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March 09, 2007
Goodbye, Jerry
Jerry Huff was one of many professors that I had classes with during my undergraduate years at the University of Saskatchewan. Although I wasn't shocked, I was quite sad when I heard the news that his condition had finally caught up with him and he had passed away.
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Jerry was certainly a unique professor. I don't know that he ever had any formal "education theory" training, but he certainly was the best I have ever had in regards to teaching ability. Students who attended his classes were treated to a man with a great outlook on life (I don't ever remember him being grumpy), and who definitely loved to teach. With other instructors I've had, it seems that their research was their primary motivation for being at the university, but not Jerry. He always made us feel like he genuinely cared, and really wanted each of us to succeed.
I know that many students have their "favorite professor", and I'm sure that there are a great number of superb teachers out there. I've read stories by other students who have wonderful stories about their professor, and they're always entertaining. Some times you can relate those stories of others back to your own experience.
I have a couple of good stories about my interaction with Jerry. (Actually, we just called him "Jer" most of the time, and that in itself shows how close his students felt to him). One particular time in a third-year undergrad class, about half way through class Jerry was writing some formulas on the chalkboard. He made a small error in one of the formulas, so I stopped him and said, "excuse me sir, I hate to interrupt, but I think you made a mistake."
He fired back with, "no, you don't."
"Excuse me?"
"You don't hate to interrupt. In fact, you really enjoy being able to think faster than the professor and point out his mistake. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind at all - we should get the error fixed, for sure. And I'm not saying that you're rude, because you're not. But don't claim that you actually mind interrupting."
"Fair enough." And then I went on to help him correct the error.
I think that most other professors would have reacted differently. Truthfully, I may not have stopped too many other of my undergrad profs, because many of them would have blown their top over being corrected in front of the whole class. But not Jerry - he didn't mind, and he laughed about it with me later. He loved the learning process, and acknowledged that it was a lifelong endeavour.
Jerry never just outright gave the answer to students who came to him with questions, he always challenged them to think for themselves. He would help students walk through the proper thought processes, and people who came to him for help actually felt that they learned something from talking with him.
One spring day around 1993 I was hanging out in Jerry's office when he asked me if I wanted to come with him for a ride. Sure, why not. We went in his car first to his house as he had to pick something up, and then we drove to some unknown destination. I was just happy to be along for the ride since Jerry was always a non-stop fountain of discussion. Along the way, he asked me how I would go about making a cut in a flat ribbon of aluminum that was flying by in an assembly line. The problem, he said, was that you didn't want to stop the aluminum to make the cut because that would slow the manufacturing process down too much.
I thought about how I would go about making a cut in a moving band of metal, and the best I could come up with was a variable-speed wheel controlled by a computer with a blade on it. He said that he thought of that, too, but the math required to speed up and slow down that wheel was too complicated, and made the timing hard. Then he shared his solution with me - just cut the metal. Just ram a blade down and cut it. I said, "but what about the metal behind the blade, that would now be running into it?" "Aha, that's why it's important that I said the metal was aluminum... it bends, you see!" Yes, I did see, and the solution was superb in its simplicity.
We finally arrived at our destination, and it turned out to be a window blind manufacturing facility. The machine in question was located within the blind facility, and he turned it on and gave me an in-person demonstration. I was quite amazed that here was a university professor who had some actual hands-on experience in the real world, building machines that worked and were in production use.
In 1998 I started working at the University of Saskatchewan, and from 1998 to 2000 I would occasionally wander over and grab Jerry for a coffee. He was always up for standing outside the engineering building just to chat. I miss Jerry, but at the same time I'm glad that I had the time with him that I did.
Goodbye, Jerry.
Here's the obituary that was run the local paper, just in case it disappears online and others want to read it later:
Posted by Hammer at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2007
Life Is A Highway
Back when I lived in Kelowna, BC, I owned a van that was white with a bright orange stripe painted down the side - yes, it used to be an ambulance. How ironic that it would almost be the death of me...
