February 14, 2002

Thank you all very much.

Thank you, President Byker, for your comments — some of them were even true! And of course, thank you for selecting me for this award. You know how surprised I was when you called to tell me, and I still haven't fully recovered.

It is indeed such an honor to be added to the list of names that you read — people who have received this award in the past:

— My good friend Ken Kuiper, the very first recipient, someone we all admired and miss very much.

— And my colleague in the math department, Paul Zwier, renowned for his antics in the classroom but even more so for his deep insights into the foundations and philosophy of mathematics.

They and the other recipients have raised the bar very high and I certainly don’t claim to have reached it. Because basically, all I've tried to do is to teach and write — and other things President Byker mentioned in his comments — in the same way that my parents taught me to do any task — work hard at it and do your best. I remember my mom saying, “That’s all the Lord expects of you.”

And for whatever may be exemplary in what I've done, the credit goes to God. He’s the one who called me to teach here and who dropped one surprise after another in my lap as he charted my course to Calvin.

Instead of a lecture on my philosophy and methods of teaching that you may be expecting, I have decided to tell a story — a story of what being called to teach means to one person. This will be the Reader's Digest condensed version since I have a time limit that I will try very hard to meet.

The story begins in 1947 — 55 years ago. The setting is Dispatch, Kansas — located in one of the 2 Dutch settlements where there’s a Christian Reformed church. It’s a very small village with a population of anywhere between 15 and 30 . . . people . . . not hundreds or thousands! [The exact count, you see, depends on how many children the current minister has . . . and whether you include the suburbs.] There's a young lad in bib overalls shooting hoops with some other kids. They just got home after walking the 2 miles from Oak Creek School. [Confession time to some people: It wasn’t uphill both ways . . . and we did have shoes to wear.] This boy is a very shy 3^rd-grader, who cries easily when the big kids tease him. And he gets frightened easily, which happened today on the way to school. A local farmer with a carload of German prisoners of war who are working for him for the day stopped to give the kids a ride to school; and this boy, being one of the littlest, had to sit on a POW’s lap . . . scared spitless! You see, he has 3 brothers in the armed forces . . . and this is the enemy.

So that’s what God had to work with 55 years ago — a shy, scared, crybaby, country kid from Kansas. And really not much has changed today — I’m still quite shy, not very brave, my eyes get watery at almost anything overly sentimental or emotional; and I’m a country boy at heart — as my colleague Sandy Leestma likes to say, “You can take the kid out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the kid.”

But God had some things in mind — and I think He must have had fun over the past 60+ years, planning the surprises that led up to this latest one.

One of the first things was to introduce me to the whole idea of Christian Education. And here’s how that happened. My parents and some others bought a vacant one-room schoolhouse, moved it to a field behind the church across the road from our house, hired a teacher; and I spent the next 5 years in Dispatch Christian School! This is pretty amazing, you realize! It's 1947! And I don’t think the directory of the National Union of Christian Schools had very many one-room country schools listed in it! [Today’s CSI]. But God put one there while I was growing up.

Then it was on to high school. At the end of my junior year, I helped my brother move to Muskegon to teach at Western Michigan Christian. I remember coming to Grand Rapids to visit some relatives and that we drove through the Franklin campus. I don’t remember being particularly awestruck, but something must have made an impression.

Because all through high school I had planned to go on after graduation to Kansas State where my brother had gone. But for some strange reason, during my senior year, I wrote an essay for a contest in the Young Calvinist magazine; and I won a scholarship to Calvin. [Truth be known: my mom probably helped me write it.] And sometime after that my plans for college switched from K-State to Calvin.

So in 1956, Carl Sinke and I started at Calvin — he as a new math professor and I as a scared freshman. Almost every math course I took was from Carl, so I got to know him quite well. Thank you, CJ, for being an exemplary teacher to me, but also a friend who made me feel at home at Calvin. You should be the one up here receiving this award.

I was in the secondary ed. program . . . intending to teach high school math. In fact, I practice taught under my brother in Muskegon! But God decided it was time for another change of direction. A letter came from Dean Ryskamp informing me that I had been selected to receive a fellowship to the University of Michigan.

So 41 years ago this past September, my bride of a few weeks and I trekked off to Ann Arbor for 3 years of graduate school.

