Tag: math

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.

October 2, 1998.  Fall quarter this year felt very different from usual. (#194)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

Decades before the Wordle game took the Internet by storm, the College Ready Mathematics curriculum had the Silent Number Game.  The two games worked similarly; in the Silent Number Game, students had to guess a two- or three-digit number, and the teacher would silently mark how many of the digits were correct and how many of the correct digits were in the correct position.  Both games were inspired by the board game Mastermind, which in turn was inspired by various pencil-and-paper folk games.  The CRM geometry textbook instructed teachers to play a few games with students over the course of a week, and some of the homework problems in the book asked questions based on this game.  By explaining what someone knows or does not know after a few turns, and why, students use thought processes useful for making mathematical proofs, a concept that is introduced soon after the Silent Number Game.

Mrs. Tracy, my master teacher in the geometry class, let me lead the class in a few rounds of the Silent Number Game.  The students were getting better at the game over the few days that we had been playing.  Mrs. Tracy walked to the front to take over and finish teaching the lesson; I took a deep breath, still feeling tense after what had happened earlier that day in the Basic Math B class.  At least no one in the geometry class cussed me out today.

After Mrs. Tracy finished, I walked around the room helping students with their work.  I happened to glance at Andy Rawlings’ paper as he wrote an answer to this problem:

Tara is playing the Silent Number Game.
923   1 correct, 1 in the right position
964   1 correct, 1 in the right position
945   2 correct, 0 in the right position

Tara thinks that the number must start with 9.  Explain how you know Tara is wrong, and find the correct number.

Andy had written, “Tara is dumb.”  I pointed at his answer and said, “Really?  That’s what you’re going with?”

“Come on, Mr. Dennison,” Andy replied.  “It even says she’s wrong.”

“Yes, but explain how you know.  Without calling her names.”

“Fine. Let me think about it.”  Andy erased his work as I moved on to the student behind him, Kayla Welch.  She had left the problem blank.  “Mr. Dennison?” Kayla asked.  “I don’t get this one.  I thought the number started with 9 too.”

“Let’s talk this out,” I replied.  “Why do you think it starts with 9?”

“Because the first two guesses started with 9, and she had one number correct and it was in the right position.  And the last one had two correct digits.”

“How many of the digits in 945 are in the right position?”

Kayla reread the problem.  “None of them,” she said, trailing off as she contemplated this information.  “But 9 has to be in the first position.”

“Let’s think about this.  If there is a 9 in the number, it has to be in the first position, because 923 had one digit correct and it was in the correct position.  But 9 can’t be in the first position because of what you said about 945.  What does that mean?”

Kayla thought about this, then said, “There isn’t a 9 in the number?”

“Right.  So which two digits of 945 are correct?”

“The 4 and the 5.”

“And, look at the other guesses.  Which digit is 4?”

“The last one.  Because 964 had one number in the right position.”

“So which of 923 is the correct digit?”

“Not the 9.  It’s the 2, because we already know the last digit is 4.  So the number is 524.”

“That’s what I got!  Good job!”

After the bell rang, Mrs. Tracy asked to talk to me for a minute.  “You did a good job of making Kayla think through that problem.”

“Thank you,” I said.  I sighed and added, “I don’t feel like I did a good job in Mrs. Matthews’ class this morning.  A girl cussed me out for telling her to get back to work.”

“That happens sometimes.  What did you do?”

“I looked over at Mrs. Matthews.  She gave me a Room Two form, and I filled it out,” I explained.  Everyone at Nueces High School knew that Room Two meant the room where students get sent out of class for misbehaving, and I learned this quickly during the week of teacher meetings at the start of the year.  “And I called her mom and left a message.”

“Then you did the right thing.  Don’t let it get to you.”

“I know.”

“Not every student is going to like you.”

“I know.  I’m learning that.”

“You did great today.  Don’t let it get to you.  Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you Monday.”

“Thanks.”


After I got home from student teaching, I made a sandwich, as I always did.  When I finished eating, I got on my bike and headed to campus.  Yesterday was the first day of classes for the University of Jeromeville’s fall quarter.  Classes started on a Thursday, as fall quarter always did, but fall quarter this year felt very different from usual.  For one thing, one of my classes for the student teaching program had already been meeting for a month.  Student teaching itself was an eight-unit class officially called Education 306A: Teaching Mathematics in Secondary Schools, consisting not only of the time I spent at Nueces High every morning but also an hour-long seminar every day.  The UJ academic year started later than that of public high schools in the area, but Ed 306A followed the public school schedules.  I had two other education classes this quarter that met on the university’s academic schedule.  One of them started yesterday, and the other would start on Monday.  Neither of these classes met on Fridays, so all I had today was the seminar.

The classroom was about half full when I arrived, but of course “half full” was a relative term, so this meant that eight students and Dr. Van Zandt were in the room when I arrived.  This class was exclusively for students in the mathematics teacher certification program.  There were seventeen of us in the program this year, and Dr. Van Zandt, who had been the professor for this program since 1990, said that it was the largest class of future math teachers he had ever had.

Today, Dr. Van Zandt asked if any of us had any experiences to share regarding difficult students.  I raised my hand.

“Yes, Greg?” Dr. Van Zandt said.

“Just today, I told two girls to get back to work because they were talking.  One of them looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I don’t effing have to do what you say.’  But she said the actual word.”

“What a little brat,” Ryan Gaines, another student teacher working at Nueces High, said.  Some of the others chuckled.

“And how did you handle that?” Dr. Van Zandt asked.

“Mrs. Matthews gave me the form to send the girl to Room Two.  That’s where misbehaving students get sent.  She took it and stormed off.”

“Then I think you did what you needed to.  Did you do any kind of follow-up after that?”

“I called her mom and left a message.  Mrs. Matthews said that was required.”

“She’s right.  According to State Ed Code, if you send a student out of class for the period, you have to contact the parents.  That’s called a class suspension.  And it’s always a good idea to make contact with the parents as soon as possible after any kind of discipline.  Thanks for sharing, Greg.”

I listened to others share stories of their own misbehaving students.  Although I handled it well this time, that kind of defiant behavior from students made me angry.  And although a conversation with the girl’s mother may be productive in the long run, I secretly hoped that she would not call back.  Talking to parents terrified me, mostly because I was barely twenty-two years old and did not expect to be taken seriously by parents of high school students who were probably twice my age.


For the last three years, the highlight of my Fridays had been the large group meeting of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  Again, I knew that this year would be different.  I was no longer an undergraduate, and for some reason I had yet to understand, there were very few graduate students attending JCF.  I only knew of one at the time, a guy named Andrew Bryant who was now in his second year of getting his Ph.D. in chemistry.  Of course, this might just be a consequence of the fact that most graduate programs are a lot of work, leaving students little time to be involved in campus activities outside of their program.  I did not see a need for my student teaching to take me away from my involvement at JCF, or from activities at church.  Being in the student teaching program, I was classified as a graduate student, but I was pretty sure that actual graduate students working toward master’s, doctoral, or professional degrees had a much greater workload than I did.

The most visibly obvious difference at JCF was the location.  Since I started attending JCF early in my second year, the large group meetings had been in Evans Hall, but this year they moved to Harding Hall.  The buildings were not far apart; Harding was on the corner of Davis Drive and Colt Avenue, diagonally across from Stone Hall, and Evans was just on the other side of Stone.  But psychologically, I always associated Evans with JCF.  I had never been inside Harding, so this would feel like unfamiliar territory.

Harding Hall, like many of the buildings on this part of campus, was an older building, dating to the 1940s.  The University of Jeromeville had a world-class School of Veterinary Medicine, one of the largest in the United States.  Harding Hall was the original location of the vet school, but many of the laboratories and the teaching hospital moved in the 1970s to a new location on the edge of campus, between Andrews Road and Highway 117.  The vet school still had offices and classrooms in Harding Hall, and the entrance of the building reflected its history; above the doors stood relief sculptures of various animals.

My housemate Jed was with me when we arrived.  “Have you had a class in here before?” I asked.

“No,” Jed replied.

“Me either.  I’m not sure exactly where the room is.”

I opened the door and walked into the lobby.  A large stairway led up, with hallways on either side..  A handwritten sign on poster board said “Jeromeville Christian Fellowship” with an arrow pointing up the stairs.  As I walked up the stairs, the soft din of voices that I heard upstairs gradually became louder.

“What’s up, G,” Todd Chevallier said from the table where he sat, handing out the weekly newsletter and writing name tags.  He wrote “G” on mine and stuck it on my shirt before I could object, then he handed Jed his name tag.

“‘G,’” I said.  “I guess I’ll be ‘G’ tonight.”

“It’s not a bad nickname,” Jed said.

“There are only two people who are allowed to call me ‘G,’” I explained

“Oh yeah?  Who?” Todd asked.

“When I was in high school, my friend Jessica always used to shorten everyone’s name.  Melissa became ‘Mel,’ Renee became ‘Nee,’ Kevin became ‘Kev.’  She called herself ‘Jess.’  I already went by a one-syllable name, so I became ‘G.’  And then later our other friend, Melissa, also started calling me ‘G’ sometimes, but not as often as Jessica.”

“That’s funny.”

“And now I guess I’ll have to tell people that story,” I said, patting my ‘G’ name tag with my hand.

