Teachers

I'm in my 47th year of teaching.  I know that seems like a long time, but I don't see anything on the horizon to cause me to completely retire.  I still enjoy it, as I noted in a lengthy e-mail regarding history and its teaching last week.

All these years and I still think of my own teachers, from way back.  From the perspective of 47 years of teaching, I think I have a pretty good grasp on the good ones and the not-so-good ones. 

I think I have written a number of times about my college professors at Amherst.  Oh, I had some dogs there, but most were very good and some just brilliant.  I have called them "The Gods."  And, to me, they are.  I am grateful for them and their teaching and feel honored to still be in contact with several of them.

But I want to go farther back than college.  I think I remember almost every one of my elementary teachers and most of my junior high and high school teachers.  Some I thought were pretty lousy back then and still think so.  Others I thought were pretty good, some of them even growing in stature as I try to figure out this teaching stuff.  (Yep, after 47 years, I'm still trying to figure it out!)

Most of my elementary teachers were very good.  Oh, all but one or two were strict, quite so.  That never bothered me, other than join in with others to say "How mean" or whatever one of them was.  I learned a lot from them, including some self-discipline.  Despite their strictness, at least to me, their caring always seemed apparent.  If not always or even sometimes nurturing (Isn't that a buzz word now?), they did want us to learn and demanded it.  If we didn't, due to our laziness or refusal, they jumped all over us.

In junior high, I had a much more mixed bag of teachers.  One English teacher, I thought then and still think today, was very good.  Oh, many of the students found him to be harsh, even mean.  Hey, if a student was caught chewing gum in his class, he would say, "You are caught!" and then make the sinner stand in front of the class with the gum on his/her nose.  It was quite the deterrent.  Rumors were he was once a professional wrestler, although I never bought into it.  He was a stickler for grammar, in speaking and in writing, and did his best to drill that into us.  I always respected him and thought even more highly of him as a moved along with my own teaching.  Obversely, another of my junior high teachers was the nicest, quietest woman one could imagine.  Oh, she was smart.  One would think with her demur stature, with her almost shy personality, she'd have trouble with classroom management, with discipline.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  There were never any problems in her classes.  She was a master!

One of my math teachers was also very, very good, but just one of them.  I think a couple of the others were outside of their subject areas and it's almost as if the best students taught themselves with the text book.  Another was highly regarded, even by my father, but I didn't think much of him, not compared to the math teacher I had before him.  This one was very quiet, almost nerdy, but not quite.  I suppose I wouldn't have been surprised to see him walking around with a slide rule hanging from his belt loops.  I think, though, that he did have a plastic pocket liner!  But he was really good at explaining math concepts, esp how they were used in story problems.  (Are they still called that, "story problems?")  And, any thought of "nerdiness" was erased when he came down to the gym after school and showed how to play basketball!

I really enjoyed my phys ed teacher, too.  He was my football and swimming coach.  For the longest time I wanted to be a phys ed teacher, to be just like him.  He was far more than, "OK, this unit is volleyball" or "basketball" or whatever.  He took time to show an interest, at least with me he did.  I would bet a lot of others would say that, too.  And, in the same vein, our assistant principal was just outstanding, too!  He seemed to be everywhere at all times.  And we were terrified of him--he was many of our parents' coach at one time or another and, back then, coaches were gods.  How many times was I on the verge, when, from out of nowhere he'd emerge, saying, "Marinucci, do I have to call your old man--at work?"  "NO!!!!!!"  Any thought of wrong doing disappeared.  Oh, by the way, I was on the receiving end of their paddles more than once--"more than once" shows how stupid I was.  But this assistant principal was always there, always.  In the gym, he'd be watching.  Sometimes he'd challenge us to a game of "21," shooting free-throws.  He shot them the very old-fashioned way, even then, underhanded like Wilt Chamberlain sometimes did.  Except, I don't think he ever missed, ever lost to us.  Sometimes he'd even beat us while he was blindfolded!  And, to make things interesting, he (and my phys ed teacher) would play us for "Cokes."  But neither ever made us pay up; I think they knew we had no money.

