The Bolt

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: