Teaching

Abstract

After a talk I gave at a scientific meeting when I was middle-aged, a very elderly man introduced himself afterward as one of my former students. I thought he meant that he had been a student in our statistical television course on Continental Classroom, but he denied it. No, it was back at Carnegie Institute of Technology. I had almost forgotten that in my senior year there I had taught a night-school course.

The distribution of ages of participants in night-school courses is much different from that in daytime. I had taught this gentleman one course in algebra and trigonometry, and happily with that training he went on to become head of a large corporation in the steel industry. He did not actually claim that that experience was the main reason for his success, but I was willing to assume it.