Longtime Hawkins County math teacher dies

SURGOINSVILLE — Christmastime is most often a joyous but busy time for we mortals here on this orb called Earth.But I've learned over the years, including this year, that death sometimes changes our perspectives during the holidays.Remember the episode of the "MASH" television series in which Hawkeye and other 4077th medical professionals work to keep a mortally wounded U.S. soldier from dying on Christmas Day half a world away from home?If you didn't grow up in the 1970s and early 1980s, you may have caught it in reruns.In the end, they went so far as to move the clock in the surgery room ahead a few minutes when the patient died just before Christmas Day ended in Korea.CHRISTMAS 2024This year I spent the Christmas season like most of you probably did, with friends and family eating too much and sleeping too little, exchanging gifts in between the ham, turkey, sausage balls and seemingly endless desserts.I even got to attend a Christmas play at my home church, Amis Chapel United Methodist near Surgoinsville, in which my youngest son, 16-year-old Volunteer High School junior Creed Wagner, had a speaking part. Also, a cousin named Ben Davis, his wife, Maddie Davis, and their newborn baby, Mack Davis, played Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus, respectively.Unlike Creed's dad, who during a play at the same church when he was young in practice read his part about King Herod as "He-rod" instead of "Herr-odd," he got through the play without a hitch.As I recounted in a previous column, after that faux pas during play practice, everybody else in the play had to stifle laughter or giggles as I approached the line, but I pulled it off without a hitch and minimal snickering the night of the play.ALMOST LATESunday, I came in just in time for the start of the play because I went to Rogersville for the receiving of friends and family for my high school math teacher, 91-year-old Chalmer Jacob. Of course, my family and friends say I'm always running a little late, but this time I had a good reason.On the day of the Surgoinsville Christmas parade, Dec. 14, I ran into former Surgoinsville and retired Volunteer girls' basketball coach Dennis Bellamy at the Country Kitchen Restaurant in Stoney Point, and we noted Mr. Jacob's death Dec. 11.I didn't realize it then, but one of my elementary teachers from fifth grade, Bobbie Jean McNabb, died Dec. 14, and I didn't get to go to the funeral home for her. But I remember her well. She was a great aunt of Karen Reeves Coleman, a classmate and church member of mine from kindergarten through college. McNabb's husband, an elementary teacher and later principal named Ken McNabb, died in 2018.MORE MEMORY LANEThe Country Kitchen is almost within walking distance of my aunt Sharlene Spaulding's home, a little farther where the house where she grew up and my mother and uncle lived once stood.It also is near the intersection of Stoney Point Road and U.S. Highway 11W, where in driver's education class my sophomore year at Surgoinsville I accidentally released the hood of the car when I was trying to release the emergency brake.Poor Surgoinsville High School football coach Curtis Mawk was my instructor and in the car when I had to go out to put the hood down on the late 1970s Buick, but I did go on to become the 1982 4-H Tennessee Automotive Driving champion. I competed but did not win nationally.In contrast, math never was my strong suite in high school or college, but Mr. Jacob helped me get through Algebra I and geometry at Surgoinsville High School and then Algebra II at Volunteer High after it was formed by the consolidation of Surgoinsville and Church Hill high schools.He would give students some credit for signing their name to their work and work with students who wanted extra help.I did go on to take self-paced Algebra at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and one quarter put my mind to getting a perfect 4.0 grade point average, even though I had a math class.I made the grade, a 4.0, including math. I hadn't done that well in math since sophomore geometry at Surgoinsville, a class I enjoyed and understood more than Algebra.Mr. Jacob taught generations of Hawkins County students math at Church Hill, Surgoinsville and then Volunteer high schools. He earned an undergraduate degree at Lincoln Memorial University and a master's degree at East Tennessee State University.At the funeral home, I talked with his son, Karl, from the Volunteer Class of 1983, and the family of his late son, Jeff, from the Volunteer Class of 1981. Judging from Facebook comments on Mr. Jacob's death and memories shared by former students at all three schools, he is well remembered. Karl is a music director at a Catholic church in Knoxville; Jeff worked for FedEx in Fayetteville, North Carolina.I also got to talk with Lynn Norris, a former 4-H extension agent and later Volunteer assistant principal, and his wife, Patsy Norris. I learned from them I missed seeing former Surgoinsville band director Jim Hageman by about 10 minutes. Patsy Norris was the daughter of Norma Netherland, a volunteer 4-H leader.HAIR YESTERYEAR, NONE NOWOn the Sunday late afternoon, I recounted when I went to the receiving of friends for Mr. Jacob's wife, Jean, in 2015. They met in college, and she later substitute taught and helped with 4-H Club activities as an agriculture extension agent. Jeff and I were involved in 4-H.I introduced myself at the funeral home to Jeff and Mr. Jacob. Neither recognized me, but I gave Jeff hints about being in band with him, playing tuba and being assistant manager of the Surgoinsville basketball team for two years while he was manager."You used to have hair," Jeff responded. Jeff, who lived in North Carolina, died in 2022, but my hair he remembered started fading away before that, more than 20 years ago.I got to meet Jeff's three sons, including one who is a high school math teacher and said he loved his job. I told him he was lucky not to have such a poor math student as I was.PRACTICAL MATHOther than a fleeting moment of a college "A" in math, my math education wasn't a total loss.I did and do still use math in my job as a reporter, including my own concoction of solving an equation of sorts when I want to figure out how much a so-many-cents property tax rate increase would affect taxes owed on a residential property.I also sometimes approach a math problem from a different perspective, solving it by taking the answer and then working backwards to the beginning, which in effect becomes the end, to double check my work. Sorry if that makes no sense.I remember a few other things from Mr. Jacob.One is that he announced in Algebra II that the answer key in the back of the book had wrong answers for a couple of problems, in case we worked out a problem but got a different answer than the book.Another thing I remember is that he once told me he became a teacher and enjoyed his work, saying that teaching was a steady job with reasonable compensation.A third thing is that after I took the ACT my junior year, which back then we took only once instead of multiple times like today, I asked him why the ACT tested me on things I had not yet learned.He responded that was just the way the ACT testing schedule worked, testing for Algebra I, geometry and Algebra II in the middle of a year-long study of Algebra II.I scored a 28 composite on the ACT in 1981, taking the test at Dobyns-Bennett High School the morning after marching at a high school football game the night before the test. Math was my lowest score, a respectable 24, with my other scores in the upper 20s and low 30s.I don't think that 24 was bad for a student who wasn't very good in math and was still learning it when he took the test only once.BACK OF BOOK NOT ALWAYS RIGHTOne other thing I learned from Mr. Jacob was you can't always look up the answers in the back of the math book and expect they always will be correct.Once in an honors astronomy class at UT, instructor and professor Kermit Duckett gave my partial credit for the answer to a problem asking how long it would take for a channel to be cut by flowing water on the surface of Mars given a set of parameters laid out in the test question.He said he was impressed with my work. I got the answer completely wrong, but my process to get an answer was somewhat sound, albeit misguided.ONE MORE MATH THINGI noticed in Mr. Jacob's obituary that he died one day short of his 92nd birthday. I then remembered that about a year ago, his son, Karl, posted on Facebook a photo of Mr. Jacob eating a birthday meal at a Chinese restaurant, which Karl posted was one of his father's favorite places to eat.If it were up to me, I'd give Mr. Jacob the extra day's credit to make him an even 92 years. He most certainly showed his work over a quarter of a century at three Hawkins County high schools and deserves the credit.