Trego's Mountain Ear

It took a little while to understand – but whenever I have been the smartest person in the room, or on the project, I’ve definitely been in the wrong room. Simply enough, it’s easy to be the smartest person in the room – you just have to pick your room. And you have to pick it for ignorance.

It doesn’t take a great physicist or chemist to run rings around me in either field. This week I releveled my sawmill – and I know several high school dropouts who could do the job with a string and a carpenter’s level. I, with a Ph.D., need a self-leveling instrument to do the job. I am definitely not the smartest person in the room if it’s a room full of millrights.

So let’s talk about teaching. Mike Brandon took the time to teach me to file a chainsaw. Others had tried before – I recall Pete Klinke’s analogy with a fishhook – but I still can’t see it, nor could I learn from Pete. Mike Brandon knew me well enough to select a description I could understand. To me, his approach was simple, comparing each tooth on a chain with a hand plane, and explaining that the length of the shaving was how I could tell the sharpness. Pete Klinke used an explanation that worked for him. Mike Brandon selected an explanation that worked for me.

Reading came easy to me – I was blessed with vision that made it easy, and interested in finding the stories for entertainment. How different it was for a young woman I met who entered college reading at a third-grade level. She liked listening, but I wasn’t capable of shifting her to a higher point on the reading level. I’m still not sure if the failure was mine, or belonged to an elementary teacher twenty-odd years earlier – but my first education class, years ago in Colorado, included this phrase: “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

It’s a hard evaluation standard. Over the years, I’ve ran into a lot of teachers who argued with it. They never seemed to realize that arguing that they had taught, when the student hadn’t learned, was a statement on their ability to teach. Most of the arguments came from teachers who identified as good to great teachers – but their arguments were always that they had taught, despite their students not learning.

It was as a school board member that I learned about motivation for reading. I learned of a kid who just couldn’t read. For five years, I heard reports that he just couldn’t be taught to read. The next year, I was presenting the bicycle for the Masonic Lodge Bikes for Books program – and realized that I was passing the bicycle to that same youngster who had been described for five years as incapable of learning to read. While he held onto his new bike, he described how the motivation of the bike had led him to read. For five years, his teachers had accepted that he couldn’t read, whether they used phonics or whole word approaches. If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.

It’s easy to believe you’re the smartest person in the room if you select your room. It’s easy to learn if you select a room where you aren’t. Mick Nelson taught me the little I know of plumbing – pointing out the complexity of the irrigation systems I was designing, and how the same principles worked on a smaller scale, and explaining things so that I understood.

The other day, I was talking with Brad Osler – and the topic went back to high school classes. Both Brad and I had despised our PE teacher. In retrospect, I was lucky – I only had PE twice a week from the jerk. Half of my classmates also had to suffer through a year of him teaching math – while I had gone into Mr. Tripp’s math class. I was 35 when I met a colleague who was a good PE teacher, showing me that abusive teachers weren’t required for PE.

One of my greatest lessons in teaching was from a high school classmate who had asked for help. In my usual style, I explained (several times) “It’s simple. You just . .” and a short blonde exploded on me, explaining that “If it was simple I wouldn’t be asking for your help.” She was right – a lot of times, simple just means you tackled the problem right the first time. I learned a great lesson about how to teach – and, despite the fact she had asked me for help, I wasn’t the smartest person in the room. Whenever you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s a good idea to look for another room.

This system adds a city manager, someone hired to run day-to-day operations while elected officials set policy.

It sounds like a fix. It isn’t always.

In a town like Eureka, where only 8 to 24 people are paying attention at meetings, the manager depends on the commission to keep their job. That means they are unlikely to challenge the people who hired them.

So instead of open control, you get quiet influence:

• Decisions shaped before meetings
• A manager who keeps certain people happy
• Contracts and hiring that reflect relationships, not just qualifications

The public sees a professional structure, but most of the real decisions are still being guided by a small group.

It feels cleaner than the commission system, but it can actually make things harder to see and harder to question.

Bottom line: More professional on the surface, but still vulnerable to insider control, just less visible.

In Montana, the commission form puts a small group of elected people in charge, and each one runs a department.

On paper, that sounds efficient. In reality, in a town like Eureka where only 8 to 24 people show up to meetings, it creates pockets of power.

Each commissioner can end up “owning” their department. That means hiring, contracts, and decisions can stay inside that one person’s circle. When only a handful of citizens are watching, there isn’t much pressure to explain those decisions.

This is where small-town problems show up fast:

• Hiring friends or family
• Favoring certain businesses
• Keeping information inside departments

The public may not even know what’s happening until it’s already done.

The problem isn’t just corruption, it’s that everything becomes personal and territorial. One person controls one piece, and it’s hard for anyone else to step in.

With such low turnout, this system becomes easy to control quietly.

Bottom line: Simple structure, but high risk of favoritism and “good old boy” control that’s hard to break.