jeromeville, and much more populous than the rural area of Plumdale where I went to high school, but somewhat smaller than Gabilan, the city next to Plumdale where my grandparents lived.  Nueces had few tall buildings, typical of cities of its size in the Valley.  Its name, Spanish for “nuts,” referred to walnuts and almonds grown in the area.  I wondered if teenage boys at Nueces High School ever made jokes about their school’s name meaning something that was a slang word for male gonads.  Maybe not, though, since my understanding was that actual Spanish speakers called testicles “huevos,” literally “eggs,” instead of “nueces.”

Buena Vista Avenue narrowed to one lane in each direction just before I reached the school.  The neighborhood looked several decades old, and when I arrived at the school, I noticed that the building looked around the same age as those around it.  The school sprawled across a large campus of one-story buildings, with covered walkways but no proper hallways.  NUECES HIGH SCHOOL, HOME OF THE BULLDOGS proclaimed a sign in the front.

I found the office near the front of the school.  “May I help you?” the secretary asked.  “Are you a new teacher?”

“I’m a student teacher from Jeromeville,” I explained.  “Greg Dennison.”

“Here you go!” she said, grabbing a folder from her desk that had my name on it.  Two others were next to mine, labeled “Ronald Pinkerton” and “Ryan Gaines.”  I recognized those names; they were two other student teachers from my program at UJ who had also been assigned to Nueces High.  “The meeting is right over here in the library,” she said, pointing out the door through which I had just come in.

I walked into the library, about fifteen minutes before school started, and by the time everyone arrived, the first thing I noticed was that I had worried about being underdressed for nothing.  Back in Jeromeville, I usually wore a t-shirt and jeans to class, and a collared shirt and jeans to church.  I dressed slightly nicer today, wearing a collared shirt and slacks, but I was not sure if that was enough.  Looking around the room, though, I saw that many of the other male teachers were wearing t-shirts, jeans, shorts, sandals, things like that.  Some wore baseball caps.  I suspected that they were underdressed because today was a day with no students on campus, and that they would be dressed more nicely next week when the students arrived.

“Greg!” I heard a voice call from halfway across the library.  I looked around at the tables in the middle of the library where everyone sat, and I spotted Josh McGraw waving at me.

“Hi!” I said, sitting at an empty seat next to Josh.

“What’s up, buddy?”

“You know.  My first day.  Just trying to figure all this out.”

“We’ve all been there.  You’ll do fine.  And technically it’s my first day too.”

The principal of Nueces High School, Martin Garrett, welcomed everyone back, then went around the room to introduce the new teachers and the student teachers.  Ron Pinkerton, one of the other student teachers from Jeromeville, was sitting on the other side of Josh and me and noticed me clapping loudly when Mr. Garrett introduced Josh.  “You two know each other?” Ron whispered to me.

“He was my roommate last year and the year before,” I replied.  “He did the science education program at UJ last year and got hired here.”

“Oh, wow!  You both just happened to end up at Nueces High?”

“Yeah!”

Most of that first day was kind of boring.  Mr. Garrett discussed a lot of things which did not all pertain to me as a student teacher.  He led the student teachers on a tour of the campus.  Ron, Ryan, and I met with all of the math teachers. I would be in Basic Math B period 1 with Ms. Kate Matthews and Geometry period 3 with Mrs. Judy Tracy.  The math education program at Jeromeville typically placed student teachers in one grade-level class and one class of students below grade level, so that student teachers would experience a wide range of ability levels.  This was also why student teachers from UJ commuted to Nueces and other nearby cities: Jeromeville was a university town, and many of its students came from much more educated families, atypical of public schools in the rest of the state.

The three of us from UJ were excused from the teacher work day two hours early, because we had a class every Monday back in Jeromeville, Education 306, a seminar with Dr. Van Zandt, the supervisor of our program.  The UJ academic year had not started yet, but this class followed the schedule of the schools where we did our student teaching.


The next day, I drove back to Nueces for more meetings at the school.  After hearing presentations about areas of improvement for the upcoming year, and long-term plans to incorporate more technology into teaching, I went to go find the teachers I would be working with, so I could talk to them in more detail.  I wanted to ask Kate Matthews about Basic Math B, since I was not entirely sure what the class was.

“The thing you have to remember,” she explained to me, “is that most of these students are never going to take another math class in their lives.  This class doesn’t count toward college application requirements, it’s just enough math credits to graduate from high school.”

“What exactly is it that they’ll be learning?”

“We pretty much just go through the textbook.  It’s a survey of math topics, but taught in a way to make it accessible for students who haven’t had algebra or geometry.”

“I see,” I said, flipping through Kate’s copy of the textbook.  “Will I get my own copy of the textbook?  Do I need it yet?”

“You will.  The librarian is really busy right now, but check later this week.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Usually how it works, I’ll tell the students on the first day that you’ll be helping out in our class this year.  Then gradually over the next few months, I’ll be turning the class over to you.”

“Are we avoiding the word ‘student teacher?’  Do we not want them to know that I’m brand new to teaching?”

“It doesn’t really matter.  They’ll figure it out.  Some of them have had student teachers before.  You’ve probably been trained on how to use CRM?”

“I’ve heard the basics,” I explained.  “I have a training for CRM tomorrow and Thursday.”

“We don’t use CRM for Basic B, obviously, so I don’t usually use those techniques in Basic B.  My teaching style is much more straightforward.  We go over the homework, then students take notes on the new material, then they try some problems, and whatever they don’t finish is homework.”

“Makes sense.”

“You’ll be in another class this year, right?  A class that does use CRM?”

“Yes.  Geometry with Judy Tracy.”

“Judy doesn’t use all of the CRM techniques.  If your program is pushing you to use CRM techniques, is that going to be a problem?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “I’ll have to ask my professor about that.”

“No big deal.  Just something to keep in mind.”

Two years earlier, when my brother Mark began high school, my mother told me that the school was using a new math book, from a series called College Ready Mathematics, and that one of the authors of the CRM textbooks was Dr. George Samuels from the University of Jeromeville.  I took a class from Dr. Samuels later that year, and it was he who first put the serious idea in my head to consider teaching as a career.  My brother did not have a good experience with CRM, though; during phone calls with Mom that year, she often jokingly told me to tell my professor that his math book was terrible.

The CRM textbooks were popular in this region, not only because of their local origins, but also because they were paperbacks with no color photos inside, making them considerably less expensive than traditional hardcover textbooks.  The curriculum also satisfied many of the buzzwords that were trendy in education at the time, being based around group work, manipulatives, and student-centered discovery-based learning.  Last year, as part of my orientation to the mathematics education program, I heard Dr. Samuels give a presentation on CRM.  Hearing the program presented from the perspective of an insider, these nontraditional methods made sense.  But for such a program to succeed, students, teachers, and parents would all have to buy in, and there was much that could theoretically go wrong.  I wondered what had gone wrong in Mark’s experience with CRM.  I also wondered exactly which CRM techniques Judy was not using, as Kate said.

Kate’s classroom, Room 129, was a portable classroom.  There were two main classroom buildings, a large one in the middle of campus with one- and two-digit room numbers, and a smaller one west of that with three-digit room numbers.  The portables were even farther to the west, with higher three-digit numbers.  The athletic facilities were east of the main building.  I had two more classrooms to stop by that afternoon.  The first one, Room 108 in the smaller classroom building, had nothing to do with my student teaching assignment.  This smaller building, like the larger building, had outdoor walkways instead of proper hallways, with a row of high windows allowing natural light into the classrooms while blocking students walking by from view of the students inside the room.  I would learn much later that there once was an elementary school located right next to Nueces High, and that when the high school expanded, the school district closed the elementary school and sent its students to other schools.  The high school then absorbed the elementary school campus, and this building was originally the main classroom building of that now-defunct elementary school.

I opened the door to Room 108.  Josh McGraw was inside, unpacking boxes and putting posters up on the wall.  “Hey!” he said when he saw me.  “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to see your classroom.”

“Here it is,” Josh said, extending his arm.  A table was full of an assortment of rulers and balance scales.  A microscope sat on a cabinet in the back.  When I arrived, Josh had been putting up a poster with pictures of the planets of the Solar System.  There were still considered to be nine in those days, including Pluto; it was not until 2006 that Pluto was reclassified into a new category of objects, along with Ceres, at the time considered an asteroid, and other objects not yet known in 1998.  The back of the classroom did have actual windows; they looked out onto a narrow space between this row of classrooms and the adjoining row, a space that appeared to be used only by school maintenance professionals, and possibly trespassing students doing things they were not supposed to.

“What classes will you be teaching?” I asked.

“Two periods of general science, two of biology, and one of AP Physics.”

“Wow,” I said.  “Giving the AP class to a brand new teacher.  I’ve heard that’s rare.”

“It is.  I guess no one else wanted it, and since my degree is actually in physics, it just made sense.  Did you take the Physics 9 classes at Jeromeville?  Did you use this textbook?”  Josh gestured toward a stack of around twenty large and familiar physics textbooks on a shelf.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I have that book at home.”

“Would you be willing to sell it to us?  We’re a few short this year, and we won’t be able to get more for a few months.  I said that there’s a class at Jeromeville that uses that book, so I can ask my friends if anyone has the book and is willing to sell it.”

“Sure.”

“Great!  I’ll tell our department chair.  Just bring it by later this week.”

“Sounds good!” I said.  “I’ll let you get back to setting up.  I need to go find Judy and talk about math stuff.”

“Is she your master teacher?”

“Yeah.  One class with her and one with Kate Matthews.  I’ve already talked to Kate.”

“Nice.  I’ll see you around then.”

I walked back toward the larger building, looking for room 37.  The larger building was very similar architecturally to the smaller one.  I knocked on the door and heard a voice from inside say, “Come in!”  When I opened the door and stuck my head inside, Judy smiled and said, “You’re my student teacher, right?”

“Yes,” I replied.  “Greg Dennison.”

“Come on in!  Did you have any questions for me?”

“First, I just wanted to make sure I could find the classroom.  I did.”  I looked around the room.  On the wall facing the outdoor walkway was a chalkboard, the old-fashioned kind that used actual chalk, as opposed to the dry-erase board in Kate’s room.  Above the chalkboard was a projector screen; not the pull-down kind, but a flat screen that made an angle up from the board so as not to cover any of the board as a pull-down projector screen would.  This room looked pretty old, but it would be adequate.

“Have you had the training for CRM yet?” Judy asked.  I could tell quickly that Judy was not originally from this state; she spoke with a noticeable Southern accent.  I never did learn the story of when and why she moved out west.  Judy was definitely older than Kate, probably in her fifties.

“Tomorrow and Thursday,” I said.  “But I know a little bit about it just because of its connection to Jeromeville.  I heard Dr. Samuels give a presentation on it.”

“Did you ever take a class from George Samuels?”

“Yes, I did.  He was actually one of the ones who suggested that I go into teaching.”

“How nice!”

“Kate told me that you don’t follow all of CRM’s recommended techniques.”

“I don’t know if I’d put it that way, but I see why she would say that,” Judy explained.  “I don’t have them sitting in groups, and I don’t do a lot of manipulatives.  We don’t have a lot of the recommended manipulatives at this school; we’re working on that.  But I do give them opportunities to discuss their work with neighbors.”

“I see.”

“You’ll end up finding something that works well for you.  Every teacher is different.”

“That makes sense.”

“You’ll just be watching me for the first couple months, and walking around to help students when they need it.  And you can start taking over the class as soon as you’re ready.”

“Sounds good.”

“So, tell me about yourself!  Are you married?  Do you have any kids?”

I paused, not expecting this question.  “No,” I said.  “I just graduated from UJ in June.  I turned twenty-two a week ago.”

“Really!  I would have guessed you were a few years older than that.”

“People have always assumed I was older than I really am.  As a kid, I thought it was because I was tall, but that doesn’t make sense as an adult.”

“That could be it,” Judy said.  “I was married when I was young and dumb, and that didn’t work out.  I just got remarried a year ago.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Are you from this area?” she asked.

“I just moved to Jeromeville for school.  I grew up in Plumdale, near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”

“I love Santa Lucia!  It’s so nice there!”

“It is, but I knew I needed to get away and get on my own.  And Jeromeville offered me a scholarship for my grades.”

“Good for you!”


By the end of that week, I felt much more ready for this new challenge of student teaching.  My two days of training for College Ready Mathematics gave me a much clearer understanding of how the program was expected to work.  I learned about classroom manipulatives like algebra tiles, geoboards, and creative uses of tracing paper to teach concepts like symmetry. I also got my own copy of the CRM Geometry teachers’ edition, so I could start looking over what my students would be learning.