I really must add one other tidbit here. Remember I said that I helped my brother move to Muskegon the year before I came to Calvin? God didn’t plan that just so I would have a cushy place to practice teach. You see, when I was at Calvin, I went there to visit most weekends — to be with their family. And I got to know their baby-sitter quite well — so well in fact, that she went with me to Ann Arbor and supported me in grad school. Thanks Hon!

In 1962 the first of our 4 children arrived, and a year later, because of our grim financial situation, we decided it was time for me to find that high-school teaching job. But once again, God had something else in mind. One morning, out of the blue, the phone rang and it was Professor John Tuls calling, and he asked if I’d be interested in teaching math at Calvin!

So the fall of 1963 found me teaching here . . . with, surely, Carl Sinke as my mentor! 4 years later, a National Science Foundation fellowship paid my salary — tax free, if you can believe it! — so I could finish up my Ph.D. God cut that surprise kind of close, though! Because the next year NSF stopped that program.

Just one more anecdote: Sometime in the 70s, as you heard President Byker say, I made a change in what I was teaching. Carl finally persuaded me to help teach some of those early computer programming courses, something that I had resisted for quite some time. Commercial textbooks just didn't seem to fit the courses very well, so Sandy Leestma and I started writing some of our own manuals.

Then in 1980, totally unexpected, a sales rep. from Macmillan Publishing making his rounds on campus, stopped at my office and asked if we’d mind if he sent our Fortran manual to his publisher. Sure, why not! Later, a contract was drawn up and signed . . . and that began my experience with textbook-writing. It has gone on for the past 22 years . . . and I do hope it lasts into retirement!

David Hoekema isn't here for me to thank, but I still want to tell you how he encouraged me in this writing. During his tenure as [dean], when I told him one day that taking on a certain task would mean cutting back on my writing, he jumped up and said “We can’t have that! You must continue writing those books. Just think of all the people around the world who are finding out about Calvin through them!” [My impersonation of David leaves a bit to be desired!] That was such an encouragement for the [dean] to say that this book writing was good for the college!

Well, that's the end of my story of what being called means to me: that God takes people — even shy country kids without much promise — and charts a course through history that brings them exactly to where He wants them to be. I'm here tonight because of what He has done.

But what is even more incredible is that He now rewards ME with this [teaching award]. . . for something HE has done. Talk about amazing grace! . . . I thank you Lord!

. . . But there are people that He used in this latest surprise that I also want to recognize:

Keith VanderLinden: Thank you for heading up the whole nomination process for the Computer Science department, contacting people to write letters and doing the same yourself, and all the other work that was involved.

Joel Adams: Thank you for writing . . . And thank you, by the way, for coming to Calvin some 12 years or so ago as our first Ph.D. computer scientist. Leestma and I really needed some help.

Gerard Venema— a former student of mine by the way — Thank you for co-sponsoring my nomination from the math department and for writing for me also.

Dean Stob — yet another former student — Thank you, Mike, for selecting my name from those you received; and also for writing to support my nomination.

Two other former students who wrote letters are here tonight.

One you’ve already heard about, Wayne Dyksen, Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State. Thanks so much Wayne and for your friendship and encouragement over the years. It's good to have you back in the area.

Sara Willett: Thank you for your letter. Sara is someone who thought enough of her education at Calvin to move back here to Grand Rapids from Denver so her husband Zach could study computer science at Calvin.

[I am also grateful to others who also wrote letters but who can't be here tonight : Steve and Thea Hare— Steve is a VP at Purdue— responsible for Information Technology Security. My publisher Alan Apt from Prentice-Hall, from Fort Collins, CO — a good friend who encourages me and supports me in my textbook writing. Several people at other colleges and universities that I've gotten to know through textbook interaction.]

Members of the Board: I'm grateful to your predecessors for approving my appointment to Calvin 38 1/2 years ago; and I thank board members like yourselves for allowing me to stay on here. . . and for making it a pleasant experience. It's also great to see former students on the board!

Colleagues: I’ve gotten to know many of you well. And I thank you for the influence you’ve had on me personally and for your contributions to the college. Several of you could as well be up here instead of me.

And now my family: I can’t begin to thank you enough for being so incredibly supportive and understanding over the past 40-plus years; for listening patiently when I've moaned and groaned about something; for not complaining . . .too much . . . about all the hours I spend holed up in my study, prepping for the next day or working on a textbook. I realize that I owe you far more than I can repay, especially more of my time — and as God gives me more years, I promise that I will try to give you that. I love you all.

Thank you everyone . . . To GOD be the praise!