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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

I GET EVEN

When I was a sophomore at Stetson University, although 1 was a music student, everyone had to take
some science courses and I ended up in a biology class which was taught by a retired Lieutenant
Coronel from the army, Dr. Pritchard.

Early in the semester, perhaps the second or third day, Dr. Pritchard gave us a test, which 1 found to be
an easy test and finished it considerably ahead of the rest of the class. Since my test was already
completed, I was just sitting at my desk with nothing to do, sort of looking around.

Dr. Pritchard came over and took my test paper off of my desk, and tore it in half and said, “Mr. Dicks,
during tests we keep our eyes on our own papers in my class”. I took this to mean that he thought I was
cheating on the test, but what could I say.

I thought to myself, “You son of a —, I’ll show you”. I made up my mind in those few minutes that I
was not going to allow him to give any tests during the whole semester that I could not make an A on,
and I developed a strategy for doing that. Each night, from the section of the text book that had been
assigned to us, I would make up a test of 20 questions, write the questions down, and then write all of
the answers. I gave myself a test every night of that semester, and there was never a test given in his
class that 1 did not make 100 on.

At the end of the semester, Dr. Pritchard told me that I had the only A in the class, and I do not know if
he remembered he had torn up my paper at the beginning of the semester for suspecting me of cheating,
but the subject did not come up.

About 15 years later, when my older brother Tribble was in Stetson University, and since he was
majoring in Biology, he had a course under Dr. Pritchard also. Dr. Pritchard had some complimentary
things to say about me to my brother, and I trust that he was duly impressed. 1 can recall one of the
terms that I remembered from that biology course was Trypanosoma Gambiance. I have found this term
very difficult to work into casual conversations, but as I recall it is the name of the organism that the
African Tetse Fly carries, which causes sleep-sickness. Since that term did not ever have any practical
application for me, I have tried to recall whether anything else I learned in that biology class has helped
me, but I consider the whole semester a waste of my time. I did learn how to study because of it,
however, and that may have been some benefit to me even though I used very little biology in being a
High School Band Director.

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