One class I taught will always rank among my most memorable, but not for a good reason.
Between the early 1990s and early 2000s, I taught over 100 weeklong classes. During those years before digital imaging, my exercises were original inked finger and palm prints, and real lift cards with tape lifts on them. I had fingerprinted literally hundreds of subjects and lifted many thousands of latents starting in 1986. The exercises were organized in sets of eight subjects, sixteen packets of ten lifts each, at different levels of difficulty. All of the inked prints were in 9” X 11” manilla envelopes and the lifts were in 5” X 7” manilla envelopes.
In addition, I had a dozen brand new exercises I had made with five subjects each and fifteen difficult latents, exercises which approximated the IAI latent print certification exam and were used for students preparing for the exam.
The class in this case had 26 students, the maximum I would take. It consisted mostly of beginners and I was teaching at a very basic level. At the end of the final day after the students had all departed, my exercises were spread out in disorganization across the tables in the large classroom. It usually took me two hours to reorganize everything and pack my boxes to ship home.
Just as I was getting started, my host came into the room and announced that the Police Commissioner wanted to see me. He was there to pick me up and take me to Headquarters. I told him I needed to pack my class materials first.
No! the Commissioner was insistent that I come immediately.
I expressed concern for my exercises being left out, but he assured me we would lock the classroom and nobody would enter it until we returned. On that promise, I agreed and we went to see the Commissioner. He was very gracious and presented me with some impressive gifts as a thank you for teaching at his department.
We returned to the classroom and – SHOCK!!! – my exercises were GONE. I was frantic. The officer learned that the custodian had cleaned the room and thrown my exercises away. The garbage truck had picked up the trash and was on the way to the dump.
We raced to the dump and beat the garbage truck there, but only because it had one more stop between the police training center and the dump – a meat packing plant. When the garbage truck got to the dump, we had fifteen to twenty of the students there waiting with us. A half ton of pig guts had been loaded into the garbage truck on top of my exercises.
The garbage truck dumped its contents on flat ground to the side and a backhoe separated the garbage and spread it out over a thousand square feet of ground. Most of my exercises had been soaked with the fluids from the packing plant waste. A few sets remained dry, and some of the others only had minor wetting to the manilla envelopes, but not the lifts or inked prints inside.
Nonetheless, that fiasco cost me months of preparation time due to the lost exercises. Teaching does not always go as planned!