![]() ![]() Wolesensky was not a math prodigy, and he didn’t start as a math major. In fact, it bothers me insomuch as what I could have done better.” I get no joy when students do poorly in my class. You don’t earn my trust you earn my distrust. There’s a through-line from that first teaching job to his current one. In my mind, they were all going to be successful.” This world is full of very worthwhile people, and I never said, ‘Oh, this person won’t be successful.’ That never entered my mind. I don’t have a single bad memory about teaching there. I actually connected with my students in the penitentiary. “You hear about people in a penitentiary, and think, ‘Oh gosh, they’re scary people!’ But they were more like me than not. (He taught it by reading two classes ahead.) “I didn’t know Lotus!” he says laughing, speculating that he got the job because he was the only one who applied. ![]() He responded to a want ad for someone to teach Lotus software to inmates. (At 56, he finally paid off the farm, which he checks on about three times a year.) When the farm crisis of the 1980s hit and interest rates soared to 20%, Wolesensky, then 22, purchased the family farm to save it. “My family had no money,” he says flatly. Though his loans were deferred, he still needed money for grad school. “My student loans were coming due, and I heard that if you went to graduate school, you got them deferred.” But economic necessity propelled him back to school. He then worked in a bar and trained racehorses on his farm. He attended the nearby University of Nebraska, working in an Alpo pet food factory each summer, and after 6½ years earned a bachelor’s degree. Wolesensky grew up on an 80-acre farm 35 miles outside Lincoln, Nebraska, planting and harvesting corn, sorghum, wheat, oats and soybeans and surveying the biological world from the seat of a tractor. This is the story of someone who finds riches everywhere he goes. But this is not an educational rags-to-riches story. In 2020, he won the $25,000 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and this year, he was promoted from assistant professor of instruction to full professor of instruction. It took him right down the Nebraska State Penitentiary’s death row. Bill Wolesensky vividly remembers the walk he made every day to his first teaching job. ![]()
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