The large lecture hall, room 2101 Harding Hall, held around three hundred students, larger than JCF’s previous location in 170 Evans.  The seats were steeply inclined, such that the entrance to the room, in the back of the seating area, was on the second floor, but the front of the room was level with the first floor.  The room was not very full yet.  Jed and I sat on the left aisle about halfway toward the front.  I skimmed through the newsletter, then watched the room gradually fill up.

I had been part of this group for long enough that I knew many of these people.  But I could not help but notice the absence of those people who had graduated last year and left Jeromeville.  Ramon Quintero, Sarah Winters, Krista Curtis, Xander Mackey, Raphael Stevens, Scott and Amelia Madison, Joe Fox, Alyssa Kramer, Evan Lundgren, and Haley Channing were all gone, among others.  There were some students from my year who had graduated but stayed in Jeromeville, as well as some from my year who had not finished their degrees; I said hi to one of those, Mike Knepper, as he took a seat down the row from Jed and me.

Brent Wang was a senior this year; he played keyboard and was this year’s worship team leader.  He led the group in a song.  Eddie Baker, who graduated my year and was now on staff with JCF, gave the announcements, followed by Brent and his band playing a few more songs.  After this, Todd and Brent, along with senior Ajeet Tripathi, a junior named Ellie Jo Raymond who was on the worship team with Brent, and sophomores Brianna Johns and Chelsea Robbins performed a skit based on the TV show “Friends,” which most people I knew were obsessed with but I could never get into.  The skit was amusing, but many of the references to the TV show went over my head.  I made a mental note that the first large group two years ago, with the Scooby-Doo skit, was funnier.  Of course, I was a little biased, since I was part of that skit.

The rest of the night was structured similarly to every other JCF meeting I had been to, except that Janet McAllen’s message was fairly light and general about following Jesus without including any heavy theological concepts.  This made sense, because new students who are just checking out all the groups on campus often came to the first meeting of the year, and we did not want to get too intense for students who are just checking out Christianity for the first time.

After the message, the band played one more song, and then the group dispersed.  Jed walked over to talk to a group of students from his year; I followed him.

“Hey, Greg,” Tim Walton said, looking at my name tag.  “‘G?’ Is that what we’re calling you now?”

“What’s up, G?” Brianna Johns asked, emphasizing the G and giggling.

“Todd wrote that as a joke,” I explained.  “How were your summers?”

“I just went home,” Tim explained.  “Nothing special.”

“Same,” Brianna added.  “I was just working.  How was yours?”

“It was good.  I just hung out in Jeromeville, doing youth group stuff with J-Cov.  And I started swing dancing.”

“Fun!” Brianna said excitedly.  “Are they still doing that at the U-Bar?  I went a few times back in the spring.”

“Yeah.  You should come back,” I said, adding in my mind without saying out loud that I could always use more beautiful women like you to dance with.  “And my student teaching program started five weeks ago, and one of my classes here did too.”

“Wow!  You’ve been busy!” Brianna said.

“How is teaching going so far?” Tim asked.

“Pretty good,” I replied.  “So far I’m just observing and helping answer students’ questions.  I’ll gradually start teaching soon, and a few months into the year I get to take over the class.”

Chelsea Robbins turned around, having overheard what I had just said.  “What grade are you teaching?”

“High school.  Geometry and Basic Math B.”

“Here at Jeromeville High?”

“No.  Nueces High.”

“You commute to Nueces every day?  Wow.”

“It’s not that bad of a drive.  And all my classes here are in the afternoon, because these classes are specifically for student teachers who are in the classroom in the morning.”

“That makes sense.  Have the students been nice so far?”

“Some are, some aren’t,” I explained.  “There’s this one girl in the Basic B class who is really mouthy and defiant.  I told her and her friend to get back to work, and she just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t effing have to do what you say.’  But she said the real word.”

“Wow,” Chelsea said.

“So what happened to her?” Brianna asked.

“She got sent to the detention room.  I got to call her mom, my first parent phone call as a teacher, but she didn’t answer.  I had to leave a message.  I can tell I’m going to have trouble with this girl.  On the first day of school, she came with a shirt that said ‘420.’  The master teacher sent her to the office to change on a dress code violation.  I had no idea what that even meant.”

Tim now rejoined the conversation, saying, “You didn’t know what ‘420’ meant?”

“No!” I answered emphatically.  “I grew up sheltered, my only friends were other honors students, and my social life in Jeromeville revolves around church.  How and why am I going to know marijuana slang?”

“You have a point,” he replied.


That night that Todd wrote my name tag as “G” happened during a time when I had lost touch with everyone I knew in high school.  Melissa Holmes was the last high school friend I had heard of, about six months ago.  I got back in touch with Melissa about a year later, and Jessica Halloran not too long after that.  Decades later, at our 30-year class reunion in 2024, I had already arrived when Jessica showed up.  She saw me and immediately said, “Hey, G!  How are you?”  I told her that she and Melissa, who was also at the reunion that night, were still to this day the only people allowed to call me “G.”

Dealing with students like Marie, the girl who cussed me out, was always my least favorite part of teaching.  My strength as a teacher is the subject matter, and it takes so long to walk to my desk and fill out the necessary forms when sending a student out of class that my natural inclination is to just ignore the misbehavior and move on with the material.  However, I also know it is necessary to deal with disruptions immediately, because small problems left unresolved become larger problems later that are more difficult to deal with.  This is true in many areas of life, not just issues of classroom management, and this is something that I am still learning now in middle age.  Early in the student teaching program, Dr. Van Zandt mentioned that teachers are lifelong learners, but we are all lifelong learners in some way regardless of profession.  Life is full of surprises, everything is constantly changing, and nothing I can do will change that.

Readers: What is something that is a key part of your job (or a key part of being in school, if you are a student) that you feel like you are not very good at and still have things to learn? 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!

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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.

March 30, 1998.  My last first day of class as an undergraduate. (#167)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

I opened the door of 105 Wellington and sat down.  After four years here at the University of Jeromeville, so much was familiar about everything I was doing this morning.  I rode my bike to campus on the usual route.  Wellington Hall had two floors above ground and a basement, full of nothing but classrooms of all sizes, and I had had many classes in Wellington before.  I was pretty sure I had even had a class in room 105 at some point, although I did not remember for sure which one.  Most of the people taking this class were juniors and seniors majoring in mathematics, with a few computer scientists and engineers in the class too.  I recognized many familiar faces from other math classes.  Jack Chalmers.  Katy Hadley.  Silas Penfield, whom I also knew from church and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  A guy named Alan, who bore a striking resemblance to the actor and comedian Norm MacDonald.

“Greg!” Jack whispered loudly, waving.  He motioned to an empty seat next to him.  I waved and nodded, walking toward the empty seat and waving to Silas on the way.  Katy was not looking at me.

What was unfamiliar was the subject itself.  The class was called Linear Programming, Mathematics 168.  I needed one more upper-division math class to finish my Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, and the only prerequisites for this one were lower-division calculus and linear algebra, both of which I enjoyed and found relatively easy.  But I knew very little about what linear programming actually meant.  The word “programming” made me think of computers and writing code, but the description in the course catalog did not seem to mention computers.  It said something about solving optimization problems, which I assumed meant determining the best way to do something.

The professor, Dr. Wu, was also unfamiliar to me.  I had not taken a class from him before.  He began the class by giving an example of the kinds of problems we would be studying.  “Suppose you’re planning meals with two different foods,” he said.  “Each serving of food A contains 2 grams of fat, 1 gram of carbohydrates, and 5 grams of protein, and each serving of food B contains 3 grams of fat, 4 grams of carbohydrates, and 4 grams of protein.”  Dr. Wu paused to write these measurements on the board.  “And let’s say you know that the meal has to have at least 15 grams of fat, 20 grams of carbs, and 30 grams of protein.  And you know that each serving of food A costs, say, 35 cents, and each serving of food B costs 50 cents.”  After writing the rest of the problem on the board, he continued, “How many servings of each food should you buy to minimize the cost, but still have the required amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates?  That is a basic example of a linear programming problem.  We have something we need to maximize or minimize, but it is subject to constraints.”  I nodded, writing an abbreviated version of all of this in my notebook.  Linear programming seemed fairly straightforward as a concept, something I could visualize in the real world and express symbolically using the language of mathematics that I already knew.

The rest of that first day of class was even more straightforward.  Dr. Wu quickly reviewed some key topics of linear algebra that would be important this quarter.  I remembered all of them well, but I still took notes anyway, because of my tendency to be overly cautious when it came to studying.

After that class, I had a two hour gap before my next class.  I walked across the street to the Memorial Union and read today’s Daily Colt, completing the crossword puzzle successfully. I tore out the completed crossword puzzle to hang on my wall at home with all the other crosswords I had completed this year.  With nothing else to do for two hours after finishing the crossword puzzle, I got an early start on math homework, reading the beginning of the book and working on the first homework assignment.  I found the same example about nutrition that the professor used; he took it directly from the textbook.

