In Mr. Neahr’s math class, I was challenged for the first time in my academic life. He piled on homework, which I spent hours on at home, pretty much because I had nothing else to do. The thing about Mr. Neahr’s instructional style was that he approached things very much as colleges did. He always addressed students by last name, occasionally using titles. He used titles every time if he didn’t like you. I was usually just “McClain.” My friends thought he was too strict, but my life experience had shown me that they didn’t know what strict was.
I liked being challenged. I still remember one time in his class being told that one cubic inch was 16.387064 cubic centimeters, and that a student had told him, years after he had left Mesick, that the one thing he remembered from the math class was 16.387064. I was determined to be like that student, so I memorized the number. I still have it memorized. Memorization, as it turned out, was a powerful tool in education, especially in 1977.
At one point in math class, I had the advantage of owning a handheld calculator, the Novus 650 Mathbox. That was uncommon back then for 7th graders. I had received the calculator for Christmas in 1975, and yes, I had asked for it. My mom had a calculator, and I enjoyed playing with it, to see what I could make it do. This particular model cost $17 in 1975, which is over $91 in today’s money. This was my only Christmas gift that year! This six-digit wonder had a fixed decimal and used Reverse Polish Notation. That means you would input your first number, press the ENT+ button, input your second number, and then press the operator button that you wanted to do to the pair. So, let’s say you wanted to subtract 18 – 6. You would input 18, press ENT+, input 6, then press the – button. I had to spend a lot of time figuring out what I could and couldn’t do with it.
Novus 650 Mathbox
I would often use the calculator to check my work, but when we were doing fractional work, I had to learn how to recognize common fractions when the decimals would appear on the screen. At one point, I made a hand-written list of common decimal equivalents, and did the long division by hand. When I did this, I discovered something interesting about the sevenths. One-seventh was 0.142857… (repeating). Two-sevenths was 0.285714…(repeating). Three-sevenths was 0.428571…(repeating). At that point, I saw the pattern. The same six digits repeated, in order, every time. They just started at a different place in the sequence! I couldn’t wait to show Mr. Neahr my discovery. He was impressed, but my classmates less so. I was being singled out as a “nerd,” that hip insult from Happy Days. I kept my discoveries quiet after that, and went back to being a clown.
I still spent hours on my homework, though. When we started doing a bit of geometry, we had to name all the segments in a standard cube.
Standard Cube
I listed all the ones I could see, like AB, BF, FE, EA, and so forth, but I remembered Mr. Neahr saying that through any two points there was exactly one line. So, I erased my work and started naming them systematically. If there was a point A, there would be a line (and subsequently a segment) through A and every other point on the cube. So, I listed AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, and AH. Then I did BC (BA was the same as AB), BD, BE, BF, BG, and BH. I repeated this process until my paper was full of pairs. And that was just one problem. Then I remembered how little my classmates appreciated me showing off, and I crumpled up that paper and started it all over again, only listing the visible segments. But the next day, when someone else pointed out that there were possibly other segments that could be listed, I blurted out that I had done that and thrown my paper away. Mr. Neahr told me, at that point, that I shouldn’t let social pressures affect my work ethic or thought process, and to let this be a lesson. I wish I had paid more attention to that lesson.
My friends perceived Mr. Neahr very differently. They said that he made them feel stupid, and that’s probably true. He was an intellectual, a rated chess player, and he had no patience for foolish behavior. If you tried, he would help you, but if you didn’t, you would sometimes find yourself on the receiving end of some pretty pointed barbs. I was just glad not to be one of those recipients.
When I was in elementary school, I had learned that on Groundhog Day, if the groundhog saw its shadow, we were in for six more weeks of winter. I was much older before I learned that six more weeks of winter was bad news. We routinely still had some snow on the ground on April 1.
DC Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters April 1978
But this April was warming up nicely, and it was decided by our class sponsor, Mr. Salling, that our 7th grade class would have our very first dance. Now, bear in mind, what we called a dance then is very different than a middle school dance now. This was our chance to dance with a partner of the opposite sex, something many of us dreamed about and just as many feared. I was both.
