The Julia Smith "Field of Dreams"

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I am writing you to express a deep and sincere gratitude for having known and been taught by Julia Smith.  All of her students know her simply as “Mrs. Smith,” for as you know there is only one Mrs. Smith.  That name has loomed large at Coleman High School for decades.  For as we entered her classroom for the first time, as legend has it, we were to abandon all hope of ever leaving her class without homework, again.  It only took about a week to realize that the legend was true.  Mrs. Smith was, however, a task master with a purpose. We learned a lot of math, but even more importantly, learned that the work never ends, that there’s always still more to learn, and that if we just get started we’ll eventually get there.  I don’t remember much from math class anymore.  I don’t know the difference between sine and cosine, and I couldn’t mathematically prove my way out of a brown paper bag.  But I do remember the overhead projector and a bottle of naptha, and the smudges of grease pencil on Mrs. Smith’s right hand.  And how she would tell us stories about J. B., then she’d get tickled, stick her head out straight at you and laugh ... and laugh hard ‘til she was red in the face. We laughed a lot.

If you’ve known Mrs. Smith for any time at all then you know how selfless she is. She was always willing to help when there was work to be done.  During my last semester in high school, she took her off period to teach me calculus everyday.  Thankfully, I’m not doing much calculus anymore, but the time spent with Mrs. Smith saved me countless hours of frustration later on.  One of my proudest moments was being able to come back to Mrs. Smith two years later and tell her how to do a calculus problem that the two of us could never figure out.  We eventually figured out that you have to derive everything related to time.  So, I’m doing that today. And when I relate everything to time, now; I realize that it won’t be that long until we all see Mrs. Smith, again...and laugh.  God Bless, David L. Tyson, MD - CHS Class of 1987.