My wife sent me the newspaper clipping shown below. She had received it from her father. Click on the image for a larger view.
Hazel Childress taught me math during my 10th and 11th grade
years at South Charleston High School in West Virginia. My family moved to Nashville, Tennessee for my
senior year, so I missed out on one more year with my favourite teacher. Ms Childress was one hell of a teacher. I last spoke to her in 1987 on my final day of
11th grade, and I still regret never crossing paths with her again to tell her
just how profoundly she impacted my life.
Even before my first class with Ms Childress, I knew her by
reputation. She was much older than in
the photo shown in the clipping. Students warned me her classes were “hard,”
that I’d have “lots of homework,” and that she was “scary” and an “old
battle-ax.” But I was a nerdy
kid—unfazed by hard work or heavy workloads.
I was also a kid whose parents and grandparents had never
been to college. That’s just a fact—not
a knock on them. I had fallen in love
with mathematics early on, but I had no real sense of what college was, or what
it might mean to make a living using one’s brain.
Ms Childress didn’t just sharpen my math skills; she
deepened my love for the subject. In our
trigonometry class, she would drill us on trig function values for special
angles. I can still hear her voice: “What is the cosecant of 135 degrees?” I remember the way my mind lit up as I
thought, “root 2.”
Some students groaned; others complained that a calculator
could do the work for us. But Ms
Childress taught us the value of understanding things from the ground up. I know how to use a calculator well precisely
because I know how to get what I want without a calculator. I truly started to grasp trigonometry and
logarithms when she had us put our calculators away for two weeks and use slide
rules instead. I wouldn't use a slide
rule today, but that experience helped me understand how we calculate; that
understanding helped me later in advanced math and computer programming.
I’ll never forget when a new math course started in January,
and she returned our trigonometry finals. She called each of us up to her desk to
collect our exams. When she called my
name, I walked up, but she didn’t immediately hand me mine. I saw a 108 written on the front. She later told me she had given me extra
credit for the “clever ways you did some of the proofs.” Then she turned to the class and said, “Eric
is the best trigonometry student I have ever had.” I was completely embarrassed—and yes, I paid
for that comment later among my friends—but when I got home, I was on cloud
nine.
Some younger teachers I had over the years leaned into the
“everyone gets a trophy” approach. Not
Ms Childress. She believed in every one
of her students, but for her, hard work and achievement meant something more
than simply showing up. A compliment
from her carried real weight.
Although Ms Childress wasn’t the sole reason for what came
next, she played a big part in it. I got
hold of a calculus book and taught myself two semesters’ worth before I ever
encountered it in school. I sat at a
desk in my room and nerded out—reading the theory, working through hundreds of
problems. When our final course together
touched on calculus, I was more than ready. I asked her questions before class, after
class, and even stopped by her office a couple of times when I saw her sitting
alone.
Ms Childress was an old-school teacher who inspired far
more than just me. She might have
intimidated students who weren’t keen on math, but for many of us, she pushed
us to become better than we thought we could be. I never feared her; I respected her deeply. And I thank her now for the incredible
memories, for showing me how rewarding learning can be, and for helping me
realize that a whole world could open up if I used my mind.
I’ve carried her influence into my own teaching. If I ever manage to be even half the teacher
she was, I’ll know I’ve done something truly special.