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It was the winter of 1991, and I was working full time in Kelowna. It was a Friday evening, just shortly after work, and I was heading to Vancouver on the Coquihalla Connector, highway 97C. The roads were quite slippery due to the snow that was falling, plus the temperature was hovering just around freezing point. Before I left work for the day I told everyone that I was heading to Vancouver for the weekend, and my boss told me, "drive very carefully!" Of course I promised him I would.
About 30 minutes up the mountain highway, I went to change the music I was listening to. I reached down, grabbed Tom Cochrane's Mad Mad World disc, and popped it into the CD player. I pressed play, and then looked back to the road ahead of me. No sooner had I given my full attention back to the road when my van started drifting on the road. I looked carefully down at the road, and realized that I was on sheer ice (glare ice, black ice, whatever you want to call it). Uh-oh.
Using all of my available driving knowledge, I applied a few steps in turn: ease off the gas pedal - no change, the van was still drifting. Shift the transmission into neutral - no change. Turn the steering wheel very slightly - no change. Shift back into drive and apply a bit more gas - no change. Nothing that I tried made any difference to the path that the van was on, it just kept going. There was no traction at all.
About this time, the music was getting into the main verse: "Life is a highway / I want to ride it all night long..." In spite of the situation, I was fairly relaxed, and I got to enjoy the perverse appropriateness of the music, as the front left tire of the van inched closer and closer to the meridian that was dividing the highway.
As the tire finally caught the meridian, and sank into the snow, the whole van was pulled down and proceeded to dive into the ditch. Then the angle of the vehicle was just too much, and it rolled. And rolled. And rolled. Well, it seemed to roll for a long time to me, but it was actually only one full revolution, coming to rest again right-side up on all four tires.
I shut the engine off and paused, reflecting on what just happened. I noticed that my head was bleeding, but I knew that head wounds tended to bleed a lot without actually being too bad. My neck didn't seem sore, nor did my back or anything else. I undid my seat belt and stepped out of the van into a foot of powdery snow. In spite of rolling the van, it was quite a nice night out, with flakes of snow still gently falling around me.
I gathered the things that I needed to take with me and hitched a ride back to Kelowna. A few stiches to the head later, and I was no worse for wear. The next morning when I told my boss what happened, he said, "I thought I told you to drive carefully?"
"Yes, I was," I said, "the speed limit is 110 and I was only doing 70."
"Obviously that wasn't careful enough."
OK, point taken.
So the two scary things about this story are: first, I had only buckled my seat belt about 5 minutes prior to rolling the van. At that time in my life, I wasn't wearing my seat belt all the time like I do now. My injuries would have been much worse without that seat belt.
Second, there was no guard rail on that section of highway, and my van could have just as easily drifted to the right instead of the left. If it did, I would have rolled down the side of a mountain.
I guess this wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the story I have about the car that almost killed me. I think the universe needs me alive for some reason unknown to me.
Posted by Hammer at 03:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2007
Made In China
My oldest daughter came back from a birthday party this past weekend, and noticed that the rubber ball she got in her take-home goodie bag was stamped "Made In China". She asked me why it said that...
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So I explained that the ball was indeed made in China, another country far away from Canada.
"Why was it made in China?"
"Because it's less expensive to make that ball in China."
"What else is made in China?"
"A lot of stuff."
She then walked away with a curious look on her face. Little did I know that she was proceeding to examine every toy she could find upstairs at the time. About fifteen minutes later she came back to me and said that of all the toys she checked, all but one was made in China. She handed it to me, and I laughed as I read, "Made in Taiwan"
"Where is Taiwan?"
"Fairly close to China. It's also quite far from here."
"Why would they make toys so far from Canada and then bring them here?"
"Because it costs less to make the toys in China and Taiwan."
"But doesn't it cost money to bring them here?"
Wow.
I don't know why I keep being surprised that six-year-old children are so smart. The light bulb obviously went on in her head... and now she's trying to understand global economics. Simply amazing.
So we had a chat about the way that toys are made, and the cost of labour versus cost of inputs, coupled with a very short explanation of economies of scale when shipping massive quantities of goods at once. I know, that sounds like I was talking above her, but trust me I wasn't.
The questions just keep getting tougher.
Posted by Hammer at 10:39 PM | Comments (1)