2010 DEC Clothesline

Greetings to all on 10 DEC 2010.

Thought for the Day
A few months ago NBC ran special reports entitled Education Nation for a week. Watching some of the features took my mind back to my most memorable teacher. So, this month I’ll take a break from the usual fare and take you back to the days of my youth.

There are several teachers that I remember fondly over the long course of my formal education, but one stands out among the rest. It was August 1972 and I was beginning my sophomore year at Gulf Coast Junior College (now GCCC). As a math major, one of the required classes was Physics - two semesters at five hours each plus a lab meeting.

Our instructor was Robert Tinney. We had heard of his penchant for throwing erasers at inattentive students. Fortunately, I never witnessed that but did detect his anger with the occasional insolence of a student. Mr. Tinney gave detailed lessons and instructions. One still lingers with me; his lab rules contained the line, “No dangerous horseplay.” We took that to mean that “safe” horseplay was OK!

He was your stereotypical physics teacher with coke-bottle thick horn-rimmed glasses and crew-cut hair. He always wore black slacks with penny loafers (the tassel kind) and a white shirt with double pockets to hold all his tobacco products which included cigarillos, a pipe and tobacco pouch. Oh, I almost forgot; he always wore a bow-tie. Our favorite was the die-cut leather one!

At precisely 9:58 he emerged from his office, stopped at the outdoor water fountain and sauntered over to our primitive classroom to begin the lesson promptly at 10:00 AM. On Fridays we met from 10 until noon. If he was even a few minutes late, you knew he wouldn’t be there at all. He missed a couple of classes that Spring semester. We didn’t know it but his health was already beginning to fail.

Physics was one of my favorite classes, especially the labs. My lab partners were a friend I’d known since first grade, Wayland Whitten, and a guy maybe a dozen years our senior named Paul Bishop. We made a great team, plus Paul already knew how everything worked! I did well in the class: I think I made an A and a B for the two semesters. On two different occasions, Mr. Tinney mis-graded my tests to my advantage. Both times I went to his office and pointed out the errors. He wasn’t the kind of teacher to say, “Oh, don’t worry about that.” Instead, he perfunctorily down graded my test. By the way, his tests were difficult; the multiple choice question had a “guessing penalty,” minus one if left blank, minus two if incorrect! He would let us write anything we wanted on a 3x5 note card as a cheat-sheet for the tests. We actually had one student who tried to cram so much onto the card that he wrote with a fine-tip pencil while using a magnifying glass! Needless to say, he didn’t do that well on the tests.

So what’s the point of this story? When my two years were over at GCCC, I was headed for the University of West Florida to complete my B.A. in Math Education. Unbeknownst to me, my name was in the running for a scholarship to help pay for those next two years at UWF. I was awarded the scholarship and had all my tuition paid for my junior and senior years.

As Paul Harvey would say, now for the rest of the story. After finishing college, I became a math teacher at Bay High School in Panama City Florida where I worked for 13 years before moving to Texas. The husband of one of my colleagues was Mr. Traweek, who had also taught science at GCCC. One day during those early years, Mr. Traweek was at our cafeteria table joining his wife for lunch. I don’t remember how the subject came up but he asked if I knew why I received that scholarship. As usual, I was clueless. It was then that he informed me how Robert Tinney had fought for me to receive that award! Unfortunately, Mr. Tinney had passed away by this time, but I have to think that my honesty made an impression on him. I’ve always wondered if he made that second error on my test on purpose.

For all those reasons, Robert Tinney is my most memorable teacher. [1] Maybe you can tell someone about your favorite teacher. You never know which seeds will yield a harvest.

May God Bless
Mike Toole
Lori Moores, ed.

1. The best we can determine, Mr. Tinney was born 1 APR 1932 and died 4 DEC 1979. We were never able to locate an obituary.