By Ken Anderson — Columnist
A number of years ago, eight of us, mostly from Concord, were on a golf trip in Alabama. We had played seven different courses over five days. We were relaxing over beers and burgers, rehashing amusing moments.
Rick Loughlin or Terry Taylor interrupted the general golf chatter to ask Ronny Baker to name his favorite course.
“Math,” Ronny replied. Bill Boland, Paul Thompson, Andy Magee, Andy’s brother-in-law John Milligan and I joined Rick and Terry in exclaiming, in unison, “Math?”
“Yes, math with Miss Nealon.”
When I think back on this story, I can’t help but think of my favorite teachers and their different approaches to educating their students.
My contemporaries and I were blessed to have a number of great teachers in the Concord (and Carlisle) public schools. For example, in my time, exceptional teachers at CCHS included, but were not limited to, Mr. Dillon (physics), Miss Hardie and Miss Savage (Langan) (French), Mr. Regan (biology), and Mr. Levy (math).
We also had great teachers in middle school, including Mr. Godfrey (social studies), a teacher with whom I did not see eye to eye, and Mr. Dickie (math).
I loved math growing up, so if the course question had been posed to me and had I understood it as Ronny did, “math” would have been my response. And my named teacher would have been Mr. Dickie, Mr. Levy, or both.
A numbers game
In middle school, which was grades 7 and 8, Mr. Dickie taught and inculcated a love of math in many students. By the time these students entered high school, they were ready for Mr. Levy’s math classes.
Mr. Dickie taught the basic stuff but supplemented it with other material to challenge his students. He offered Today’s Twisters, a collection of 180 problems. For example: “What number has its half, its double, and its third add up to 68?” He had a chart on the bulletin board which kept track of our successes.
He also presented a number of papers that explained various math topics outside the regular curriculum: exponents, the binary system, and combinations and permutations, among many others. I kept in touch with him much later in life and have a copy of his book, “MathEnriched Individualized Non-Algebra Units Easy to Difficult for Grade 6 to Adult.”
A few years ago, I was talking to a retired middle school teacher about Mr. Dickie. He told me that a number of teachers had learned that his salary was well in excess of their salaries. They confronted Mr. Seavey, the principal, as to why such was the case. He told them that it was because he was a much better teacher!
Mr. Levy taught math at CHS and then at CCHS. He worked hard to get students to commit to math and to bring out the best in themselves. He was one of the founders of the interscholastic math leagues. His teams were rarely, if ever, beaten. He coached the math teams. (Off the topic, but he coached the rifle team as well.)
He took interested students (and tracked down those with less interest) to take state and national math tests. (One such test led me to my career as an actuary.) And among other things, he identified exceptional math students in the Metrowest area and tutored them.
Small world, isn’t it?
In a meeting, one client asked me how I became an actuary. I told him that I had a very strong math teacher for four years of high school. He asked if it was Norton Levy. Apparently, Mr. Levy had tutored his son for the U.S. Math Olympiad, in which his son placed first out of about 860,000 contestants.
When Mr. Levy retired, he undertook an international search to find his top students and invite them to a party. In attendance were members of the classes from 1956 through 1989. One person came from the Netherlands, and others came from all over the United States. He prepared a program for the event titled “a gathering of all those who have encouraged my best teaching efforts — on the occasion of my retirement.”
He held the party at Concord Rod and Gun Club. His intention was to speak about each student. This process was going along slowly, which prompted Tom Dillon to point out that he’d better pick up the pace; otherwise, it would be 5 a.m. before we knew it. For the musical interlude, he had written lyrics for a song titled “Mathematician’s Progress,” which he sang to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.”
Lesson learned
Another notable teacher was Mr. Horne, who taught English and coached tennis. One year at the athletic awards ceremony, he pointed out that playing tennis at CCHS (the courts were out of sight on the hill behind the athletic department parking lot) meant LTMFS, Learning Tennis Means Fine Smoking, a twist on the Lucky Strike slogan, LSMFT: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.
On another occasion, Mr. Horne walked into a boys’ bathroom and found a student smoking and carefully blowing the smoke into the vent. Hearing the door open, the student cupped the cigarette in his hand and put it in his pocket.
Mr. Horne asked him if he was smoking.
No, Mr. Horne.
What’s in your pocket?
Nothing!
Hoping that presenting both hands would satisfy Mr. Horne, he let go of the cigarette and brought his hand out of his pocket. In a subtle pedagogical moment, Mr. Horne engaged the student in conversation until his leg started shaking in pain.
Mr. Horne left. I suspect that the student, having learned a lesson out of the lesson plan, never smoked in the boys’ room again.