My dad was excited by the prospect of me going to my first dance. He considered himself quite the lady’s man, and his three marriages by age 34 seemed to confirm that. He told me exactly what to do. He said that most of the boys would be too “chicken shit” (his words) to ask anyone to dance, and if I acted boldly and simply went up to ask someone, she would probably say yes, because so many boys would be lined up on the opposite wall, afraid to go over. He made sure I had my appearance and hygiene correct. My clothes were clean, I had showered and washed my hair, and had applied a generous amount of deodorant. We’d had conversations about that before. I was ready.
When we got to the dance, we self-organized into our usual cliques. I was with the jocks who’d played basketball together in the winter. We had sloppy joes to eat, prepared by Mrs. Salling, who taught elementary school and was our advisor’s wife. I had eaten a moderate (for me) two sloppy joes and a handful of potato chips. I didn’t want to look like a pig, after all. But at the end of the eating portion of the evening, there was a lot of sloppy joe mix left. Mr. Salling bellowed out, “Stacey! McClain! Get over here!”
Dan Stacey and I had resolved our differences earlier in the year and no longer hated each other. It turns out that when he took pictures of me in my underwear in the locker room, there wasn’t even film in the camera. And our reputations as big eaters had certainly preceded us, and Mr. Salling didn’t want to let the food go to waste. So, he organized an eating contest between Dan and me. I told him I didn’t want to participate. I was already nervous enough about asking someone to dance as it was. But he wouldn’t hear of it, and he goaded me into the competition. And one thing I had at age 13 was a competitive streak, because I was constantly trying to prove myself to gain the respect of my peers.
We began eating. One each. Two each, Three. Four. Five. Ten. We didn’t even start slowing down until we had each eaten 12 Sloppy Joes apiece. The thirteenth went down slowly, and Dan had just finished his 14th. My buddies were cheering me on, and about three-fourths of the way through my 14th Sloppy Joe, I puked. I mean, it all came up. I managed to avoid getting any on my clothes, but it was all over my plate and the tables we used in the home ec room. A collective “EEEWWWWW” erupted from everyone. And yes, there had been girls watching, too; the ones I was supposed to ask to dance. Without thinking, I put the last quarter of my Sloppy Joe and my mouth and swallowed it whole. After all, my stomach was empty now. That made the next reactions of grossed-out girls even worse.
I was mortified. I don’t think there’s a description of the level of embarrassment that quite captures how I felt at that moment. I just knew I was never going to find a dance partner, not just that night, but maybe ever. How was I going to go home and face my dad? I felt like such a failure.
I couldn’t brush my teeth, but I rinsed my mouth out and bummed a piece of gum (or two) from one of my friends. When the dance started, Mr. Salling encouraged me to go ask a girl to dance, but I just meekly shook my head and stayed where I was. I was afraid of rejection, the same kind of rejection I had felt from my mom’s husband when I had tried to be a son to him. I couldn’t take it if the same thing happened to me in my new school.
About a half hour into the dance, I just decided to go home. I lived a 10-minute walk away from the school, and I didn’t want to call for a ride. I would walk home in the dark. Just as I got up to leave, a pretty little blonde girl named Jenny Harris asked me to dance. I looked skeptical. “Are you sure?” I asked. She smiled at me and nodded yes, and she took my hand and led me out to the dance floor, also known as the high school gym. It was a slow dance, and in those days in seventh grade, that meant putting your arms around each other and swaying back and forth, maybe even going in the occasional circle. As we rocked back and forth, I almost cried because I was so grateful to Jenny for having pity on me. And it felt like a colossal weight had been lifted from my shoulders. After the song ended, I thanked her, and she just smiled and nodded again.
I would discover much later that Jenny was in fact Mr. Salling’s pet and spy. She was a friend of the family, and she babysat their new son. Mr. Salling had seen what I was going through and said in his gruff tone, “Harris! Go dance with McClain.” And she had obliged him.
“Jenny,” or Jen as she goes by now, is still my friend to this day, 45 years later, and I always respected Mr. Salling because of this kindness. I related this story at his memorial a few years ago with Jen at my side, and I don’t think there was a single dry eye in the house, including mine. That’s the kind of teacher he was. That’s the kind of man he was. And having these types of people in my life at that age, both Jen and Mr. Salling, made all the difference in the world.
