DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HIS-TO-REE

10 January 2003

I can remember that line of the old song, and the next "don't know much biology..." but it starts to get fuzzy after that.

"The Today Show" is doing a teaser for an upcoming series on American History (which looks to be as much of a hit as Ken Burns' "Civil War" was). They started with asking a bunch of history questions to people on the street--kind of Jay Leno-esque. I was imagining how I would do with the same questions. I knew a bit more than the respondents they showed did, but not much.

But they started yesterday's segment by asking what the Wright Bros. did before they built their plane. I don't remember the four choices (they made it easy: multiple choice), but I intuitively knew that they had built bicycles (and not because I ride one either). Today it was which wife wrote to her husband while he was attending the Continental Congress, and of course it was Abigail Adams--and easy question (I think).

Pulling those answers from the dusty corners of my brain where I store long unused information I haven't needed since I left high school, I was immediately catapulted back to my sophomore year at St. Vincent's High.

I don't remember the name of our history teacher, but she was a lay teacher (i.e., not a nun) and I remember she was small and perky and loved history. History was always a very dull and boring subject for me. It was a series of memorization of dates and events that happened long, long ago and I could care less about.

But this teacher made history come alive. From day one I loved it. I loved imagining myself back in the time of the Revolution and what it must have been like to be there. This was a whole new experience for me--learning to love history.

But three months into the year, the teacher's husband was transferred and she had to leave. Her replacement (who still teaches there, some 40 years later!) came in that first day and asked what we had been learning. When she saw how much we had covered in the first two or three months of the year, she was appalled. We hadn't done nearly enough.

She wasn't a very exciting teacher to begin with--kind of a Julia Childs look alike, without the sparkle that Julia has, but the same kind of voice. From day 1, she stood at the blackboard, and wrote down names and dates and held quizzes to see how well we'd memorized them. History died for me that day.

Ironically, when I read books, I would read historical fiction and enjoyed the author's take on various events. But I never again felt as inspired as I did for those first few months of my sophomore year.

When I think back over the years of my schooling, which ended abruptly when I flunked out of UC Berkeley gloriously after a semester and a half (sometime I'll go back and write about my brief time at Berkeley...it's sometimes amazing the insight I get when I just sit here and free associate), I think about the teachers who stand out. There are those who stand out because they were so good and those who stand out because they were so bad.

Poor old Sister Colette. She taught us biology in Sophomore year. I don't think Sister Colette was meant to be a teacher, but convent life is about obedience, and so she was obedient. Biology embarrassed her. It all embarrassed her, whether because she didn't know what she was talking about or because she was genuinely embarrassed. We didn't learn much that year--and the only thing I take from that year is the amusement that we all felt when she said we would skip the chapters on reproduction. Poor Sister Colette just couldn't handle teaching a bunch of teen age girls about mating behaviors, even of single celled lifeforms. We learned so little that year that if we were going to go on to college, we had to take the class again in our Senior year.

But then there were teachers like Sister Mary William. She taught English and there was a lady who knew how to excite and inspire her students. To this day, I credit her for getting me started with writing. And I will never forget how special I felt when, at the end of my freshman year, she asked me to join the yearbook staff as the sophomore editor (working my way up, over the next three years, to senior editor).

It wasn't only the high school teachers who stand out. When I got to Cal, for those brief months, I began taking required courses and enrolled in Physics 10, which was taught by Owen Chamberlain, 1959 Nobel Laureate. Now you'd think that a Nobel Laureate would be able to inspire his students. Maybe he did if you were "physically inclined," but I hated loathed despised and abominated Physics. To this day, the only thing I remember from that class is the Doppler effect, and then only because a friend practically beat it into my head.

Ironic that having hated Physics so much, I ended up working for the Physics Department (and, briefly, for both Chamberlain and co-prize winner, Emilio Segre). While working for the Physics Department, I had occasion to sit in on the class taught by my boss, Fred Reif. Fred just had a "way" with students. Even though this was a class for graduate students, and even though I didn't understand most of it, I really enjoyed his style of teaching.