When it came time for my next class, I walked south across the Quad toward Orton Hall, the other major classroom building here on the older side of campus.  As I headed across the Quad, I saw a slim, bespectacled girl with straight brown hair walking toward me.  I noticed that this girl kind of looked like Sasha Travis from church, which made me realize sadly that I would not get to say hi to her every day this quarter.  Last quarter, I did an internship every morning helping out in a math class at Jeromeville High School, where Sasha was a student, finishing her last year.  I would always see Sasha in the hallway, or at her locker, as I headed to where my bike was parked after my class was done.  Even though Sasha was still in high school, I felt like she and I had gotten to be friends, through those conversations in the hallway, and the fact that she was Erica Foster’s best friend.  Erica, a freshman at UJ, was part of my social circle already, since we were both youth group leaders at church.

As I approached this girl who looked like Sasha, I kept looking at her, realizing more and more that it was not just a resemblance; I was pretty sure this actually was Sasha.  But what was she doing on the UJ campus during the school day?  She smiled at me and waved.  Yes, definitely Sasha.

“Sasha?” I asked.

“Hi, Greg!” Sasha replied.  “How are you?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Jeromeville High has a program for high-achieving seniors to take classes at UJ during the day,” Sasha explained.  “I just got out of English 10.”

“That’s cool!” I said.  “I’m pretty good.  Three classes today.  I’m on my way to Christian Theology, with Hurt.”

“I’ve heard such good things about Dr. Hurt!  Erica took one of his classes last quarter.  I didn’t see you this morning.  Are you still TAing with Mr. Gibson?”

“No.  That was just for a quarter.”

“I have to get back to the high school,” Sasha said.  “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah.  Have a good one!”  As I continued walking to my class, I felt a little jealous that Sasha grew up in a university town where high-achieving students had opportunities like that.  Taking university classes as a high school senior was even better than taking AP classes for college credit.  Growing up in working-class Plumdale, I was discouraged from taking too many AP classes, and the nearest university was in Mount Lorenzo, forty miles away.

I continued walking toward Orton Hall.  Dr. Hurt’s class was in one of the larger classrooms of Orton Hall, with about sixty seats, and the class was about two-thirds full by the time I got there.  I expected a lot of my friends from church and from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship to be in this class, and while a few of them were, it was not as many as I had expected.  I sat down against the wall, on the opposite side of the room from the outdoors-facing windows, and looked around as Dr. Hurt prepared to begin his lecture.  My eyes moved toward a corner of the room I had not seen as I was walking in, where I saw Carrie Valentine sitting with a notebook on her desk.  She looked up and made eye contact and waved at me.  I did my best to smile, nervously, and waved back.  Dr. Hurt began speaking just at that moment, saving me from having to decide whether or not to go talk to Carrie.

Last year, Carrie was always friendly to me, but things seemed a little tense the last few months ever since she turned me down for a date.  She had said that everything was okay, that I had done nothing wrong, but I was not sure if she really was treating me differently, or if it was mostly in my head and I was avoiding her.  I felt relieved that Dr. Hurt had started class before I could talk to her, which I guess meant that I ultimately did not want to talk to Carrie right now.  I wondered if things would ever feel normal with us.

Dr. Hurt explained an overview of the class.  We would be studying the development of Christian theology from the period of the early Church through modern times.  Our study would include different schools of thought for subjects in which different branches of Christianity had slightly different beliefs, as well as some rejected schools of thoughts that had been deemed to be heresy over the years.  We would learn about the natures of God, Jesus Christ, and the Trinity; salvation, sin, and grace; and the role of the Church, among other topics.

I was still fairly new to practicing my Christian faith, and while this class did not satisfy any specific requirements other than giving me enough units to be classified as a full-time student, it was definitely something I wanted to learn.  Jeromeville was a secular public university, but our Religious Studies faculty included Dr. Hurt, a renowned New Testament scholar.  It was nice that I could still learn about Christianity in this context, even though secular public education did not include things like prayer and worship time.

When class ended, I looked up; Carrie was talking to someone I did not know, absorbed in conversation.  I got up and left before she saw me, avoiding the question of what to say to her and whether or not things would be awkward.  My next and final class on that Monday was in an hour, back in Wellington, on the other side of the Quad from Orton.  I began walking back toward the Memorial Union looking for a place to sit, but decided to just sit on the grass of the Quad instead.

The Quad was a square lawn about five hundred feet on each side.  The University of Jeromeville was founded in 1905 as an agricultural campus, with crops growing on the area that later became the Quad.  After becoming surrounded by buildings over the first three decades of the campus’ growth, the Quad was converted to a permanent lawn.  It was ringed by tall, mature European cork oaks, with other trees scattered across it at irregular intervals.  To the east were the oldest surviving buildings on campus, Old North and Old South Halls.  The Quad also bordered the Memorial Union building on the north, Wellington Hall and one other building on the west, and the library on the south, with Orton Hall on the southeast corner.

The weather was pleasant, on the warmer side but not uncomfortably hot, mostly sunny with blue skies dotted with a few clouds.  People sat on the Quad, reading, talking, napping, and eating.  I sat cross-legged and took the lunch I had packed out of my backpack, and I ate as I watched people walk past.

About ten minutes before class was scheduled to start, I walked across the street to the west to Wellington Hall, then took the stairs down to the basement.  The class was in room 6, which was a small lecture hall with around a hundred fixed seats, sloping toward the front of the room as in a theater, with an aisle down the middle.  Physical Education 43, Healthful Living, was not a class that would have been on my radar to take.  My lifestyle would not exactly be considered healthful, but the class was required for the teacher training program that I would be in next year.  And it was only two units, meeting for one hour twice a week, so it would not be as much work as most classes.

I sat in a row that was still mostly empty, one seat in from the aisle.  As the room gradually filled over the next few minutes, I looked around to see if anyone I recognized was in the class.  I saw two or three faces that I recognized from various places, but no one I knew in particular.  Then my eyes reached the door in the back of the room.

You have got to be kidding me, I thought.

Carrie Valentine walked through the door.  She saw me and immediately made eye contact, smiling and waving, noticing the empty seat next to me.  I waved back.

“Hey, Greg!” Carrie said, sitting in the seat next to me.  “Looks like we have two classes together!”

“I know,” I replied.  “What did you think of Hurt’s class so far?”

“Looks like it’ll be interesting.  There’s a lot of that kind of stuff I don’t really know.”

“Yeah.  Same.  I grew up Catholic, and going to Jeromeville Covenant now, I’m always interested to know about differences between Catholics and other Christians.”

“How was your spring break?”

“It was good.  I went to see my family for most of it.  We had an 80th birthday party for my grandpa.”

“Oh, how nice!  Are you and your grandpa close?”

“Yeah.  This is Mom’s dad, and they always lived just a mile away growing up, so we saw them all the time.  I got to see some relatives I don’t see often.  Some came all the way from Oregon.  A lot of Grandpa’s friends were there too.  What did you do over break?”

“Really nothing.  Just relaxed at home.  Hung out with my parents and my sister, and saw one of my friends from high school.”

“That’s nice.”

The professor, Dr. Payton, began speaking, introducing herself first, and telling us to make sure that we were all in the right class, PE 43, Healthful Living.  “The class is always around this size every quarter,” Dr. Payton explained, “so I am not going to get to know every one of you personally.  But if you ever see me around campus, feel free to wave at me and just say, ‘Forty-three!’  That way, I will know that you were a student of mine in this class.  I’ve been doing this class for twenty years, and you wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve run into people who recognized me.  I’ve had strangers on airplanes come up to me and say, ‘Forty-three.’  My husband and I went to an opera in Bay City, and one of the ushers at the theater remembered me.  The strangest one of all was when we were on vacation in France, and we toured a historic monastery.  Some actual monks walked past the tour group, and one of the monks leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Quarante-trois.’”  A few in the room chuckled.

As Dr. Payton continued outlining the class, it became apparent that I was not sure what I was expecting from this class, but what she was describing was not exactly it.  I expected somewhat of a rehash of what I had learned in high school health class: nutrition, exercise, hygiene, and of course sexuality.  But in addition to that, this class would cover other topics, including stress management, relationships, and alternative medicine.  “Please be respectful if there is anything you don’t agree with in this class,” Dr. Payton said.  “One year, I was reading the teacher evaluations at the end of the year, and in regards to the homeopathic medicine presentation, someone wrote, ‘I don’t believe in voodoo.’  Homeopathic medicine is not voodoo.  It is a type of medicine with theories and methods practiced by people around the world.”

Since UJ was a secular public university, and I was a Christian, I expected that I would probably have disagreements with some of the material in the chapters on relationships and sexuality.  But Dr. Payton’s request to be respectful certainly seemed reasonable.  And while I generally associated homeopathic medicine with New Age hippie nonsense, I would even approach that with an open mind when we got to that chapter, since I knew little about it.

I stood and stretched when class was over.  “Do you have any more classes today?” Carrie asked me.

“No.  I’m done.  I’m headed home now.”

“Nice!  I have a discussion now on Mondays, but I’m done after this class on Wednesdays.”

“Enjoy your class,” I said.  “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah!  Have a great afternoon!”

