High School: Mr. Schweighardt - Physics Teacher

Belinda tells me her favorite and most influential teacher of all time was Mr. Schweighardt. She says that this man changed her life, causing her to start on the long road toward adulthood and religion. I remember in high school she talked about him constantly - she almost idolized him. Based on her reference, I decided to take a few classes from this man. After all, I thought, my sister and I generally agreed on a lot of things (although, at the time, there was no way I’d let her know this).

I signed up for a physics class in the second semester of my junior year. From the first day in that class, it was obvious what attracted my sister to the man. He had a very dynamic and powerful personality. He strongly believed in God, and made no secret of his personal feelings about the school, big business and government.

His classes were an interesting mixture of personal tirades against the government, physics and his beliefs in God. I remember that I kept wondering how he got away with preaching in class, but it was so refreshing to hear someone talking about their religion that I didn’t complain to the administration.

I had a love/hate relationship with this man from the first day I attended his class. On one hand his lectures were very interesting. I learned a lot about God, religion, big business and the government. On the other hand, I didn’t learn very much about physics. He seemed to be more interested in convincing his students of the correctness of his world viewpoint then he was in teaching his subject.

Because he spent most of the hour lecturing us on unrelated topics, we were required to complete more than the average amount of homework to keep up with things. The pattern for a typical hours in his class was very simple. We’d first take a quiz. The first ten minutes of every single class consisted of the completion of a short quiz to determine what we learned so far.

Then he’d talk for about ten minutes about the previous night’s homework. After that, he’d assign the homework to be completed by the next day. The remaining forty minutes or so of class were taken up by lectures on his personal views of the world.

I must admit that I didn't learn much about physics in his classes. I did learn about the world and how it operates, and much of what he taught stuck with me through the long years.