File:Teacher, Jack Mehl 1983-84.jpg: Difference between revisions

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From Jon Evans

These photos are from the 1983-84 BHS yearbook which was dedicated to math teacher Jack Mehl (pronounced "mail" not "mell") in recognition of his contributions to the high school. During his career at Brunswick Jack was a classroom teacher; coached numerous different sports including football, baseball, and both boys and girls basketball; and served as the advisor to the Student Government Association.

Jack also performed many quasi-administrative tasks such as helping to create the record keeping system for allowing clubs and study halls to meet during the school day. As every single principal and vice-principal at Brunswick knew, Jack was an invaluable asset to the school's administration not only for helping with various academic tasks but also for gathering information about incidents on or off campus whenever the administration ran into a wall of silence from students.

As anyone who sat in his classroom knows, Jack was well known for correcting students whenever they said "yeah" instead of "yes." Also, Jack had a facial expression he projected to students that were not being truthful, or when they were doing / saying something stupid, that conveyed an unspoken message of "that's bullsh*t" or "stop fu*king around." However in the almost 35 years I have known Jack I do not ever remember hearing him actually use profanity.

After an in-service day workshop introduced the faculty to the teaching method known as "Mastery Learning" Jack quickly implemented it in his classroom. From that point on, students in his class became familiar with taking "Test A" and doing "correctives" in order to be eligible to take "Test B" if they wanted to improve their grade.

Jack and I used to have discussions about allowing students to use calculators for tests covering basic math skills. I was against allowing the use of calculators because I thought high school students needed to have basic memorization skills when it came to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Jack believed that if students did not have these skills by HS they were not going to develop them and that calculators allowed students to engage in more problem solving applications.

Jack and I were polar opposites when it came to politics and we often engaged in lively but fun debates on various issues. For many presidential elections, Alan Lecalleet and I would have a bet with Jack and Ed Sell about which candidate would win the election. After the election, whichever side lost the bet had to pay for dinner at Griffs Restaurant in Frederick. We usually gathered for dinner on the night of "all you can eat Alaskan king crab legs."

One thing we both shared was our fondness for betting on the ponies over at Charles Town Race Track. Jack bought a computer program for handicapping races and often after school, or even sometimes during a common planning period, as I read past performance data from the Racing Forum Jack would enter it into the program. We would print out the summary "picks" for each of the races and then head over to Charles Town for the races that night. For several years the BHS faculty had an annual dinner over at Charles Town, and using the computer program Jack and I would create and printout a tip sheet of picks for all the races which we titled "J&J's Picks."

After retiring a few years back Jack went on to become, and still is, the Varsity Women's Basketball Coach at Hood College and is also involved in several support programs for helping students with their academic studies.

Jack is one of the finest teachers I have ever known, and if I had to pick one word to describe him overall it would be he's a man of "integrity" :=)!