I quickly came to realize that the teaching methods for CRM were not the kind of teaching that came naturally to me.  I did not like working in groups as a student; the rest of the group would never concentrate on what they were supposed to do, and many of them did not know what to do in the first place.  I did not like the idea of forcing students to work in groups, or of teaching them how to work in groups.  I wanted to teach them math, not interpersonal skills that I myself did not possess.  It seemed like this kind of curriculum assumed fully engaged students, and unlimited resources with which to purchase classroom manipulatives and make copies.  For a curriculum developed by people who lived in Jeromeville, with its educated upper-middle-class families, these were reasonable assumptions, but they seemed much less reasonable in a working-class community like Nueces.

Hopefully, as Judy said, I would find a way to make the curriculum my own.   And I would not need to do this overnight.  I would spend the first couple months observing, gradually increasing my responsibilities in the classroom.  I would have plenty of time to figure things out.  It all seemed overwhelming right now, but I felt an excitement building that I did not usually feel at the start of a school year.  I still needed more work-appropriate clothes, I did not want to be inappropriately underdressed when I met the students, but I had a shopping trip planned this weekend.  I finally felt like real life beyond school had arrived.  And, just like Steven Tyler’s voice kept saying on the radio over and over again, I did not want to miss a thing.

Readers: Have you ever had a commute to work or school? What was it like? Tell me about it, or about anything else, 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.

June 20, 1998. Life was beginning to take shape. (#180)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

“Your gown is still in the package?” Mom exclaimed incredulously.  “It’s gonna be all wrinkled!”

“I don’t know!” I replied loudly.  “I don’t think about these things!  I’m a guy!”

“Well, when you’re a teacher, you’ll have to dress nicely, and that means ironing your clothes so they aren’t wrinkled.”

“That doesn’t help me right now,” I said.

“I have an iron,” my roommate Sean said, sitting on the couch and overhearing our conversation.  “Would that help?”

“Yes,” Mom replied.  We had about half an hour until I had to assemble for my graduation ceremony.  Mom, Dad, and my sixteen-year-old brother Mark had driven up from Plumdale yesterday, arriving in the early evening.  They stayed at a motel in Woodville, about ten miles from my house, on the assumption that it would be difficult to find a room in Jeromeville the weekend of graduation.  Mom put a bed sheet on the dining room table, since there was no ironing board, and got most of the wrinkles out of my gown using Sean’s iron.

Graduation day at the University of Jeromeville was more accurately graduation weekend.  The university held five different graduation ceremonies in the Recreation Pavilion, divided by major, with additional separate ceremonies for graduate students and the various professional schools such as medicine, law, and veterinary medicine.  A month or so ago, I had sent an email to my old roommate Brian Burr, who was now on the other side of the country, finishing his first year at New York Medical College.  I mentioned my upcoming graduation, and he said to sneak in a Game Boy, because the ceremony was long and boring.  I had my Game Boy at the house, but it felt disrespectful to sit there playing video games during the most important celebration of my educational career.

After I put on my cap and freshly ironed gown, we all got in the car, and Dad drove the mile south to campus.  The Campus Parking Services department charged full price to park on campus for graduation, which felt like a massive ripoff to me, but graduation was not an everyday occurrence, so I would just suck it up and deal with it this time.  After all, back in 1998, full price was only three dollars, and Mom and Dad were paying.

“I’m supposed to go over there,” I said, pointing to the opposite side of the building from where we were.  I then pointed toward the main entrance and continued, “You get in over there.”

“Okay,” Mom replied.  “We’ll see you afterward.”  Mom hugged me.

“Congratulations,” Dad said, shaking my hand.  “Dad loves you.”

“You too,” I replied.  Mom, Dad, and Mark walked toward the main entrance, and I walked to the other side of the building.  I saw a few people I know, and I said hi and congratulated them.  The informational packet I received a few weeks ago told me to assemble on the south side of the building by 9:45.  I looked at my watch; I was right on time, but after finding my assigned position, I stood there for almost half an hour before the line of graduates began moving forward.  By then, my feet were starting to hurt.

I walked into the Pavilion and looked around.  I was walking on what was usually the basketball court, but it had been covered with over a thousand folding chairs.  The highest level of seating, collapsible bleachers which I had only seen in use during a few heavily attended basketball games, were filled to capacity with family and friends of graduates, as were all the lower levels of seating.  Including the graduates on the floor, there were probably at least ten thousand people in the building.  I had no idea where Mom, Dad, and Mark were, and it was hopeless trying to find them.  I stood at my seat on the floor, as I had been instructed to, listening to the marching band play Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1.  They repeated the same section from that piece over and over and over again, as was tradition at graduation ceremonies, as all of the graduates filed in.

Next, some official-looking person in a suit whom I did not recognize walked up to the stage and told us to be seated.  I took a deep breath.  My feet hurt. This was going to be a long day.  I fidgeted in my seat, trying to get comfortable.  The man in the suit introduced himself as the Dean of Something-or-other, and he took several minutes to welcome us all to the ceremony, using big words to make himself sound good.

Two more bigwigs from the university administration spoke next.  I continued fidgeting in my seat, trying hard not to fall asleep as the speaker droned on and on about the challenges we would face in the future.  Her speech was saturated with left-wing buzzwords about the environment and cultural diversity.  The next speaker was even more boring; halfway through his speech, I had really wished that I had followed Brian Burr’s advice to bring a Game Boy.

The valedictorian, a girl named T’Pring Miller who double majored in physics and English, spoke next.  A few weeks ago, I had received a large envelope in the mail with information about the graduation ceremonies, and when I saw the name T’Pring Miller listed on the program, I wondered what language her first name was from.  Years later, I would learn that the name T’Pring came from Star Trek.  I tended to dislike the idea of naming children things based on popular culture, and I hoped that any future children I had would have more traditional names.  Popular culture changes so often that names like this lose their meaning.  I wondered if T’Pring Miller was ever teased about her name growing up, and if that was what drove her to choose such a challenging educational path, double-majoring in two unrelated subjects.

I was bored.  T’Pring Miller was speaking about the challenges she had to overcome in life, but she did not mention her unusual name as one of the challenges.  I was sure that she had a lot of interesting things to say, but I found myself starting to nod off.  I sat up and started wiggling my feet up and down, trying to stay awake.  I did not want to be disrespectful, but I was tired of sitting.  I was ready to walk across the stage and receive my prop diploma.  I knew that my actual diploma would arrive in the mail several months later, but this was not publicly announced to everyone watching.

After what seemed like an eternity, the dean who spoke at the beginning announced that it was time to receive our diplomas.  In the sea of graduates, I was slightly behind the middle, so my turn would not come for a while.  In addition to being uncomfortable and bored, now I also had to pee.  I could see the end in sight, though, as people sitting near the front were gradually moving forward to receive their prop diplomas.

I wondered if Mom and Dad and all of the parents and family members in the audience were as bored as I was.  Mark was probably complaining by now.  I knew some people who were graduating this year but skipping the ceremony entirely.  At first I did not understand why people would not want to celebrate their momentous accomplishments, but now, after seeing how long and boring the ceremony was, I understood.  I finally reached the stage, after waiting for hundreds of people in front of me.  I shook hands with the dean, and someone else handed me a folder that was blank on the inside.  Someone took a photograph of me, which I could buy for an additional fee if I wanted to.

I returned to my seat and waited for the rest of the graduates to walk across the stage.  Finally, almost three hours after the ceremony began, the time came for us to turn our tassels to the other side of our caps, to show that we had graduated.  We then filed out of the Pavilion one row at a time while the marching band played the school alma mater song, the same one I sang with University Chorus at the Waite Hall dedication ceremony last October.  As soon as I was out of sight of the audience, I headed straight for the nearest bathroom.

To the south, between the Pavilion and Davis Drive, was a large lawn, used during the year for intramural sports.  This was where we had assembled a few hours ago before we filed in.  My parents and I had the foresight to pick a general direction to meet after the ceremony, so that we would not get lost in the giant crowd.  When I got there, I spotted a couple of other people I knew and said hi: old classmates, people from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and one guy from my freshman dorm.  I eventually found Mom and Dad right where I told them to be.

“Congratulations,” Mom said, giving me a hug.  Dad shook my hand, and so did Mark.

“That was long,” I said.

“I know,” Mom replied.  “But graduations are always like that.”

“So where are we going next?” Dad asked.

“A reception for the math department, in the West Barn.  I’ve actually never been inside the West Barn.”

“And you said you’re getting an award or something?”

“Yes.”

“Can we walk there from here?” Mom asked.

“Sure.  It’s not too far.  Are we ready?  I’d like to get away from these crowds.”


The four of us walked across the lawn and turned east on Davis Drive, toward the core campus.  We passed the turn that led to the South Residential Area, where I lived freshman year.  We continued walking past a brand new science laboratory building on the left and several small buildings on the right.  These so-called temporary buildings were permanent enough to have been there for a few decades.  I then led my parents across the street to the Barn, the student union on this end of campus that was inside what was once an actual barn.  We crossed through the building and exited to a courtyard on the other side of the building, away from the street.

The West Barn Café and Pub, on the west side of this courtyard, was a fancy restaurant that could be reserved for receptions and other formal dinners and luncheons, such as this one for the graduating mathematics students.  It was well-known as the only place on campus where alcohol was served, although none would be at this function.  I had never had a reason to go here, so this building was entirely new to me.  I saw an outdoor patio with tables and umbrellas to my left as I entered the building, with my parents behind me.

“Hi,” someone I did not know, apparently a student assistant, said from behind a table full of programs and name tags.  “What’s your name?”

“Greg Dennison,” I said.

The student assistant handed me a program and my name tag.  “Welcome, Greg,” she said.  “Take a seat anywhere.”

I turned around and asked the rest of the family, “Where do you want to sit?”

“Wherever,” Mom replied.  Dad and Mark seemed equally noncommittal.

I walked to a table near the middle of the room that had four empty seats together.  Jack Chalmers and his parents were at the table next to us.  Jack leaned over and said, “Hey, Greg.  Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I replied.  “You too.  Mom, Dad, this is Jack.  We’ve had a bunch of classes together over the years.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mom replied.  She and Dad both shook Jack’s hand.

“Greg, these are my parents,” Jack said, gesturing toward the people sitting with him.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking Jack’s mother’s and father’s hands, one at a time.

“Are you the Greg that’s getting this award?” Jack’s mother asked.  I looked on her program where she was pointing; it read Department Citation – Gregory Dennison.

“Yes, that’s me,” I answered, smiling.

“Congratulations,” Jack’s mother said.

I turned back with Mom and Dad as more people filed into the building.  Mom asked if I knew anyone.  “Of course I know people,” I replied.  “I’ve had classes with them.”

Dr. Alterman, the department chair who had taught my Number Theory class the previous fall, called the reception to order.  He pointed out the food line, where we would be served out of trays by restaurant employees.  We all lined up for food, and I got chicken, pasta salad, regular salad, and buttered bread.  I returned back to my seat and looked around the room to see who else was here.  I recognized a lot of faces of other mathematics majors who had been in classes with me, and I knew some of their names.  Katy Hadley, the cute redhead, was there, but I did not know her particularly well, and she was never all that friendly, so I did not go out of my way to speak to her.  Alan Jordan sat across the room; the first thing I always noticed about him was that he resembled the actor Norm MacDonald, not only physically but also in his deadpan voice.  Andrea Wright sat with her husband, as well as other family.  Andrea was my first crush at UJ, when her name was Andrea Briggs, and I was disappointed to meet her boyfriend a few months later.  They got married last summer.  Sarah Winters, one of my best friends for our entire four years at UJ, was here with her mother.  I knew that her parents were no longer together, and I did not know whether or not her father was at graduation.  I did not know how that kind of family dynamic worked, and it was none of my business.

Dr. Alterman spoke for several minutes on the importance of mathematics in a connected society.  He used many trendy buzzwords that had arisen in the past few years with the emergence of the Internet into the mainstream, such as “information superhighway.”  Dr. Thomas, a woman of around forty who was one of my favorite professors, spoke after Dr. Alterman.  “Next,” she said, “I would like to present this year’s Department Citation.”

That’s me, I thought, suddenly a little bit nervous.

“This award goes to the undergraduate mathematics major with the highest grade point average in mathematics classes.  This student had straight As in all math classes.  I had the pleasure of teaching this student two years ago in Combinatorics,” Dr. Thomas said, “and he was one of the top students in the class.  I also know him from my work with the Math Club, and I have seen him grow and explore different futures in mathematics as he continues to perform at a high level in the classroom.  The recipient of the 1998 Department Citation in Mathematics is Gregory Dennison.”

Everyone applauded as I walked to the front of the room.  Dr. Thomas shook my hand and handed me a certificate.  “Thank you,” I said.