I walked back to my bike, unlocked it, and rode north to the end of West Quad Avenue, where I turned left onto a road heading generally northwest.  I passed more classroom and lab buildings, then rode through the North Residential Area to the intersection of Fifth Street and Andrews Road.  I continued north on Andrews Road for almost a mile, then turned left and zigzagged through the neighborhood to my house at 902 Acacia Drive.  The house was quiet; I was the first one home today.  I connected to the dialup Internet and got on Internet Relay Chat.  A nineteen-year-old girl from Texas named Melody, whom I had met in this same chat channel a few days earlier, was on; I messaged with her for about half an hour, telling her all about my day, about my new classes and the uncomfortable situation of having two classes with a girl who said no to going out with me a couple months ago.  Melody told me about a party she and her friends went to over the weekend.  I heard someone else get home and told Melody that I needed to go, but I would email her later.  I did not want to tie up the telephone line during the day with other people in the house. 

I had finished my last first day of class as an undergraduate.  So far, this quarter did not seem too difficult.  I had one more class that did not meet today, Fiction Writing, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30.  That class sounded like fun, and hopefully it would not be too tough, especially since I liked writing fiction to begin with.  This would be a good way to finish off my bachelor’s degree.

About a month later, we reached the lesson in health class about homeopathy, and we had a guest speaker that week.  About five minutes into that lecture, I completely understood why the anonymous former student had called homeopathy voodoo.  Nothing about the presentation made any sense from a scientific perspective.  I questioned why this belonged in a serious class at a prestigious university, but Jeromeville was enough of a hippie town and school that I was not entirely surprised either.

Although none of these classes had assigned seats, it was human nature for most people to sit in or near the same seat each time class met.  Because of this, Carrie and I typically sat on opposite sides of the room in Dr. Hurt’s class, but we almost always sat next to each other in health class.  By the second week of the quarter, I genuinely felt that whatever awkwardness might be lingering between Carrie and me was gone.  We did not talk about my failed attempt to ask her out; I just did my best to put that in the past and move on, and Carrie never did anything to make me feel bad about what happened.  That incident did come up in conversation once, three years later, in a respectful and productive way that gave me a lot of closure regarding why she said no.  That mutual respect is part of the reason why Carrie is the only one of my many unrequited crushes from my Jeromeville years with whom I am on speaking terms today.

Readers: Have you ever had an experience where you were in close proximity to someone with whom you had issues in the past? How did that go? 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.

January 23, 1998.  An almost perfect Friday. (#161)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

In the winter of 1998, I began every school day with my internship in Mr. Gibson’s class at Jeromeville High School.  I was starting to feel like I was learning more about what not to do when I was a teacher someday.  Jeromeville was a university town, the locals placed a high value on education, and parents often bought their students fancy, expensive graphing calculators for math class.  The predominant model at the time was the Texas Instruments TI-82.  In those days, the Internet was emerging as a mainstream technology, and the kids all knew either how to download games onto their graphing calculators or copy games from their friends’ calculators.  Mr. Gibson’s teaching style was lecture-based and kind of dry, and half the class was tuned out, playing games on their calculators.  That just made me sad.  I thought about telling this to Mr. Gibson, but as a 21-year-old undergraduate intern, I did not feel right questioning a veteran teacher on his teaching style.

 As I was leaving, I passed by Jeromeville High students on their way from first to second period.  I saw a familiar slim brown-haired girl with glasses approaching; she was a senior named Sasha Travis, and she and her family went to my church.  I usually saw her in passing as I was leaving the high school after Mr. Gibson’s class, and I knew her well enough to wave and say hi.

“Hey, Greg!” Sasha exclaimed.  “How are you?”

“Pretty good.  Glad it’s Friday.”

“Me too!  Have a good weekend!”

“Thanks!  You too!”

I went straight to the university campus after I left Jeromeville High, as I always did.  I parked my bike near the Memorial Union and walked inside.  With almost an hour before my next class, I had time for one of my favorite daily rituals: reading the school newspaper, the Daily Colt.  At some point in my childhood, I started reading the local newspaper regularly every day, and I have done that ever since.  Jeromeville has a local newspaper, but my roommates subscribed to the nearby big-city newspaper, the Capital City Record, before I had any input into the issue, so these days I read the Record every morning before I leave the house.  That was how I got most of my news on the major issues of the day.  Then at some point during a break between classes, I would read the Daily Colt to get campus and local Jeromeville news.

I did not always read every story; I skimmed or outright ignored the ones that were less interesting.  I saw a story buried on page five about some plant pathology professor who had won some award, which I was about to skip until I noticed the by-line under the headline: “BY SADIE ROWLAND, COLT CAMPUS WRITER.”  Sadie was my friend, so I always read her articles.  I might see her tonight at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and if I told her I read her article, maybe she would like that.  It would give me something to say to her, at least.

After I read Sadie’s article, I found Joseph Tomlinson‘s weekly column. The Daily Colt was published Monday through Friday, and each of the five days of the week featured a different student columnist.  Typically two of them wrote about political issues, one from a liberal perspective and one from a conservative perspective, and the other three just wrote about their lives as students at the University of Jeromeville.  Joseph Tomlinson was in his second year of being the conservative columnist, and his column this week was on Jeromeville’s obsession with “small-town feel.”

The Jeromeville City Council had a distinct anti-corporate bias in those days, which is still the case today.  A running joke among Jeromevillians was that one cannot buy underwear in Jeromeville.  The local leaders believed that large chain department stores did not belong in a small town like Jeromeville.  While I saw the value in supporting small, locally owned businesses, I was hesitant to support government interference in the free market.  Also, this position was built on false pretenses to begin with, because whatever it was once, Jeromeville was not a small town anymore.  Sixty thousand people lived in the city limits, and another eight thousand lived on campus just outside the city limits.  And with no clothing stores in Jeromeville, people had to drive eight miles north to Woodville or twenty miles east to Capital City to shop, putting more pollution in the air.  The chain stores all went to Woodville instead, even though Woodville had only three-fourths the population of Jeromeville.

Recently, the corporate chains won a rare victory in Jeromeville with the opening of Borders Books.  This upset many people, but a bookstore was classy enough that it did not anger Jeromevillians as much as something like Walmart would have.  Joseph Tomlinson pointed out in his column that one of the City Council members owned a bookstore, so he should have recused himself from votes related to Borders because of a conflict of interest.  I agreed.  “Vote no on Small Town Feel,” Tomlinson concluded.  “Small Town Feel violates the American concept of freedom.”  I always do, Mr. Tomlinson.  I always do.


On Friday nights, I attended the large group meetings of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, back on campus.  When I arrived that night, I found an empty seat and sat down.  A guy with bushy blond hair wearing a collared shirt, slacks, and a flat gray driver cap sat next to me a few minutes later.  I had seen this guy around JCF before; he always stood out to me because he was more well-dressed than the typical university student, and because he wore cool hats.  “Hey,” I said as he sat down.  His name tag said “Jed.”

“Hi,” Jed replied.  “What’s up?”

“Not much.  Just glad it’s the weekend.”

“I know!  What was your name again?”

“Greg,” I said.  Then I pointed to his name tag and asked, “Jed?  I know I’ve seen you around before.”

“Yeah.  Jed.  It’s nice to meet you.” Jed shook my hand.  “What year are you?”

“I’m a senior.  You?”

“Freshman.”

“They’re starting, so we should probably be quiet,” I said in a loud whisper as I heard the worship team start playing. “But It was nice to meet you.”

“You too!” Jed replied.

As I stood and sang along to the music, I turned around and saw that, while I had been talking to Jed, Sadie Rowland had arrived, sitting in the row behind me.  I smiled and waved, and she waved back.

An hour and a half later, after the talk and more worship music, I still had no plans for afterward.  I was about to ask Jed if he was doing anything, but he spoke first.  “I need to get going,” he said.  “I’ll see you next week?”

“Sure,” I replied.  “Have a good weekend!”

I turned around, hoping that Sadie was still sitting behind me; she was.  “Hey,” I said.

“Hi, Greg!  How are you?” Sadie asked.

“Good.  Just been busy with school.  How are you?”

“Same.  I had a paper due today.  I finished it at the last minute.”

“You finished it.  That’s what’s important.”

“Right?”

“Hey.  I saw your article in the Daily Colt today, about that professor who won the award.  It was good.”

“Thanks!” Sadie replied.  “It was interesting researching and writing that story, but I’m hoping to get moved to local politics next year.  That’s really what I want to write.”

“I know.  They need a conservative voice on the Colt, even though they probably don’t want one.”

“Yeah, really.”

“I guess they have Joseph Tomlinson, but he’s just a columnist, not a reporter.”

“Joseph Tomlinson is great!”

“Yes!” I agreed.  “He’s hilarious, and insightful too.  I loved his column today on Small Town Feel.  Jeromeville can be pretty ridiculous.”

“I know!  You’ve been here two years longer than I have, so I’m sure you’ve seen more of the Jeromeville ridiculousness.”

“Definitely.  Like the ‘historic’ muddy alleys where mosquitoes breed, but they won’t pave them because of the neighborhood’s historic character.”

“Wow,” Sadie said, rolling her eyes.

“And you know about the frog tunnel, right?”

“Yeah.  That’s so weird.”

“I know.  One City Councilmember was quoted as saying she wanted to build connections to the frog community.”

“Like the frogs have any idea what’s going on,” Sadie added.  “But, yeah, the media is so biased.  The newspaper back home keeps calling our house trying to get us to subscribe, and my dad is like, ‘Stop calling me.  I don’t want to read your Commie trash.’”

I laughed.  “That’s a good one.  I should try something like that next time someone calls me trying to sell me something.”

“That would be funny.”

