Nick Altringer, professor at Murray Middle School, works with Emma Kue, an eighth year student, to build garden boxes at Murray intermediate school. Altringer was a teacher student with Tim Chase before becoming a full-time teacher himself. (Alex Kormann / The Minnesota Star Tribune)
At the time, the Murray College Fair was legendary, “in development of scientists and intelligent and informed citizens for decades”, wrote Chase in 2014. When he started there, he had just left a failed sales career. Not a better place to be, right?
But the timing worked against him. He arrived in the middle of the school year and has always shocked his experience in the business world, he had trouble connecting with students whose professor had left them.
Chase thought he should stay to teach the summer school, but was not sure of himself, he recalls. Thus, he turned to a veteran instructor, the late Johnny Bland, to get advice, and we told him: “You will spend time with your wife. You come back next fall. These students will think that you are here forever, and it will be better next year.
Soon he had his confidence, and 30 years later, his footprint is everywhere. It is not only in the excursions of Wolf Ridge in the field that her former student, Nick Altringer, is now leading, but it is in the garden beds that produce vegetables for a course in culinary skills at Como Park Senior High.
Last week, Altringing worked with fees to build new wooden garden beds with wooden setting. Some children were drilled, some manual shovels and beautiful shoes were muddy.
Altringer, too, entered the second career teaching and was a student teacher at Chase when the E2 program took off. He has become a full -time instructor and realized that in being part of such a accomplished scientific team – Mary Crowley and Erin Dooley are there too – he could do big things NOW.