On Mr. Wilson — The Anachronistic Instructor Who Changed My Life
My dad, who threw our TV out on the lawn and got us reading, didn’t have the opportunity to pursue higher education and ended up working in a refinery for over 30 years. He was determined my brother and I would have the opportunity to do more and he strongly urged us to go into science or engineering.
With blue-collar parents and limited opportunities, my brother and I attended El Camino (Community) College (ECC) in Southern California for our first two years of undergrad. Those were the two best years of education either of us would receive in terms of access to quality, dedicated teaching professionals.
Both of us had the opportunity to take physics courses from Mr. Tom Wilson, who was a teaching virtuoso. It was impossible not to love physics after taking his classes. He was nearing the end of a 40-year career at ECC. His lectures were wildly entertaining. As I would later learn when I was in the front of a classroom, when you’ve mastered the material, you have the bandwidth to focus on presentation and why not entertain and inject humor while delivering a great lecture?
One of Mr. Wilson’s favorite sayings was in relation to what he considered to be a straightforward physics problem — “Why, even a nine-year-old child could solve it.”
While not even remotely athletic, at the age of 60, Mr. Wilson would demonstrate it is possible to safely land from a relatively high jump, if only one understands physics. He would climb up on the large desk at the front of the classroom that was about 4 feet (1.2 meters) high and proceed to jump onto the hard floor. By bending his knees sufficiently to increase the duration in which his momentum was changing, he showed us how to reduce the average force on our body.
Mr. Wilson was an anachronism. It seemed like he should have been living in the 19th century in genteel society in Europe. He was very fond of the classics and overall was very cultured.
He actually had a “Great Books List” he had compiled over the years that included many classics. Only those of us who completed the full four semesters of physics at ECC were given a copy of the much-coveted list that we heard about for two years.
I stayed in touch with Mr. Wilson after I completed my two years at ECC. One time I had the opportunity to visit him at his home. Surprisingly, he lived in a modest apartment that was literally across the street from the beach in Redondo Beach. It might have been that his late wife, who had taught English and shared his love of all things cultured, had fancied the beach. Not so for Mr. Wilson. He had not set foot on the beach in over 20 years at that point. He just wasn’t fond of all that sand. And that pesky sun with those bright sunsets over the beach. He made sure he didn’t deal with that by having aluminum foil on the windows.
Mr. Wilson was a purist about science in general, and physics in particular. Though he knew we needed to produce many more engineers than physicists, in his humorous way, he would look down his nose at engineering and talk about the virtues of physics. But, he did so in his always refined, articulate manner so it never offended the engineering students. He was beloved by all his students.
With that attitude towards physics, he expressed some disappointment that I had chosen to transfer to the University of California, Davis (UCD) with a major in electrical engineering.
It was my dad’s influence that led me to major in engineering. My dad pushed the idea of civil engineering as he thought it would combine working outdoors with working as an engineer. No doubt, he was projecting what he would have loved for a career choice. Instead, I chose a field of engineering that had what I thought would include more physics content than some other engineering fields.
But, for Mr. Wilson it wasn’t physics.
And since he was nearing retirement, he began to think of me as someone who could take over his position when he retired. Physics major or not, that wasn’t going to happen because I high-tailed it out of Southern California as soon as I could. Too many people, too much traffic, too much smog.
What I quickly found within the first two quarters of classes at UCD was that electrical engineering includes a lot of circuits courses. And, solving circuits just didn’t thrill me enough to want to have a career designing them. So, inspired by Mr. Wilson, I decided I wanted to become a community college physics instructor. Just not in Southern California.
I switched my major to physics at UCD and Mr. Wilson was delighted, especially since I was planning to become a physics instructor.
However, karma wasn’t going to let that go so easily. Before my career in academia concluded, I would teach various circuits classes over 20 times!
This is the first of a series of articles on my adventures and misadventures from my way-too-long 24 years in academia. See my second article here.
