He Blinded Me With Science:

Tales Of A Wayward Student And An Unlikely Friendship.

Recently, I was awoken in the middle of the night from a dream I had been having.

I don’t remember it, but it somehow triggered memories of high school physics.

I attended an all-boys Catholic high school run by a lesser-known order of priests and brothers. Overall, my grades were decent, but I tended to be a bit flummoxed when it came to science. My first year, I somehow ended up in a difficult biology class, one of only two freshmen, and barely made it through, usually getting a C at the end of the quarter, once a very low B. 

We were only required to take two years of science, so I managed to avoid the subject until my senior year, when I took a physics class taught by a priest named Father Milton, a founding member of the faculty.

The man was brilliant and very passionate about physics. 

The class seemed to have an inordinate number of students who were decidedly neither.

I was quickly in way beyond my depth, understanding little of what was being taught. Easily distracted, I found my place amongst the ill-behaved, acting out to get attention instead of trying to actually absorb anything. On one particular day, so many of us were thrown out that we made more noise in the hallway than we had in class, making it nearly impossible for the teacher to teach. Looking back as an adult, I have no idea how he tolerated us, particularly me. 

The list of offenses began to pile up. 

Once he walked into the classroom and found me walking on lab tables. Another time, he threatened the class with consequences if we couldn’t simply say “here” when he took attendance, because so many of us were responding in an infantile manner. 

I was the only one who just had to say something silly.

I accidentally broke one in my hand, getting blood all over the sink, because of course I did. 

Another time, he entered the class just in time to see me taking a swing at another ne’er do well who had stuck gum in my hair. We were immediately sent down to the dean. 

In my determination to not learn, occasionally certain terms would still capture my attention, but for reasons that had nothing to do with academics.

When we were studying elastic collisions, I immediately concluded that it would make a great band name. I drew a picture of a new wave group called The Elastic Collisions:

Another time, a bunch of guys around me were banging out a beat on their desks, and it inspired me to write a song about the class, called “Let’s Vector.” Most of it was unrelated to the subject matter, instead revolving around unruly behavior and the teacher’s futile efforts to control it, though there was mention of an oscilloscope being broken and a laser being stolen, neither of which happened. 

Another time I perked up in class was when we were shown a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote short, and were told to write down every time the laws of physics were violated.

There were around 50 and I got pretty much all of them. I may not have been able to recite the laws of physics, but I sure knew when a cartoon was violating them. I had the highest score in the class and won a prize, which was a Roadrunner coloring book. 

I kept it for years.

That lone victory aside, I was floundering in the class, and found myself in danger of getting a lower grade than I ever had in high school. 

My saving grace was when we were assigned to write a paper on any of the physicists we had studied. 

Now we were talking. 

Writing was more up my alley. My report on one Robert J. Oppenheimer almost singlehandedly brought my grade up to at least a more respectable level, which I did not think I deserved but gladly accepted.

As badly as I had behaved in Father Milton’s class, he appeared to have no animosity toward me at year’s end. When he learned which university I would be attending, he told me about a professor he knew there that taught a class on the science of acoustics, knowing that I was interested in music.  After my first year of college, I returned to my high school to visit, and inadvertently saw him in the attendance office. 

I did not see him again until about 15 years later. 

I began getting hired to play for liturgies and prayer services at the order’s province center, which was down the street from the high school. A number of priests and brothers lived at the province center or in living quarters on the upper level of the school and were often in attendance at the services for which I would play.

That group included Father Milton. 

Afterward, he would almost always come up to me to talk. He told me that he was no longer at the high school, and was teaching as a professor at DePaul University. He had lots of stories, and always found a way to connect his knowledge domain with mine. 

At one point in our conversations, he asked me if I had drawn a picture of a band called The Elastic Collisions when I had been in his class. I said that I had. 

He told me he still had the picture. 

When he celebrated his 50^th anniversary of ordination, he did so at a church where he frequently helped out. 

He asked me to sing in the choir for it, even though I had never worked at that church before. The director put me in the bass section, with a friendly, gregarious Italian man. He couldn’t sing a lick, but everybody seemed to love him. The day of the mass, I stood next to him and noticed right away that his spot in the choir was strategically as far away from the microphones as possible. 

Father Milton presided over the mass, and at the end of it, he read off a long list of people to thank. 

He then said that he liked to think that he was partially responsible for me finding my calling as a musician because after being in his class, it was clear that I would never be a scientist. The entire church burst out into laughter.

It was quite the savage and unexpected burn. I was embarrassed – but it was undeniably funny, and a small payback for all the torture I had put him through in that class. 

When I took a full-time position at a church, I no longer played at the province center, and did not see Father Milton very often in the years that followed. 

He passed away in 2022, just two days before my mother’s passing.

I made sure to attend his funeral. The eulogy was given by a fellow priest who had been the calculus teacher and was another genius in his field. The two of them had been good friends, and many entertaining stories were told, and anecdotes that revealed we were celebrating a man who had touched many lives, simply by truly living a life of service to others and sharing his knowledge and love of science.

I found myself very saddened by his death, and at the same time grateful that we had been in touch over the years, and that such an unlikely friendship had formed. 

Reflecting further, I realize more than ever that it was because of him. 

Physics was his passion and his life’s work in terms of academics. 

I was decidedly a non-scientist and a rock-bottom terrible student in his class.

But he saw value in me as a person, for who I was and who I wasn’t, to the point that he wanted me there as part of an important milestone in his life. 

It is a precious reminder of what can happen when a teacher doesn’t give up on an immature, crazy kid and finds a way to relate to them. This is the tremendous gift that Father Milton gave to me.

Though…

He never returned my drawing of The Elastic Collisions.

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