Ample Customer Parking: Batman Signage in a University World

When we pulled into the parking lot at the car dealership we had to laugh. Directly in front of our car was a large sign that read, “Ample Customer Parking.” The same message sat squarely in front of every parking spot. “Ample Customer Parking” – repeated 50 times – all over the lot.

“It’s the Bat Cave!” we said. Because in the 1960s live-action television version of Batman, every item carried a carefully concise label: the Bat pole, the Bat computer, the Bat chemical analyzer, Batmobile parking. Pretty funny.

We didn’t think much more about all those signs.

Until, that is, we got the survey. Our salesman told us we’d be getting a customer satisfaction packet -- that his dealership prided itself on extremely high customer satisfaction ratings. He’d really appreciate it, he said, if we’d take the time to fill out the survey and send it back.

You guessed it. On that survey was the question, “Did your dealership provide ample customer parking?”.

Of course it did. The signs told us so. We laughed, but it was also true.

Would the parking have been ample without those signs? Probably. Would we have thought about it as much when we filled out that survey? Probably not.

We can take a lesson from Batman and from the car dealership. Communicate frequently. Make the message redundant. Keep the signs up. That way, there’s no mistaking.

Ample customer parking? Yeah, we got that.

Ms. Wanza

My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Wanza Sharp, died Jan. 27, 2008, at the age of 92. That she of all people should live to be 92 probably surprised very few who knew her. Ms. Wanza was perpetual energy and motion. She was active, enthusiastic and very involved with her students. She was born to be a teacher.

She was born into a family of educators, actually. At a place and time when even going to high school was luxury, Ms. Wanza's family produced teachers and school administrators who were well known and respected in Union County, Tennessee. One sister was a much-loved high school biology teacher. A brother became superintendent of schools. Her youngest brother went to Harvard and became a professor of at the University of Tennessee.

Ms. Wanza began teaching at Horace Maynard High School, but eventually settled into a fourth grade classroom at Maynardville Elementary. That's where I met her.

I'd had wonderful teachers before, but none quite like her. We were going to have fun, she said. If we finished our work, we'd do dictionary drills. We would compete to see who could find definitions the fastest, and that would be fun. We were going to have fun with math, of all things. We would learn long division and, when we did, we'd have so much fun we might just spend all day doing long division. She made us believe this might actually be true.

And it was. We worked long division problems in chalk on a green board for hours at a time. We did spend a couple days doing just math, which none of my other teachers had ever seemed all that enthusiastic about.

Ms. Wanza was enthusiasm itself. We would learn what we needed, even if it wasn't in the book. She got us workbooks on maps and graphs, something no other fourth graders in the area had. That material would be on our achievement tests, she said. It was. But the knowledge would be basic to the rest of our lives.

Ms. Wanza's natural ability to teach touched all of us, but especially a few kids in the classroom. These were the kids, especially a few boys, who seemed to fade into the classroom woodwork all the other years. They were quiet; they were badly behind; they wanted to be somewhere else -- probably just about anywhere other than school. Come high school, most of them disappeared.

But not in Ms. Wanza's class. With her, they had identities. She knew their grandpas, she said, and their cousins and their moms and dads. She tousled their hair when she walked by and gave them affectionate nicknames. In return she got grins, and wonder-of-wonders, some actual progress. For that one year, if no other, these kids actually seemed to like school, at least a little, and to feel at home there enough to learn.

Later, after she retired, Ms. Wanza came back to school as a substitute teacher. She seemed to know a little bit about every subject as she roamed from class to class at the high school. She seemed to be there at least half the time. And she was just as fun as ever. Ms. Wanza in class meant a good school day.

Now she's no longer with us. If they happen to need someone to teach long division in heaven, she'd be perfect for the job.

I've always thought that heaven would be a place to get answers to all the things you ever wanted to know -- and to find out what really matters. If that's the case, I hope Ms. Wanza gets to see how much her life's work mattered. I hope she gets to see all the lives she touched, and that her legacy lives on.

Here By the Owl

The owl is a time-honored emblem of knowledge and wisdom.
Being older than the rest of you, I am asked to advise you from time to time, as the need arises.
I hope my advice will always be based on true knowledge, and ripened with wisdom.

From the FFA opening ceremonies, in the official FFA handbook, circa 1978.

My dad was an FFA advisor. He taught agriculture at Horace Maynard High School beginning in the fall of 1955 until he became "just" an administrator about 1993. Much of the time, he was a teacher and administrator both. But in his capacity as ag teacher, he spoke the advisor's part of the opening ceremonies hundreds of times.

I heard him say the owl's part a few dozen times myself -- first, while trapped in his office after school listening to him and his "boys" practice for parliamentary procedure competition. The opening ceremonies were always a part of the contest requirements. Later, I was on his parliamentary procedure team myself, but that's another story.

In FFA meetings, each officer, including the advisor, is stationed at a bust of his official emblem. My dad's, of course, was an owl. He also had a stuffed, great-horned owl on the wall of his classroom. I never see an owl without thinking of my dad.

And that is fitting. He is, and has always been, a very wise man.

He had remarkable success with his high school program, especially considering the resources available to him. Not that he would have admitted that, ever. He would never take that credit.

He advised older "boys" too, because he worked with UT students doing their student-teaching in agricultural education. Several dozen University of Tennessee students passed through his program over the years on their way to teaching positions of their own. They would become owls, too.

He gave them good advice. "Start tough," he would tell them. "Let the students know you mean business from day one." That's important, because you can always ease up later. "But if you start off too easy, you can never go back the other way."

Part of Pop's success was a natural ability to size-up people, and a good, basic understanding of human nature.

When I was a high school freshman, it came to my attention that he was completely misjudging and mishandling one student in his class. I knew the guy. I'd gone all the way through school with him. He was bad news. And here my dad was treating him just like any ordinary student.

So, with all the wisdom of a young teen, I told my dad he was wrong.

Pop didn't seem too impressed with my advice. I wanted to know why.

He thought about that for a minute.

"Well, Lisa," he said. "It's like this. I know who that boy is. I know what he is. But he doesn't have to know that.

"You see, if I treat him like I know his reputation, why, he'll feel like he has to live up that reputation. If I treat him like everybody else, maybe he won't."

Did that actually work?, I asked.

Not always he admitted. But a surprising number of times, it did.

And wouldn't you know, the wise old owl was right. A whole bunch of boys who were trouble-makers in other classes never gave my dad much trouble at all.