“Next year,” Dr. Thomas continued, “Greg will be right here at the University of Jeromeville, in the teacher certification program.  When a student of Greg’s caliber chooses a career in education, our young people have a bright future ahead.”

I smiled as I walked back toward my seat.  I felt humbled that Dr. Thomas believed so much in my ability to be a great teacher.  Dr. Thomas had once encouraged me to pursue mathematics research.  She was planning to start a summer research internship at UJ, and she encouraged me to apply to similar programs elsewhere; this was how I ended up in Oregon last summer doing math research.  Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Thomas was disappointed that I did not choose research as a career, but today it certainly did not sound like it.  I sat back down next to Mom, Dad, and Mark; Mom looked at me, smiling proudly.

The other professors at this event took turns announcing recipients of other awards, and recognizing students who had been accepted to particularly prestigious graduate schools.  I sat and listened and applauded politely.  This was more interesting than the graduation ceremony in the Pavilion, since I knew some of these people and recognized most of their faces.  In the past, I would have been envious of these students and the fancy letters that they would have after their names in a few years.  But at this point, I was okay with the path I was on.  I had received my award, and after the events of the last two school years, I now knew that I enjoyed teaching much more than mathematical research.

After the individual awards, Dr. Alterman read the names of all of the mathematics graduates as we all stood up to be recognized collectively.  He then gave a brief concluding speech and congratulated us all once again.  When it was clear that the event was over and people were getting out of their seats, I got up to find Sarah.  Alan found me first.  “Hey, Greg,” he said as he walked by.  “Congratulations on the award.”

“Thanks.  Alan, this is my mom, dad, and Mark, my brother.”  I turned to my family and said, “This is Alan.  He’ll be in the student teaching program next year too.”

“Nice to meet you,” Alan said.  He continued walking toward wherever he was going, and I continued walking toward Sarah.

“Greg!” Sarah exclaimed, giving me a hug.  “Congratulations!”

“Thank you,” I replied.  “You too.”  Sarah introduced me to her mother, and I introduced Sarah and her mother to my family, as I had already done several other times today.  “Sarah lived downstairs from me in C Building,” I explained to my family.  “And I know her from JCF and church.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mom replied.  “I’ve heard Greg talk about you.”

“Next year,” I explained, “Sarah is moving back home to Ralstonville, to do the student teaching program at Ralstonville State.  Is that right?” I asked, turning back to Sarah.

“Yes,” she said.  “But I’ll be up here visiting a few times.”

“Good.  Will you be at church tomorrow?”

“Yeah!  I’ll see you then.”


After the reception, the four of us walked back toward the car.  As soon as we were out of earshot of others, Mark said in his usual exaggerated, sarcastic tone, “I didn’t know you went to school with Norm MacDonald!”

“I know,” I replied. “I noticed that right away when I first met Alan a couple years ago.”

We drove back to the house, and Mom, Dad, and Mark said their goodbyes and left for Plumdale about an hour later.  Later in the summer, I would be back in Plumdale for a week, although I had not decided on the exact dates yet.

I went back to my room to check my email.  I did not feel all that different now that I was a graduate of the University of Jeromeville.  And my life would not look that different over the summer.  I would continue volunteering with the youth group at church and going to Bible study.  I planned on going for bike rides around Jeromeville while the weather was warm and dry.  I also had some special events this summer, including Scott and Amelia’s wedding a week from now and Josh and Abby’s wedding in August.

My life had changed so much in the last four years.  When I graduated from Plumdale High School, I was excited to get out of Santa Lucia County and make a new start somewhere else, because I was tired of the same old thing and ready for something different.  But I did not know what my future would look like.  Today, though, life was beginning to take shape.  And instead of being excited to get away, I was ready to stay in Jeromeville for a long time.  Through the influence of friends, including Sarah, I had learned over the last few years what it really meant to follow Jesus Christ.  I had become more involved in church, which gave me a sense of community here.  And I had a plan for my future: I was going to teach high school mathematics.  I would be good at it, according to Dr. Thomas.  My Christian values felt out of place at times in a university town like Jeromeville, but Jeromeville was now my home, and I hoped to stay here and raise a family here someday.  Of course, as is often the case, my future did not end up looking like that at all.  But at that moment, I had a plan, and I was ready for what came next.

I’ll be taking a few months off before I start season 5. I need time to plan too (in writer lingo, I’m a plotter, not a pantser). But I will post on here a few times; I need to do a summary of the year at some point, and I may have a few other things to say.

Tell me anything you want in the comments. Anything at all.

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.

January 7-8, 1998.  A silly new word for a new quarter. (#159)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

For reasons I would never find out, whoever was in charge of scheduling at the University of Jeromeville did something different for the winter and spring quarters of 1998.  Winter classes began on a Wednesday instead of the usual Monday.  I did not have a problem with that, but pushing everything back two days like that had a ripple effect on the rest of the academic year, leading to a very annoyingly inconvenient schedule for spring break and spring quarter.  But that is a story for another time.

I had to get up early five days a week now for a class at eight in the morning, but the class was not on the UJ campus.  I locked my bike in the bike parking at Jeromeville High School, which was much larger than the bike parking I had ever seen at any other suburban school.  Jeromeville touted itself as a bicycle-friendly community, and this local culture trickled down to all ages.  I walked to room E-3; I knew my way around the E building, where the mathematics classes were, because I had done this same thing before last year, only with a different supervising professor back at UJ.  I arrived about ten minutes before the scheduled time for class; the door was open, and a few students were sitting in desks, talking.  A middle-aged man with graying brown hair and a mustache sat at the teacher desk.  He was of averageheight, slightly on the heavy side, with graying brown hair and a mustache.  He wore a dress shirt with a tie.

“Is this geometry, with Mr. Gibson?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Greg, the intern from UJ.”

“Yes!  Greg!  Nice to meet you.”  Mr. Gibson shook my hand.

“So what should I do?”

“For today, you can just sit in the back and watch how things work in class.  If you feel ready, you can start walking around and helping students at the end of the period when they start homework.”

“Sounds good!”

After the bell rang, Mr. Gibson read the morning bulletin to the class.  “If you look in the back of the room, you will notice someone new with us,” he announced.  “This is Greg.  He’s a student at UJ, he’s studying to be a math teacher, and he’ll be helping out in our class for the next few months.”  I waved as the students in the class turned around to look at me.

As Mr. Gibson began his lecture, explaining relationships between angles when two parallel lines are cut by a transversal, I looked around the classroom.  Many of these students looked bored.  Mr. Gibson was standing at the front of the room lecturing, and some students were occasionally copying things from his lecture into their notebooks.  I took some notes of my own while Mr. Gibson lectured, but instead of writing down theorems about parallel lines and angles, I wrote my thoughts on Mr. Gibson’s teaching style and how students responded.

I had done an internship like this the previous school year, in Mr. O’Rourke’s precalculus class.  My professor of record last time was Dr. Samuels of the mathematics department, and this internship was set up through Dr. Van Zandt of the education department, so it would show up on my transcript as Education 197 instead of Mathematics 197.  I was told that this internship would essentially be the same thing, although I could see a few subtle differences in the classes themselves already from the first day.  Mr. Gibson’s lecturing style seemed more bland to me than that of Mr. O’Rourke, who was funny and had more interaction with students.  Mr. O’Rourke was older than Mr. Gibson, but he did not fit the stereotype of older teachers being boring.  Also, typically only college-bound students took precalculus.  A geometry class had a mix of college-bound younger students and upperclassmen who were behind grade level in math.  The best students that Jeromeville High had to offer would never even be in this geometry class.  They would have finished geometry before even getting to high school, two grade levels above state standards.  That option, apparently commonplace in a university town like Jeromeville, was never available to me growing up in working-class Plumdale.

Students began their homework with about fifteen minutes left in the period.  Mr. Gibson addressed me at this time.  “You can walk around answering students’ questions,” he said.

“I’ll do that,” I replied.  I began circulating up and down the rows of desks, watching to see what students were writing.  I did not engage any of them in conversations yet, although I thought about doing this sometime soon after I was more comfortable in this new position.

At one point, one of the students raised his hand as I walked by.  “Hey, can you help me with this?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied.  I looked at the top of his paper, where he had written his name.  “Matt,” I replied.  “I don’t know everyone’s name yet.  What was your question?”

“This one,” Matt said, pointing at a diagram with two parallel lines labeled l and m.  A third line labeled p intersected both lines, with the acute angle between p and m labeled 37 degrees.  The question asked to find the obtuse angle between lines p and l.  “What did you learn about this today?” I asked.

Matt turned back a page in his book and recited from it.  “‘If two parallel lines are cut by a transversal, the alternate interior angles are equal.’”

“The angle you know, and the angle you’re trying to find, are they alternate interior angles?  Look at the diagram.”

“I don’t know.  They don’t look equal.”  Matt studied the diagram.  “I don’t think so.”

“They’re not, because they’re on the same side of line p.  So did you learn something about angles on the same side of the transversal?”

Matt turned back to the page with the theorems on it and continued reciting.  “‘The angles on the same side of the transversal are supplementary.”

“Are those angles on the same side of the transversal?”

Matt looked at the problem again.  “Yeah.”

“And what does supplementary mean?”

“Isn’t it, like, the angles add to 90, or 180, or something like that?”

“Yes.  180.”

“So to find the angle, I would do 180 minus 37?”

“Exactly.  Good job.”

As I continued walking around the room, it occurred to me that maybe I should have asked Matt to look up the definition of supplementary himself.  But I think that was a positive interaction.  Matt figured out most of the problem himself.

After the bell rang, Mr. Gibson asked me, “So what did you think?”

“It was good,” I said.  “It’ll be good to see your teaching style and compare it to others I’ve seen.”

“Have you worked in a class here at Jeromeville High before?”

“Yeah.  Last year, with Mr. O’Rourke.”

“I’m a little different from him.  He’s good, though.”

“It’ll be good seeing a different perspective.”


I rode my bike from the high school to the Memorial Union on campus, a distance of about a mile.  I arrived a little after nine, giving me almost an hour until my next class.  I had no homework yet on the first day of classes, so I grabbed a copy of the Daily Colt, found an empty seat, and read.  My friend Eddie Baker was a writer for the Daily Colt, and he had written a fluff piece in today’s issue about made-up slang words and what some would call the butchering of the English language.  My eyes landed on a pull quote in the middle of the article, in bold font and slightly larger printing:

“I have a roommate who always says ‘buttass.’  It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Jason Costello, senior

I laughed out loud.  Buttass.  That was hilarious.  Something clicked in my brain after a few seconds.  I knew Jason Costello; he was one of Eddie’s roommates in that big house on De Anza Drive.  I knew all of their other housemates too: Ramon, Lars, John, and Xander.  I had never heard any of them say “buttass.”   It was probably Lars. “Buttass” totally sounded like a Lars thing.

After skimming the rest of the articles, I folded the paper over so that the crossword puzzle was showing.  I finished it in about ten minutes, so I tore the puzzle out and put it in my backpack to put up on my wall back home later, next to the other puzzles I had finished.  Today’s puzzle seemed fairly easy, compared to others I had done.  Buttass easy, I thought, giggling to myself.

My next class was Mathematics 150B, Introduction to Abstract Algebra.  This class was a continuation of 150A from last quarter, except that the same professor did not teach it.  This new professor, Dr. Lisitsa, was a large gray-haired Russian man whom I could understand although English was clearly not his first language.  Many of the same familiar math majors from 150A last quarter were in this class, including Katy Hadley, Jack Chalmers, and Melissa Becker.  Most of 150A was easy, but it had started to get difficult toward the end of the quarter, so I was a little apprehensive about this class.  By the end of the first day, though, I was still following along with everything just fine.

After Abstract Algebra, I felt like a change of scenery, so instead of going back to the Memorial Union, I walked to the library.  The library had been expanded several times in the history of the university, to the point that it had become a rectangular ring with three distinct architectural styles surrounding a courtyard.  Behind what was now, but had not always been, the main entrance, a wall of windows three stories high looked onto the courtyard, with stairways in different directions leading to the basement, second floor, and third floor.  Part of the building had a fourth floor as well, but it was not accessible through these front stairways.

I climbed all the way to the third floor on my left.  I could have used an elevator, but I felt like climbing the stairs.  At the top of the stairs, I turned right toward the back of the building and walked along stacks of books on my left and windows on the right.  The wall was almost two feet thick, and the windows were recessed, flush with the outer wall facing the courtyard.  This created a rectangular cubbyhole-like space in front of each window, about five feet long, where students could sit and study.  I sat parallel to the walkway, with the walkway and book stacks on my left and the window on my right, my legs stretched out as far as they could.  I read through the section of the math book that we started in class today, then began working on homework.  With a three-hour gap between classes, I may as well get an early start on the quarter.

