For a teacher, there's no higher praise than kudos from students. And Evelyn "Evie" Vietz got plenty of them after teaching math for 34 years in the Fridley School District.
Vietz, of Columbia Heights, died Aug. 18 at age 79.
She was born in Carrington, N.D., about 140 miles northwest of Fargo, and graduated from the University of North Dakota, majoring in mathematics and minoring in Norwegian. Vietz later got a master's degree from the University of Minnesota.
She worked in Dayton, Ohio, as a programmer during the early years of the computer industry, said Mike Vietz, her oldest son, and then returned to North Dakota in the early 1960s for her first teaching job in Tioga, a small town in the northwestern part of the state.
On a trip back to Carrington, she met Richard Vietz while bowling one night. They would marry in 1964 and eventually settle in the Twin Cities.
In 1967, she started teaching math in Fridley, first to middle schoolers and then at Fridley High School. She taught computer programming at Fridley for a while, too, Mike Vietz said.
"She just liked numbers. She understood math and could present it to kids in a way they could understand it," he said.
An online memorial for her is chock-full of compliments from former students, from mathophiles to mathophobes. Words like "spunky" and "humor" crop up more than once to describe her teaching style.