BEATTY — Vern Nelson was working as a carpenter in the Saga gold mine back in 1982 when he got into a conversation with Ron Raiche, then principal of Beatty’s schools.
Nelson told Raiche that he was a teacher. He had left Rockford, Minnesota, coming west looking for work when the teachers back there were on strike.
Raiche encouraged him to apply for a teaching job, and he has been with Beatty schools ever since. His 32-year career there will end with his retirement later this month.
Nelson has spent the last couple of years teaching the same grade levels, 2-3, where he began his teaching career. In between he spent 20 years teaching middle school.
“I love teaching science,” Nelson said. “That was my passion in middle school.” He liked doing hands-on projects with the students, building bridges out of balsa wood, building and flying rockets and racing rocket cars.
After having students build rockets from kits, he challenged them to be creative and make rockets from objects brought from home. Once someone built one out of a car air filter. A couple of girls built one that was a foot or more in diameter and several feet tall. He said they got the fins properly aligned, and when it was launched, “It flew beautifully straight … for about 6 or 7 feet before it ran out of fuel.”
Sometimes science experiments became “never do that again” experiences, like when a demonstration with sulfuric acid and sugar exposed a lack of ventilation and required evacuation of the school building.
Another time, the class was making hot-air balloons using Sterno as fuel. “It was windy outside, so we decided to try one indoors.” It caught fire, and he wound up stomping out the flames when it fell to the floor.
Nelson says that custodian Connie “Cinderella” Hensyel used to tease him about a demonstration on wind erosion and dune formation using sand and hair dryers left his whole classroom coated with dust.
Nelson tells how he helped with the effort to add variety to the middle school curriculum: “We were always a small school. We tried to give the kids electives.” He used some of his own tools to supplement what the school could provide to teach basic wood shop, helping the kids make simple items like shelves and stools.
Nelson also coached wrestling at the high school for 12 years, starting as an assistant under Todd Klopp. “I had never wrestled. I learned from Klopp and from books and videos,” he says.
Coaching involved a lot of road trips. It also gave him an opportunity to get to know the older version of some of his former students. “I could see how much they’d matured and grown. That was kind of neat.”
“I have all good memories of being in Beatty,” the teacher said. “I loved having kids in second and third and then having some of them again in middle school. By the time I got back to elementary, I was having some of their kids.”
The school staff gave Nelson a surprise retirement party after school on May 13. He says he has no particular plans of what he will do in retirement.