The Crucial Impact of Some Early Teachers

Lately the seriousness of approaching my seventh decade of life has been profitable and sobering.  I think that one of the specific marks of aging is that you can look back and see with greater clarity and insight as to why you are walking the present path you are on.  I have had some excellent teachers who have contributed greatly to my life.  Some of the early teachers from middle school and high school years deserve another day of recollection to honor them.  But my thoughts have been with three of them in the range of 1985-86 when I was in RN school.  It is almost shocking when December of 2026 arrives that I graduated from RN school forty years ago.  I am in a different place now than what I anticipated on that night that I shook that hand of Dr. Nathan Hodges at that commencement ceremony.  But I can acknowledge clearly that the Lord has directed everything in my life to this point and I am in belief that He will continue to do the same until I reach the finish line. 

The three teachers that my reminiscing recalled were all biology teachers at Wallace Community College in Dothan.  Back then everything was on a quarter system, not a semester structure as it is now.   It was the winter quarter of 1985 and I was barely eighteen years old.  That time stamp allowed me to be dropped into the first of two required quarters of Anatomy and Physiology.  The teacher of A&P showed up late that January morning, I think it may have been 15-20 minutes or so before he arrived.  I had heard about him by reputation but had not seen him until that morning.  He was a tall burly guy named Gerald Bryant.  He shows up in a beaded and fringed-sleeved deer skin jacket, a red checked flannel shirt, blue Levi’s, and some of the craziest looking boots that came just below his knees.  He had his Levi’s tucked into them and he looked more equipped for a mountain hike than to teach an A&P class.  Long-haired with a massive Duck Dynasty beard thirty years before Robertson boys ever showed up.  It was a little shocking for me due to my very sheltered upbringing at home and the classes at Rehobeth High School. 

The A&P class met four days a week with one of those days being a lab that lasted for three hours.  The lab was loaded with microscopes, skeletons, formaldehyde jars with pigs, snakes, rats and mice being preserved and pickled in them.  I was going to be in class with Gerald Bryant for six months in 1985 because once you registered with an A&P teacher, it was best to stay with them so you wouldn’t get out of sync.  That old textbook that we used back then has long since disappeared, but I can still remember the layout of the cover, the colored pictures of the anatomy, and the layout of the diagrams of stuff like the Kreb’s Cycle and other things.  That old A&P book got drug around in an old duffel bag because back in those days’ backpacks was not nearly as available as they are now. 

Numerous times we might have only been in class for 20 minutes and his famous line would drawl out, “Let’s smoke!”  All the smokers would rush toward the door and smoke out in the halls while the rest of us would dutifully wait until they finished their breathing treatments.  You could hear Mr. Bryant telling off-color jokes, talking politics, and small talk, smoking that on a Marlboro.  The smoke boiled up in the hallways on the second floor because those were the days that smokers could smoke inside.  There were times when a couple of the physics teachers would join up with them and go at their cigarettes puffing like trains. 

One day in class, old Mr. Bryant in sort of passing sarcastic manner dropped this line, “Frankly, I can’t say I believe the rib business.”  That line was not lost on me because at the time, I listened to David and the Giants, and they had a song about evolution that fit those carefree days of the ‘80’s.  Mr. Bryant was quite sporty with all that personality, and I was in a hurry to get out of his classes intact with a passing grade so I just made do with what I would classify as worldliness.  I know that this might get me classified as “narrow-minded” and such, but I grew up in a day when things were black and white, and almost nothing was gray.  Preachers and saints who were serious about their Christian walk had strong and solid convictions.  The youth camps, camp meetings, local revivals, and local church events were very intentional about strong morals and separation from the world.  We took Christian standards and our identity very seriously.  Mr. Bryant was a fellow that didn’t go out of his way to try to unsettle Christians in his class, but it was obvious where he was both intellectually and spiritually and it wasn’t Pentecostal.  Looking back, I think he probably fits best as Mr. World-Wiseman as one of Mr. Bunyan’s characters. 

