My Favorite Teacher

Sammy Finesmith, chemistry teacher. TSF: Tough. Sarcastic. Fair.

I saw Sammy a few years before he died and got a chance to thank him for his table of valences that I used in college. Unfortunately, while some of the other teachers were very good, I felt that the curriculum at PS was not tough enough. At the UofD, students from NY and Baltimore were far better prepared in math than I. They all had had Calculus. At the UofD, two years after Sputnik, I was thrown into large math lecture halls, handed an advanced Algebra and Trig text to learn on my own, and was quickly cut down to size when called on and did not know the answer.

If I only had a computer back then.