Monday, December 14, 2020 - Moving into Higher Education

 Monday, December 14, 2020

Moving into Higher Education

After God’s intervention to move me out of Keokuk, Iowa, I was hired at Winona State University to teach math for a year.

I was in a dream.  I walked across the campus - not as a student, but as an instructor (definitely not a professor - yet).  I greatly enjoyed my classes and my students.  Towards the end of the fall semester, the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Chair, Herb Johnson came to me and said “You know if you could teach a computer class, I could assign you to teach in the summer.”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead.  Yes, I LOVED where I was - definitely God had granted me my Hearts Desire (Psalm 37:4 Delight yourself in the Lord; And He will give you the desires of your heart.”).  But, for the last few years, I didn’t really work (other than the country club swimming pool job), and summer employment would be GREAT!!!

I had taken some computer courses while getting my master’s degree.  I did okay, but I didn’t get “turned on” to them.  But, now, I had a purpose in learning computing!!!  For the second semester, I took two computer classes - COBOL and Fortran.  I was to teach COBOL, so that was my focus.  

(Aside - this was the department of Math and Computer Science.  They taught COBOL - Common Business Oriented Language as a on demand course - but “real computer scientists” didn’t do COBOL (okay, a bias on my part)).  

My first COBOL program almost knocked me out.  We had to use punched cards to encode our programs.  We punched the cards on card punching machines and then handed the deck to a computer operator to run.  Student applications were run at a lower priority than regular college business functions, so it could be a few hours to a day before my deck of punched cards would be loaded into a hopper and run. I was SO ANXIOUS!!

And, boom!!  Not only did my program NOT work, but I also had over 100 errors!!  Oh, no!!  I was never going to master this language.  I wouldn’t have summer employment, we would be back to running out of money during the summer.  What a disaster!!!

But, COBOL is a very structured language with some strict syntax rules.  For example, the first section had to be called IDENTIFICATION DIVISION - and if I had coded “INDENTIFICATION DIVISION” - not only would it not work, but I would get well over 100 errors!!!

I corrected my obvious errors and gave the updated deck of punched cards to the operator.  This time I had only five errors.  And, these errors were easily corrected, and (after the wait for the program to get into the system), I had no errors on my third try!!!  SUCCESS!!!!

I learned that I needed very careful proofreading of my code.  Sloppy code - using COUNT at one point, and COUNTER at another point would give errors.

Soon, I was off and flying with COBOL.  The basic class was easier and I succeeded there.  AND - I was going to have summer employment in teaching at the college level!!  WOW - what joy!!!  My classes were great, I was back in WInona Minnesota, and teaching. I even was a faculty advisor to my undergraduate fraternity.

The position was to be one-year replacing faculty who were on leave.  It became two years as a grant to do math workshops for teachers was funded.  For my second year, I taught more computer classes AND taught workshops on math for teachers.  It was 1979 and there was a push to move to the Metric System, so I did workshops on miles to kilometers, feet to meters, inches to centimeters; gallons to liters, Fahrenheit temperatures to Celsius temperatures.  AND - I took all the computer classes I could fit into my schedule. 

But, I didn’t have a terminal degree.  I could teach one more semester (fall semester 1980) and then I would be done - out - finished.  I started to search for jobs.  

Where the move to Winona and into college teaching was definitely a “God move”; this wasn’t so Godly.  (I learned I couldn’t manipulate God - and snap my fingers and say “God, find me a job”!!!)

But, in late August (as my last semester at WInona State was starting, I had a job interview and was hired to teach COMPUTING CLASSES at another academic institution!!!  (And, I lost some of my dependency on God for a while)

More on that tomorrow!!!

LOVE WINS!!!

HUGS!!

Karen