“Yeah.  So how was your week?  What else did you do?”

“We had Bible study yesterday.”

“Nice,” I said.  “My Bible study is huge.  We do a few worship songs together, then we split into three groups to do the actual study part.  We come back together for prayer requests at the end.”

“Which one is that?  Who are the leaders?”

“Joe Fox and Lydia Tyler.”

“How big is huge?”

“We average probably between twenty and twenty-five each week.”

“Twenty-five!  That’s too big for a study group like this.  Why is it so big?”

“It’s exactly what I said was going to happen. JCF has moved so much toward groups for specific populations.  You’re in a Kairos group, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Those are handpicked by their leaders, and people like me never get included. And there’s the group for transfer students, and the group for student athletes, and the two groups just for women.  All of us who don’t fit those categories only had one group left to choose from, so that group ended up huge.”

“I don’t think the Kairos ministry is supposed to be about excluding people, but I get what you’re saying,” Sadie observed.

“I’m concerned with the direction JCF is going.  There’s also a group specifically for Filipinos, and I’ve heard someone say that next year they want to make more groups specifically for people from certain cultural backgrounds.  How is that not racist?  Aren’t we supposed to treat each other equally and not be segregated by race?”

“That’s messed up.”

“I know.  Paul said in Galatians that there is no Jew nor Greek, for all are one in Christ Jesus.”

“Exactly!  Maybe you should tell Dave or Janet or one of the leaders your concerns.”

“I have.  Didn’t do any good.”

“That’s too bad.  What are you guys studying?”

I told Sadie that we were going through Romans, and I tried to remember specifically what insights I had that I could share with her.  She told me about her Kairos group and everything that they had learned.  Her group seemed to have the same kind of studies as other groups, but with a specific focus toward preparing student leaders, which was the stated mission of the Kairos ministry.

“You have any exciting plans coming up?” Sadie asked me a bit later.

“Not this weekend.  But in a few weeks, I’m taking the basic skills test I need to get into the teacher training program.  And then I’m going straight from there to meet up with the kids from church at Winter Camp.  I’ll be joining them a day late.”

“Winter Camp sounds fun!  What is this test?”

“It’s required for anyone wanting to be a teacher, or a substitute, or anything like that.  It looks like it’ll be pretty easy.  It’s just meant to show that you have the equivalent of a ninth grade education.”

“Really?  Only ninth grade?”

“Yes.  And a lot of people are complaining that teachers shouldn’t have to take the test.  They say it excludes people who would otherwise be good teachers.”

“How?  How can you be a good teacher without a ninth grade education?”

“I know!  They say it’s racially biased.”

“Of course.  Everything is racially biased these days.”

“If I had kids,” I said, “I wouldn’t care what color skin their teacher had, but I certainly would insist on a teacher who could do ninth grade reading and math.  If you’re a teacher, you need to understand more than just the material you’re teaching.”

“And that’s why you’re gonna be a great teacher.”

“Aww,” I smiled.  “Thank you.”

“We definitely need good teachers.  A lot of my teachers in high school were ready to retire and just there for the paycheck.  And, of course, I had a history teacher who was really liberal.  He and I used to get into arguments all the time.”

“That would have been fun to watch.  I wish I had been in your class to see that.”

Sadie laughed.  “I could have used your support.  I did have one other friend who used to jump into those arguments and take my side.”

“That’s good.  I had a friend kind of like that in history class, but he usually started the argument with our teacher, and I’d join in.  He was kind of annoying, but we had a lot of classes together, and I liked having a conservative friend.”

“Annoying how?”

I told Sadie about Jason Lambert and how he could be kind of loud and argumentative, and also about the time he asked out the girl that I wished I had the guts to ask out.  But I also told her some good things about Jason, like the project we did in Spanish class where I was a bully taking his lunch money.  Jason’s character used a magical growth drink called La Leche de Crecer, at which point we paused the recording and replaced Jason with a six-foot-seven football player, who proceeded to take revenge on my bully character.  Sadie told me about some of her more memorable high school friends, and some of the parties she had gone to with them.  She had a bit more active social life than I did in high school, apparently.

“Hey, did I tell you I’m going to Washington, D.C. for the spring and summer?” Sadie asked after the conversation about high school reached a lull. 

“I don’t think so.  What’s this for?”

“An internship with my Congressman from back home.”

“That’s great!”

“Yeah!  I’ve met him a few times.  My dad volunteered for his campaign.”

“That’ll be good experience for you.  When do you leave?”

“April.  I’ll go home for spring break, then stay there for two weeks, then I’ll be gone until the middle of September.  I’m going on planned leave for spring quarter.”

“That’s exciting!  I’ll miss seeing you around spring quarter.”

“I know!  I’ll miss everyone here.  And I’ll miss Outreach Camp.  I had so much fun there this year.”

“I know.  I have to miss Outreach Camp too, because I will have started student teaching by then.  The school where I’m teaching will start earlier than UJ.”

“Do you know where you’ll be student teaching yet?”

“No, but probably not Jeromeville High.  The professor who runs it says the student population in Jeromeville doesn’t reflect what we’ll see in the average teaching position around here.  Jeromeville families tend to be wealthier and more educated.”

“That makes sense,” Sadie observed.

“Greg, Sadie, time to go, you two,” I heard Tabitha Sasaki’s voice call out from across the room.  I looked up, confused.  The room was empty, except for me and Sadie, and Tabitha, who was carrying the last of the worship band’s equipment toward the door.  I looked at my watch.  Sadie and I had been talking for over an hour, long enough for all of the hundred or so others to go home and the staff and student leaders to put everything away and clean up the room.  And I had not noticed any of this.

“I guess we have to go now,” Sadie said.  “I should get home and go to bed anyway.”

“Did you drive here?  Where’d you park?”

“I’m over in the lot by Marks.”

“I’ll walk you to your car,” I said.  I grabbed my Bible, Sadie grabbed hers, and we walked out into the dark but clear night, with no moon and only a few stars visible beyond the streetlights lighting the path we walked.  “You said you just turned in a paper?  Does that mean this will be a relaxing weekend?”

“Unfortunately, no.  I have a midterm Monday.”

“That sucks.  But good luck.”

“Thanks.”

We had arrived at Sadie’s car by that point.  “It was nice talking to you,” I said.

“You too!  I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah.”

“Good night, Greg.”

“Good night.”

I walked toward my car, but before I unlocked my car, I watched Sadie drive off.  I got in the car and began the trip home a minute later.

If I could live my university years again, knowing what I know now about life as an adult, I would take more chances.  I would not have wasted this opportunity, getting thoroughly lost in conversation with a cute girl, and walking her to her car, only to watch her drive off without attempting to make some kind of future plans.  I did not know exactly what to do; I was always just trying to be a good Christian and be friends first and not rush into dating.  But this did not work for me, because I did not know what to do once I was friends with a girl.  As a student, I was surrounded by others in more or less the same stage of life as me.  I did not come to realize until my thirties that life would never be like that again.  As I write this in my mid-forties, I have grown apart from many of my friends, and I have found it difficult to meet people and  make new friends.  If I had been able to see the future on that winter day in 1998, if I had known the directions that mine and Sadie’s lives would take, I would have done everything imaginable not to let her just drive away that night.  Things might not have worked out between us, but at least I would have known that I tried my best.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about a night you wish could have ended differently.

I updated the Dramatis Personae. Some of the entries were badly out of date. And Sadie didn’t even have an entry; she was just listed, with no last name, under “Others from JCF.” If anyone is looking for hints of what will happen in the rest of Year 4, it is noteworthy that two characters who were just briefly introduced in this episode now have their own entries already…

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!

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.

December 9-12, 1997.  Not everything follows consistent rules the way math does. (#156)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

Three more days, I kept telling myself as I stared out the window of the bus.  Three more days, and I could finally take a break from studying.  I could take a break from everything, in fact.  It was Tuesday morning, and by Friday afternoon I would be done with this quarter.  

I arrived at campus around nine-thirty, an hour before my first final.  I had been studying abstract algebra all weekend, and I felt ready for this final.  But I still found an empty seat in the very crowded Coffee House, across the street from Wellington Hall where my class met, and reread sections of the textbook over again.  That was just who I was when it came to studying.

A few minutes after ten, I saw a girl from my math class named Jillian walk by.  She was a thin, pale girl with shoulder-length straight hair that was dyed black, and she held a large chocolate chip cookie in a paper wrapper.  I did not know her well, we had never really said more than hi to each other, but I recognized her enough to wave.  She waved back and walked toward me.

“How’s it going?” Jillian asked.  “Ready for the final?”

“I think so,” I said.  “What about you?”

“I’m freaking out.  This is gonna be so hard.  Can I sit down?”

“Sure.”

“Quiz me on vocabulary.”

“What’s a group?”

“It’s a set with, um, an operation on the elements of the set, and the inverse property.”

“And?”

“Oh.  And the identity.”

“And there’s one more thing.”

“There is?”

“Another property that the operation has.”

“Commutative.  No, associative.”

“Associative, yes.  And a group with the commutative property also, what’s that called?”

“It’s that one that starts with A.  Crap.  I don’t remember.”

“You’re right, though.  Abelian group.”

“Oh, yeah!”