In high school, four of my math teachers were just outstanding.  I went to Amherst toying with the idea of majoring in math.  (Freshman calculus ended that thought!)  They all had the same easy-going style, rarely showing any anger, always having the class(es) under control, and patiently teaching.  I don't know if it is ironic or stereotypical or......but the only bad math teacher I had was a football coach.  My two chemistry teachers were good, the advanced chem teacher outstanding, really really good.  I remember he crammed the "required" material into one card marking period and used the last two for experiments.  I remember some of them.  He'd mix a solution and then give us a vial of it.  We had to determine what the "ingredients" were.  We'd do "dry labs" on paper, using all of the formulas, and then the actual experiments.  If the experiments didn't come out the ways the dry labs suggested, we had to go through both and explain why they didn't. 

I guess I'm not surprised it took a good long while for me to really learn to write.  I credit that to two things.  One, at Amherst that's all we did, well, other than read millions of pages.  We had, in many classes, a 3-5 page paper due every Monday; going in there, I thought 3-5 pages was a term paper, not one for every Monday.  Two, after graduation, my friends were all over the country, none here in Michigan.  Long before e-mail and toll-free long distance calls, we wrote letters, often three and four and five pages, even longer.  But back to high school.  I had some mediocre English teachers.  A couple were brand new, right out of college (and teachers have to start somewhere; I think it takes time to forget all that crap the schools of education try to teach) and another was out of her discipline.  One taught me a lot, but I'm not sure it helped my writing at all.  He didn't like the curriculum and rushed through the required grammar book; we had two or three hours of grammar homework a night to get through it.  I'm sure he never graded the homework, a black mark on him, but......  He was very tough, making us do research papers and, most important to him, give oral reports on them.  We dreaded that because he would try to tear us apart while presenting.  But, he did teach us how to think, if only a bit (our fault, not his!), to be thorough, and to be able to back up what we wrote or said (or he'd tear us apart!). 

It was kind of cool, my senior year in baseball, this tough English teacher and the second chemistry teacher would come to ball games.  After we outfielders threw to bases, these two guys would alternative hitting me fly balls until the game(s) started.  My buddies, players and otherwise, could scarcely believe their eyes!  These were two hard cases, yet......  I think I had trouble believing it, too.

Oddly, throughout my junior high and high school times, I really didn't have a history (or social studies) teacher who I thought was very good, then and now.  So, how did I become a history major?  I think my Amherst professors were outstanding and that is why.  But, again I digress.  In junior high, I'll bet most of the students thought one of the teachers of history was great.  I didn't then and think even less of him now.  Perhaps ironically, he had a first-rate mind, at least in asking questions.  (I think he was pretty close-minded, though).  But he didn't work very hard at it and really didn't teach me anything. I think it was more a case of just going through the school year than anything.  It's too bad; I think he had a lot to offer.  (This teacher also frequently raved about an English teacher at the high school.  He had her back when and told us how great she was and how lucky we'd be if we also had her when we got there.  Well, I did and I found her to be mediocre, at best.  I still remember one assignment we did that demonstrated she wasn't very good, couldn't really think.)

In high school, I had one social studies teacher I thought was very brilliant, had great ideas, and led wonderful classroom discussions.  I learned from that.  But I think he was lazy and what little work we had to do, he never graded, but had us do it in class.  He could have been great.  But my geography teacher was outstanding.  When I took the class, it was the first time it was offered and, obviously, taught by him.  He was really, really good.  He had a wonderful personality and sense of humor and a great way of presenting material that wasn't always stuff that grabbed us.  (It didn't hurt that he sat me next to a girl I eventually dated and took to the prom!  She was great.)  I later had him for a graduate statistics course in college.  He had earned his PhD, but insisted that I continue to call him, not "Dr.," but "Mr.," just like in high school.

I supposed I could remember more, but now, I have to head off to class!!!!!!  I'm looking forward to three hours on the civil rights movement.  I bet students will be surprise at how much time we'll spend on Jackie Robinson!