Schodack Central School, Castleton-on-Hudson

After graduating from Albany, I got married two weeks later, and we both went to summer school. My wife had to finish one more year of college, and I started a master's degree in mathematics, also at Albany.

I will always be in debt to Mr. Larry Davis, principal of Schodack Central School, which was located in a small village of Castleton-on-Hudson, across the river from Albany, NY. He took a risk and hired me to teach high school math and junior high science. I worked there for three years, and most of the time in our seven or eight period day taught six or seven classes including Geometry, Algebra I, General Math, and General Science for seventh graders. At the end of the first year, I decided that teaching, while rewarding, was really a very hard job, as a good teacher tries to enable each student to learn, and with over 200 students this was an overwhelming job. Discipline was not easy to master or managing so many classes, but I persevered and gradually improved as a teacher. At the beginning of my third year, I went to see Mr. Davis to inform him that this third year would be my last one teaching there. When asked why, replied that I was going to try to get a job in a community college teaching math, go back to graduate school, this time at Cornell University, or seek to be head of a math department in another school since that job was already filled at my school.

Imagine my surprise when all three possibilities occurred and I had to make a choice. Back to see Mr. Davis for some good advice, and he said that the best offer was to continue with my graduate studies at Cornell. This meant that I had been selected to receive a National Science Foundation Grant to study full time at Cornell for a complete calender year with all expenses paid and a living allowance to boot. It was a wonderful experience and nine of us from throughout the United States made our way to study graduate mathematics at Cornell. They gave us a study room and a tutor if we should need one, and we found wonderful ways to assist each other with our program of studies. We emerged as life long friends and keep in touch to this day. All nine of us graduated the following summer with a Masters of Arts for Teachers in mathematics. I then returned to Albany to complete my last summer of graduate work there and received a Masters of Science in Mathematics at the end of the summer. Both degrees were in math but each program had a different focus, and so there was no overlapping of course content. So then what to do? The next blog or two will go on with the story. Stay tuned.