#Teachers In Memory of Owen Miller - A tribute to teachers

A Science Guy’s Almanac #32. Year 2. September 6,  2016

This is a special post in tribute to teachers. It's up today because, when I started teaching, just after the last T-Rex died, school started the day after Labor Day.

For Owen Miller:

one of my truly best friends and my closest colleague

Nearly all high schools in America will have started by tomorrow. It seems appropriate to bring this message to all teachers.

What follows is the "eulogy" I was honored to give at the memorial service of Owen Leslie Miller. Owen and I worked as a team for 16 years. He had an incredibly creative mind. However, he wasn’t all that concerned about what happened to his ideas. He was content to share them. See the yellow highlighted line below for a specific example.

Those of you who know me, know that I don’t use notes when speaking. Today, I’m making an exception because I want to be sure I make it through this. If I choke up and/or cry, I offer no apologies.

It is my privilege and honor to speak to you today. When I heard Owen had died, and Kathie was trying to track me down to see if I could speak at this service, I went to the Southwest Airlines site to check airfares to Sacramento because I would have gone to Grass Valley in a heartbeat to be able to speak for Owen today.

I first met Owen in the Fall of 1972. I began to work as a Teacher’s Assistant at Monte Vista while I was finishing my teaching credential. While I wish I had a memory of the first meeting, sadly I do not. However, I’m sure it was like any other of Owen’s first meetings with people—within minutes you felt like an old friend of his. In all the years we spent together, almost 20,000 hours, I only remember being angry with one another one time.

I got hired to teach biology at Monte Vista the next school year. I taught with Owen for 16 years—until he retired. He and I did innumerable revisions and refinements of our curriculum. We spent hours together tweaking and fiddling. Until he retired, I never realized how much Owen and I were symbiotic. I’ve never worked with another teacher as dedicated as he was.

By the late 1970s elective courses for students were all the rage. Owen leaped at the chance to teach oceanography and marine biology. While he was working on curriculum, “we” decided to set up a marine aquarium in our room.

Our first task was the aquarium itself. Owen decided we needed at least a 100-gallon tank for the best possible environment. Saltwater tanks are notorious for having “issues” with animal waste, and the 100-gallon threshold was the largest we could imagine in our room.

The aquarium stand we had was military surplus. It was heavy-duty, with emphasis on both of those words. We measured the length and width of the shelf, headed to North Park, and placed our order for an all-glass, double bottom tank.

We got a call about two weeks later, hopped in Owen’s VW van, and went to pick up our treasure. Did you ever consider how big a 100-gallon container is? Let’s just say that, when you limit the size of the base of the tank, the height is very, very tall. It was impossible to reach the bottom of the tank without having a small child to lower into the thing.

Once we had the tank in place, after much discussion, and because Owen had a collector’s permit for sea life off the San Diego coast, we decided to refrigerate the water in our tank to the 64° average off Pt Loma. We would save money by collecting specimens and not having to buy them. Being the thrifty souls we were, we scrounged an old refrigerator and Rube Goldberg’ed a system of PVC pipe and old aquaria for the water to run through to cool it. It took two holes through the wall, two holes in the old fridge, and lots of PVC elbow joints, but we got the water to remain at about 67°.

When we finally got the thing set up, we needed water and creatures. At the time, the pier below Scripps Institute of Oceanography had a “filling station” where you could bring containers and fill them with filtered seawater for no cost. We loaded Owen’s VW bus with empty 5-gallon water bottles and headed for the pier. Five gallons of seawater is heavy. Ten glass five-gallon water bottles full of seawater are very, very heavy. We barely made it up the hill from the pier to the street with our cargo. Then we had to make a second trip to get close to enough water for the tank.

With the tank in place, and filters running, we headed out for our first collection trip. We decided to start with invertebrates to “pop” the tank (allow the nitrogen cycle to become established). You always lose animals during this phase, and invertebrates were much easier to catch than fish—I mean, how hard is it to outrun a snail?