One of the first things I found different when I moved in with my dad is that I was permitted to take showers. That’s not to say that I didn’t bathe. Of course I did. But for 95% of the time I lived with my mom and stepfather, I took baths, and it was not a pleasant experience.
Because we saved money in any and every way possible, all of us kids took baths in the same bathwater. I went first, and then my brother and sister would be bathed at the same time. When my stepfather ran the bathwater, it was scalding hot. And I had to get in before it cooled off. It was very uncomfortable, and I got back out just as quickly as I could. I had to wash my hair while in the bath, and instead of rinsing my hair under running water, I had to submerge my head in the bathwater, again, still scalding hot.
There were no toys allowed in the tub. No bubble bath. Just Ivory dish soap, 99 44/100 percent pure. For how uncomfortable the bath was, I wouldn’t have wanted a toy in there with me anyway. It was all business, in and out. And if I was judged not clean enough, as happened more and more frequently as puberty began to set in? Well, the following bath would be given to me by my stepfather, who was, shall we say, not gentle with the washcloth. I might as well throw a trigger warning in right here.
Not only would he practically scrub the epidermis off me, but as dandruff was becoming a problem for me, instead of using a shampoo to treat it, I was given additional rinse time. He would grab me around the neck and the back of my skull and hold my head under water. And hold it. And hold it. He would hold my head submerged until I had to literally fight for breath. These struggles were probably part of what made my mom give me to my dad. She told me much later, when I was 29, that she thought that Steve was going to eventually kill me, and I have to admit, that as an 11-year-old, I thought that, too. There were some occasions where I was close to passing out or drowning. This process continued until the first pubic hair appeared. And from that point on, my baths were my own.
I was also given deodorant to use to combat the effects of puberty: Secret. “Strong enough for man, but made for a woman,” the slogan went. My mother had tried Secret, but it didn’t agree with her body chemistry, so I had to use the rest of the roll-on. Nothing like going to a sixth grade classroom smelling like your mom. It was humiliating to say the least.
When I went to live with my dad, though, everything changed. I was able to take showers without worrying how long I was in there. I was given Speed Stick to use as a deodorant, the same as my dad used. No one in my new family had ever used an anti-perspirant before, so I still pitted out my shirts regularly, but at least I didn’t smell bad. I wore a baseball cap to cover my always-greasy hair. Puberty was a rough go from the beginning for me. It didn’t matter when I showered, night or morning, my hair would be oily in just a few hours. I even wore that cap to school, despite school rules. This is probably another reason why Mr. Hunter was an incredible teacher. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now. That’s the kind of man he was. When I think about him and the teachers I had later in junior high and high school, is it any wonder I became one myself?
When I was nine years old, I joined the Cub Scouts, and one of the things the Cub Scouts was known for back at that time was teaching young boys to be responsible with pocket knives. I have carried a pocket knife ever since. I got my first one when I was nine and I carried it through elementary school, junior high, and high school. In high school, I even carried a hunting knife in a sheath on my belt. Can you even imagine? And yes, it was allowed, as long as the blade didn’t exceed three inches.
When I first became a full-time teacher, I lived in Michigan City, Indiana. There was an knife/cutlery store at the outlet mall in Michigan City. When I visited as a 20-something adult, I decided it was time to upgrade my pocket knife. And I found The Mechanic. This Swiss Army knife had everything I needed. It had the usual blades and bottle and can openers, but it also had a Phillips head screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Now, most of you are probably thinking that no one really needs a $30 pocket knife. You’d be wrong.
The Mechanic, by Victorinox
I used the Mechanic for over 25 years. As a teacher, there were hundreds of times that I used the pliers alone to pull a locker open when a student had jammed the door shut over their coat. I used the Phillips head screwdriver all the time when screws came loose. Go ahead, you’re thinking it. I always had a screw loose. I sharpened innumerable pencils when the classroom pencil sharpener failed in its only job, evoking gasps from students almost every time: “Mr. McClain, you have a KNIFE?” I always laughed and said, “You do know I have to pass a background check every five years to work here, right?”
