My father – Lloyd Temes – was a teacher, though teaching was not his first profession. He’d become an engineer after finishing his degree at New York’s City University. He was surprised, though, by how little joy he took from corporate and military engineering.
Before he was out of his twenties, he began his first high school teaching job. It put him on a trio of busses each day, twice a day. He felt the pull of his new life – he now knew that he was a teacher, born for this kind of work – but his school was too far from home. When a spot opened up at a top math-and-science high school in much closer to his home in Brooklyn, he leapt.
He loved teaching. Three stories capture that love. None are about what he taught; all are about how he taught, and how he learned.
The first takes place in the junior high school he attended, though the important prologue to this story begins in fourth or fifth grade. “The teachers could really have a bad attitude,” he recalled later about those 1940’s classrooms. “And one day when a teacher made a particularly obnoxious remark, I climbed up on my desk and punched him in the nose.” This would have been in fourth grade, maybe fifth. My father might embellish a story now and then, but I believe this one. He never shied away from conflict, and he was unstoppable when he thought he was right.
Fast forward to junior high school. By seventh grade, my father was on what he later called the “pre-delinquent track.” He’d been put in a program for poorly-behaved students. They had minimal academic classes and spent most of each day working in the school’s printing shop under the guidance of a famously tough man named Johnny Fontana who had never been to college, was lucky to have a steady job away from the usual dark and dangerous sites of his industrial printing trade, and found in my father a boy with talent.
Fontana set firm limits for my father’s behavior and enforced them. Certainly it helped that he was bigger and stronger than the boy. He saw that my father had some natural aptitude for math and pressed him to study for one of New York City’s “challenge exam” high schools. Along with thousands of other New York City students, though perhaps the only representative of the pre-delinquent track, he sat for the exam and to the shock of many he passed. He entered Stuyvesant High School and worked like coal miner every day to earn passing grades. He was, my mother later observed, a plodder: bit by bit, he would work at every problem. More through determination than flashes of insight, he would get the work done, pass his classes, and hold onto his place in this elite institution.
Another story. My father made his way to the faculty of Brooklyn Technical High School – a school that held much in common with Stuyvesant – partly because he could teach physics, but partly because he could teach the radio electronics shop course there as well. Brooklyn Tech did not offer a pre-delinquent track, but the least-appreciated among the school’s bright students would often wind up taking shop. So my father knew them, and knew them with some of the warmth he remembered from his own shop class in junior high school.
Once day, he later told me, there was a rumor spreading at lunch that two groups of tough kids at the school had formed into gangs, had knives and chains, and were going to do some real harm when the school day ended. When the final bell rang, my father peeked out from the radio shop – not much bigger than a closet, he said – and saw a scene out of West Side Story: the toughest of the tough boys was at the head of a phalanx of his followers, heading quickly down the hall toward his opposite number. The leader of the first group ran within arm’s reach past the radio shop door. My father reached out, grabbed him, pulled him in and locked the door. “End of riot,” my father reported a couple of decades later, still quite proud of himself.
My father had a lot of stories like this, and I know that he believed in them fully. That was part of who he was – and a big part of why he was a great teacher: he was a believer.
A final story. My father taught high school science in the age of Sputnik. The Russian marvel, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, unleashed a flurry of anxiety over the “science gap” and a river of money meant to supe up science in American schools. One particular experiment began with the interesting observation that helping average teachers become better at teaching might do more good than luring more top performers into the classroom, if only because there are (by definition) so many average teachers. The National Science Foundation was, therefore, given a sizable amount of federal funding to identify a group of average science teachers and place them inside the nation’s cutting-edge research facilities to see whether this exposure to the best and the brightest might inspire the teachers to better-than-average heights.
My father was one of those lucky average teachers, and his experience leaving Brooklyn to work for a season inside the University of California’s Lawrence Radiation labs did indeed transform him. But not at first. He arrived at the lab and was given a fairly mundane task, presumably well suited to an electrical engineer like my father. He was asked to make lightening.
In certain of the large vacuum chambers at the Radiation Lab, scientists were splitting atoms and sub-atomic particles were (they hoped) shooting off in various directions when these atoms ruptured. But it was all happening microscopically. Without some way to verify the paths of the subatomic particles, the scientists were not entirely sure that they were accomplishing what they thought they were accomplishing. But if the experimenters could throw a bolt of lightning into the chamber precisely when the atom split, the lightening would follow the path of least resistance – the path taken by the spinning-out particle – and light it up for all to see. So my father made lightning, and was fairly content with that task.
Every week, though, he found himself in a staff meeting at the lab, and seldom understood the conversation. He was ready to head home a failure, a science teacher but not a scientist, when a lab-mate asked him what was wrong. I can’t follow it, he confessed. I just don’t understand. Well, what’s your field, the other fellow asked. Electrical engineering, my father said, not expecting the distinction to do any good. Ah, came the reply. You speak another language. When they say this in physics, they mean that in electrical engineering. The language was the issue, the style of reference, not the depth of the concepts.
With this key in his hand, my father opened the stuck doors in front of him, and had a fine fellowship. He came back to New York, came back to teaching, took two master’s degrees at night and went on to complete a PhD part-time. He moved from his high school to a community college electrical technology department. There he used the work of an engineering professor named Mischa Schwartz to translate electrical engineering concepts into more basic language that allowed a generation of technicians without any higher math to do the kinds of repair and maintenance on serious electronics that were previously the province of engineers only.
So this idea stuck with my father through his career as a teacher: it’s never as hard as you think it is. Learn the language, figure out how the other guys are doing it, and you can do it too. The will to get it done is the part that matters most.
The.American.Word. 