We launched Owen’s small aluminum boat from Harbor Island and set sail for the inner shore of the Pt Loma peninsula. Although I don’t like boats of any type, we made it to shore without any boating issues or gastronomic events. It was easy pickings to collect a couple dozen Tegula funibralis, the local marine snail. We also nabbed a sea star and a sea anemone. What we did not consider were the tides in San Diego Bay.

By the time we were finished collecting the tide had risen significantly. While we landed the boat in ankle-deep water, we ended up launching the boat with me standing in the bay, with water up to my armpits, holding the boat while Owen clambered in and worked on starting the small engine. Afterward, I had to get a new driver’s license since this was way before laminated or plastic ones, and mine was thoroughly soaked from the launch.

Upon returning to Monte Vista in the dark, we unceremoniously dumped our sea creatures into the tank. On the following Monday, we checked the tank and discovered that one sea star has a BIG appetite. There were no living things left in the tank but the small fish we had put in a week earlier on a whim, the sea anemone, and the gluttonous sea star. The snail shells were all scattered randomly on the sandy bottom, each completely empty.

One of the proudest times in Owen’s and my teaching is when we developed a series of activities for students: Cranial Creations in Life Science.

While the activities all came from our years of collaboration, the story behind the idea for these types of exercises came while attending the NSTA Regional Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Owen and I had attended several sessions, including one on critical thinking. That particular session was long on theory and very short on application. Owen had also been intrigued by a demonstration of a Cartesian Diver he had observed.

About 4:30 the next morning I was awakened by a hoarse whisper from the bed next to mine in our hotel room.

"Chuck. Chuck. Are you awake?"

"I am now," was my groggy attempt at a snappy comeback.

"You know that diver in the bottle?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Well, I've been awake off-and-on all night trying to figure out why it works the way it does. It really bugs me. Why can't we do things that bug kids like that?

With that, Owen rolled over to go back to sleep. He was like that. Vent a problem, and go on. On the other hand, I tend to take a problem and move to solve it as quickly as possible.

So I hopped out of bed, grabbed my notebook, and told Owen that we were going to list activities we already did that would fall into the "bug kid" category and that we were going to think up some others as well. About an hour later, we had a list of thirty-plus exercises. We both agreed on his idea for the title, Cranial Creations, for our ideas, because 

1. Cranial Creations is alliterative, 
2. they encourage students to use their brain to think (cranial), and 
3. they encourage students to be creative.

For  5 years our book was the best-selling science title from “our” publisher.

One other essential aspect of the Owen Miller I knew was travel. At three different times, he and Mary went to Europe and bought vehicles to drive around while they spent the whole summer there. Always adept at savoir-faire, Owen was often asked by tourists if he knew where some statue or attraction was because he acted like a native just about wherever he was.

Part of his travel plan was kind of a lack of planning. Spur of the moment ideas were frequently acted upon. For example, once he placed his personal business card, which he insisted was a staple of European life, inside a bottle at tossed it in the ocean off the coast of England. Many months later, a blue-collar family that lived central England contacted him. They had retrieved the bottle while on holiday in Cornwall.

The following spring, Owen found a discount airfare from San Diego to London, contacted that family, and spent spring break with them, all within a two-week time span. I told you he knew no strangers!

Since I’m speaking of travel, you should know that Owen prided himself on his internal compass. “I always know which way I’m going” was his mantra whenever we went to a conference in another city. He would regale me with stories of his navigational prowess during his European jaunts. However, San Antonio, Texas threw his compass for a loop.

We were presenting our Cranial Creation ideas at a session. It was one of the first sessions of the conference, so we had most of two days to explore the city after our presentation. As we wandered around various parts of San Antonio, Owen consistently had this look of frustration on his face. Finally, he confided, “Chuck, I just don’t know where we are”—quite an admission. Chagrined, we finally found our way back to the hotel after much more meandering than we had planned.

I will end with a final travel-themed statement. In spite of the sorrow I feel about Owen’s passing, I leave you today with this good news:

I am confident that Owen’s internal compass was working just fine when he left this world. I guarantee you that he found his way to Jesus’ side in heaven.

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