I used the knife to open cans of Trader Joe’s version of Spaghettios when I was sitting at conventions, unwilling to pay $12 for a sandwich that should have cost four. When my banner stand lost an endcap, I had the tool to put it back on. If that knife ended up costing me a penny per use, I’d be shocked.
I took this knife everywhere I went, even on planes, pre-9/11. I would never have thought of going anywhere without it. But there are some places where you just can’t take it with you besides airports now. No knives are allowed in courtrooms, for example. The county/city building in Mishawaka has a metal detector. And unfortunately, one year, I find out the hard way that you could no longer take pocket knives into Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions play. A few years ago, we were making our annual sojourn to see the Lions play, and we had parked two miles away and walked. And when we got to the gates, there were metal detectors and a strict policy posted. I did not have the endurance or time to walk another four miles to take my knife to the car and return, so I did the unthinkable; I threw my knife away.
I thought I could replace it easily. It had to be a popular model with all the use I’d gotten out of it over the years, right? Oh, I was so wrong. The Mechanic had been discontinued in 2017. There were no more to be found. Every time I found a knife shop to visit, I always inquired, hoping someone would still have one in stock, but no one did. I thought to just look online, and sure, I could get another one–for a hundred dollars!
Finally, I caught a break this month and found one on Ebay. I only paid $50 for it, including shipping. If that seems exorbitant, it’s really not. My $30 knife in 1992 would cost $63.22 now, with inflation. I actually got the replacement for less than I paid for the original. Is it a brand-new knife? No, but it opens cleanly and the blades are sharp. And even though it’s not the original one that I bought in the 1990s, I hope it’s something my daughter will carry when I’m gone and remember me. Because she never knew a time when I didn’t have one. And the way she is with machines, she’ll probably get more use out of it than even I did.
I was a math teacher for 32 years. I taught every math subject under the sun, first in high school for 10 years, then eighth grade for 11 years, and then finally spending the final 11 years of my career teaching an elective course called 7th Grade Math Problem Solving. Now, what Math Problem Solving consisted of was a question for the ages. No one seemed to know. The teacher who was teaching it while I was teaching eighth grade hated the idea of a nebulous, free-form course that had no formal textbook or ordered set of standards. She was as uncreative a teacher as I’ve ever met. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she left teaching to become an administrator shortly afterward. I, on the other hand, despised being tied to specific texts and schedules.
A little background is required, here. At the beginning of my career, teachers had the power to select their own textbooks, by school system. Every seven years, just as Vulcans return to their home planet to mate, textbook companies would come courting, to try to bribe us teachers to vote to adopt their textbook. I guess you could call it Textbook Pon Farr. In a large school system with thousands of students, this adoption would be extremely lucrative for the book company. And when they courted us, they meant business, literally. Teachers would be treated to meals at the best restaurants in the area, and companies would try to sway us with promotional items, sample textbooks, and other gifts. One time, we teachers and a guest were treated to a private showing of Star Wars The Force Awakens, complete with free popcorn and snacks! Clearly, this system is ridiculous and corrupt, and just before I took on the problem solving course, the power to vote for a preferred textbook was taken from teachers completely. An administrator and his hand-picked committee made the decision for us, and in this particular instance, a very poor and unpopular decision was made. A problem-based curriculum was chosen, which would have been great, except for one thing; it was scripted.
When I say the textbook was scripted, that is precisely what I mean. It was in the format, say this, do that example, ask this question, assign these problems. And we were required to attend inservices where the teachers who piloted the program insisted that every page must be followed to the letter, or it would have no validity. We had some really creative, experienced teachers at that time, and I would stack their homemade lessons against the scripted curriculum any day of the week. They were told they could not vary from the book, even when their activities were similar. There was a mass exodus soon after, as they fled the system. If I’d had the experience and the years in, I would have followed them. As it was, I had the opportunity to jump ship and teach the soon-to-be-abandoned problem solving course. And jump I did.
