The first draft of this essay was composed several years ago and sent to Tim, an old high school friend who was dying of cancer. The essay was a tribute to Jim Arnwine, our high school science teacher, a man who had exerted a profound impact on our lives. That initial version included a memory of when my friend, as a high school junior, was helping Mr. Arnwine complete his Masters thesis, a study of two varieties of field mice. While Tim was shifting to reverse in his father’s old Jeep, he accidentally broke all the thermometers being used to record daily temperature variations. The draft also recorded Mr. Arnwine’s assistance in helping me compose a research project investigating garden seed inhibitors, a project that I submitted for a summer biology institute for high school students at Emporia State University.
Several years after composing that essay for my dying friend, I discovered that Mr. Arnwine’s wife had died in an accident, and I decided to send him a revised version of the essay originally written for Tim, one of his star pupils. For this revised version, I deleted several paragraphs, including the references to the demolition of thermometers and my failure to obtain funding for a high school botany experiment. This past winter, three years later, I was reminded of the essay while reading James Nardi’s Discoveries in the Garden and came across information about seed inhibitors, explaining the mechanisms that my little unfulfilled science experiment was intended to investigate. Although this latest draft no longer has any botanical or gardening references, I feel they are still present, like the soil underneath the flowers, present but not explicitly acknowledged. And so I post this month’s garden essay, without any expressed reference to gardens, gardeners, or gardening.
It is gone now. All that remains of the three-story high school brick building, built in the early 1900s, is an empty lot covered with white gravel and intermittent weeds. During the years when I attended this small high school in southeastern Kansas, it shared the city block with a grade school building, constructed during the Depression, and a cafeteria/shop/FFA building erected twenty years later. Only the shell of the 1950s expansion still remains.
In my youth that triangular constellation was the center of my educational, social, and cultural life. In those buildings I learned to read and write, studied algebra and geometry, played tether ball and basketball, learned to dance the two-step and the twist, played trumpet and sousaphone in the marching band, acted in several silly high school comedies, discovered the allure of adolescent women in tight-fitting sweaters, and during my four years in high school completed five science courses. The first four of those classes–general science, biology, chemistry, and advanced biology--were taught by Jim Arnwine, the high school’s science teacher from 1959 to 1962.
Although Mr. Arnwine has certainly been one of the most influential people in my life, I am struck, fifty years later, by how little I ever knew about him. Although I have the impression he was married at the time, I have no recollection of his wife, what she looked like, whether she was employed outside the home. They must have rented a house in Howard, but I have no memory of where they lived or what their house was like. After he left Howard, he taught biology for over 30 years at a community college, but once he left Howard we never had any further direct contact, our lives pursuing different trajectories.
All my grade school and high school teachers could be divided into two groups. Most of them were women, life-long residents of the community, most married to farmers or owners of small businesses in Howard. The other, smaller group were transients, typically young men with fresh teaching certificates from small colleges in Kansas or Oklahoma. When Mr. Arnwine arrived with his freshly minted degree, he surely knew he would not be staying long.
I don’t know what was the salary for a new teacher in the fall of 1959, but I suspect it was around $4,000. Salaries were not a topic that teachers discussed with their students–though I do recall one afternoon after football practice walking into the coaches’ office/supply closet/training room and overhearing the assistant football coach announcing that he made more money in the summer working for the railroad than he made in nine months of teaching. I don’t know if Mrs Arnwine had a separate income, but I am sure it was a subject I never thought about. Only now, a half century later, do I wonder about the life of a young teacher and his bride, living in an economically depressed county on the edge of the Flint Hills in southeast Kansas. Who did they know? What kind of social life did they have? How did a science teacher’s wife spend her days while Mr. Arnwine was explaining to high school freshmen the rudiments of general science?
Although I had several good teachers while in high school, Mr. Arnwine was my favorite. We all enjoyed his lectures, and in our own modest ways we appreciated the energy he brought into the classroom. He was excited about science, and in a classroom where we were introduced to the word “osmosis,” we managed to absorb occasional bits of that passion.
Despite spending hundreds of hours in Mr. Arnwine’s “Science Room,” I find it amusing that my most distinct memory is from watching him play basketball on a team of Elk County teachers assembled to play a team of traveling barnstormers, a minor league version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Needless to say, part of the evening’s attraction was watching our teachers wearing gym shorts and demonstrating they were not in great physical conditioning. But it was evident that Mr. Arnwine had played some ball in his time. The teachers didn’t win the game, but that evening we acquired a new appreciation for their courage and good humor.
As for his demeanor in the classroom, I recall Mr. Arnwine sitting cross-legged on top of his desk, his lanky body coiled like a spring, ready to burst into action as his mind leaped from lecturing to asking questions to insisting we ponder the beautiful symmetry of chemical equations. We were often amused by Mr. Arnwine’s nasal, Oklahoma twang– though we were all unaware of any issues with our own pronunciation of “warsh” and “crick”–and while we might have been amused by his southern speech patterns, we all understood that he expected us to take our academic work seriously. In most high school classes when the teacher asked a question, few of us, other than our class valedictorian, made an effort to respond, but it was different in Mr. Arnwine’s room. He was as close to Socrates as we would ever see in Howard, Kansas.
Ironically, the two iconic memories I have from Mr. Arnwine’s classes say nothing about chemistry and biology but rather touch on more fundamental mysteries of education. The first moment occurred in my freshman year when Mr. Arnwine needed a flame for a class demonstration, and he asked me to serve as his assistant. All I was required to do was light a match. As someone who had never smoked a cigarette and had minimal experience starting fires, I accepted this assignment with immediate trepidation. My fears proved well-founded as I proceeded to ruin several matches without producing any noticeable fire. It did not help that I was standing in front of the class, everyone’s eyes focused on my ineptitude. Eventually Mr. Arnwine had me pass the matches to one of our experienced smokers, who effortlessly created the missing flame.
My second memory comes from Mr. Arnwine’s last year at Howard when he offered a new course, advanced biology. Enrollment was by invitation only. Despite my deficiencies with matches, I was one of the eight students invited to join the class. Mr. Arnwine planned for us to spend many of our class sessions outdoors in field studies, gaining first-hand knowledge of local flora and fauna, about which most of us knew nothing. When we met for our first class period, I discovered one unexpected student in the class. Although Larry should have been a senior, he seldom came to school and was functionally illiterate. We all “knew” he would never graduate. After the first class session, I asked Mr. Arnwine why Larry was in the class. He responded by asking me what Larry did every night.
“He goes coon hunting with his Dad.”
“Yes. And thus while you are indoors doing class assignments or watching TV or sleeping, Larry is exploring the countryside with his father, learning about coons and coyotes. He knows how to find tiger salamanders and the nearest blue heron rookery. He knows more about Elk County than you or I will ever know.”
I will never grasp Mr. Arnwine’s motivations for inviting Larry into the class. Perhaps he was hoping Larry would begin to see a connection between what he knew about raccoons and the benefits of studying high school biology. Perhaps Mr. Arnwine was simply hoping that Larry could help us locate those shy salamanders. Although Larry dropped out of school before the arrival of winter, no fall semester in my own teaching career never arrived without me thinking about the young men and women entering my classes who–like Larry–would bring such realms of knowledge and expertise. Mr. Arnwine envisioned a classroom as an open community where we could meet for this wonderful gift exchange, enabling everyone–both student and teacher--to share what they know. You light my match, and I will help you find a blue heron rookery.