Jillian opened her textbook and skimmed through it as she took a bite of her cookie.  “It’s a little chewy,” she said after swallowing. “It’s like it isn’t cooked all the way through.”  She took another bite and continued, “I guess I should say it isn’t baked all the way through.”

“That’s weird,” I said.  “Why do they call it a cookie?  You bake it, you don’t cook it.  They should call it a bakie.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna start using that,” I said.  “Chocolate chip bakies.”

Jillian looked up at me.  “How are you doing this?  We have a final in a few minutes, I’m freaking out trying to cram as much as I can, and you’re over here talking about bakies!  I wish I could be as calm as you right now.”

I laughed.  “I guess I just feel ready for this final.”

“I wish I did.”

Jillian and I sat at the table for another fifteen minutes or so, occasionally quizzing each other about abstract algebra.  When I noticed it was almost time for the final, I asked, “You want to walk over now?  It’s almost time.”

“Sure,” Jillian replied, grabbing her bag and slinging it over her shoulder.  I put on my backpack, and we walked together across the street to Wellington Hall.

“What are you doing over break?” I asked.

“Just going home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Capital City.”

“That’s not far.”

“What about you?  Are you going home?”

“Yeah.  Plumdale.  Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”  By then, my fourth year at the University of Jeromeville, I no longer waited for people to ask “Where’s that?” when I mentioned Plumdale.

“How far is that?  Couple hours’ drive?”

“Yeah.  Two and a half.  Then for New Year’s, I’m going to see my old roommate at his parents’ house in Valle Luna.  He’s in medical school in New York now.  And apparently he always has these massive New Year’s parties at his parents’ house.  I’ve never been to one.”

“That sounds fun.”

The math final was straightforward, and I thought I did well.  I hoped that Jillian did well too; she seemed really worried about this final.  Although fourth-year university mathematics courses were not as easy to me as high school math was, I still felt bad for people who struggled so much with math when I did not.  Everything made so much sense, and everything followed consistent rules.  But those people who are not good at math are good at other things in life that I am not.  Unfortunately, not everything follows consistent rules the way math does.


Part of the reason I felt like the rules of life were so inconsistent were that I, like all people, was often not in control of the things that happened to me.  I had heard all of the clichés about making things happen and not being a victim of circumstances, but that could only go so far.  I was not in control, and I never would be.  But occasionally, the unpredictability of life worked out in my favor.

I had two other finals, my other math class tomorrow afternoon and English on Friday.  I wanted to find a quiet spot in the library and study this afternoon before I went home, but first it was time for lunch.  I walked back to the Coffee House where I had been sitting earlier.  The student-run Coffee House, despite its name, also sold burritos, pizza, sandwiches, and many other food items.  I got a slice of pepperoni pizza and a Coca-Cola and carried it over to the tables, and I saw something that had the potential to make this good day perfect.

Carrie Valentine was sitting at a table, eating lunch, alone.

I walked closer to make sure it was her, since she was facing away from me.  The girl at the table was taller than average, with straight brown hair, wearing a dark red long-sleeve shirt and blue jeans that were frayed at the bottom of the legs.  I approached from the side, hesitantly at first until I recognized her for sure, then more purposefully.  Carrie saw me approaching out of the corner of her dark brown eyes.  As she turned to look at me, I said, “Hey.”

“Hi, Greg!” Carrie replied enthusiastically.  “Sit down!”

I smiled and sat across from her.  “How are you?  Did you have any finals yet today?”

“I had one this morning at 8, and I have another one at 4.  I’m staying here all day to study so I don’t get distracted.  But I’m taking a lunch break.”

“I just got out of a final, for abstract algebra.”

“Abstract algebra,” Carrie repeated.  “The name of that class makes my brain hurt.”

“That’s what a lot of people say,” I said.  “The final was pretty straightforward.”

“Good!  How many more do you have?”

“One tomorrow and one Friday.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“Yeah.  I’ve been working on a new episode of Dog Crap and Vince during study breaks at home  I should have enough time to get that done this week.”

“Dog Poop… what?”

“Dog Crap and Vince.  I haven’t told you about that?”

“No!  What’s that?”

“Did I tell you about the movie I made with the youth group kids from church?”

“Yeah!  That sounded like a lot of fun!”

“I do a website called Dog Crap and Vince.  It’s a series of illustrated stories about two weird teenagers and their friends.  I’ve been doing things with these characters for several years now.  And that movie was based on those characters.”

“What did you say it was called?”

“Dog Crap and Vince.”

“Dog Crap?”

“Yes.”

“One of the guys is named Dog Crap?  Why?”

“Because I was sixteen when I made them up, and anything related to poop is funny.”

“That makes sense.  I guess, at least.  I only have a sister, so I don’t know what goes through the minds of teenage boys.  So you write a story and draw pictures to go with it?”

“The drawings really aren’t that good.  It would probably work better as animation, but I don’t have the capability to do that right now.”

“That’s so cool, though!  What’s this next one about?”

“It’s a Christmas special.  The guys and their friends do a Secret Santa exchange.”

“Secret Santa?”

“Yeah.  They all get randomly assigned someone else in the group to buy a gift for.”

“Oh, okay.  I’ve heard of that, but I’ve never called it Secret Santa.”

“Dog Crap gets someone he doesn’t know very well, and he keeps buying exactly the wrong thing.  And Vince has to buy something embarrassing for the person he has.  And then when they meet up to exchange the gifts, all these weird things happen.”

“That sounds funny!   Are you looking to get this published someday?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “For now I’m just doing this for fun.  You want to read it?”

Carrie’s eyes lit up.  “Yeah!” she said, smiling.  “It’ll probably have to wait until I’m done with finals, but I’ll totally read it!”

“I’ll send you the link when I’m done.  I should be done later tonight.”

“Thanks!”

“So what are you doing over break?”

“Just going home.  And my sister is coming over.  She’s older, she lives on her own. What about you?”

“Same, going home.”  I told Carrie about going to visit my family, and about Brian Burr’s New Year party in Valle Luna.

“I remember Brian,” Carrie replied.  “That’ll be fun seeing him.”

“Are you doing anything for New Year’s?”

“Not really.  I don’t usually.”

“Nothing wrong with that.  Brian said everyone can stay over at his house, so I can try to sleep before I drive home.”

“That’ll be good.”

Carrie and I had both finished eating by then.  “I really should get going now,” she said.  “But it was good hanging out with you!”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I’ll send you a link to Dog Crap and Vince.”

“Yes!  That’ll be good!  Good luck with the rest of your finals, and enjoy your break!”

“Thanks!  You too!”  Carrie gave me a hug, and I walked toward the library, to find a quiet place to immerse myself in number theory in preparation for my next final exam.

Later that night, after I finished the Dog Crap and Vince Christmas episode and posted it to the website, I opened a blank email and began typing to Carrie.  I copied and pasted the link to Dog Crap and Vince, then continued typing, “How did your final go?  How many more do you have?  I hope you did well!  It was good to see you today.”

Earlier today, an opportunity had fallen into my lap when I got to talk to Carrie at the Coffee House.  Now, it felt like time to seize that opportunity and use it to take a giant leap forward.  I paused, trying to think of exactly how to word the next part.  It had to be absolutely perfect.  After I deleted three or four attempts at the next sentence, I came up with this: “Would you ever want to get together for lunch again sometime?  If you’re busy with finals, we can plan for after we get back from break.  Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.”

Now all there was to do was wait.


After I finished the number theory final on Wednesday afternoon, I felt confident.  I was pretty sure I answered everything correctly.  When I got home, the first thing I did was check my email.  I heard the sound that I had new messages, and I could feel my body tense up when I saw that one of the messages was from Carrie.  I took a few deep breaths, then double-clicked Carrie’s name to open the message.

From: “Carrie Valentine” <cavalentine@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 14:06 -0800
Subject: Re: Dog Crap and Vince

Hi Greg!  Your Dog Crap and Vince story was funny!  Thanks for sharing!  Also, thank you for the offer, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to get together right now.  But good luck with finals, and have a great Christmas with your family.

– Carrie

I closed the message on the screen, then climbed up to my bed on the loft above the computer and lay down, face down.  What did I do wrong?  Why was this not a good idea?  I was confused.  Did this mean that Carrie did not want to talk to me at all anymore?  Was she only being nice to my face because it was proper, and she really hated me and did not like talking to me?  Should I leave her alone now?  Should I have left her alone yesterday?  Or was she just busy with finals?

As I thought about this, I realized something.  If Carrie really was just pretending to like me, and we were not really friends, then maybe I had nothing to lose by asking her why she turned me down and finding out what was really going on.  What would happen if I asked her?  She would get mad and never talk to me again?  Maybe that was for the best.  On the other hand, if there was some other reason Carrie turned me down, then she really was enough of a friend that she might actually be honest with me.  I typed another email before I went to bed that night, trying not to sound presumptuous, arrogant, or anything else that might jeopardize this friendship that may or may not exist.  It took several tries to get the wording right, and I still was not sure it came across the way I wanted.

To: “Carrie Valentine” <cavalentine@jeromeville.edu>
From: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Subject: Re: Dog Crap and Vince

I’m sorry if I did anything wrong.  May I ask what you meant when you said it wasn’t a good idea to get together?

I spent most of Thursday studying, although the English final tomorrow would not exactly be the kind of exam where I had to memorize facts.  I went to campus for a few hours just to get out of the house.  I checked my email when I got back, and this message was in my inbox.