A little after twelve, I was hungry, so I walked back to the MU and got in line for a burrito. I walked to the tables, looking for a place to sit, and found Sarah Winters and Caroline Pearson, whom I had been friends with since the first week of freshman year.  “May I sit here?” I asked, gesturing toward an empty seat at their table.

“Sure!” Sarah said, smiling.

“Hey, Greg,” Caroline added in her Australian accent, slight now after having lived in the United States for a decade, but still noticeable.  “How are your new classes?”

“Good.  I’m TA-ing at Jeromeville High again in the morning.  Then today I had Math 150B, and I have Ed 110 later this afternoon.  Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m TA-ing again, and then Math 131.  Probability.”

“I took 150A and B last year,” Sarah said.  “I thought 150B was kind of hard.  But I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

“You’re a teacher’s assistant at the high school?  Is that for a class?” Caroline asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Education 197, for two units.  I did something similar last spring.”

“Oh yeah, I remember that.”

“When is your next class?” Sarah asked.

“Not until two,” I replied.

“Do you have that big gap in your schedule every day?”

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  It’ll be a good time to get work done.”

“Are you tutoring for the Learning Skills Center, like you did before?” Caroline asked.

“Not this quarter.  I didn’t want to overdo it.”

“Good idea,” Sarah said.  “Now, you can have meet someone for lunch at eleven, and meet someone for lunch at twelve, and meet someone for lunch else at one.”  She smiled.

“Haha.  I guess I can.”  I’d probably run out of people to have lunch with quickly, though, I thought.

“How was your winter break?” Caroline asked.

“It was good.  I made a silly movie with my brother and his friends.  And I went to Valle Luna to see Brian Burr, for his New Year’s party.”

“How is Brian doing?  Where is he now?”

“New York Medical College.  He seems to like it.  What about you?  What did you guys do for your break?”

“Just hung out with family.  We went to the snow for a weekend.”

“Nice!  Sarah?  How was your break?”

“It was good. I had Christmas with family.  Saw a couple of my friends back home.”

“That’s nice.”  I thought about how I did not have friends left back home, except for my brother’s friends Cody and Boz, but I decided not to bring up that topic.


By one o’clock, Caroline and Sarah had both left for class.  I still had another hour free.  This three-hour gap between classes would take some getting used to, but within a few days, the workload would ramp up and I would be buttass busy, with plenty to do.

Today, though, I was done with homework, I had read the Daily Colt, and I had eaten lunch with friends.  I walked south to the Arboretum, which ran for a mile and a half from southwest to northeast along a creek bed which had been filled to become a long, narrow lake.  I sat on a bench amidst trees from all over the world and took out my Bible.  I opened to the back, where there was a plan to read the Bible in one year by reading three passages per day.  I turned to the chapter and verse that was listed for September 15.  I started in January of 1997 with the passages for January 1, but I had fallen behind by a few months at this point, since I only read four or five times per week.  After I read, I prayed.  I thanked God for this beautiful nature area right on campus, and I asked God that I would do well in my classes and not feel overwhelmed.

When two o’clock approached, I walked toward Orton Hall and my Educational Psychology class.  The course catalog listed Psychology 1, which I had not taken, as a prerequisite.  Josh McGraw, one of my housemates, had taken both of these classes, and he did not remember anyone checking to see if everyone had passed Psych 1.  He thought I would be fine without it.  Josh gave me his old textbook for the class too.  After the first day, I was still keeping up with everything.  So far so good.  This was a class based more on reading and writing than mathematics, which was not particularly my strong point, but I had done fine in classes like that before.


The internship in Mr. Gibson’s class was five days a week.  On Thursday morning, the second day of the quarter, it was pouring rain outside.  I took a bus to Jeromeville High School, and later I took a different bus from there to the university, both new bus routes for me.

Lars Ashford was on that second bus I rode after Mr. Gibson’s class.  “Sup,” he said when he saw me.

“Can I sit here?”

“Sure, man.”

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you.  Yesterday in the Daily Colt, I read Eddie’s article about made-up slang words, and Jason said one of his roommates always says ‘buttass.’  Is that you?”

Lars laughed.  “Yeah, dude, that’s me.”

“‘Buttass’ is a great word.  I’m gonna start using it.”

“Sweet.”

I was a little bit intimidated after the first day of probability class.  The professor, Dr. Craig, said from the start that he usually only works with graduate students and does not often teach undergrads.  I got the impression that he thought we were beneath him.  His teaching style was very lecture-based, as seemed to be the case with many professors who only work with upperclassmen and graduate students.  I was following along okay, I would probably do okay, but that kind of teaching style does not work for all students.  I was starting to see that in Mr. Gibson’s class, where some of the students got easily bored.  They needed a more interactive experience, like Dr. Samuels from Euclidean geometry last year.

By the end of the class, though, I felt a little more comfortable.  When Dr. Craig dismissed us, I got up to leave the room, but a guy who was sitting a few desks away walked up to me first.  He said, “You look familiar.  Do you go to U-Life?  Or did you used to?”

I paused, trying to remember if I knew him.  University Life was the college group affiliated with the First Baptist Church of Jeromeville, which was not my church, but I knew some people from there.  “I did a few times last year,” I said.  “I usually go to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, but I was kind of frustrated with them for a while, and I had made some friends at U-Life and they invited me.  Ben Lawton, Alaina Penn, Corinne Holt…”

“The poetry reading!  At Alaina and Corinne’s house!  That’s where I remember you from.  You got up there and said a bunch of math stuff.”

“Yes!  That was me!  I don’t remember your name, though.”

“Mike.”

“I’m Greg.  Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too!”

I shook Mike’s hand, and we made small talk all the way to his next class while I attempted to hold an umbrella in the wind.  It was buttass wet outside.  I was done for the day, so I found a dry spot inside the MU to eat the sandwich I had packed.  When I finished eating, I went to my spot next to the window in the library and did my Bible reading for the day.

The first two days of the quarter were complete.  So far, so good.  Mike from Math 131 seemed like a nice guy; I had to think of him in my mind as “Mike from Math 131,” because I knew so many other Mikes and Michaels and I did not know this Mike’s last name yet.  I was enjoying helping Mr. Gibson’s students so far.  And Ed Psych did not seem too difficult yet, although I was going to have to write a buttass long term paper later in the quarter.  The rain was starting to let up by the time I got off the bus, but I still had to walk a few minutes to my house.  When I got home, I took off my backpack and lay on my bed.  It was time for a nap. I’m tired, I thought to myself. Buttass tired. This was going to become my new favorite word. Of course, some would disapprove of making up new words like this, but that is all part of how language and communication evolve. Some new words bother me, yet I have been known to make up new words myself. It probably has more to do with what the new word is. New words that bother me tend to be related to things I already do not like, whereas new words like “buttass” just make my inner potty-humor-loving child happy.

The tree in the library courtyard would not have been so green in January. I took this photo in 2022 at the Spring Picnic.

Readers: Do you and/or your friends have any buttass silly words that you made up? Tell me about them in the comments!

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October 15-19, 1997.  Trying to figure out if I can graduate in June. (#149)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

The weather in Jeromeville for most of October was typically what I could consider perfect.  Days were sunny, with afternoon temperatures in the 80s, still warm enough to be outside, but the nights were cool, so the days did not get blisteringly hot like they did in July and August.  I was still wearing shorts to class during the third full week of fall quarter, and I had some free time on that Wednesday afternoon, so I sat outside on the Quad.  I brought another book with me to campus in addition to my textbooks, and I was looking through this book when I saw Carrie Valentine walking toward me, coming from the direction of the library and headed toward the flagpole.  I waved, but she was not looking in my direction, so I quickly put my hand down, not wanting to look awkward.  I nervously watched as she approached and waved again when she turned her head toward me.  She stepped off the path and walked toward me.

“Hey, Greg,” Carrie said, smiling.  She put her bag down and sat on the grass facing me.  “Can I hang out here?”

Yes, I thought.  Of course you can.  It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve actually gotten to talk to you, and I’ll never make you fall in love with me if we don’t talk more often.  But all I said out loud was, “Sure.  What’s up?”

“I’m meeting with my Kairos leader,” Carrie explained.  “But I’m early.”

“You’re in Liz’s group, right?”

“Yeah!”

“We were in the same dorm as freshmen.  She was across the hall, one down from me.”

“That’s cool!  Whose Bible study are you in this year?”

“Joe Fox and Lydia Tyler.  The group is so huge, we usually read the Scripture together and then break up into three smaller groups.”

“How big is it?”

“Usually around twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five!  Why so many?”

“Honestly, I think it’s because, with all the Kairos groups, and all the specialized Bible studies for certain groups of people, there was only one group left for all the rest of us.”

“Interesting.  You couldn’t be in a Kairos group?”

“The Kairos ministry is for training future leaders.  You have to be asked to be in a Kairos group, and they don’t invite seniors.  Unless you’re leading a group as a senior and you were in one before, like Liz.”

“I see,” Carrie replied.  “Hmm.”

I decided not to share my exact thoughts about Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s Kairos ministry, since Carrie was part of a Kairos group.  As I was thinking about what else to say, Carrie broke the silence and asked, “What are you working on?  Is that the course catalog?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I was trying to figure out if it’s possible for me to graduate at the end of this year, what classes I still need to take, stuff like that.”

“That’s exciting!  What are you doing after graduation?”

“I’m going to be a teacher.”

“That’s so cool!”

“I’m still trying to figure out if I’ll do my teacher certification through Jeromeville, or Capital State, or somewhere else.  I know Jeromeville’s program is one year, and it’s only fall through spring.  If I graduate in June, then I’ll be able to do that, but if I don’t graduate until December of ’98, then I’ll either have to wait until the fall of ’99 to start student teaching, or see if anyone has a program where I can start in the winter.”

“I hope you get all that figured out.”

“I got this Graduation Progress Tracker form in the mail last week, I guess they send it to all the seniors.  They list all the graduation requirements and what you’ve done and what you still need.  And I also have some prerequisites for the teacher certification program that I have to be able to fit in.”  I saw a familiar face out of the corner of my eye walk up to the flagpole.  “There’s Liz over there,” I said, pointing.

“Oh, yeah,” Carrie replied.  “I should go.  Good luck figuring that out!  Keep me posted.”

“I will!  Tell Liz I said hi.”  I watched as Carrie got up and walked to the flagpole.  She said something to Liz, who then turned in my direction.  I waved, and both of them waved back.


My new house on Acacia Drive was a quick three minute walk to church, and in addition to Sunday mornings, I was there every Wednesday night as a volunteer with The Edge, the youth group for junior high school students.  Before the students arrived, the leaders met to catch up, go over the events of the upcoming night, and share prayer requests.

“What’s up,” Taylor Santiago said as I approached the group.  I had known Taylor the longest of any of the other Edge leaders; he lived on the floor above me freshman year.  Taylor was also the one who first suggested I get involved with The Edge.

“Not much,” I said.  “I’m just trying to figure out if I can graduate in June.”

“I thought you said you were going to go four years plus one more quarter.”

“I just assumed I had to, with all the math classes I still have to take and the prerequisites for the teacher training program.  But I was looking at stuff earlier, and if I understand correctly, I think I will be able to graduate.  I wanted to take some more of Dr. Hurt’s New Testament classes, but I might have to skip those if I don’t want an extremely full class schedule.  They don’t fulfill any requirements at this point.”

“Have you filed your intent to graduate yet?” Noah Snyder asked, having overheard this entire conversation so far.  Noah was the youth group intern, being paid part time by the church to lead The Edge.

“Not yet,” I replied, “but I want to do that in the next few days.  I just hope I understand everything correctly, and that I don’t get to graduation day and someone tells me that I can’t actually graduate, that I have to take more classes.”

“That won’t happen,” Taylor said.  “I’m pretty sure someone will contact you if you file for graduation and you haven’t met the requirements yet.”

“Kathleen Sutton works with the office that handles all that stuff,” Noah added.  “You could probably ask her to look over your form.”

“That’s good to know,” I said.  Kathleen Sutton was a youth group parent; the Suttons occasionally hosted lunch socials for the church college group at their house. Kathleen’s daughter was in The Edge last year, and she had an older son in high school and a younger son in the preteen youth group.  “When I got that Graduation Progress form, it had a number to call.  I’m sure between that person and Kathleen Sutton, I can get all of this figured out.”

“Are you going to stay at Jeromeville for your teacher certification?” Noah asked.

“If I can, I’d like to.  I know the professor who does math education, and I’d be able to stay here and keep working with The Edge.”

“I’m going to stay in Jeromeville, but commute to Cap State for mine.  It’s cheaper, and it just works out better for me.  They have a really good program for elementary school teachers.  I’m not sure what they’re like for high school teachers, though.”

