3.1. A Little Bit of Mr Hauswald#
I’ll bet if you ask almost any professional scientist what first made them think of a scientific career they’ll probably remember a high school teacher. That was certainly the case for me in my little farm community of Sycamore, Illinois in the late 1960’s. In our school, there were two tracks for students: the “college track” and the “technical track.” The latter was for kids who wanted to farm or be a machinist or a cook or a secretary and so on. This worked great and they all had jobs that applied credit for their area of concentration. So they made money and learned on the job.
Fig. 3.1 Walter E. Hauswald
1904-2004#
The college track in those days included four years of math, through pre-calculus; two years of a language (French or Latin…my mother made me take Latin which was taught by the baseball coach whom I disliked — inside the lines and in the classrooom); and four years of science. (Oh yeah. We had a whole term of “typewriter.”) We took a biology course in our freshman year — taught by the track coach. In those days we learned about evolution without any controversy.
Our sophomore-through-senior science was all Mr Hauswald: pre-chem, chemistry, and physics. Mr Hauswald was a large, taciturn man who’d been teaching at that school since the 1930’s. When I was there he was seeing children of parents and grandparents that he’d taught there. Outside of the classroom, people were afraid of Mr Hauswald. He was large, had a no-nonsense demeanor, and posted scores for exams and quizes by student name outside of the door to his room. That took some getting used to.
But inside the classroom, he was patient and a funny, funny man. I can still remember him swivelling on his stool with both hands pointing at the window to indicate what happens to an electron in a magnetic field. He took me under his wing for some reason and I spent my study hall periods in his room setting up his labs and demonstrations for the day.
He encouraged me to take a computer course at IIT on Saturdays, which was traumatic for my parents who thought that a 16 year old shouldn’t be driving 60 miles into the dangerous city — but they liked Mr Hauswald, and so that worked. He also encouraged me to read outside of class on the topics that he would only skim. For me the outside fascination was Quantum Theory and I wrote a term paper on it for him that wasn’t required.
Mr Hauswald made my bones and in part I dedicated my PhD thesis to him and enjoyed talking to him after I graduated and began working as a scientist and a professor. He’s gone now, but I think about him as I stand in front of classes.
