Monthly Archives: April 2016

A TEACHER TO REMEMBER

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Education and Teaching, Uncategorized

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A Teacher to Remember

(I love this story)

Two years after I retired and moved to Port Ludlow in Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula, I got a call from Peninsula College.  They needed a part time Marine Biology teacher in a hurry.  The teacher they were planning on to teach a marine biology course off the main campus in Port Townsend became unavailable.  The class was in their class schedule and was full with 25 students.  It was to start in four weeks.

I hadn’t been teaching for a while and jumped at the chance to get back into the classroom with the future leaders of our country teaching my favorite subject.

The class was to be held at the Marine Science Center on the end of the pier at Fort Warden State Park in Port Townsend.  That was good news and bad news.  Being 45 miles away from the main campus, all the normal lab supplies were not available.  They had microscopes and a few prepared slides but that was all.  The good news was there were a dozen major aquariums in the building that we could use, and being my only class I had time to collect live specimens to use in our lab sessions.

It worked out well and I had a great time mixing with the younger generation again.  I stayed for six years.

Like in any class there are things that occur that were unplanned that you remember as special.  This is the story of one of those occurrences.

The lab session for this particular night was to look at live plankton.  Plankton is mostly very small animals and plants that drift in the ocean.  To catch and look at it under the microscope we use a ‘plankton net’; which is a very fine mesh butter fly type net.

This evening my plan was to have the class go down to the dock on the pier and pull the net along the dock, then go directly to the classroom (100 feet away), and watch the live specimens swimming around through their microscope.

Not wanting to get caught flat-footed I came an hour early and went down to the dock to check if there were enough plankton in the water to catch.  Sometimes the water was clear and almost no plankton would be in it, then I would switch to a different exercise.

The ramp down to the dock was forty feet long and as I walked down, the eight river otters that were resting on the dock all went back into the water.  They used the dock all the time and it was covered with otter poop.  As I was tiptoeing between the piles, I had a sudden realization that the poop on the dock looked exactly like the ‘Cliff Bar’ I was in the process of eating, as my ‘before class’ snack.  I broke off a good size chunk and placed it on a ‘clean’ spot at the edge of the dock, and went back up the ramp to meet my class.

An hour and a half later after my lecture, the class got their plankton nets and we all marched out to the dock to collect our lab material for the 2 hr. lab that was to follow.

There were a couple of otters on the dock that hit the water when we came down and I announced to the class to be careful not to step in the poop.  They all became very aware of it all over the dock.  I had them now – the con was on.

I said, “I wonder if they were males or females.”  I was sure one of them would take the bait, and one did. College students are always interested in sex.

“How can you tell?” was the question from the crowd.

I said, “It’s easy, the females have estrogen in their feces and it makes it sweeter than the males.”  I bent over, picked up my planted Cliff Bar, and popped it in to my mouth.  “This one is a male,” I said spitting it out, and going on with the class collecting like nothing had happened out of the ordinary.

Those 25 students may not remember much about marine biology as they grow old, but they will never forget the teacher, and have a great story to tell to their grandchildren.  Don’t you just love it when a plan all comes together?

 

Pop and the Bucket

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in Personal Philosophy, Tips for a Happy Life

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This story starts with my dad, (Pop), asking me to come to Cardiff in San Diego County where he and my mother lived in a mobile home park, (long since torn down and made into a state park). It was located on the water at the foot of the cliffs leading to Solana Beach.
There was a rock reef, exposed at low tide out in front of their mobile home, and we often fished from it. My dad would go out when the tide was real low and collect mussel, (a type of bivalve/clam), off the rocks, open them up, take out the meat, salt it down, freeze it, and it became the bait we used to fish in the surf and off the reef. We caught a lot of fish over the years and it was nearly the only thing I ever did with my dad as an adult. He was 70 when this story took place.
It took me about an hour to drive down to their place from Santa Ana where I lived and taught at Santa Ana College. He was waiting for me when I got there at 6 a.m. so we could catch the low tide, walk clear to the end of the reef, and cast way out to where some big calico bass and sheep head lived. Later in the morning, as the tide came in, we would move off the rocks to the beach and fish for Corbina and perch in the surf. The rocks became very dangerous when the waves started breaking over them as the tide came up.
I was watchful of Pop, at 70, he wasn’t as steady on his feet as he used to be, but he knew this reef well, every crack and hole in the rocks. He was born in 1899 and raised just a few miles back from this beach on a farm. His brothers and sisters would hike to the beach and fish off this very same reef when he was only seven. It had been his friend for sixty-three years, and still was.
We caught a few nice bass and the waves were getting where they were washing over the reef, I shouted over their noise, (my dad called it the “Sea Serenade”), and said, “Pop, let’s move over to the surf and try for some surf perch.” Pop liked to eat the perch and so did I. I walked over to him and picked up the bucket with our bait in it. Pop had his hands full with a 12-foot fishing rod in one hand and rod holder in the other. He made his own rod holder. It was ½ inch rebar three feet long and sharpened on one end with a two foot piece of two inch steel pipe welded to the other end, to put the butt of his surf rod in. It weighed at least seven pounds and he was using it as a walking stick to get across the uneven rocks, which were now under water as each wave passed over them.
Back to ‘The Bucket.’ When I picked up the bucket I was caught off-guard; it must have weighed about 25 pounds. It was like lifting one of my diving lead weight belts.
After we walked a hundred yards down the beach, and set up our gear, I asked, “Pop, why is the bucket so heavy?” The bait in it couldn’t have been more than a few pounds, and his spare reel he always took along was only a pound or two. He always carried some extra sinkers he molded out of lead from old tire balancing weights, but not 20 pounds worth. He was on his way to wade out into the surf and make a cast.
He glanced back, looked at the bucket, and said, “Those old metal buckets (he got it before the days of plastic), don’t last as well as they should. That one rusted out in the bottom. (No kidding, he had been fishing with it at the beach in salt water for 15 years). I fixed it so it will last at least as long as I can still carry it.” He laughed, walked out waist deep in the water, and cast out. He backed up so the water was only knee deep, which is what we always did when fishing the surf. I did the same thing and came back and stood next to him.
I just had to ask the question. “Pop, how did you fix it?’ I couldn’t imagine what he had done.
The answer was simple and matter of fact. “I poured three inches of concrete in it.” Just then he hooked a two-pound Corbina and we never talked about the bucket again. He was still using it when he fished with me for the last time at age 85. The only difference was I had to climb out on the rocks and get the bait.
Whenever I get the urge to buy something new, I remember the bucket…maybe you should too.