Gerald W. Smith Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

I Gerald W. Smith
1
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be a hi& school teacher and a principal, I had no one counseling very
carefilly with regard to that. Knox did not have a central counsel ng
program, each student was assigned to a professor. Interestingly e ough
Dr. Wiltbank, who was the chairman of the psychology department the area
in which I majored, was to re a very exciting teacher. I thought h was
great, both as a classroom teacher and a master of his subject, but
f
he
was quite an introvert and he was qy counselor who never counseled e. I
would go to him at the beginning of each semster with my layout of courses
for the semester and show them to him and he would immediately sign them.
When I would ask him if they were all ri&t and he said, "Well, tha 's
what you want, isn't it?" (laughs ) And that was . . .
Q. He was way ahead of his time.
A. That was all of the counseling that I had. But Dr. Conger, who was the
chairman of the history departrent-and as I indicated, I took histgyy and
political science and those kinds of things-becane a personal friend of
mine. Dr. Conger, self-appointed, took quite an interest in all of the
students who wanted to teach; he and I became personal friends and be
would have me over to his house to visit. As I was finfshing junior
year and we were talking about rqy aspirations to be a high school teacher
and a high school principal, he pointed out that q aspirations were not
impossible, that it was feasible to do the kind that I wanted in some of
the small hi& schools around. So he began to question me about my pprc-
gram, observing that I had two weaknesses in my program: first of all I
did not have enough courses in education to qualify for a cefiificate,
nor did I have enough work in a minor outside the field of psycho log^
which was not really a very usable subject for a teaching position at the
high school. So, he had me arrange schedule and even did some things to
accommodate me for it, so that I was able to build up enough in the social
sciences to qualif'y and to qualify for a certificate, so I cam out all
right with it.
NOW Dr. Conger was also the man who personally led me to my first employ-
ment whfch we'll talk about a little later on. So interests were general,
I took courses in quite a few of the areas of the college but majored in
psychology. I majored in it simply because I was fascinated by the sub-
ject and by the professor who taught it.
Q Did you mu? into any field of knowledge and encounter any ways of think-
ing that repelled you?
A. Yes, I did, but I ran into a method of teaching that repelled me and
this was in the study of French. I studied the foreign languages and I
liked them. I have indicated that I was not a particulwly strong student
in languages, and I had teachers who, for the most part, were interesting.
Professor Drew was rry teacher in Latin, I thought the world and all of
him. And I learned one thing about teaching from him that's always stayed
with me. Now I came to the study of third year Latin as a college fksh-
man and I was very weak in some of the Latin gramrm, particularly the
ablative absolute. Therefore, Drew proceded to teach me the ablative abso-
lute, or so he thought, and he worked diligently at it and really
he taught it to me, but he didn't. What he really taught me was,
there was a point of grarranar he called on me to explaln, the