Mother was a drop-out, part 4

A few years later …

By this time teachers’ salaries were going up. The amount depended on years of training and years of experience. A Masters’ Degree would be very helpful to our income. Dad decided to go to St. Francis in Fort Wayne. He wanted me to go along. I really was not interested in all that study and had no desire to go back to full-time teaching at that time. However, if I wanted to see Dad, I knew I’d have to go. He was teaching full-time and farming. Either of those is a full-time job. I don’t know how he found time for anything else. So of course I went along. This was in the late 60s when our two older children would have been in college.

Many times during his final years of schooling, Dad didn’t have time to crack a book. Whenever he could find a few minutes, he read ahead in the textbook. Unless it was written work, he knew only what I told him as we rode along and we talked about the lessons for the day. His grades were usually the same as mine or better. Once as we walked into our classroom, the prof was handing back test papers. To the whole class he said, “It’s always a toss-up as to whether Mr. or Mrs. Adler gets a higher grade.” We attracted a good deal of attention because we were the only married couple in our classes. There were plenty of sisters and even a priest or two. After a while the sisters began calling me “Mother Adler.”

Statistics was a time-consuming difficult course. One day a sister asked, “Do you have an adding machine?” We didn’t so she gave us a page of really long addition problems and the answers. “This isn’t cheating,” she said, “because you both know how to add.” It did save us a lot of time and sister guaranteed the answers were correct. All of the answers were needed in order to solve a problem in our lesson for the next day. Bless that sister! (I believe two sisters helped).

Past days of school came in June 1970. With Masters’ Degree in hand Mother Adler gladly dropped out again! Yes, mother dropped out of school, that is organized school. She is still amazed at the lessons to be learned in the School of Life. And every day she discovers how paltry is her small store of knowledge. Your Grandpa Howard set an excellent example. He said, “I intend to keep on learning as long as I live.” And he did – right up to almost age 89.

Grandpa knew many Bible passages by heart. When he preached, he usually “read” the Scripture from memory. He kept studying his well-worn Bible, too, for he knew it contains most important of all knowledge.

By Dorothy Howard Adler