“If staying in Jeromeville ends up too complicated, I’ll look into Cap State too,” I said.  Capital State University was about twenty miles from Jeromeville on the other side of the Drawbridge, and Noah’s mention of their program being cheaper started to give me doubts about my tentative plan.  However, Mom always told me not to worry about money, that we would find a way to pay for things.  My grandmother had started a college savings account for me when I was very young, and with the academic scholarships I had received, we had hardly had to use that money so far.  I would also have to find a way to pay for school if I stayed at UJ for part of a fifth year as an undergraduate, so I would keep that under consideration if any options that did not include graduating in June were still on the table.


When I got home, I went straight to my backpack, in the large bedroom that I shared with my roommate Sean.  Sean was sitting at his desk typing a paper on his computer; a cluster of helium balloons, including one that said “Happy Birthday” and another that had the number “22” written on it in black marker, was rising from the floor next to him, anchored by a weight at the end of a ribbon a few feet long.

“It’s your birthday?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Sean replied.

“I didn’t know that.  Happy birthday!  Did you do anything fun?”

“I went out to dinner with some friends from the wildlife bio major tonight.  We just got back a little while ago.  And I’m flying home tomorrow to spend the weekend with my family.”

“That’ll be nice,” I said, excited for Sean that he will get to see his family, but also excited that I would have the bedroom to myself all weekend, able to flirt with girls on Internet Relay Chat and not worry about someone looking over my shoulder.

I got out my course catalog and the Graduation Progress form.  I had completed my general education requirements and the classes required for everyone regardless of major.  The only requirement remaining was for the major itself, and I needed three more upper-division mathematics classes, including 150B, the continuation of my current abstract algebra class.  With two quarters left, I had plenty of time to take those.  I was limited in which classes I could take, since not all classes were offered every quarter, or even every year.  But I was sure I could find three that would work with my schedule.  Math 150B was offered every year in the winter, and at this point I did not really care what the other two classes would be.

The tricky part would be preparing for the teacher training program.  In my state, universities do not offer education majors; instead, teacher training is a one year graduate program taken after completing a bachelor’s degree.  I would have to reapply to UJ by the end of November, this time as a graduate student applying to the School of Education.  I was missing three classes for that program’s requirements: Educational Psychology, a lecture class offered by the physical education department called Healthful Living, and one more English class of my choice.  I looked up to see which quarters those classes were offered, and I came up with a plan.  In the winter, I would take Ed Psych, Math 150B, and some other math class that I could fit into my schedule, and in the spring, I would take Healthful Living, one more math class, and Fiction Writing for the English class.  Fiction Writing was a lower-division class, but it sounded the most fun and interesting out of all the English options, and I would still have enough total upper-division units to graduate.  Healthful Living was only a two-unit class, so I would need one more class in the spring in order to be a full-time student.  I would be able to take one more of Dr. Hurt’s New Testament classes after all; he taught Christian Theology in the spring.  For the winter, I would have just barely enough units to be a full-time student, so maybe I could look at doing another two-unit internship tutoring at Jeromeville High School, as I had done last spring.

At that moment, something caught my eye at the bottom of the Graduation Progress Tracker.  A few lines of small print at the bottom informed me of a number to call if I had questions.  Apparently, as fourth-year student, I had been assigned to a specific person, the one who had filled out this form, and that person would process my application to graduate, as well as answer any questions I might have.  The lower left corner of the form said, “Completed by,” with a blank for that person to initial, and in that blank were the handwritten initials “KS.”  I remembered Noah’s words a few hours earlier, telling me that Kathleen Sutton worked in the office that processed these forms.  Could Kathleen Sutton be the “KS” who filled out my form?  Did I just happen to get assigned to the one person in that office whom I knew personally?  How many of these graduation processing specialists were there, and what were the chances of that?  It was probably a coincidence; there were plenty of people in the world with the initials K.S.  I had nothing more to do at this point for graduation planning, and I had finished everything I needed to do for tomorrow’s classes, so I went to bed.


I saw the date on Sunday morning’s newspaper; it was my brother Mark’s birthday, sixteen years old now. I reminded myself to call home this afternoon, although I had already sent him a card with a fart joke on it.

I had not yet turned in my application to graduate.  I was nervous.  What if I was not ready to graduate?  I would apparently have my requirements done by the end of the school year, but what if I was misinterpreting the requirements?  And was I really ready to finish my undergraduate time and move on to the next phase?  A few weeks ago, when I thought I would need another quarter or two to graduate, I was looking forward to staying in Jeromeville longer.  Jeromeville was my home now.  I had a community here.  Advanced mathematics was getting weird and abstract, I did not enjoy it as much as I used to, and I was ready to be done with school.  But filing for graduation would bring closer the inevitable day when I would leave Jeromeville and go out into the world.

All of this was still on my mind when I got to church that morning.  The worship team played a fast song to begin the service, and when they played a slow song later, I sat and prayed about these things.  I asked God to give me peace about my plan to graduate at the end of the year and do my student teaching through UJ.  Send me a sign that this is your will for my life, I asked silently.

God often speaks to me through odd coincidences.  Some people have told me that I pay too much attention to this sort of thing, but God knows that it will get my attention.  The sign that I prayed for came quickly, as I was wandering aimlessly on the patio after church mingling with others.  I saw Kathleen Sutton ahead of me in the direction I was walking; she turned and looked at me, and I waved.  “Hello,” I said.

“Greg,” Kathleen replied.  “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I work in the office that processes graduation applications.  We were doing this year’s Graduation Progress Trackers, and I recognized your name on one of the forms I filled out.”

“Oh, wow,” I said.  Kathleen Sutton was “KS” after all.

“I saw your transcript,” Kathleen continued.  “A 3.9 grade point average, and all As in all those hard math and science classes.  You have a pretty impressive academic record.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“What are you planning to do after you graduate?”

“I’m going to be a teacher.  I didn’t think about being a teacher until just last year, but I was planning out the rest of my year this year, and I’ll be able to do all the requirements for the teacher certification program before the end of the year.”

“Good for you!  We definitely need good teachers who know their subject matter.  I’m sure you’ll do great.”

“Thanks.  Oh, by the way, if I’m misunderstanding something, and I file for graduation but I don’t actually have all the right classes, will someone let me know?”

“Definitely.  But I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

When I got home, I changed into an old pair of shorts and went to the small shed in the backyard.  Our house only had a covered carport, not a locked garage, so I typically left Schuyler, my bicycle, in the shed.  I had a long ride I would occasionally do around the entire perimeter of the city of Jeromeville, and with the October days getting shorter, I wanted to do my long ride again before it got too cold and gray.  I had sat down once with a ruler and a map and estimated the ride at fifteen miles, and the fastest I had ever completed the ride was just a few seconds short of an hour.  I rode west on Coventry Boulevard across Highway 117, worked my way through the neighborhoods of West Jeromeville, then headed back east on Fifth Street along the row of walnut trees that separated the city of Jeromeville to my left from the university’s agricultural research fields to my right.  After crossing back to the east side of 117, I cut through campus, past the North Residential Area and the Rec Pavilion, and emerging into downtown Jeromeville next to the Death Star building on Third Street.  Although I was trying for record time, pedaling as fast as I could, I slowed down a little bit through downtown, with its many cars, bicycles, and people.  I worked my way to the Cornell Boulevard underpass, still too narrow for its traffic volume, southeast past Murder Burger and across Highway 100.

I had learned quickly as a freshman that I would feel a bit out of place in a university town like Jeromeville with its hippies and extreme politics.  But now, as a senior, I was on a timeline to graduate eight short months from now, and I did not want to leave.  Jeromeville had grown on me.  It was the place where I found friends, and the place where I found Jesus.  I had gotten involved with youth ministry at church and built meaningful connections beyond the campus bubble.  Jeromeville, in all its quirkiness, was home.

I continued along the southernmost neighborhoods of Jeromeville, through the neighborhood where Eddie, John, Xander, and Lars had lived when I first met them sophomore year, and into a section of the Greenbelts where those guys had held the Man of Steel disc golf competition.  I continued east all the way to Bruce Boulevard, the easternmost of Jeromeville’s north-south thoroughfares, and turned to the north.  About a mile north, I crossed back over Highway 100, where a new neighborhood was under construction, rare in a city like Jeromeville where suburban sprawl is so hated.  I turned west on Coventry Boulevard and rode for almost three miles, then turned into the Greenbelts of north Jeromeville, emerging on Maple Drive about half a mile north of my house.  I looked at my watch when I got home: 58 minutes, 57 seconds, a new record for me.

Time moves forward.  Children grow up and become university students, who then go out into the real world and have children of their own.  But, although time was definitely moving forward, maybe I did not have to leave Jeromeville yet.  I would still have one more year at UJ in the teacher training program, so I would be a registered student through June of 1999.  If I did not get into UJ’s program, Jeromeville was close enough to commute to Capital State.  After that, there were plenty of high schools in commuting distance from Jeromeville where I could work; maybe I could even teach at Jeromeville High.  If I did leave Jeromeville eventually, as I would do in 2001, it would happen when the time was right, when I felt ready to move on.

Readers: Did your education and career end up happening according to your plan or projected timeline? Did you even plan these things in advance? 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.

March 29-April 3, 1997.  A montage of the new quarter. (#126)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 24 Comments

“Now remember, Boz,” I said.  “When Brian finds out that you’re a Star Wars fan, he’s gonna test you and ask if you know the number of the trash compactor that Luke and the others almost got smashed in.”

“I don’t remember,” Boz replied.

“It’s ‘3263827,’” I said.

“‘3263827.’  I’ll remember that.”

I had just spent four days at my parents’ house for Spring Break, returning to Jeromeville on the Saturday morning before classes started.  Mom, my brother Mark, and his two best friends Boz and Cody followed me up for the day in a separate car.  Mom had gotten the idea that it might be fun for the boys to come visit, and with all three of them in high school now, it was never too early to start visiting universities.  We had met at McDonald’s for lunch, and now we were on our way back to my apartment.

“Hey,” Brian said when the five of us walked inside.

“This is my brother Mark, and his friends Cody and Boz,” I said to Brian.  “And you’ve met my mother before.”

“Boz?” Brian asked.

“Short for Matthew Bosworth,” I explained.

“Yeah,” Boz said.  “You can call me Boz.  Or Matt.  Either one.”

“Boz is as big of a Star Wars fan as you,” I said.

“I have a question I always ask Star Wars fans,” Brian explained, “to see if you’re a true fan.  What is the number of the trash compactor on the Death Star where they were stuck?”

“3263827.”

“Very good.”

“I have to admit, though, Greg prepared me, because he told me you would ask that.”

“Ah,” Brian replied.  “Do you have any obscure Star Wars trivia you ask people like that?”

“Sure.  Who is the director of photography?”

“I don’t know that one.”

“Gilbert Taylor.”

“Nice!  I don’t have all the obscure credits memorized.”

“I would just leave the credits on and watch the names sometimes.”

“That’s cool how each of us pays attention to different details,” Brian said.

The rest of the day went well.  I showed the boys around campus.  They came back to the apartment and played basketball in the common area.  I like to think that something from that day really made an impression, because Cody and Boz would both end up attending the University of Jeromeville after they finished high school.  My brother did not; he went to community college for a few years and then transferred to the State University of Bay City.


Sunday was Easter, my first since I began attending Jeromeville Covenant Church.  Church was more crowded than usual, but it was not as dramatic of a difference as Catholic Easter masses back home at Our Lady of Peace were compared to ordinary Sundays.

My first class Monday morning was not even on the University of Jeromeville campus.  I rode my bike along my usual route as far as the intersection of Andrews Road and 15th Street, then turned left on 15th and parked at the bike rack of Jeromeville High School.  I walked through the entrance to campus and found Mr. O’Rourke’s class toward the back of the school.  Mr. O’Rourke had told me to just sit at the table in the back, and I could help students work on problems later in the period.

Mr. O’Rourke was an older man with short gray hair and a no-nonsense personality.  After the students had arrived, he gestured toward me.  “This is Greg Dennison,” he said.  “He’s a student at UJ, and he’s going to help out in our class for the rest of the year.”  Some of the students turned around to look at me, intrigued; I waved at them.

As Mr. O’Rourke lectured, I looked around at what I could see of the class.  The class seemed very large to me; I counted forty-one students.  I was used to high school classes of around 30 students at most.  I would learn later that Mr. O’Rourke was semi-retired, only teaching the one class, and he was such a popular teacher that students would sometimes ask to be in his class even when it appeared full.

After Mr. O’Rourke finished explaining and demonstrating relationships between sine and cosine functions, I walked up to his desk.  “So, just walk around and help students now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mr. O’Rourke said.  “That would be good.”