Mr. Bryant’s tests were always mimeographed in that old purple looking ink they used back in the day of around 75 questions that he had handwritten out.  Don’t miss that description, his tests were not typed.  They were never multiple choice that I can remember but rather fill in the blank and there wasn’t a word list to choose from.  His class was quite a demanding affair and there was no way you would pass them if you didn’t study.  I can recall the last final exam I took in the spring quarter of 1985 which was one question: Trace the blood flow from the heart to the big toe and back to the heart by writing out all the arterial and venous vessels.  I barely passed that test to be able to move on to Microbiology.  Here was the clincher, if you didn’t pass his A&P class, you couldn’t move on to the next level of the RN program.  So, a whole lot was riding on his classes, in fact if you failed one or the other, it could set you back potentially six months or more.  I know there were students who got caught in the academic trap and some of them never returned because they had to get on with their life.  In those days there were no apps, no internet, no personal computers, just books, spiral-notebooks, notecards, and sweat and prayer. 

Mr. Bryant had a colleague whose class filled up almost immediately on registration day.  You could not register online, you had to stand in a long line that wound around the registrar’s office outside with double lines inside once you got into the door, and it was nothing to stand in line for 4-6 hours trying to get registered.  His colleague was Mrs. Elsa Gier and she was a lovable soul.  I knew her only by reputation from all the other students who managed to get into her classes.  She had two classes that had about 35 students in each one.  She used color transparencies; she was energetic and interesting!  All the things that Mr. Bryant was not.  Mr. Bryant kept a box of chalk in his back pocket that he used on a blackboard, but it was hard to decipher what he wrote most of the time. 

There weren’t any instructor evaluations at the end of the quarter, I am not sure if the administration was even interested in what our thoughts might have been even if they had them.  You couldn’t go to a website for a “rate your professor” screed because there wasn’t an internet.  The administrative crew knew they had a stellar nursing program that was extremely competitive to get into and their state board passing rate was better than UAB, Auburn, and Troy, so they weren’t too concerned about our feelings.  There was a lot of hubris about the fact that the nursing program had a better passing rate than the big schools.  My opinion on the reason for that is because we had almost twice the amount of clinical time the large schools had back in the day.  I have jokingly said before that all the nursing instructors were a bunch of old battle axes who could trace their lineage back to either Attila the Hun or the Vikings.  They could care less about your little feelings!  I look back and have concluded that they were more interested in flunking me out than seeing me pass.  That is just a subjective opinion, but the program was exhaustingly stressful.  There were forty-six students who started the RN program with me in March 1985 and when we graduated in December 1986 there were only 14 of the original crew. 

But back to Mrs. Gier, she could trace her lineage to the angels.  Her students loved her, admired her, perhaps borderline worshiped her.  Her tests were multiple choice, neatly typed and even though they were hard because she was in the flow of state board preparation success also.  Here is the thing about the NCLEX which is the state board exam for RNs; it is multiple choice but two of the answers are correct and you must make the selection of the best choice of the two right answers.  This created a need for critical thinking at all levels.  But Mrs. Gier wanted to make sure that her students knew A&P backwards and forwards.  She gave pop-tests almost every day that cumulatively made up to two test grades.  So, if you bombed a test grade, the pop tests could make up the difference, and she would drop the lowest test grade at the end of the quarter.  She also allowed students to draw pictures with colored pencils for extra credit.  I can remember going to the library and seeing a lot of her students sitting at tables with a Gray’s Anatomy book open and they would be drawing pictures freehand from that famous textbook.  It was rare for one of Mrs. Gier’s students to fail her class.  If my memory serves me correctly, she had a husband who had tragically died in an accident, and she never remarried but immersed herself in her craft there at the college. 

Then there was the saintly Dr. Sylvia Norton who taught me Microbiology that summer quarter of 1985.  At the time, there were very few advanced level doctorates teaching at Wallace and she had one of those degrees.  However, she was perhaps that kindest and warmest of all the teachers that I had during that tenure.  She was everything all the nursing instructors were not.  The summer semesters were usually very small classes, in fact, I think there were only seven of us that summer and all of us were nursing students slogging along toward that finish line at the end of 1986.  Her classroom was unique in that we all had our own heavy-duty microscope in front of us at our desks, along with a host of Petri dishes that held various kinds of mediums to “grow” microbes on.  She would teach and work with a projector on her microscope.  She would point out things on the screen as the microbes flipped and flopped while we all watched the movement in real time.  Later in the quarter, she gave us our “unknown” which was a microbe that we had to figure out what it was by a process of elimination with the various mediums to grow.  I made an A in her class, which was only one of about three during my two years, but it was because she motivated me to learn.

