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University of Minnesota Athletics
Fleck, Gophers Featured By The Athletic
4/30/2018 12:00:00 AM | Football
MINNEAPOLIS -- Sixteen months after getting hired at the nation's sixth-largest campus, the former sixth-grade social studies teacher is talking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and how the New Deal brought this country out of the Great Depression.
He is talking about Winston Churchill, the British Bulldog, and how he saved London even after so many people had given up on him. He is talking about Gen. George Patton, and how he brought tank warfare to World War I.
He is talking about Rosa Parks, about Gandhi, about Harriet Tubman -- "It's amazing what she did and the amount of successful trips she had on the underground railroad and how many times she was never caught. But the risk that she took to save other people ..."
There are lessons about Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., about John F. Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey. Tutorials on Jackie Robinson and Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. There is even an explanation -- amazingly, a necessary one -- for why George Washington is on the wall that greets visitors inside this newly minted office.
"It's amazing. The kids sit there and say: `Yeah, that's the Geico commercial,' " P.J. Fleck says. "Nah, that's our first president crossing the Delaware."
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