Densho Digital Archive - Richard Sakurai Interview (denshovh-srichard-01-0017)

<Begin Segment 17>

RP: And now when you did go back to school in 1943 was it?

RS: Yeah, everything was fine. Everything went according to... and I finished, instead of finishing in two years I finished in a year and a half. That's why I graduated in January. It's as if nothing happened before, I just went back to school and did everything.

RP: What were the teachers in your high school like? What do you recall about the teachers and you shared that story earlier before we started the interview, I wondered if you could share it again.

RS: I had some really good teachers and few that really didn't do very much. But I think in general I think the teachers that I had were pretty good. The one teacher that really in some ways influenced my life a great deal besides the one that was the former missionary, was the one that taught the geometry class. And by the time I went back to school there was a shortage of teachers, that's why my sister got appointed to be a teacher. But then there's a shortage of math teachers. So to teach the geometry class in high school they asked the teacher who was all her life had taught elementary school, an elderly really nice woman, gentle old woman who taught elementary school and so they assigned her to teach geometry. Well, of course it was years and years since she had done anything like that, you know. She taught her grade school teachers arithmetic, nothing like geometry so she had a hard time. So she would we would go over some things in class and then she would assign some problems and of course mathematics was one of my strong points, and so it was no problem for me, but all the other people can't do mathematics very well. So the next day there's always somebody that said, "I don't know how to do problem number such and such that you assigned." And of course the teacher was kind of... didn't quite know what to do about it so she always asked me, "What's the solution to problem such and such?" And so I would say, well, this is the way you solve this problem. And this got to be habit, and so I in many ways I taught, along with this teacher, geometry. And that meant I really learned geometry. Geometry is something that ever since that time, geometry is the thing that I used to guide my way to thinking about mathematics and science. The way geometry is structured is the way I structure my way of thinking about other mathematics and other science. And so I think she had a great deal of influence on my life and my career because my career is in mathematics and science. And so it started about there.

RP: That's great.