From: “Carrie Valentine” <cavalentine@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 12:29 -0800
Subject: Re: Dog Crap and Vince

I just meant that it kind of sounded like you were asking me on a date.  I’ll see you after break.  Good luck with your last final!

I thought, what does that mean?  Of course I was asking you on a date!  Why is that a bad thing?  If Carrie really was not interested in dating me, why could she not just say so?  I noticed she did not answer the part of the question about if I had done anything wrong.  It would be nice to know if I did something wrong, so I could fix that for future interactions.  It was possible she was just not attracted to me that way; I had plenty of single female friends I was not attracted to as more than a friend through no wrongdoing of their own.  That answer would have been disappointing, since that seems to be the case with all girls I am interested in, but at least I would not be left to wonder what I did.

I thought I did fine on the English final, it seemed like a simple enough piece of writing, but when grades were released, I ended up with a B in that class.  It was my only B in five years at UJ, from freshman year through the teacher training classes I would be taking the following year.  I did not have a perfect 4.0 grade-point average before that, though, because I had gotten two A-minuses over the years and would get one more later that year, and an A-minus only counts as 3.7 grade points in UJ’s grading system.  There were now two reasons that 1997 was ending on a disappointing note.  Hopefully Brian Burr’s New Year party would be awesome enough to make up for this disappointment.

I still was not sure how to interpret Carrie’s remark about being asked out on a date.  Was the act of someone asking someone else on a date being construed as a bad thing in and of itself?  Why?  Was it not true that people asked other people on dates all the time?  If this confused me now, then it is little wonder that upcoming events of 1998 and the years beyond would find me even more confused and frustrated.  But that is another story for another time.

None of those things ended up being the reason why Carrie had written what she did.  I was a little distant for the next couple months, but Carrie and I did stay friends after this.  An opportunity arose a few years later to bring this up and ask about what happened.  By then, it was less awkward to discuss, since it was clear that it did not matter and I was not trying to rekindle anything.  Carrie and I lived sixty miles apart at that time, and she was already in a relationship with the man she would eventually marry.  I found out that the reason she rejected me was actually more complicated than any of the scenarios I had considered in my head, and her side of the story definitely cleared things up.  Because of that, it is no coincidence that Carrie is the only one of my many failed love interests at UJ whom I am still occasionally in touch with today.

But there was no such comfort in my mind as I packed my car and drove down Highway 6 through the hilly outer suburbs of Bay City to San Tomas, then down Highway 11 to my parents’ house.  All I knew was that I had failed again in making any meaningful steps toward finding a girlfriend.  This had been the story of my life so far, and I was learning nothing that would lead to more successful outcomes in the future.

Readers: Merry Christmas! I’ll be taking a break from writing for a while, as I always do whenever character-Greg takes finals in December and June. Keep in touch, and leave a comment about anything you want… something this story made you think of, something you’re doing for the holidays if you celebrate anything this time of year, or just something random and silly.

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.

November 30 – December 8, 1997. But he won’t admit he has a problem. (#155)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

I realized that I was so busy and scatterbrained last week that I forgot to acknowledge that last week was four years since I started this blog. Thank you so much, loyal readers, for sticking with me on this adventure.

As church dismissed and the congregation filed out of the building, my mind was on one thing: a quiet, relaxing Sunday afternoon at home.  Today was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and church was noticeably emptier than usual.  In a university town like Jeromeville, everything gets less crowded on major holidays, when students go home to visit their families and do not return until the very latest possible minute.

I went back to Plumdale to visit my family for Thanksgiving.  Growing up, we always traveled north to see Dad’s side of the family in Bidwell for Thanksgiving.  But now that my brother Mark was in high school and playing basketball, his first tournament of the year was the weekend after Thanksgiving, so we could not travel far from home.  We had a small Thanksgiving celebration at our house, and my grandparents on Mom’s side, who lived nearby, came over.  I came back to Jeromeville last night, because my bike was here, my computer was here, my family was not doing anything particularly noteworthy the rest of the weekend, and I liked being able to be on my own.  Sam and Josh were around the house for the weekend; neither of them had to travel far for Thanksgiving, with their families both nearby, across the river in Capital County.  Sean’s family was farther away; he would not return until tonight.  I had the bedroom to myself for another several hours.

Of course, my Sunday afternoon was not as quiet as I was hoping.  Jim Herman approached me as I was headed to the parking lot.  Jim was a scrawny-looking man, older than me, probably in his late thirties or so.  He did not have a spouse or children as far as I knew, but he seemed well-connected around church.  He had told me before that he was a real estate agent.  When I made the Dog Crap and Vince movie earlier this fall, Jim had asked if he could help, and I appreciated having another person to run the camera.

“Hey, Greg,” Jim said.  “Can you help me out this afternoon?”

“What do you need?”

“I need to borrow your car.  I’m showing a house in Woodville, and I don’t have a way to get there right now.”

I was not entirely thrilled about someone else driving my car.  What if something happened to it?  “I don’t know,” I said.

“I won’t be gone long.  I’ll bring it back by three o’clock.  I’m really in a bind here.”

I had heard a lot of talks and sermons recently about showing God’s love by helping and serving others, and Jim was a church friend, so I figured I could trust him.  “Okay,” I said.  “I walked here, but you can follow me home and leave from there.  Be back by three, because I need to go grocery shopping later.”

“Okay.  Thank you so much.”

My Ford Bronco had two separate keys, one for the door and one for the ignition; this was common in cars from that time period.  When we got to my house, I took both keys off of my key ring and handed them to Jim.  “I need it back by three,” I reminded Jim.

“I’ll be back here soon,” Jim said.  I went inside, trying not to worry about the car.

I noticed a message on the answering machine.  “Hi, Greg,” Mom’s voice said on the recording.  “I just wanted to make sure you got home okay, since you never called when you got home last night.  But I know you forget sometimes.  Let me know you’re okay.”

I rolled my eyes at Mom being a mom and worrying, but she had a reason to, since I had forgotten to call.  I dialed the number, and when Mom answered, I explained that I was fine.

“Glad you made it back,” Mom said.  “How was your day?  How was church?”  I explained that I had let Jim Herman borrow the car, but I was a little uncomfortable with that, and having second thoughts. “I wouldn’t be comfortable with that either,” Mom said.  “And it’s still our car, technically.  What happens if he wrecks it?  Then you’re stuck.”

“Yeah,” I said, knowing now that I had screwed up.

“I’m sure you trust this guy, your church friends seem honest, but please don’t let people borrow the car again.”

“I won’t,” I replied.  Mom and I made small talk for another few minutes, but we did not have much to say since I had just seen her and Dad the day before.  After we hung up, I tried to take a nap, anxiously awaiting the return of Jim with the car.

Jim did in fact return the car on time, undamaged.  “Hey, thanks again,” he said.  “Can you take me home now?”

“Sure,” I replied.  I drove east on Coventry Boulevard just across the railroad overpass to Jim’s apartment.  I tried asking him about his showing, how it went, but he gave answers using some real estate words I did not understand.  It seemed like his client had not made a decision yet.  Jim said I could just drop him off at the entrance to the parking lot; I waved and turned back to my house.  Something told me that I had dodged a proverbial bullet, with Jim having brought the car back intact.  Something also told me that I would eventually have to confront Jim, that he would ask me again to borrow the car and I would have to tell him no.  I had an excuse this time, though.


My chance came three days later.  I got home from class on Wednesday afternoon, and the light was blinking on the answering machine.  The message was from Jim, needing to borrow the car again tomorrow for another property showing.  I did not look forward to conflict, and I was nervous to call Jim back and tell him no, but I knew that I had to.  I called Jim back, and he did not answer; I left a message on his machine explaining that my car technically belonged to my parents, and they did not want me letting others drive.

About an hour later, I was in the living room, doing homework while watching reruns of The Simpsons.  The phone rang, and Sam, who was in the kitchen cooking something, answered since he was closer.  He called me over, indicating that the phone call was for me.

“Hello?” I said.

“Greg,” Jim said over the phone.  “I really need to borrow your car.  If I can make this sale, that would be huge for me.”

“I understand,” I replied.  “But I can’t help you.  I don’t own the car.  It isn’t mine to lend.”

“Look.  I’m really in a bind here.  I promise nothing will happen to the car.”

“Can you rent a car?”

“I can’t afford it right now.  Just let me borrow your car.  What would Jesus do?  Jesus says to help those in need.”

Was Jim right?  Was I being un-Christlike?  Jesus made it clear that all earthly possessions paled in comparison to the rewards of heaven.  But did that mean that I must put myself and my driving record at great financial risk so that a friend could do his job?  Was it worth disobeying my parents?  “I told you,” I said, “It isn’t my car, and the car’s owner said no.”

“Look at the early church in Acts,” Jim said.  “The believers had everything in common.  No one was in need.  By leaving me in need, you’re sinning against the Lord.”

Jim had Scripture to back up his point, but his aggressive tone certainly seemed un-Christlike to me.  After a pause of a few seconds, I realized that I had Scripture on my side as well.  “One of the Ten Commandments says to honor your father and mother.  So I can’t let you borrow the car without dishonoring my father and mother.”

