A day late and a 'thank you' short

I've been wanting to share this story for some time now... if for no other reason than to remind others that they needn't experience the kind of regret that I carry around with me every single day.

I've mentioned on many occasions that I was never a very good student.  Alright... I was a disaster of a student.  In fact, using the term 'student' to describe me is only appropriate in the sense that I was physically present in a classroom for a set number of years.

However, I somehow managed to get a dazzling score on my SATs, graduate from high school, and even earn a BA in English Lit.  That 'somehow' had a name: Mr. David Patterson... and I can say without hesitation that most of what I know today about a dizzying range of subjects, I learned from this incredible man.

Between 3rd and 4th grade my family moved from New Paltz ,New York to San Diego, California.

When we arrived there I was evaluated by the new school system, given a battery of tests (including an IQ test), and based entirely on the results I was assigned to a 'gifted' program at a nearby elementary school. 

The 'gifted ' program was full of Über-smart kids, and taught by some of the most imaginative teachers on the planet. 

My 4th grade teacher was an intimidating, giant of a man named David Patterson.  He was a retired Marine with the requisite crew cut, burned/creased leatherneck, ramrod-straight posture and a deep, gravelly smoker's voice. 

Mr. Patterson didn't walk... he marched in regal, perfectly measured strides.  His voice carried across the playground much as I'm sure it had once carried across parade grounds and battlefields.  He was larger than life and a terrifying presence for an inveterate slacker like myself.  However, I quickly found that Mr. Patterson's craggy, imposing exterior camouflaged a gentle, intensely thoughtful teacher. 

This isn't to say he was a softy.  Oh my no! 

I remember on one occasion when a black girl in our class came back from recess crying about someone having made a racial slur, Mr. Patterson stood us at attention and harangued us like new recruits for nearly 30 minutes.  It was a terrifying ordeal to say the least, and I never experienced anything like it again... even while I attended boot camp in the navy!

One day Mr. Patterson handed each of us a protractor, a length of string and a lead fishing weight.  He didn't explain what we were going to do.  He simply told us to tie the string onto the tiny hole in the middle of the protractor and the weight onto the end of the string.

From there we were led out on to the enormous playground/ball field that surrounded the school on two sides and told that we were going to play a game called 'Angles and Elevations'. 

He placed us in a big circle in the middle of the field and let us take turns standing in the center, holding the protractor flat against our chins with the curved side away from us, measuring the number of degrees between specific classmates around us. 

This, he explained, was how the angles portion of the game worked.

After we had mastered this fairly straight-forward skill, he told us to hold the protractors upside-down and let the string hang down over the curved portion with the numbers.  He ordered (Mr. Patterson never requested) one of the more agile kids in the class to climb up onto one of the baseball backstops and then told us to look at this kid's nose from along the bottom (which was now the top) edge of our protractors. 

Once we all had this student's nose sitting on the top edge of out protractors he shouted "Now trap the string against the side of the protractor!"  Those of us who didn't drop our protractors out of shock did as he had ordered.

He then went from student to student and asked us to tell him the number on the protractor over which the strong was trapped. The numbers varied widely and we were sure we'd completely screwed up when he bellowed, "Excellent! That's the elevation part of the game! Now can anyone tell me why you all got different elevations?"

We stood in dumb silence for nearly five minutes before one of the kids realized that it was because we were all standing different distances from the backstop when we took our elevation measurement. 

I thought Mr. Patterson was going to explode from pride that we had all caught onto the basics of this 'game' so quickly, but he wasn't finished yet.

He then used marks in the sandy playing surface to show how we each had very similarly spaced strides, and that once we knew the length of these strides (it turned out to be 3 strides = 2 yards), we could accurately measure any distance that we could walk.  He also taught us how to do triangulation (although he didn't use that word) to figure out missing measurements such as height.

From there he handed out pads of graph paper and pencils, explained that each little square was two yards, and had us write down the angles, elevations and distance to various other landmarks within view.  By the end of the day we were standing in large complex shapes and accurately drawing pictures of them. 

The last thing we did was collect all the angles and elevations for the perimeter of the playground and drew a scale picture of it on our graph paper.  We were amazed to find that everyone had drawn the exact same picture of the playground... right down to the height of the chain-link fence!

The next day we came to school ready for more fun and games... and we weren't disappointed.