Dear reader, you may think I have been a bit hard on Mr. Bryant and too easy on Mrs. Gier and Dr. Norton.  However, I am thankful that I encountered all three of them.  Because at the time, I did not realize it, but they were teaching me how to study.  Because Mr. Bryant did not have a lot of bells and whistles in his classes, I knew that I was going to have to work extremely hard to pass his class.  So, it was half-desperation and half-determination that I managed to make it through.  Mrs. Gier added an element of creativity to my personal study even though I never took any of her classes.  I would doodle around in my spiral-bound notebooks in Mr. Bryant’s classes because I had seen what her students were doing.  Drawing like that even if you aren’t an artist helps you to learn the material.  Dr. Norton was simply thrilled and in love with the subject that she taught, and it was infectious and motivating to me.  

At the time that I was going through all those classes, my plans were to go on to anesthesia program that was partially hosted at one of our local hospitals.  They worked in conjunction with UAB in Birmingham with great success and it is still open now.  That plan got altered in 1988 when I went to Because of the Times in Alexandria, Louisiana.  I had felt a vague call toward ministry but at the time, it was just that—vague and uncertain.  I would later have the opportunity offered free of charge to go to the same anesthesia program in 1997, but I chose not to go because of ministry involvement here in Dothan.  To be very frankly honest, there are times that I have huge internal struggles with not taking advantage of that opportunity.  In 1998, another opportunity came along from a group of physicians who offered to send me to USA in Mobile for a PA program and then employ me as their PA after I finished.  That was another situation for education free gratis.  Once again, I turned that down and there are times that I cry over the spilt milk so to speak about that decision.  One of the sponsoring physicians who offered me the arrangement told me when I declined to go; he said, “Philip, you are going to waste your life on that little old church!”  That was almost 30 years ago that he said that and certainly the financial aspects of ministry don’t even begin to match up to what that position would have been. However, when I start bearing down when I am preaching about the eternal versus the temporal, it’s not just a theory with me; it is something that I have walked, lived, breathed and slept for a long time now.  Forgive me for that little rabbit trail but maybe it will help someone decide in the future what is for them.

What I am getting at with these teachers, is that I learned things in their classrooms that have helped me to dig into studying, into preaching, into teaching, and into following every potential biblical lead I could find.  I know Dr. Norton has passed and I am certain that Mr. Bryant and Mrs. Gier probably have as well.  However, in the sovereignty of God, He allowed me to pass along their paths in my late teen years for what I have come to believe was effective.  I have benefited from these lives that I encountered.  All of us are moving toward a final destination and we need to have a strong commitment to the Lord to do our diligence with deep commitment.  I believe the tendency is present for all the older generation to look down on the on-coming generation and think about character qualities, commitment issues, and work ethics that have drastically changed in the last 40 years.  I do believe there is some merit in observing the unraveling of Western civilization that needs to be addressed but whether things improve or further deteriorate, I owe those teachers who touched me to offer my best!

Lastly, I would briefly make a plea especially for those who are involved in a public pulpit ministry that has aspects of teaching and preaching the Bible, take your study and work seriously.  It is a shame that too many take academic preparation for a job far more seriously than what they do to know the Word, to dig into the Word, and to preach the Word.  I have made a long-term commitment that continues even to this point, to take the Scriptures seriously and to use every available study Bible, commentary, book, fountain pen, highlighter, four-color pen, journal, legal pad, prayer journal, prayer bench, fasting, public and private worship to move me into a place to be the best “pipe” that I can be for the Lord to use.  I believe there are some others in the same category but the longer I go, the more I realize that we are still far too few.  Come on my brother, let your teachers shape your commitment toward excellence. . .

Thanks for reading. . .

Philip Harrelson