Did you have a favorite teacher when you were in high school? Mine was Mr. Shoup. He taught government and often pointed with a stub index finger.
When one of my classmates used the phrase “had went” he immediately demanded the student rise and repeat after him, “I, Richard Borne, if I ever use ‘had went’ again, I will give my body to be severed in twain and buried beneath the golden sands at low tide.” I remember it clearly.
I also really liked Ms. Beavers, the mathematics teacher.
Since then, Mr. Watson has become my favorite teacher. He was the first person to tell me that I would be a lawyer someday. I knew he was crazy because I was going to be a mathematician. I didn’t decide to become a lawyer until after my first semester of senior year at Purdue pursuing my degree in mathematics.
Mr. Watson was the Ag teacher. He also was the FFA sponsor. One of the activities of the Future Farmers of America organization was contests involving the use of parliamentary procedure. Senior Max Beer, the FFA president, presided. As Vice President it was my job to make certain motions or ‘rise to a point of order’ to state a clarifying rule. Parliamentary procedure knowledge has come in handy ever since.
Mr. Watson also inspired my two cousins and myself to form a judging team to compete in a contest sponsored by NJVGA. The winning team the previous year had won a trip to Hawaii. NJVGA is the National Junior Vegetable Growers Association. The contest involved identification of up to 100 different vegetables merely by viewing their seeds, identification of common diseases in vegetables, grading potatoes, identifying the different vegetables, identifying the weeds common to growing vegetables, etc. We won first place in the Indiana contest.
We held our breath when the national location was announced, hoping for Florida only to hear that the national contest that year was in Cincinnati, Ohio. Farm boys in the big city. We stayed at the Hilton Hotel during the national contest. It had a machine that would spit out cream soda just by pushing a button. Its restaurant was visited each morning for breakfast. The waitress could not believe that we would eat four waffles each morning. When we were out walking late one evening, we noticed the ‘girls’ were very friendly. We decided to ignore them and take in a movie.
Mr. Watson encouraged me to become a state FFA officer. That allowed free admission to the state fair, and we worked in the FFA display area. The area I was in had the usual farm animals, chickens, ducks, geese, sheep, a sow and her piglets, goats, rabbits, and a jersey calf. I thought no one would be interested until I heard one young boy looking at the jersey calf and tell his dad, “Look, dad, a deer.” Only to hear the father reply, “No, son that is a pony.” One girl got visibly sick when I mentioned that the large hog sure would make a lot of bacon. She had no idea that was the bacon source.
In addition to parliamentary procedure and double entry bookkeeping, we learned about partition fence rules, the more than 3,000 soil types, the rules for managing regulated and mutual drains, net and tare scale weights, animal nutrition, USDA programs, and managing the woods found on nearly every farm. We learned to identify by sight when plants were short of nitrogen, phosphorus, or potash and we learned how to conserve natural resources.
Have I used my mathematical study of trigonometry, calculus, Boolean algebra, logic, statistics, groups, rings, fields, ideals, Laplace transforms, number theory, or topology? Not nearly as much as my training on boundary line fences and drainage regulation learned in Ag classes from Mr. Watson. Thank you, Mr. Watson.