My memories are of many talented and dedicated teachers (Frank Lemire, Neil Wigley, Om Chandna, Erwin Kreyszig, Dan Britten, Chi Song Wong, and Tim Traynor in math and Lucjan Krause and Arie van WijnGaarden in physics---apologies if I've misspelled some names or missed people) and courses that were usually quite interactive and a lot of fun.
The first course I taught as a professor, I tried to imitate Om Chandna's technique when he taught MA 212, second-year Honours Calculus, which was generally to lecture without notes (once he carefully unfolded from his shirt pocket a small piece of paper with a "complicated formula" on it, wrote it on the board, and carefully refolded the paper and deposited it back in his pocket---that was it!). This impressed us all. About halfway through the year some of us heard him through his office door practicing a lecture ahead of time, and we assumed after that that that was how he was able to do it.
So for my first course as a professor, differential equations, I prepared for 20 minutes each day a lecture on the board in my office, and marked in my textbook the problems I wanted to assign for homework. The result was a disaster---I was rated 1.9 on a scale of 1 to 5 by the students. One comment I remember 30 years later: "Professor Lucier is never prepared for class and he chooses homework problems randomly from the textbook." I guess the technique has to be appropriate to the audience.
Another highlight was studying Real Analysis (MA 210) in six weeks in the summer of 1974 (the summer Maureen and I got married) with Frank Lemire. Man, that course flew.
It was great being a student, sharing an office with three other students, and spending many evenings working together on homework or preparing for exams. The view at night from the tenth floor was wonderful. The evening janitor, an Italian immigrant named Tony, was very nice to us students, emptying and cleaning the ashtrays (!) in the offices. How times have changed.
I remember the parties that were generally for the faculty, but students were invited, and Maureen and I would go. Harold Atkinson played guitar and we'd sing songs (new songs for me, like "Charlie on the M.T.A."). In 1974 the departmental Christmas party was held in the basement of the Dominion House tavern, and I have to admit I was in pretty rough shape the next day, which was the day I first took the Putnam exam! Once, Lynne Sebele held a party at her apartment on Mill Street and invited all our teachers, but among them only Neil Wigley and Elias and Bhatia Zakon showed up; I remember it as being very pleasant. Many years later, after Elias Zakon's death, I got to know his daughter Tamara Zakon very well when we worked together to publish e-book versions of the three analysis books that her father developed over many years for MA 191c, Basic Concepts of Mathematics; Math 210, Mathematical Analysis I; and Math 310, Mathematical Analysis II. In 2001, when I next met her, Bhatia didn't remember the student party; she died last December shortly after her 99th birthday.
Finally, around December 1975, the Ontario Mathematics Association (or something similar, I can't find it using Google now) held a meeting at the University of Windsor, and Paul Halmos was the invited speaker. I remember he gave a survey of recent results in operator theory, and I was surprised that I could understand quite a bit of it, taking Tim Traynor's course on functional analysis at the time. Again, Maureen and I decided to attend the conference dinner, which I believe was at the Anderdon Tavern on Front Road in Amherstburg. Being a bit nervous, we hurried to get there, and ended up getting there before anyone else, a few steps in front of Halmos and Janos Aczel, a mathematician friend of Halmos's from the University of Waterloo.
Well, what could we do? Maureen and I sat across from Halmos and his friend in the middle of the long table reserved for the conference dinner, and we chatted throughout dinner. I was applying to graduate schools at the time, and Halmos was very negative. "Don't go to graduate school, there are no jobs for mathematicians", he said. I don't care, I said, I want to be a mathematician. "You have a wife and child", he said, "how are you going to support them without a job?" "I don't care, I want to be a mathematician." After a few more rounds back and forth, he finally said "OK, go to graduate school then, if you want it that badly you'll do all right."
And he was right.