Learning Morse Code

This isn’t a story about me. For what it’s worth, I think I started learning Morse Code when my older brother showed me a paperback book he owned that described all of the things that every Boy Scout needed to know. We dotted and dashed a few letters back and forth, and after a few days, forgot about it. But a few years later, when I was 12 or so, I got serious about learning the Code so that I could get my ham radio license (Novice, 5 wpm followed by Advanced, 13 wpm, WA6AGU). There were many, many hours spent listening to tapes provided by the Lockheed Employees Radio Club.

No, this is actually a story about one of my daughter’s childhood adventures in learning. This particular one was triggered by the spelling homework that her 4th/5th grade teacher, Ms. T, used to assign. Ms. T was a great teacher and a memorable personality in her own right. One of her phrases, “the squeaky boy gets the wheel”, has lived on in our family’s memory for two decades, and we always felt very lucky that our daughter grew up in Ms. T’s classroom. But, back to the Morse Code. Here’s my daughter telling of the story …

Ms. T had a whole bunch of different ways you could complete the weekly spelling assignment. We had 5-10 words assigned and we had to practice them, but “practice” could mean write backwards in a mirror, write in bubble letters, write in macaroni, etc. She had a whole posterboard of choices. At some point Mom (and/or I) decided this was insufficiently challenging so we got permission to introduce Morse code into the mix. I have a feeling Ms. T had trouble grading my submissions, but perhaps she just assumed they were correct.

Can you imagine what it must have been like for poor Ms. T? Each week receiving a stack of pages from 4th and 5th grades, some covered in neat rows of words, others covered in macaroni, some words spelled forwards, others written backwards (words and letters! and maybe in macaroni), and then one page titled:

_ _    _ . _ _

. . .    . _ _ .    .    . _ . .     . _ . .    . .    _ .     _ _ .

. _ _    _ _ _    . _ .    _ . .    . . .

My daughter is now a teacher herself. Each semester she stands (or goes online) in front of very large quantity of university science students and introduces them to the mysteries of chemistry (not Morse code). Her creativity never ceases to amaze me. The legacy of great teachers like Ms. T is, and has always been, seeding the fields for the next generation of great teachers.