Homer Jacobson

Now that I am now officially a nonagenarian I find all kinds of stuff showing up in various media that gives a jolt to my memory bank. The NY Times on October 25, 2007 ran an article about how the creationism crowd were trying to hijack one of my favorite college professor’s, Dr.Homer Jacobson. I was in my forties attending Brooklyn College at night. It was in a physics course that I had the great fortune of meeting up with Dr. Jacobson.

He was a short, very energetic man who literally was having a love affair with his subject matter. The same quality overflowed to the class of almost all adult students. After our first exam he asked if I would stay after class. He held a copy of my test paper in his hand. He looked at it and then at me and said, “checked your admission records and found you never went to high school.” He seemed confused and I hastily explained that I had taken all the college entrance exams and had done fairly well. “Yes,” he said, “I am not suggesting you shouldn’t be here, but your lack of high school algebra is doing you in. You seem to know exactly which formula to apply to a given problem. Your trouble is with the arithmetic. You add where you should divide and multiply when you should subtract and so on.” I was obviously troubled by all this as I was terribly insecure about being in college in the first place.

To Dr. Jacobson’s everlasting credit he quickly recognized my insecurity and spent the next five minutes assuring me that indeed I can do the work and need not be overly concerned. He said, “Here is what I am going to do. You will take the exams with everyone else, but you will just plug in the formula that you think applies to the solution and leave it at that. The really important thing is to know what formula goes with the problem. The arithmetic you can get out of any text book.” And that’s what I did for the rest of a very satisfactory semester.

On another occasion Dr. Jacobson asked if someone would review Boyles Law on the inverse relationship between pressure and volume of gases. This had been discussed in a previous session. Without thinking about it I raised my hand and he said, “Okay Mr Schrank tell us about it.” And off I went into what I thought was a beautiful exposition of Boyles Law. I finished thinking I had done a great job when Homer Jacobson said, “That was very well presented with your usual certainty, but I must tell you, you were absolutely wrong.” Well the whole class roared with laughter and so did I. I learned that certainty might be required characteristic of leadership, but has nothing whatsoever to do with being right.

My next encounter with Homer Jacobson had a life long effect on the many many times I was dealing with programs designed to help disadvantaged kids, whether at Mobilization For Youth, the Job Corps, New York City Youth Training and Employment or the Ford Foundation. We are now back at Brooklyn College and to the best of my recollection Dr. Jacobson was teaching a class on the history of science. I remember so clearly how he was able to dramatize all the great scientific breakthroughs which he said were “built on the shoulders of the giants who went before.” It was in a discussion of the race between Leibniz and Newton for the invention of calculus that he decided to demonstrate how calculus was used. The classroom had blackboards on three sides. He began on the front blackboard to write formulas and explain their significance. He had gotten somewhere on the side near the back when he turned to the class and asked, “Does anyone in this room know what the teacher is doing?” There was silence, but an overwhelming number of heads shaking very quietly indicated a very loud NO. He thought for a moment and said, “Why don’t the students go to the cafeteria have a nice cup of coffee and a Danish while the professor figures out how to teach this course.”

I have never forgotten that lesson. It was what one of my Public School teachers called an “electric light moment.” I had so often heard from teachers from kindergarten through college about “dumb kids who just weren’t ready to learn.” After Dr. Jacobson’s example, I could never accept that excuse. There were no dumb kids. There were only teachers who hadn’t yet figured out how to teach the people sitting in front of them in their respective classrooms.

Can you see why I have never forgotten this great teacher? Homer Jacobson’s example has stayed with me all these years. I thank him from the bottom of my heart.

And of course thank you Kate. N.H.W.Y.

PS. Have you had teachers in your life who were memorable or had a real influence on you? In what way? Please tell us about it by clicking on the "Comments" link below.