“Have you read Acts?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what happened to Ananias and Sapphira when they held back their money and didn’t give everything to the Lord?  They died.  They fell down and died on the spot.  Paul writes in Galatians to bear one another’s burdens and fulfill the law of Christ.  This is the law of Christ.  It’s what Jesus is calling you to do.”

“I’m not lending you the car,” I said.  “I feel caught in the middle here, and you’re unfairly taking it out on me.  The car is not mine to lend, and as much as I want to help you, I can’t.”

The conversation continued for another several minutes, with Jim twisting Scripture to make the point that I was a bad Christian for not letting him use the car, and me trying, with great futility, to reason with him.  By now, Sean and Josh had emerged into the living room, and all three roommates intently observed my phone conversation.  Sam began miming hanging up the phone with his hand.

“Jim,” I said, “I told you, I can’t lend you the car.  If you can’t accept that, if you’re going to continue to rant at me like this, I’ll have no choice but to hang up on you.”

“You’re a brother in Christ,” Jim replied.  “At least I thought you were.  But right now you aren’t acting like it.  Are you really saved?  Do you know–”

I hung up the phone without letting Jim finish the sentence.  I sat at the dining room table, emotionally exhausted, not even going back to the couch and my studies.

“Good for you,” Sam said.

“Who was that?” Sean asked.

“Jim from church,” I explained.  “He was the one holding the camera when we made the Dog Crap and Vince movie with the kids from The Edge.”  I told Sean about the time I let Jim borrow the car, and Mom telling me not to do that again.  “Am I in the wrong here?  Was it un-Christlike of me to say no?”

“Not at all,” Josh replied.  “You said it wasn’t your car to lend.  And Jim definitely has some problems.  I know there’s been some issue before with him wanting to volunteer with the youth group, but the parents aren’t comfortable with his behavior sometimes.”

The phone rang as I was talking to Josh.  I did not answer, because I assumed it was Jim continuing his rant.  I let the machine answer the call, and after I heard the beep, I heard Jim’s voice say, “The law of Christ.  Look it up.”  Jim then hung up.

Josh never said anything mean about anyone, so the fact that he characterized Jim as such really made me feel like Jim had some serious problems, problems that I did not want to get mixed up in.  But I did not know how to deal with Jim’s problems, and I had a feeling he would not just leave me alone.


Friday was the last day of classes before finals.  On Saturday afternoon, Andrea Briggs invited a bunch of us from the Abstract Algebra class to a study group at her apartment.  Actually, Andrea Wright invited us, but I still thought of her as Andrea Briggs; she had just gotten married a few months ago.  She and her husband, Jay, lived in an apartment complex at the corner of Coventry Boulevard and G Street.  The C.J. Davis Art Center, where I had seen a now-defunct band perform a benefit concert a while back, was across the street.

I got home a few hours later, feeling much better about the upcoming Abstract Algebra final.  When Sam heard me walk in, he called to me from the living room.  “Yes?” I replied.

“Your friend left you another message.”  Sam pointed to the blinking light on the answering machine.  I pressed Play and listened to Jim ask to borrow the car again, then launch into another rant about how I was a hypocrite and a bad Christian.  After about a minute or so, I deleted the message without listening to the rest or calling him back.

The following Sunday after church, I asked Dan Keenan, the college pastor, if I could talk to him about something.  “Sure,” Dan said.  “Wanna come to my office?”

I followed Pastor Dan to his office and explained the situation with Jim.  I also told him that I was wondering if Jim was right that I was being a hypocrite.  “First of all,” Dan said, “you’re not doing anything wrong.  I think you’re handling this just fine.  And you aren’t the first person who Jim has done this to.”  I nodded as Dan continued.  “Jim will often find someone who agrees to something that he wants, then he will continue to harass and manipulate that person.  He claims to be a real estate agent, but he lost his license some time ago.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that I had been taken advantage of to a much greater extent than I had thought.

“You said he’s living in an apartment now?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“I don’t know who set him up with that, but he’s been homeless for much of the last few years.  He doesn’t have a stable job or a stable living situation.  He used to be a leader with The Edge, but we asked him to step down when he was stalking some of the kids at home.”

“Wow,” I said.  To me, the events of the last week made Jim seem annoying but relatively harmless.  This allegation made him sound much more dangerous.  No wonder the youth group parents had complained about him, as Josh had said. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have let him help with my movie, with kids around.  I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.  No one blames you for that.  But if he won’t leave you alone, call the police.  Other people have, and they’ll know that he’s still someone they need to keep on their radar. Jim has been in trouble with the police before, so hopefully that will get him to leave you alone.”

“I will,” I replied, not exactly enthused about having to call the police on someone I thought was my friend, but ready to do what it would take.

“Would you be willing to submit a written statement about your interactions with Jim?” Pastor Dan asked.  “The church board was looking at actions we could take after the last incident, and now that he is harassing someone else, we need to revisit that.”

“Yes,” I replied.  “I just hate that it has come to this.  It sounds like Jim really needs help.”

“But he won’t admit he has a problem,” Dan explained.  “And no one can really get that kind of help without admitting that there is a problem.”

“I know,” I said.  “I’ll write that statement and email it to you.”

“Also, be careful.  Watch for him stalking your house.  He’s been known to do that before.  Make sure you lock the doors.”

“I will,” I said, a little more scared now.  I had not noticed anyone outside, but I did not like thinking about this possibility.


The following day, while I was studying for finals, the phone rang.  A few of us who had been to Andrea’s study session on Saturday had exchanged phone numbers, and I thought it might have been one of my classmates calling to ask a math question.  But it was Jim, asking if I had repented and decided to let him borrow the car.

“Please stop calling me,” I said.  “My answer has not changed, and it won’t as long as you keep ranting at me and twisting Scripture.  If you don’t hang up now, I’m calling the police.”

“Calling the police just proves you’re not following the commandments of God.  It says in the Bible that we must obey God rather than human authority–”

I hung up and immediately called the police.  I explained my situation to the dispatcher.  “There’s nothing we can do right now, but if this person continues to harass you, you can look into filing a restraining order.  What is this person’s name, and what is his relationship to you?”

“He goes to my church.  His name is Jim Herman.”

“Oh, we know Jim,” the dispatcher said.  “We know him very well.  We’ll add your complaint to our files.  Have you notified him that you’ll be getting the police involved?”

“Yes.”

“Hopefully he’ll leave you alone now.  Just let us know if he doesn’t.”

“I will.  Thank you.”

Jim did leave me alone after that, for the most part.  I did my best not to interact with him at church, although we did cross paths a few more times over the years.  I got a letter from the church in the mail a couple months later; I opened it and began reading.  “We are writing to inform you that the Board has voted to remove Jim Herman from the membership roster of Jeromeville Covenant Church,” I read.  I assumed that I was on the list to receive this letter because the statement I wrote was part of what led to this decision.  About a year after that, I was still a volunteer for The Edge at church, and as the kids were getting picked up at the end of one rainy night, I saw police car lights outside.  I poked my head out the door and watched as an officer led Jim away in handcuffs.  Apparently, the church had a restraining order prohibiting Jim from being on church grounds during youth activities.

I spoke to Jim once more, in 2001, a few months before I moved away from Jeromeville.  I was walking home from church, still living in the same house on Acacia Drive, when I saw Jim going through the dumpster of the apartments across the street.  He made eye contact, and I said hi, because it would have been awkward not to.  We made small talk for about a minute, ending with him asking if he could borrow my car to go to a job interview.  I said no, wished him well, and walked away.

I saw Jim in person without talking to him one more time after the conversation at the dumpster.  It was July of 2002, I was living fifty miles away in Riverview, and a bunch of my friends from my church there were driving up to the mountains for the weekend.  We stopped for dinner on the way at In-N-Out Burger in Jeromeville, the one that was under construction at the time that Jim was leaving me harassing messages.  After we sat down with our food, I spotted Jim sitting alone at the other end of the restaurant.  “Don’t make eye contact with that guy,” I whispered to my friends.  “Avoid him.  I’ll explain later.”  Jim did not see us.

Many years later, in 2021, I was scrolling Facebook.  Someone shared a post from a page called Arroyo Verde County Crime Watch, warning parents of a pervert living in the community who often sat in areas with outdoor tables and benches. spying on young girls.  The author of the post was the mother of a teenage daughter; she explained that this pervert got her daughter’s name from looking over her shoulder at something she was writing.  The mother told the man to leave her daughter alone, and the man said, “There’s no law against reading.  I didn’t do anything wrong.”  The mother explained that she had contacted the police, and that this man was well-known to them and had been doing this kind of thing for years.  I looked at the attached photo; sure enough, there in the picture, seated at a picnic table in front of a familiar sandwich shop in downtown Jeromeville, was Jim Herman, now aging and gray but still clearly recognizable.

Seeing this made me sad.  Jim and I were friends once, at least I thought we were, and he really was helpful when I was making my movie.  But now, over twenty years later, Jim had not changed one bit.  Jim claimed to have such a fervor for Jesus, and he clearly did have a lot of knowledge of the Bible, but his delusions had kept him from truly advancing God’s Kingdom and using his gifts for good.  Jim needed professional help, yet he denied this and refused to get help for decades.  All I could do, all anyone can ever do, is pray that Jim will truly be healed of these demons before it is too late, and before anyone else gets hurt.

Readers: Have you ever had someone harassing you like this? 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.