My first few times up and down the rows in the classroom, no one asked me anything.  This was a precalculus class, so these were mostly honor students; maybe none of them needed help.  Eventually, though, I saw one student who was leaving most of the work blank on his paper.  “Do you need help?” I asked.  “Do you understand what to do?

“I don’t get it,” the student said.

“What do you know about sine and cosine?  Can I see your notes for today?”  I pointed out what he had sloppily written in his notebook and showed him what he could use to solve the problem in front of him.  I could not tell how well he understood.

“Is there anything else I have to do?” I asked Mr. O’Rourke when the bell rang.

“No, not really,” he said.  “At the end of the week, we’ll talk about how it’s going so far.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As I walked toward the school entrance, past a row of lockers, I heard a female voice say, “Greg!”  I instinctively turned and looked, although as I did so I realized that I did not know anyone at Jeromeville High School.  This girl was probably talking to some other guy named Greg.  Maybe it was a student from Mr. O’Rourke’s class whom I just met this morning, but why would she need to talk to me now, outside of math class?  I saw a familiar face reaching into a locker as I turned around, and I realized that I did know someone at Jeromeville High School: Erica Foster from church.

“Hey,” I said.  “What’s up?”

“What are you doing here?” Erica asked.

“I’m doing a Math 197 tutoring class,” I said.  “I’m TAing in Mr. O’Rourke’s first period.”

“That’s awesome!  Everyone says Mr. O’Rourke is a great teacher.  I never got to be in his class, though.”

“He seems like the kind of teacher I would have liked.”

“So you want to be a teacher?  Is that why you’re doing this?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said.  “I’m looking at different options for the future.  One of my professors asked me if I had ever thought about being a teacher, and he set this up for me.”

“That’s cool.”

“What are you doing next year?  You graduate this year, right?”

“Yeah!  I’m going on a mission trip to Turkey for part of the summer, and then I’m still waiting to hear back from some schools, but I’m probably going to stay home and go to UJ.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“I need to get to class, but it was good running into you.”

“Yeah.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”


A few hours later, back on campus, I had Data Structures, a computer science class.  A lower-division computer science class, Introduction to Programming, was a requirement for the mathematics major.  In addition to the upper-division mathematics units required for my major, a small number of courses in statistics and computer science, including this Data Structures class, counted in place of upper division math units.  As a kid, writing code in BASIC on a Commodore 64, I enjoyed computer programming as a hobby.  I chose against majoring in computer science, though, because my computer knowledge was out of date, and I did not want a hobby to turn into work.  But I wanted to take this class, so I could learn more about programming while working toward my mathematics degree.

Technology-related majors were very popular at Jeromeville, especially in 1997 with the Internet just emerging as a consumer technology.  Because of this, computer science and computer engineering majors had priority to register first for most computer science classes.  This was my third attempt at taking Data Structures.  The first time, I was number 19 on the waiting list, and the professor said that no new spots would open up.  The second time, I had moved up to first on the waiting list by the first day of classes.  I was hopeful, but the professor said that they had already expanded the number of spaces in class beyond what they should have.  The number of computers in the labs was too small to support this many students, so no new spots would open up.  For the other computer science classes I had taken, I did most of my work at home, dialed up to the campus Internet late at night so as not to tie up the phone line.  I suspected that lab space was not as much of an issue now that working from home was possible.  But the department had not changed their rules.

This quarter, the professor gave the usual bit about the class already being too full, and no one else being admitted from the waiting list.  But this time, it did not matter, because I already had a spot in the class.  When I called in to register last month, I expected to get put on the waiting list, but it said I had successfully registered.  This might have been my only chance to take the class, so I took it.  I told this to Eddie from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship at the retreat last week, and he said this was God opening up a door for me.  Definitely.

After Data Structures, I had chorus.  As I walked toward the bass section, Danielle Coronado, who lived down the hall from me freshman year, came up to me and gave me a hug.  “Greg!” she said.  “You’re back!”

“Yeah.  I wanted to do chorus last quarter, but it was the same time as Dr. Hurt’s Writings of John class.”

“That’s right.  Well, I’m glad you’re back.”

“Thank you.”

I walked toward the bass section and sat next to a guy I recognized from fall quarter when I was also in chorus.  “Hey,” he said.  “Welcome back.  It’s Greg, right?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  I did not know this guy, I thought he was a music major, and I did not know the music majors very well.  I was surprised that he recognized me.

About fifteen minutes into class, after explaining some procedural matters, Dr. Jeffs, the conductor, said, “The pieces this quarter are Schubert’s Mass No. 2 and Brahms’ Neue Liebeslieder.  The sheet music is at the bookstore; hopefully you all have that by now.  We’ll start on the Schubert today.”  As he began playing and demonstrating part of Schubert’s Mass, Dr. Jeffs explained that Schubert was from Vienna, so we would be using Viennese Latin pronunciations instead of Italian Latin.  When performing Schubert, the word “qui,” for example, was pronounced “kvee” instead of “kwee.”  I had never heard of such a thing.  The Brahms piece was also entirely in German, a language I did not know how to pronounce.  I was sure I would get used to it.

The spring of 1997 was an unusual quarter for me; it was the only quarter that I did not have any actual mathematics classes.  Helping in Mr. O’Rourke’s class at Jeromeville High would go on my transcript as a two-unit math class, but I did not sit in a lecture or do homework out of a textbook.  Data Structures counted as a major requirement, but was not technically a math class.

This quarter was also my lightest load by number of units; I only took as many units as were required to maintain my status as a full time student.  But it certainly did not feel like a light load, because the two actual classes I was taking, besides Mr. O’Rourke’s class and chorus, were both extremely difficult and time-consuming.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I had Philosophy and Social Foundations of Education.  I had not made a final decision about my future, but I was now seriously considering the option of becoming a teacher, so I figured it would not hurt to start working on prerequisites for the teacher training program.

I could tell after ten minutes of class on the first Tuesday that this class would be a lot of work.  As a math major, I was not used to classes with this much reading and writing.  But the subject matter looked interesting, investigating some of the difficult questions about why education is important in society, and why schooling is done as it is.  As a possible future teacher, it was important to answer these questions, and I had to take this class at some point if I were to become a teacher.  Good thing I took it in a quarter when I had a light schedule.


Wednesday evening I had The Edge, the junior high school youth group at church, for which I was a volunteer.  The staff and volunteers arrived an hour before the students, and the meeting before the kids arrived felt a little different because Taylor Santiago was not there.  Taylor had been my friend since Day 1 of freshman year, and he had encouraged me to get involved with youth ministry after he noticed some boys from the youth group take a liking to me after church.  He left last week for six months of inner-city ministry in Chicago; he would be back for the start of the school year in the fall.

As the students walked in, we usually had music playing, typically some Christian artist.  Having only been a practicing Christian for a little over a year, I was just scratching the surface of the vast world of Christian contemporary music.  Whatever this music was that played today, I found it intriguing.  It sounded like rock with horns.  I only knew of one other band that sounded remotely like this, although that other band was not Christian music; this was definitely not them.  At the Spring Picnic freshman year, I had been told to go watch a local band called Lawsuit that played there every year.  Lawsuit was a unique blend of rock with horns that some people described as “ska,” the first time I had ever heard that word.  I went on to see Lawsuit play three more times in the two years since.

I was checking in students at the entrance that day, along with Erica Foster, the girl I saw at Jeromeville High after Mr. O’Rourke’s class.  Her younger brother was one of the teen boys who had taken a liking to me.  “What is this music?” I asked Erica.

“Five Iron Frenzy,” she said.  “My brother has been listening to this a lot at home.”

“I don’t know them,” I said.  “I just got excited that there’s a Chrsitian band that sounds like Lawsuit.”

“Is this what Lawsuit sounds like?” Erica asked.  “I’ve heard of them but I don’t know anything about them.”

“Sounded like,” I corrected.  “They broke up.”

“Really?  I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah.  This last New Year’s Eve was their last show.”

“That’s too bad.  I heard they were good.”

“They were!  They sounded like nothing I’d ever heard.  But now I’m gonna have to check out this Five Iron Frenzy.”

Jeromeville had a small Christian bookstore, and I went there as soon as I was done with classes the next day to find that the Five Iron Frenzy album, called Upbeats and Beatdowns, was in stock.  I brought it home and listened to it while I replied to a few emails in my inbox.  In November, I was saddened to receive a flyer from Lawsuit announcing their breakup.  I did not attend their final show, on December 31; I was halfway across the country at the Urbana conference on that day, and the show was for ages 21 and up, which I would not be until next August.  But now I was excited to discover a Christian band that sounded like Lawsuit.

I learned a few songs into the album that I had been mistaken; Five Iron Frenzy did not sound particularly like Lawsuit, beyond being rock with horns.  They had a much faster and more aggressive sound, more like punk rock with horns, a genre called ska-punk that was emerging at the time.  But it was catchy, and I could hear references to Christianity in the lyrics, at least when I could understand lead vocalist Reese Roper’s high-pitched, fast singing.

 A few minutes later, a song called “Anthem” came on, and I immediately began to regret my decision to buy this album.  Reese called America a hollow country, and sang about how he did not care about the American notion of freedom.  If the members of Five Iron Frenzy were Christians, why were they spewing this anti-American liberal crap?  As far as I knew, Christians were conservatives who loved their country.  Maybe this was not entirely true, I realized, as Reese sang about true freedom being from Jesus Christ.  But I still loved my country and did not find patriotism inherently at odds with Christianity.  Two other songs on the album besides “Anthem” directly criticized the sins of the United States and the shallow nature of the American church, but if I must be honest, these criticisms were certainly justified.

I liked most of the rest of the album.  In addition to songs praising God, the album also contained some songs that were just silly, like one about the old TV show Diff’rent Strokes and one about how Jesus is better than superheroes.  Other songs explored deep philosophical topics of interest to Christians living in this world, like one about colorful characters waiting for a bus.

The album did eventually grow on me, although to this day I still always skip “Anthem.”  I have had a complicated relationship with Five Iron Frenzy over the years, one that has featured some very personal experiences.  I sang one line on Reese Roper’s solo album in 2004, and I had an hour-long personal conversation with saxophonist Leanor Ortega-Till in 2020.  And in addition to recording some of my favorite songs ever, Five Iron Frenzy has also recorded many other songs in the same vein as Anthem that I did not particularly care for.

Currently, I have mixed feelings about Five Iron Frenzy.  They released an album in 2021 of all angry political music, with none of the Christian or silly songs.  Ultimately, though, I have always said that Five Iron Frenzy did a great job of bringing together Christian and secular fans, liberals and conservatives, just by being real.  I understand now that Christianity is not by any means limited to Americans or conservatives, and it should not be.  Paul writes to the Corinthians that different people have different gifts that are all part of the body of Christ.  Just as Boz and Brian had discovered their different takes on Star Wars trivia when they met a few days ago, people with different cultural and political backgrounds have different experiences with Christianity.  I may not agree politically with all Christians, but we are still one in Christ, each with a role in the global Church.

Hello, readers!  What’s an obscure fact about your favorite movie that you like to remember and tell people 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.

Also, the Five Iron Frenzy music video below comes from an unofficial source on YouTube.  Just in case it gets taken down, I’ll include an official audio as well.

February 21, 1997. A productive day, in more ways than one. (#121)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 13 Comments

“So when Jesus said, ‘Before Abraham was born, I am,’ the people he was speaking to would have recognized ‘I am’ as what God said to Moses,” Dr. Hurt explained.  “Where’s Lorraine?  I feel like she would have something to say about this.”

Lorraine Mathews was a religious studies major, specializing in Christianity; I knew her from Jeromeville Christsian Fellowship.   I was not a religious studies major.  I took this Writings of John class, and its prerequisite the previous quarter, because I wanted to learn more about the Bible.  I had gotten involved with JCF sophomore year, through friends, and a year ago this month I made a decision to follow Jesus.  I grew up Catholic, where Bible reading consisted of a couple of paragraphs from three different books read aloud by the priest each Sunday, and I wanted to know more about the Bible.

I did not know why Dr. Hurt thought Lorraine would have something to say about this passage, but I did know exactly why she was not in class today.  In a somewhat uncharacteristic move for me, I spoke up, drawing attention to myself and hoping to get a laugh.  “She’s watching Empire Strikes Back,” I said, loud enough for all 150 students to hear.

“Oooooooh,” a few students said, as others chuckled.

“She skipped class for The Empire Strikes Back?” Dr. Hurt repeated.  “Hasn’t she seen that a bunch of times already?”

“This is the new one!” an unidentified student said.

“There’s a new one?”

“Yeah!  With added scenes.”

“Really.  Well, that’s too bad she missed class today.”

