In this lecture dedicated to the memory of Robert Karplus, we celebrate him as an eminent researcher in theoretical physics, as a physics professor and as a visionary in K-12 precollege math and science education. I knew Professor Karplus as a physics professor at Harvard University when I was 21 years of age and a beginning graduate student. I remember him as a brilliant, thoughtful, inspiring physics teacher. He was clearly interested in teaching young people and in physics teaching methods. He seemed quite comfortable about having a woman student in his class and was fair and open about it. I knew him when he was still heavily committed to research on field theories and to the teaching of graduate physics students. Several years after leaving Harvard and moving to the University of California at Berkeley, he recognized that undesirable changes were taking place in precollege math and science education, changes that people like me were creating, by not going into the F-12 teaching profession. In my early years I had expected to go to college to become an elementary school teacher, but at the start of my second year at Hunter College I met Rosalyn Yalow, who was my physics teacher in an introductory course on modern physics and who convinced me that a career in science was more appropriate for me than a career as an elementary school teacher. Our encounter occurred before she started medical physics research at the Veteran's Hospital in the Bronx, which eventually led to her winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1977. Before meeting Rosalyn Yalow, I was under the impression that there were only three possible career options for women: school teaching, nursing and secretarial work. However, for me there was only one real choice, school teaching, because this was where I had an interest and perhaps some talent, and I clearly had no talent in the other two options. Since my birth in 1930, the New York City school system attracted highly talented teachers, who were happy to have a steady and highly respected job. Although the New York public schools that I attended in my childhood were in a very poor neighborhood, in a high crime rate district, the math and science teachers were highly dedicated and competent, perhaps on average overqualified for the jobs they held. Many of the teachers were there because they had little career choice due to the severe economic depression in the pre-World War II period. Others were there because they were women who had few other opportunities in the professions. During the World War II years, the career opportunities for women with talents in math and science started to open up, and many of these people (like me) were lost from the K-12 teaching profession. Robert Karplus was one of the first to recognize this exodus, and the effect of this exodus on K-12 math and science education in the United States. He was coura-