Not bad for someone who barely passed high school physics
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- February 26, 2018
- 1788
In over 60 years on the planet, I’ve only come up with a handful of immutable truths, one of which is that whenever you think things are going well, you’ve made a huge mistake. Fate is an unforgiving eraser and destiny a shredded piece of paper. Nothing — repeat nothing — lasts. Everything’s always in flux.
But we know this, or at least we should have learned that lesson by now. Think back to your school days and the way the teachers tried to get you to understand that even when you’re sitting still, you’re still traveling at a thousand miles per hour. And we were like, “Whoa, hold on for a second. That’s just crazy.”
But it wasn’t. And it isn’t.
I always liked my science classes, especially biology when we got to dissect earthworms, frogs and fish heads. That was so cool. And who didn’t enjoy chemistry and playing around with those Bunsen burners?
Then came physics, and well, that’s when I jumped off that particular seat in the curriculum Ferris wheel, struggling just to make a passing grade. To me it was a foreign language, one I had no particular interest in mastering.
I remember being held after class one day and having a very brief conversation with the teacher, one of those revered icons who’d been around forever and was stuck in his ways. He had no time for someone who just didn’t get what he was selling.
“You’re aware that you’re close to failing my class, yes?” he said. “You’re also aware that you have eight weeks to do much better work, no?”
That’s what his classroom was like: contradiction plus humiliation equaled elucidation.
Fortunately baseball practice ate into that particular period, the last of the day, so I got a free pass out of there most of the time,
But most of my friends excelled. I limped home with a C-minus.
With that grease stain on my resume, I had no illusions about being accepted to a good college, so I collected a batch of backups and was prepared to pick the least objectionable when Notre Dame wrote and asked, “Why not you? Why not South Bend?”
To this day I have no idea what happened.
It was a great thing to see my parents so happy. But as I said at the outset, be careful about thinking life is too good because that’s when God wields his ball-peen hammer and cracks your skull, sort of the way the nuns did in grade school, except they used a steel ruler.
On balance though, I did better than I — or probably anyone else — thought I would. If you throw out the first semester of my freshman year when I didn’t know how to study and the second semester of my senior year when I didn’t care enough to do it any more, I earned the dean’s list six straight times.
At ND, just to be precise, the minimum GPA required to make it was 3.5. That was on a 4-point scale. Not bad for someone who barely passed high school physics.
Fortunately I only had to take one science class before I declared my major, which was English, though I was sorely tempted to go into theology. Because after my Catholic grade-school carnage, I figured I’d been through the worst of it. I passed on that.
But what happened was that Earth science class I took my freshman year was one of the best scholastic experiences of my university days. For one thing it was held in a Gothic-style stone building with turrets and gargoyles, directly next door to the Freshman Year of Studies office and within praying distance of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
Which, to anyone unfamiliar with the campus, means that it was located smack dab between the Grotto and the Golden Dome, two of ND’s most popular landmarks.
I remember walking to Earth science class in the fall of 1973 as the orange and red leaves slowly swirled and wafted, ready to learn. This was, as you’ll probably remember, at the height of Watergate crisis, and the president had pretty much cashed his check when he orchestrated the Saturday Night Massacre.
We noticed of course but were much more excited about the upcoming game against Southern Cal, ranked number one in the nation even as our Fighting Irish kept winning.
Earth science class was different from my others in that the priest who taught it wasn’t a robot. In fact he was always interested in weaving current events into his syllabus, once comparing the Indian sub-continent’s crashing into Southern Asia with the Ervin Committee’s impact on Nixon’s doomed administration.
“The result,” he said, tapping the wall-sized map of the world that served as his backdrop, “as our studies will show, was the formation of the Himalayas, the greatest mountain chain in the world.”
He paused before adding, “They will outlast this and every president yet to come, but I fear this one will fade faster.”
Plate tectonics was only one of the fascinating aspects of his class. We learned about gravity and the pull of the tides, undersea volcanoes and the formation of glaciers, geysers and the gaseous core of the Earth, not to mention the notion that our planet was in constant motion, rotating on its axis even as it orbited the sun.
“You will doubt this,” he said, “when you’re stuck in your dorm rooms with a foot or two of snowfall on the ground with no place to go and nothing fun to do, but I assure you it’s true.”
He paused again. “I suggest you study your Earth science textbook,” he said, “or you could try walking across St. Mary’s Lake. Make sure it’s frozen, though there’s really only one way to find out.”
What happened when I took him up on his challenge? That’s another story for another time.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.