Science Quiz

My grade certainly wasn't as high as the empress's was, but unlike the empress, I remember my 8th grade science teacher very well. I tried to find his picture via Google, but alas, all I came up with was one print reference.

His name was Barney Finn, and he was unlike most other teachers we had in junior high school, and especially in elementary school. For one thing, he was a man, and there were few male teachers in grades 1 - 6, elementary school. For another, he was old. I'm guessing that he was maybe 65 when I was in his class the first year. Which was, I think, his first year teaching.

Imagine that Santa Claus, after years of loyal service, has been told that due to a medical condition beyond his control, he can no longer fly, or work in a cold environment. He has to do something, right? So he shaves off his beard and gets a crew cut, puts on a gray suit, and stands up in front of a junior high school science class in New Jersey. He's still great with kids, and still has the twinkle in his eye.

Okay, it was almost like that. Except Barney Finn had been a top college football player, and then a professional football player, in the 1920's. My father, who learned to read only so he could read the sports sections in the Boston newspapers, remembered his name. When he retired from playing, Barney Finn became a well-known and respected referee in college football.

The print reference I found on the Internet was about a questionable call he made during the 1964 Army-Navy game. When I started seventh grade in 1965, he was my science teacher. And he did indeed look exactly like a clean-shaven, crewcut Santa Claus.

Something he said once -- and he didn't teach a lot, but he loved to tell stories -- led us to believe that he had had to leave his previous career because he developed a vision condition in which he gradually lost his peripheral vision. A quality that a football referee would need, I guess.

Anyway, my seventh grade class was full of hooligans, and I stood out as the one little good girl, so Mr. Finn loved me. In eighth grade, I was the underachiever in an honors class, and he still loved me, but by then I realized that he loved all the kids who were bright enough to get his very dry sense of humor, which was my entire eighth grade class. We adored him. He rarely taught anything, but he stood up at the front of the room at the big lab desk -- he didn't walk around much, and when his attention was diverted, he turned with his whole body to look -- and held a yardstick in his right hand. (Actually, it was a metre stick, as we were supposed to be learning about the metric system that year.) When we became unruly, he smacked it down on the black surface of the desk. Occasionally, a chip or two would fly off the end of the stick. By the end of the school year, the stick was maybe ten inches long. Which we all thought was pretty funny.

I just loved him, and I learned a great deal about being a person and a grown up from him, as did we all in that class. I don't suppose he taught for very many more years; I never knew why he was teaching at all. I know that he had gone to college as a science education major -- Columbia University, I seem to recall -- but had either never taught or had taught some little bit while he was playing football. I know I once mentioned his name to the FIL, who would have been one of his bosses in the school system, and he just beamed. There wasn't much you could say about Barney Finn, except that anyone who knew him pretty much loved him.

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