At our age, many of the teachers we remember aren’t still around, but Jess Kauffman was in only about his second year of teaching when we were at AAHS, at the beginning of a 42-year career in high school mathematics.
And he’s still not only learning new “phi-nomenal mathematical ideas but has a recently published book, “Phi-nomena: Phenomena of Phi and Fibonacci Numbers”. Its 2nd edition, “Phi-nomena: Phenomena of the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence”, will be out shortly on Amazon. More on that in a minute.
Rob Ideson had him for algebra and Pam Ufer Wood in 2nd year algebra, but for a lot of the rest of us, it was geometry. While it had some of us often scratching our heads (Barb DeHart Eadie and I confess to this), a good teacher is always there to help unravel math’s seeming mysteries; Kathy Armbruster Zaffina remembers the way “Mr. Kauffman showed me the correct perspective to see the Right Angle”.
Vicki Guenther Farrell says, “I loved that class!“ and for Dan Kett, “He was my favorite teacher”. Rob recalls that “Mr. Kauffman had a good sense of humor” and Rob can even remember his jokes.
Mr. Kauffman was also a coach for JV baseball and Dan Kett, Garth Black, and the late, great Jim Hosler played for him in 10thgrade. Garth was also his catcher for a couple of years of summer baseball. Mr. Kauffman himself was a good athlete and pitched for Western Michigan University in the 1959 College World Series.
Now for his book. Over the last 20 years, he rewrote many of his teaching notes and heavily researched the golden ratio, phi, and numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence, combining the material from many sources to form the basis of his book. For the title, he coined the term "Phi-nomena", which he defines as “events that impress an individual as extraordinary and can be analyzed with the golden ratio, the Fibonacci Sequence or a graphing calculator.” The opening lines of the Preface promise, “Your understanding and appreciation of the beauty existing in nature and mathematics will forever be enhanced.”
On the class website, you can see the back cover of the book with striking graphics and photographs bringing the ideas behind his work to life. There’s also a picture of Mr. Kauffman taken in Bill and Pam Wood’s kitchen showing 3-D models he constructed that illustrate key concepts from the book.
Mr. Kauffman—he’s okay with us calling him “Jess”, now that we’re grown-ups—has enjoyed coming to our reunions over the years and talking to Rob, Garth, Bill, and other class members, including Duane Brown, who teases him about being the young teacher Jess was and how he was teaching the only slightly younger students we were. We’ve invited him to this year’s informal reunion in August and hope you’ll have a chance to say hello.
Jess is the very active head of three generations of Kauffmans and, with his wife, Sally, is raising their great-grandson. Nathan is a junior at Pioneer so Jess is over there every school day and says he has very good memories about the people at Pioneer. That includes us!
Comments