Luckily for Dad, he cared not one bit that he wasn’t the most popular on staff and didn’t always have the top evaluations. Throughout his career, he did what he thought was right and did not concern himself too much with the opinions of others. Not that he ignored feedback. He was more than willing to follow constructive criticism. In one of his early years in Belle Plaine, Dad received an evaluation that advised he needed to stop jingling change in his pocket. He immediately bought a small coin holder and refrained from putting his hands in his pockets for the next two or three evaluation periods. The comment turned up on each subsequent evaluation even though it no longer applied, so Dad threw out the coin purse and resumed his habit of jingling change.
Fortunately, he worked with only one administrator who copied evaluations from time-to-time and year-to-year. And fortunately, many students didn’t mind his approach to teaching. I think partly because they liked and learned from his stories, they liked expressing their opinions, and they must have known Dad practiced what he preached. He didn’t just, for example, lecture American ideals—he did his best to live up to them. So much so that once he and my mother were on an NBC Nightly News segment because during the Iran Hostage Crisis, they went door to door asking for signatures on a petition to help an Iranian family stay in the U.S.
Fortunately, he worked with only one administrator who copied evaluations from time-to-time and year-to-year. And fortunately, many students didn’t mind his approach to teaching. I think partly because they liked and learned from his stories, they liked expressing their opinions, and they must have known Dad practiced what he preached. He didn’t just, for example, lecture American ideals—he did his best to live up to them. So much so that once he and my mother were on an NBC Nightly News segment because during the Iran Hostage Crisis, they went door to door asking for signatures on a petition to help an Iranian family stay in the U.S.