One of the first things we established about the problem solving course was that it was to supplement the regular curriculum, remediating kids who had done poorly and enriching the kids who’d done well. It was a semester course, and at my suggestion, we put struggling students in the first semester so that I would have them for a full semester preceding the big test, ISTEP+, which was given in the spring. Higher-performing students would be scheduled in the second semester, so they could also benefit from the course, but their need wasn’t as critical as the struggling students. This process seemed to work well, as we saw a rise in scores soon after. It may have been a coincidence, and there is absolutely no way to make a case for the effect of this course. I just like to think it was.
I was free to use whatever materials I chose, and I was careful to support my choices with the state standards we were required to teach. I still laugh about those state standards, because they are so poorly written. In 2014, Indiana moved away from Common Core State Standards because of a misinterpretation of their origin. Tea Party Republicans viewed them as a federal takeover. And in 2014, then-Governor Mike Pence signed legislation making Indiana the first state to walk away from the national rollout of CCSS. We reverted back to the 2000 academic standards that we had been using before the advent of CCSS. When we finally adopted new standards written by Hoosiers for Hoosiers, they were about 80% Common Core, but paraphrased. So, by the time I was writing lessons to match the standards, we were using the Cliff’s Notes version of Common Core. But I wasn’t complaining, because one standard stood out over all others. I present to you, Indiana Math Standard 7.C.6:
Use proportional relationships to solve ratio and percent problems with multiple operations (e.g. simple interest, tax, markups, markdowns, gratuities, conversions within and across measurement systems, and percent increase and decrease).
At that time, we were required to write the standard we were teaching on our whiteboards, and I printed a copy off, posted it, and never took it down. It kind of covers a lot, doesn’t it? Other standards say stuff like “Add integers.” This one, though, could keep you busy for five months!
And busy we were. At the time of this writing, it’s the week of Thanksgiving, and I always had a lesson prepared that covered 7.C.6. Regular textbooks often had sections on unit pricing. You know what excited kids about those units? Absolutely nothing. Here’s how I handled it. I stopped at the local grocery chain, Martin’s Supermarkets, on Monday morning when the new flyers came out, and asked a manager if I could take 150 of them to use in the classroom. Now, what manager is going to say no to that? Free advertising directly into the hands of 150 students’ families, right? Win-win. I broke the students up into groups of four with an odd group of three if necessary and gave them a budget to buy communal food for a week. NO ALCOHOL! What, did you think I was a n00b? It was always the first thing they asked.
Martin’s sales always have a variety of unit pricing: 5/$5, 2/$4, etc. We’d start off easy on those. But then something like this would come up and the kids would choke.
This is an actual price from this week’s ad.
Suddenly, kids were in a panic. They couldn’t make it come out even. Ah, to heck with it, I’ll just buy three! And I’d point out, what if you just needed two? Are you going to waste that money? They usually thought better of it and played along. The unit price rounded to $1.67. The second one you bought would also cost $1.67, and the third one you bought would be $1.66, and the kids accepted that, as they should. I warned them, however, that it didn’t always work like that.
I’m a storyteller, you see. And there are very few things for which I don’t have a story readily available, and unit pricing is right in my wheelhouse. I worked at Meijer as a cashier when I was in college, back in the distant past of 1985. That’s right, the year Back to the Future came out. And we had just gotten those newfangled scanners. Before that, we had to ring everything up manually. Now, the problem with the computers was that they didn’t care about your rounding rules. I still remember a customer complaint when cans of Starkist tuna were 3/$1. Those were the days, right? And one day, a particular customer bought one can of tuna. It scanned $0.34. The customer complained. I agreed, one can of tuna at 3/$1 should have come out at $0.33. So, just for the sake of curiosity, I scanned it again. The second time, it scanned at $0.33, as it did on the third time. After I canceled the second two scans, I called the customer service manager, who actually got mad at me for questioning it. I said that the customer questioned it first, but that was unpersuasive. He yelled at me some more. Honestly, I don’t think he wasn’t cut out for customer service. He explained that the computers were programmed to do it that way because the company was losing that valuable penny on single can purchases, and if you sell 50,000 cans of tuna chainwide, that starts to add up to real money. How much money? By now, you see, the kids were hooked. They started whipping their calculators out and figuring it out for themselves. And this is what we call teaching.
I miss teaching this lesson, and I would have been doing it this week had I not retired.