Mr Patterson divided us into two-man teams and each pair was assigned a specific street near the school.  We were told to measure the angles, elevations and distances of every feature we could find including the length and width of the street, the elevation of any hills and the exact location and angle of any intersecting streets.  He told us that we should take our measurements by having one team member stand at each end of whatever was being measured, site in on each-other's nose... and for each of us to compare our numbers with the other to make sure they agreed.

When we returned to the classroom after lunchtime we were surprised to find that all the desks and chairs had been moved outside and that the entire floor was covered with butcher paper with a graph-paper grid penciled over it's entire surface.

Mr. Patterson explained to us that we would spend the afternoon transferring our angles, elevations and distances onto the butcher paper just the way we had transferred the measurements of the playground to our graph paper pads the previous day. 

As the end of the school-day drew near, a map of the neighborhood began to emerge on the floor of our classroom.  Thirty minutes before the final bell a man entered the room carrying a large rolled piece of paper under his arm and was introduced to us as a surveyor who worked for the City of San Diego.  The rolled paper under his arm, he explained, was the official city map with distances and elevations, for our neighborhood that men in his department had prepared.

We sat quietly in the corners of the room watching the city surveyor move industriously over our map making comparisons to reference points on his own map.  For almost 20 minutes nobody spoke, and the only sound was the scratch of his pencil as he marked off reference points and made barely audible comments to himself.

Ten minutes before the final bell the city surveyor rolled up his map with a professional flourish and for the first time looked around at the students.  I will never forget what he said, or how his words made me feel, for as long as I live:

"I couldn't have done a better or more accurate job myself.  I'd have no problem signing my name to this map and publishing it tomorrow.  It is perfect!"

He then went on to say how proud we must feel to have mastered geometry and trigonometry at such an early age.  We stared at each other dumb-struck as he droned on with other unfamiliar words like sine, cosine and tangent, and silently wondered what the heck he was talking about.  We didn't know any of that stuff... we'd just learned a game called 'angles and elevations'.

I never did learn the proper geometry or trigonometry terms (or the concepts they described).  But those two days in the fourth grade gave me the confidence to use common sense and non-traditional methods to solve many of the mathematical problems life would hand me.

This game I've described was just one of dozens he taught us that encompassed subjects like chemistry, music, language, art, architecture and even physics.  The secret was that he never used the scary names and terminology that would have brought the shutters crashing down in many of our young minds.

Like most self-absorbed kids, it wasn't until years later that I realized what I debt I owed to Mr. Patterson.  If I had to sum up Mr. Patterson's contribution to my life, I'd have to say that he taught me the essentials of improvisation, and not to be afraid to take on an unknown challenge using my small arsenal of known skills.

I thought several times during my last year of university about getting in touch with him and telling him how much he had helped prepare me for life's myriad formal and ad-hoc problems... but I never seemed to get around to doing it.

A couple of years after graduation while moving into a new apartment I found myself with a pad of graph paper in my hand, figuring out if some new (actually hand-me-down) furniture was going to fit.  I didn't know the formulas or names for any of the disciplines one would use to solve such a problem, but I knew instinctively how to do it.  After all... I'd done it countless times on a sandy playground in 4th grade.

It was then that I decided to get in touch with Mr. Patterson to finally thank him for all his help.

Unfortunately he had long since retired from teaching and Patterson is a very common name.  So I sent a very long thank-you letter to him in care of the San Diego City School System with the request that they forward it to him at whatever address he received his pension payments.

Almost two months went by before I got a reply.  I knew it was from him because the letter had a southern California return address and was written in a firm, strong hand.

But when I opened it up I found I was wrong.  It was from his daughter.

She was writing to tell me that her father had passed away just the year before and that the city schools had forwarded the letter to her.  She had read my letter and was delighted to hear that her father had touched my life so profoundly.  She also enthusiastically concurred with my assessment that her father had been a very special man.

I've shared this story with you because I often find myself improvising my way through a difficult problem only to be struck by waves of remorse for having needlessly procrastinated thanking the person who had taught me so many of life's essential skills.

If there is someone (or perhaps several someones) like this in your past, please stop what you're doing and find a way to thank them.  Google them... email them... write them a letter... call them on the phone... do whatever it takes to track them down.

But whatever you do, don't go through the rest of your life feeling a day late and a thank you short.