Reflections ON A LongAnd Blessed LIfe No. 47: Graduate School

  

As mentioned in an earlier Blog it was always my intention to get a graduate degree and I started my master’s program at Northwestern University the week after I graduated from college. But then I hastened to Tracy, California and my first teaching assignment at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and School in Tracy, California. The nearest university offering graduate work was the College of the Pacific (now University of Pacific) in Stockton. At that time, in my eyes, it was most famous for its wonderful 5’8” quarterback Eddie LaBaron who was a top football quarterback on offense, great safety on defense and punter on special teams. And the school offered a master’s program at an affordable price.

The entry process surprised me. I took standardized tests in General Knowledge and in Education. I scored in the ninetieth percentiles in both and that taught me a lesson. In a day when so much emphasis is placed on getting into just the right undergraduate school-I learned that sometimes it does not matter that much how highly the school is ranked. Concordia Teachers College certainly was never in a “top schools” list. I went there. Did my best. Got the most I could from the school and when it was time for grad school I had nothing to worry about. I think that is as true in 2017 as it was in 1951.

Since I was working full time I went to school in the summer and in the evening. My degree was in Psychology. The mid-fifties was a time when there was much emphasis on non-directive teaching and learning. One of my most disappointing classes was a class where the prof did no formal teaching. All learning was to be self-directed by the members of the class. My class did not do much “directing”. It spent most of the time arguing how the prof could assign a letter grade to students who only talked and gave each other feedback.

I had a good Philosophy course and an outstanding course in Statistics. And I was fortunate that the Statistics prof was on my thesis committee. I did my research across the LCMS elementary school system on what standardized tests were used, how they were used and what was done with the results. The most challenging aspect of that whole proves may simply have been in getting the findings into published form. It was all made possible by the incredible efforts of my wife Jane. When we were writing this she was the mother of a new baby. She did all the typing which was, of course, on an old manual typewriter. We needed two copies without any corrections on any page, all on paper of a particular nature and very strict unyielding rules on proper footnotes and citations. Because of everything else that was going on in our lives that entire thesis was written and typed by the two of us, typically beginning at 11:00 p,m., working until around 1:00 am and then going to bed so that we could be up and at work by 7:30 in the morning. Together we made it.

--> Interesting footnote: The week before my orals the US Supreme Court issued its famous Brown vs Board of Education ruling against school racial segregation. That became a significant area for the committee to address in asking me how that would influence Lutheran schools in he USA. Little did I know then that some years later I would be visiting all the black Lutheran schools of the USA south and later working for the Center for Urban Education Ministries which served many schools that were the first in the LCMS (Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod) to be truly racially integrated.