Mr. Ryan had blue eyes, black hair and bulging biceps. On Homecoming Day when everyone dressed like Dogpatch characters, he made a perfect Li’l Abner in his bib overalls and ragged straw hat. He was also an amazing math teacher. He taught advanced algebra, plane and solid geometry and calculus. He was an undisputed wizard at putting complicated ideas into understandable terms. We all learned to use slide rules, figure the areas of various trapezoids and the volumes of cones. I’m sure his students represented a record number of engineers and other math-related careers compared to any other teacher in our town had ever turned out. I credit him, and the good English teachers in our school system with the scholarship I was awarded; the entrance exam having been heavily weighted with those two subjects. Unfortunately, as he had a number of children to support and educate, he left teaching to take a much higher-paying job in industry. His replacement in my senior year was a good mathematician but a mediocre teacher and several of the math students (including me) turned to other interests.
While Mrs. Cotter had, in junior high, given us an excellent basis for excelling in grammar and rhetoric, Miss Hiller provided that magical factor that fostered creativity and the self-assurance to venture into unknown territories of expression. She was, in essence, the school’s Fine Arts Department, encouraging would-be actors, poets, novelists and artists by providing guidance and opportunities not actually included in the school system’s curriculum. She could, and would, get any student excused from a study-hall or even a class to work on stagecraft, practice for a speech contest, rehearse lines for an upcoming play, prepare for a band or vocal performance, or seek help with an original story, poem or drawing. She seemed to have an endless supply of books, magazine articles and newspaper clippings to lend a student interested in learning techniques and methods to achieve some challenging goal, be it a poem, poster, stage set, lighting effect or design for a program cover.
Miss Hiller was adviser to the high school chapter of National Thespians, an organization of students in the performing arts; not just those who wanted to act, but also those who were interested in designing and building stage sets, providing special visual and sound effects, costume design, makeup techniques and all the other skills necessary to the world of theater. She saw to it that we traveled to the nearby town of Pella to attend live performances of plays produced by the excellent theater department of Central College. I remember seeing “Blythe Spirit” and “Born Yesterday” there. I was especially enchanted by the effects of ghostliness produced by the use of color and lighting in “Blythe Spirit” and
was inspired to learn more about the differences between the color effects produced by light and those produced by pigment. While I never used that information in my brief career in theater arts, it was very helpful when I eventually found myself in painting studios as an art major in college.
Oddly enough, I had expected, and intended, to major in math and become a high school algebra and geometry teacher in those subjects I had enjoyed so much in high school. But having been excused from the required freshman math class, I opted to take an art appreciation class during my first semester at U of I and discovered a world I hadn’t known existed. Totally innocent of the knowledge that my fellow students had a solid background in art history and studio classes in high school, I changed my major to Art Education – in the early 1950’s still a fairly new specialty in the field of education. (I learned later that most art teachers before that time had earned their degrees in Home Economics, a notion I associated with cooking, sewing and child care, not art.)
Had I been more worldly, I wouldn’t have dared to switch from math to art, and I would have missed out on all the fun. Fun because there was nothing more delightful and rewarding than spending those class hours with children, watching them develop their natural inclination to create things and develop skills to achieve it. And I owe it all to the exceptional teachers who taught me.