After the fact, I felt a little bad.  Maybe I should not have said that.  Maybe Lorraine would be unhappy with me.  She can be a bit feisty sometimes.  But I said what I said.  I wished that I had been watching The Empire Strikes Back with them.  Lucasfilm, the Star Wars production company, was in the middle of rereleasing the three movies with added and changed scenes to better match director George Lucas’ original vision.  The Star Wars movies were not a large part of my childhood, but my roommate Brian was a huge fan.  Brian had watched the new Star Wars multiple times in the last few weeks.  Today he and his friends were watching the next movie, on the first day it hit theaters.  I had seen Star Wars with my friend Barefoot James a few days ago, but Brian said that I could tag along the second time he saw Empire Strikes Back, and James could too.

After the John class ended, I wandered over to the Memorial Union to find a table and get homework done.  It was sunny but cold, so the indoor tables were crowded, but not as crowded as they would be on a rainy day.  I saw Ajeet Tripathi and Brent Wang from JCF sitting at a table.  Ajeet had a book open but did not appear to be actively reading it. 

“‘Sup, Greg?” Ajeet asked.

“Nothing,” I said.  “Just looking for a place to sit for a couple hours.  May I join you?”

“Sure,” Brent said.  “How many more classes do you have today?”

“None–”

“Why are you still here, dude?” Ajeet interrupted.  “It’s Friday afternoon!”

“I need to go to office hours for geometry.  We have a midterm Monday, and I have a few questions.”

Todd Chevallier, another of Ajeet and Brent’s housemates, arrived at the table and said, “Greg.  How’d you beat me here?”  He was coming from the John class also.

“I don’t know.  I guess I just walk fast?”

“Maybe.  Oh, yeah, I had to pee too,” Todd said.

“Greg, did you say you’re taking geometry?” Brent asked.  “Like we all took in high school?”

“It’s a lot more advanced than that,” I explained.  “In this class, we get a lot into the theory behind it, and how to construct a proof.  We also learned about the undefined terms and the foundations of geometry as a logical system.”  I looked up and saw the blank stares on the others’ faces, a familiar sight when I explained anything I learned as a third-year mathematics major to non-mathematics majors.  “It’s the theory behind what you do in high school geometry.”

“Uhh, sure,” Todd said after a pause.  The conversation went into a lull, and I got out my geometry book to work on homework.  Ajeet started singing, “Da da,” followed by some clicking noises, then “Da da da da da da,” six notes of equal duration with the two notes in the middle a minor third lower than all the other notes.  Ajeet repeated the riff, and Todd joined in; I recognized it from a song I had heard numerous times on the radio.

“What are you guys doing?” Brent asked.

“I’ve had that song stuck in my head all day,” Ajeet explained.

“What song?”

“‘Santa Monica,’ by Everclear.  ‘We could live beside the ocean, leave the fire behind…’”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“Really?  It’s on the radio all the time.”

A while later, I looked up from my studying to see Alaina Penn walking by.  Alaina was involved with University Life, another Christian group on campus, and I knew her through mutual friends.  Alaina saw me and waved, walking toward our table.

“Hey, Greg,” Alaina said.  “Mind if I pull up a chair?  If I can find one?”

“I actually need to get going,” Brent said.  “You can have my seat.”

“Thanks!”

“See ya, Brent,” Ajeet said.

“Have a great day,” I added as Brent said goodbye to us and walked away.

I was about to introduce Alaina to Ajeet and Todd, but I was quite well acquainted with the embarrassment of trying to introduce people who already know each other, so first I asked, “Do you guys know Alaina?”

“No,” Ajeet answered as Todd shook his head in the negative.

“She goes to U-Life.  I met her through mutual friends.”

“Were you at U-Life this week, Greg?” Alaina asked.  “I didn’t see you.”

“No,” I explained.  “I had other plans on Tuesday.”

“That was the night you went to see Star Wars with James, right?” Ajeet asked.

“You ditched us for Star Wars?” Alaina asked.  “It’s okay, I’m just messing with you.”

“Wait,” Todd said.  “Greg?  You go to U-Life too?”

“I’ve been once.  Two weeks ago.  Alaina and her friends invited me, and I thought it might be nice to check it out.”

“I went a couple times freshman year.  Their large group meetings were a lot like JCF.”

“I noticed that too.”  I did not tell Todd or Ajeet the complete reason why I wanted to try out U-Life, that I felt frustrated at being on the outside of the cliques within JCF.

“Spring training is starting soon!” Ajeet announced.  “Do you guys follow baseball?”

“No,” Alaina answered.

“I used to,” I replied.  “I went to maybe three or four Bay City Titans games every year with my family.  I moved out right when the players went on strike, and I never got back into it.”

“Bummer,  But at least you like the right team,” Ajeet said.  “Baseball is of God.”

“Whoa,” Todd replied.  “Blasphemy?  ‘Baseball is a god?’”

“I said baseball is of God, not a God.  Baseball is God’s gift to us.”

A while later, I heard a new voice say, “Hey, guys.”  Ben Lawton and Whitney Felton, two of Alaina’s friends from U-Life, approached.  “Mind if we join you?”

“Go for it,” I said.  The table next to us was now empty, and I moved aside so that they could push the empty table next to us and make more room.  Whitney introduced herself to Ajeet and Todd; Ben had met them before, since he occasionally attended JCF also.  It was Ben who had first introduced me to Alaina.

“What are you up to the rest of the day?” Ben asked me a bit later.

“I’m going to a professor’s office hours.  What about you?”

“I have a class at 3.”

“A class Friday at 3,” Todd repeated.  “That’s brutal.  It’s bad enough that Ajeet and I have class Friday at 2.”

“We should probably get going for that,” Ajeet added.  “It was nice meeting you guys.  Greg, I’ll see you tonight at JCF?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Have a good one.”

I continued working on homework.  A few minutes after Ajeet and Todd left, Alaina said, “So Whitney and I had this great idea the other day.  We’re gonna throw a coffee house party.  We’ll make all kinds of special coffee drinks, and we’ll decorate the house like a coffee shop.”

“And we’ll have poetry readings, and we’re hoping someone will play live music for part of the night,” Whitney added.  “And we’ll make art to put on the wall.”

“That’s a great idea,” Ben said.  “When is this?”

“Oh, not any time soon.  We’re too busy this quarter.  We’re thinking maybe April.”

“Sounds like fun!”

The three of them started discussing who they could ask to play music and make artwork, naming people I did not know.  At one point, Alaina asked, “Greg, what do you think?”

“Oh,” I said, unaware that I was included in this discussion since it seemed to revolve around U-Life people.  “That sounds like a lot of fun!  Keep me posted.”  I left out the detail that I did not like coffee; it still sounded like fun even without coffee.

At around quarter to three, I stood up and said, “I should probably get going.”

“Me too,” Ben replied.

“You know what’s really funny?” I added.  “When I sat down here two hours ago, it was all JCF people at this table.  And the table gradually transitioned into U-Life people.”

“That is funny!” Alaina said.  “Greg, you just have a lot of friends.”

“I guess I do.  Have a good weekend, you guys!”

“Thanks!” Whitney replied.  “You too!”


For the last year, I would have said that Dr. Thomas was my favorite mathematics professor, but now it was a toss-up between her and Dr. Samuels.  Dr. Samuels was a much better teacher than most of the professors I had.  His was the only math class I ever took that did not feel like just a lecture.  He called on students at random, like a high school teacher might, and he would pause class a few times each hour and tell us to turn to our neighbors and summarize what we just learned.  This helped, especially on days when I could not stay awake.

Four other students came to Dr. Samuels’ office hours that day; apparently I was not the only one who needed refreshing on these topics.  From this class, I was beginning to see geometry in a new light.  My high school geometry textbook had said that every logical system had to begin with undefined terms, and that “point,” “line,” and “plane” were undefined terms in Euclidean geometry.  Why were they undefined, I thought?  It seemed lazy.  One could at least describe the concepts of points, lines, and planes using English, right?

After Dr. Samuels’ class, the concept of undefined terms made more sense.  Geometry begins with basic postulates, such as that two points determine a line.  The terms are undefined because these assumptions determine all the properties that a geometer would need to know about points and lines.  Furthermore, one could construct a geometric system where “point” and “line” were understood to mean something else, and all of the theorems would still apply in that system, since they were based on those basic assumptions.  If “point” were understood to mean what would normally be called a line, and “line” were understood to mean what would normally be called a point, some of the basic postulates would still be true.  Two lines, in the real world sense, determine one point.  This thought blew my mind.

After Dr. Samuels answered my question, he said, “By the way, Greg, can you stick around for a while?  I want to ask you something after we’re done here.”

“Sure,” I said.  “I was going to listen to everyone else’s questions anyway.”  I felt a little nervous over the next twenty minutes, wondering what Dr. Samuels wanted to talk to me about.  Was I in trouble?  I did my best to concentrate on what my classmates were asking.

After the last person left Dr. Samuels’ office, he said, “So, Greg.  What are your plans for after graduation?  I always ask this of strong students like you.”

“I’m not really sure,” I replied sheepishly.  If Dr. Samuels thought I was a strong student, I should have a better answer than that.  “I’ve been trying to figure that out.  I went to the Math Club’s career fair, and nothing really stood out to me.  Dr. Thomas told me about REU programs, so I’m thinking about that for this summer, to get a sense of what grad school would be like.”

“Have you ever considered being a teacher?  I’ve done some work with secondary education, and I’ve heard the way you explain things to others in class.”

Of all the reasons Dr. Samuels might have wanted to talk to me individually, this was not what I was expecting.  For years, I had said that I would never be a teacher, because of the politics involved in public schools.  Many of my high school teachers were active and outspoken politically, with views that I disagreed with.  I had always assumed that I would stay in school forever and become a mathematician, but my disillusionment with the career fair had left my future plans undecided.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I didn’t think much about teaching at first, but everything feels up in the air now.  And I work as a tutor at the Learning Skills Center, and I do enjoy that.”

“If you ever want to give it a try, you can get two units on your transcript as Math 197.  You’ll help out in a classroom at Jeromeville High for the quarter, and at the end you’ll write a short paper about what you did and what you learned.  If you’re trying to figure out your career plans, it would be a great way to immerse yourself in the world of teaching.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It sounds like it.  When do I have to let you know by?”

“Sometime next week should be good.  Think about it.”

“I will.  Thanks for letting me know about this.”

“You’re welcome.  This state is always looking for good teachers, especially ones with strong mathematics backgrounds.”

“Yeah.”

I left Dr. Samuels’s office and walked toward the bus stop.  This was a new wrinkle in the fabric of my life.  Could I be a teacher?  I tried to picture myself in a classroom with thirty sullen teenagers who called me Mr. Dennison.  I was sure it would be challenging, but it could be fun and enjoyable as well.  I enjoyed my tutoring job, I always enjoyed explaining math to people, and I had been spending a lot of time around younger people through volunteering with the youth group at church.

“Greg!” an enthusiastic female voice shouted as I approached the bus stop.  I saw Yesenia Fonseca, one of the first students I ever had as a tutor, waving at me.  “What’s up?”

“Just thinking,” I said.  “My professor just asked me if I had ever considered being a teacher.  I’d never really pictured myself as a teacher.”

“You’d totally be a great teacher!” Yesenia replied.  “I had another tutor last spring quarter, and she wasn’t good at explaining at all, like you were.”

“He said I could get units for helping in a classroom at Jeromeville High.  I’m thinking I might do it.”

“You should!”

Yesenia’s bus arrived just seconds before mine; we said goodbye and headed home.  Shawn, one of my roommates, was studying to be a math teacher.  He was doing his student teaching at Laguna Ciervo High School, across the Drawbridge in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Capital City.  When I got home, I told Shawn about what Dr. Samuels had said.

“You should go for it,” Shawn said.  “I think you’d be a good teacher.  We definitely need good teachers.  The teacher I’m working with is terrible.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He’s just mean.  He keeps telling kids, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’  I mean, I get you have to establish authority, but there’s got to be a better way.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see you like that.  I think you should try it.”

All weekend, I could not get this off my mind.  This had been a productive day, in more ways than one.  I had gotten a lot of work done sitting in the Memorial Union.  I had learned of an upcoming party at Alaina and Whitney’s house, another connection with a new group of friends.  And Dr. Samuels had given me something to think about regarding the future.  Me, Mr. Dennison, teaching high school kids about algebra and geometry.

Sure, Shawn was not having the best experience with student teaching.  But I was not Shawn.  Hopefully I would have a better experience.  Yesenia had told me that I would make a good teacher, and as a former tutee, she would know.  I would tell Dr. Samuels on Monday that I wanted to help out at Jeromeville High; the worst that could happen was that I would discover that I would not like it.  I would still get two units for it.  It was an option to explore, and that was what I needed right now.

