Steve Miller, Retired Industrial Arts Teacher with a Heart

Caption: Steve Miller, a retired industrial arts teacher in the Iowa City Community School District

Steve Miller, a former industrial arts teacher in the Iowa City Community School District, had a difficult childhood. An industrial arts teacher fresh out of the Air Force mentored Steve in the 7th grade. His teacher knew that due to family circumstances, Steve “never got to go anywhere or do anything,” so he asked him to be his assistant. Steve was talented in mechanics, and his teacher decided he should have a future.

Steve’s father was a railroad worker for the Chicago Great Western Railroad, which eventually became the Union Pacific. He was also an antique dealer. Most of his weekend time was devoted to music and he was gone a lot of the time. His mother was left with five kids and no car. His parents borrowed money to buy a set of encyclopedias and Childcraft books. His mother rebuked him when he and his siblings wanted to go to the library, calling them ungrateful, no-good little [brats] for not being satisfied with what they had, but they would sneak off to the library anyway.

Steve’s industrial arts teacher took him to various industrial arts fairs to judge projects with him. When Steve was in the eighth grade, he told him, “Steve, you’re smart. You should go to college.”

Steve told him that no one in his family had gone to college and he wouldn’t know how to go about getting there.

Five years later, he was at his teacher’s alma mater, the University of Northern Iowa.

First, he started at Marshalltown Community College. He wanted to be a manufacturer, so he took every course that would help him become a manufacturer with no thought of getting a degree. Then he thought maybe he should get certified in education, like his industrial arts teacher.

“I realized I’d already worked for manufacturers. At 17 I had drafting skills and worked with engineers at Collins Radio. I worked on the Apollo Program. I realized I had deficiencies in math, so I worked on my math skills at Kirkwood Community College. I would study the engineers’ drawings at Collins during my lunch hour and calculated the gear ratios for math practice.

“I found an error in the gear ratio figured by the engineers.

“The engineers scoffed. The boss told the engineers, ‘it won’t take long to determine who’s right and who’s wrong. If you ignore the kid and he’s right, it won’t go well for you.’

“Ten engineers thanked me for finding the error and the rest didn’t. I got a thank you, but no raise. So I decided to go to college.”

Once Steve graduated, he took a teaching job in a very poor school district in the rural area surrounding Cedar Rapids. He taught 7th-12th grade industrial arts. The blackboard was so pockmarked the kids complained because they couldn’t tell where the decimal points were. The shop was a mess.

Steve told the superintendent the shop would need a lot of work. The previous shop teacher, however, had run the district into the red by $150, so the superintendent told Steve his shop budget was negative $150.

Fortunately, his principal negotiated his budget up to zero.

That was a start. So Steve started going to auctions and befriended three sawmill operators in the area. He bought a sawmill for $110.

I asked him how big a sawmill is, suspecting they’re not little and not cheap. Steve said, “They’re about 40-50 feet long and weigh about five tons.”

It needed work.

One day the superintendent said they suspected a student was setting fires and was abused at home. The superintendent asked Steve to keep a close eye on the boy and involve him in work that would get him interested in something other than setting fires.

Steve taught him how to weld. He was talented at welding, and Steve soon called him “my ace welder.” They worked on a school merry-go-round, fixing it with welding repairs. The boy also helped Steve repair the sawmill.

Steve wondered how he could get the boy into the Navy Seabees, who build things like bridges and bulwarks and such. The boy went to the Hawkeye Institute of Technology and became a Seabee.

Every time the boy, now a man, came home on leave, he’d come to Steve’s shop in his Navy uniform and spend the day with him. They went to lunch together, and he never burned anything down again.

Steve doesn’t understand why the school district doesn’t respect the role of industrial arts in helping kids to grow, develop, and get good-paying jobs.

“I could teach a design class on a strip of sidewalk with a piece of chalk,” he told me.

“Sometimes I tried to help other teachers understand behavior-disordered kids. I helped a principal understand why kids wandered the hallways during lunch. It was because they had no money to eat. I knew kids who stay in toilet stalls during pep rallies.”

I told him I knew of a girl who ate lunch in a toilet stall rather than go to the cafeteria. She was the daughter of a medical specialist and a professor. Money wasn’t the issue. She was emotionally disturbed and cutting herself.

Troubled kids need professional help and also the kindness of talented teachers like Steve Miller, who know how to go the extra mile with a troubled child, just like he used to be.