A friend asked if I could find an article she’d written long
ago for our high school newspaper. That led to an evening of nostalgia spent leafing
through creased and crumbling issues of “The Talon” and poking around online to
track news from the past. It saddened me to find that one of Santa Rita’s superstars,
chemistry teacher Mr. W. A. O’Donald, passed away almost a year ago. He was in
all ways an excellent teacher and is a significant figure in my academic
folklore.
Mr. O’Donald was tall and, in the early ‘70s, balding and
filling out a little. He wore a white button-down shirt and a tie every day. Every
day he reminded us to read the bulletin board by the door. On the last day of
the second semester final he walked over to it and pulled from under a thumbtack
the scoring key for the final we were about to take. It had been up there for a
month. He would toss small sueded rubber erasers at the daydreamers. He never missed;
each time they landed gently on the top of our heads. I would add mine to the
line of them waiting on the edge of the demo table and return to my desk in
the second row where I sat by alphabetical assignment.
One day I was thoroughly absent while sitting in class and
sensed that I’d been asked a direct question. Mr. O’Donald repeated, “What is delta T?” Marc (yes, the same Marc often featured
in this blog) saw my blank look and whispered across the aisle, “Change in
temperature”. I looked equally vapidly at him. Marc leaned a little more over
his desktop and whispered again, louder, “Change in temperature.” Confused and
irritated, I turned to look at Marc full face, “WHAT?” Marc laid his forehead
on his desk as Mr. O’Donald thanked him ever so insincerely for his help.
I am a wool-gatherer still, but Mr. O’Donald did cure me of
one miserable study habit. After announcements one morning early in the year,
he handed a beaker of clear, colorless liquid to the student in front of me and
directed her to assess it without comment and pass it on. She held the beaker
chest high, waved her hand over it and then turned to give it to me. I was
always a little stuffy so I raised it close to my nose and took a hearty sniff.
I coughed, gasped, choked and
teared up, barely managing to set down the ammonia-filled beaker. Mr. O’Donald
asked the class, “Anyone else fail to do the homework on the preliminary identification
of unknown substances?”
I read assignments after that and tried hard to focus on
lectures, but lab-times remained trials to me, Mr. O’Donald and Marc, who for
some inexplicable reason had volunteered to be my lab partner. I didn’t blow anything
up, but nothing glass made it through the hour. Mr. O’Donald kept a slip with
my name on it ready so I could go pay at the bookstore for the latest broken
beaker or retort. I never wondered until today why my particular fines had to
be settled that very period. Test tubes I got for free, although the time spent
sweeping them up from the floor meant I was usually in detention for chronic
tardiness to my next class.
The only time Mr. O’Donald edged toward overt frustration was
the day I broke the piston burette mounted to the wall of our station. I had
run a sponge over the countertop but there wasn’t quite enough room under the
burette’s lower spout for both the sponge and the back of my hand. The whole apparatus
exploded off the wall. Splinters of glass flew everywhere, fortunately without
injuring me or my long-suffering lab partner. My parents were used to the supplies and equipment fines but
their reaction to one for $125.00 was fierce. By common consent thereafter I was restricted to observing
and writing up lab results.
Similar challenges awaited my U of A chemistry professor
three years later, but sadly, he fell far short. This anonymous individual did
not have Mr. O’Donald’s rapport, sardonic humor or endurance and so I do not
have a bachelor’s of science degree.