Author’s note: Who was your favorite teacher, and why?

January 23-28, 1997. Time to start thinking about the future. (#116)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 18 Comments

I walked into Kerry Hall and pressed the Up button for the elevator.  As I waited for the door to open, I noticed a flyer for the event I was going to on a bulletin board.  I walked over and read the flyer, even though I already knew the time and place of the event; we had discussed this upcoming event in detail at this month’s Math Club meeting.

MATHEMATICS CAREER FAIR
Presented by the University of Jeromeville Math Club
January 23 – 3-5pm – 450 Kerry

Kerry Hall, home to the offices of the mathematics and statistics departments, was easy to navigate; each of its six floors consisted of one straight hallway about two hundred feet long. Room 450 would be at the low-numbered end of the fourth floor.  The first digit of the room number was the floor, but for some reason the numbering on each floor started in the 50s at the end close to the elevators and ended in the 90s at the other end.  I wondered if this was because each floor of adjacent Wellington Hall only had room numbers ending between 01 and 30, so that way the two buildings would not repeat room numbers.  I also wondered if I was the only person on the Jeromeville campus who actually thought about such things.

I got off on the fourth floor and turned left, where I expected room 450 to be.  A sign next to an open door said 450 – GRADUATE STUDENT STUDY ROOM.  I did not know that this room existed, probably because I was not a graduate student.  On the other side of the door, a sign that said MATHEMATICS CAREER FAIR had been taped to the wall.  I cautiously walked inside.

I recognized several students I knew from Math Club.  Sarah Winters was picking up brochures from a table; she looked up and saw me in the doorway.  “Greg!” she said, waving.  Although Sarah was also a mathematics major, and one of my best friends, we had never had a math class together.  I knew her because she had lived downstairs from me in the dorm freshman year, and I also knew her from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship and from my church.

“Hey,” I said to Sarah.  “How are you?  What table is this?”

“School of Education,” she replied.  “I don’t know yet if I’m going to stay in Jeromeville for my teacher certification program.  I’m thinking I’ll probably move back home, but I may as well look into all the options.”

“Good idea.”

“Are you still not interested in being a teacher?”

“Probably not,” I replied.

“You’re still working as a tutor, right?  Why aren’t you interested in teaching if you like tutoring?”

“I like helping people learn math, but I don’t want to get involved in all the politics involved in public education.”

“Yeah, that’s one thing I’m not looking forward to.  What about private school?”

“Don’t private school teachers make less money?”

“Yeah, but if you really love what you do, money shouldn’t be an object.  Would you want to teach at a community college, or a university, or something like that?”

“If I stay in college forever, I’ll probably end up being a professor and having to teach.”

“That’s true.  Is that what you want to do?”

“I always kind of thought so, but I’m starting to realize I need to explore my options.”

“Well, you came to the right place.”  Sarah gestured across the room.  The UJ School of Education table where we were now was the first in a row of four manned exhibits.  At the far end of the room, the rest of the furniture that was usually in this room appeared to have been pushed to the side, to give fair attendees room to mingle.  I was not sure exactly how many exhibitors I expected at a career fair, but the answer was definitely more than four.  This was disappointing.

“I need to go,” Sarah said.  “Enjoy the rest of the fair!”

“Thanks,” I replied.  “I’ll see you around.”

After Sarah left, I walked to the next table.  “Are you interested in being an actuary?” a man in a business suit asked me from behind the table.

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “I’m kind of just gathering information right now.  I hear a lot about actuaries when people talk about math careers, but I’m not sure exactly what you do.”

“Basically, we predict the future,” he explained.  “We use mathematical modeling to make predictions, which are used by insurance companies to determine rates and risk assessment figures.”

“I see.”

“I represent the Casualty Actuarial Society.  We give the exams that actuaries have to pass.”

“Do you go to grad school to get a degree to be an actuary?”

“Usually not.  You get hired first for an entry-level position, and your job training includes prep for the exams.  Then you get promoted after you pass the exams.”

“I see,” I said.  “I’ll think about that.”  I took his brochure and put it in my backpack, although from his description, being an actuary sounded incredibly boring and unfulfilling.

I next went to the table for Sun Microsystems, a computer company big enough for me to have heard of it.  “Hi,” the woman at the table said.  “We’re looking for applied math majors with computer programming or computer engineering experience.  Is that you?”

“Not really,” I said.  “But can I have a brochure, in case I change my emphasis?”

“Sure!”

I took the Sun brochure and put it with the others.  I had chosen not to major in computer science, because I did not want a hobby to turn into work.  I also knew that most of my technology skills were vastly out of date.  I had grown up with only my childhood Commodore 64 until I got my current computer as a high school graduation present, years after the Commodore had been discontinued.  I had taken two computer science classes sophomore year and learned to code in Pascal and C.  Computer Science 110, Data Structures, counted in place of an upper-division mathematics class toward my major; I had registered for the class this quarter and got put on the wait list, but I did not get in.

The fourth and final table was for Graduate Studies in the UJ Department of Mathematics.  I took their brochure as well to learn about the different programs offered, although much of that information I already knew from the course catalog.  This career fair felt like a giant disappointment.

An older student named Brandon, whom I knew from Math Club, asked me as I was leaving, “So what did you think?”

“It was a little disappointing.  Nothing really stood out to me.  I still don’t know what I want to do.”

“Don’t forget, the Engineering Career Fair is coming up on Tuesday.  You should look at that one too, if you’re looking for what you can do with a math degree.”

At that moment, a familiar woman’s voice said from behind me, “Greg? I just overheard what you were saying; can I talk to you for a minute in my office?  I have something you might be interested in.”

“Dr. Thomas,” I said, turning around.  “I didn’t see you here.”  I had taken Combinatorics from Dr. Thomas sophomore year, and she was my favorite mathematics professor so far.  She explained things clearly, in non-broken English, and she made an effort to get to know students more than most of my professors had.  She also attended Math Club meetings sometimes.

“Sure,” I said.  I followed Dr. Thomas upstairs to her office on the far end of the fifth floor.

“Are you familiar with REU programs?  Research Experiences for Undergraduates?”

“No,” I said.

“The National Science Foundation has programs that you can apply to and do research in your field.   Some of them, you can get credits for, or you get paid a stipend.  I’m trying to start an REU here at Jeromeville, but there are programs like this at schools all around the country.”

“I see.”

“A colleague whom I’ve worked with runs the program at Williams College in Massachusetts.  And three are others much closer if you don’t want to travel that far.  It’s a good way to get a sense of what graduate school is like.  Being that you’re an excellent math student, wondering about your future, I think it would be good for you to apply to REUs.”

“Sure,” I said.  “What do I have to do?”

“Here’s the brochure from the NSF,” Dr. Thomas said, handing me a paper.  “They have a website with links to different schools’ programs, and you can find all the instructions on how to apply there.”

“I will look into that,” I said.  “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.  And whatever happens, with how well you do in math, I know you’ll figure out what you want to do.”


The Engineering Career Fair was much larger than the Mathematics Career Fair; I expected it to be, since it was being held on the floor of the Pavilion, where the UJ Colts basketball teams played.  Engineering was also a much more popular major, and one more directly connected to industry.  A sea of tables, probably close to a hundred of them, covered the floor.  The region around San Tomas, Sunnyglen, and Willow Grove, a little over a hundred miles to the south, was a hub of technology companies; I expected that many of them had representatives here looking for people with computer experience.  Surely someone here would have a career option for pure mathematics majors.

I had not brought résumés to the career fair.  Next year, when I would be close to graduation, it would be more important to do so, but today was still mostly about gathering information.  Of course, if I found an internship for this summer that I wanted to apply to, I would still need to make a résumé and send it in.  We had discussed making résumés at this month’s Math Club meeting, and I mostly just felt frustrated and unaccomplished.  “I don’t know what to put on my résumé,” I said to Brandon at one point.  “I don’t have any work experience, or skills.”

“Sure you do,” Brandon replied.  “Just put what you can do.  On my résumé, I put ‘problem solver.’  Because when you give me a problem, I’ll solve it.”

“Hmm,” I said.  I was not a problem solver like Brandon.  I had tons of unsolved problems in my life, and padding my résumé with vague embellishments that I could not back up with action or experience would not help solve any of them.

I walked to the first table in the row closest to me.  A pile of mechanical pencils lay on one end of the table.  “May I have one?” I asked.

“Sure,” the woman behind the table said.  I read the pencil: NNC DATA SOLUTIONS, INC., SAN TOMAS.  “What’s your major?” she asked.

“Math.”

“Pure math?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re looking for computer science majors with experience in coding.  I don’t think we have any positions or internships for pure math.  Sorry!”

I continued up and down each row of tables, picking up lots of free pens, pencils, notepads, and foam balls to squeeze for stress relief purposes, each with companies’ names and contact information printed on them.  And I got the same story from each one of them: they were looking for computer science or engineering majors, not me.

At one point, I walked to a table I had not visited yet, for a company in Sunnyglen called West Coast Technologies.  I grabbed their free pencil and notepad.  “Do you have a résumé?” the woman behind the table asked.

“No,” I said.

“You need a résumé to apply for a job,” the woman replied, in a condescending tone.

“I’m just gathering information this year,” I explained, trying to hide my shame and frustration.

“What’s your major?”

“Math.”

“We’re looking for computer science majors.  But, hey, maybe ten years from now, when you’re wondering why you chose math for your major, you’ll go back to school for computer science, and we might have something for you!”  She made an amused chuckle.

I walked away without saying another word to the West Coast Technologies lady.  Who does she think she is?  How exactly does mocking an applicant to his face help your company recruit employees?  If I did go back to school in ten years, I thought, I certainly would not apply to work for West Coast Technologies.  Hopefully they would be out of business by then.

I continued past the next table.  I had only three tables left to visit, and I could tell from the names of the companies represented that they were looking specifically for engineers.  I turned toward the exit, not watching where I was going, and almost bumped into someone who was facing away from me.  As I looked up at this guy, who was about an inch taller than me, I realized that I recognized this tall guy with curly dark blond hair, and I became even more embarrassed.

“Sorry, Todd,” I said as he turned around.  “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“Hey, Greg,” Todd Chevallier replied.  “No problem.  What are you up to?”

“Looking to see if there are any options for math majors here.  There aren’t.”  I told him about the condescending lady from West Coast Technologies, as well as the unsuccessful Mathematics Career Fair from the previous week.

“Well, what do you want to do with your math degree?”

“I’m not sure.  I always assumed I would just stay in school forever and become a professor, but now I don’t know anymore.  And I’m starting to stress about it.”

“Have you thought about going into teaching? It seems like a lot of people with math degrees do that.”

“I don’t want to be a teacher,” I explained.  “I don’t want to deal with the politics involved in education.”

“Yeah, I get that.  Don’t stress, though.  You have time to figure things out.  You’re only a sophomore.”

“I’m a junior.”

“What?” Todd exclaimed, with a puzzled look on his face.

“I’m a junior.”

“But I thought you and I were both new at JCF last year.  Freshman year.”

“We were.  But it was my sophomore year.  I didn’t go to JCF freshman year.”

“Really.  Wow.  It’s weird that I never knew that.  I guess you do need to start thinking about your future.”

“I know.”

“Good luck.  Pray about it.  I’ll see you Friday?”

“Yeah.”


I rode my bike home more slowly than usual, feeling disappointed and discouraged.  I pulled a random CD from the shelf; it was New Adventures In Hi-Fi, the recently released album from R.E.M.  More disappointment; I did not like this album as well as their previous ones, although it did have a few good songs. I played it anyway.

I looked through the brochure that Dr. Thomas gave me.  I connected the computer to the dial-up Internet and went to the main website for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.  I found the list of schools offering REUs for mathematics; there were quite a few, but none were nearby.  If I ended up doing this for the summer, I would have to travel, but that was not necessarily a bad thing.

School was what I was good at, so I always assumed I would stay in academia forever.  However, even that felt uncertain now.  And unless I changed my mind about being a teacher or an actuary, I had no other career options.  The good news was that, with my future so wide open, I could try different things and see what I did and did not like.  But this would require some work, and I always felt anxious about possibly making the wrong decision.  I got out my homework for tomorrow’s Advanced Calculus class and worked on that, putting aside my career uncertainty for now.  I knew that God had a plan, and I felt encouraged that Dr. Thomas believed in me, but all of this still felt overwhelming.  It was time to start thinking about the future, but none of this was imminently urgent, so planning my future career could wait.

Readers: Have you ever been told anything unusually cruel when being turned down for a position, or for something else?

Disclaimer: None of the corporations or organizations mentioned in this story were involved in its writing or production, and this is not a sponsored post.  Some of the corporations and organizations are fictional.