Has it been that long?

[rose_griffes]

Somewhere around here I have a booklet, four pages stapled together, labeled [last name redacted]'s Familiar Quotations. Inside are numbered quotes, lines that my high school trigonometry teacher was fond of repeating: phrases such as "You kids are gonna tank me one day when you get to cahlidge." The student who typed it up--a boy who was a year ahead of me--tried to spell the phrases with the Colonel's distinct northeastern pronunciation. His accent made quite the impression on us Okie kids.

The Colonel--who insisted we use his title with his last name--was a military colonel who started teaching after retirement: trigonometry, a computer programming class, and I'm not sure what else. That might have been it, in fact.

I was terrified of him. He had a reputation for being demanding--and it was true. Looking back, he had a fantastic dry wit and was interested in us as individuals, but at the time his reputation outweighed any other perceptions for me. He always wanted us to do better. In particular, he wanted the girls to do better; he would occasionally take a few moments of class time to point out, "You women, you get into these dead-end jobs like teaching." And then he would make a plug for math and sciences, any kind of job that would involve a pay scale that wasn't as stagnant as a teaching pay scale is.

At the time I was in absolute agreement. I was never going to be a teacher. This was before the discovery that 1) I was pretty good at teaching and 2) I enjoyed it.

One time he asked me to come by after school to talk. I worried about it for the rest of the day, until the time came for the meeting. I went back to his classroom, even though I felt like hiding in my locker. (Not actually physically possible to do that, but work with me here.) He told me that I was making a B in his class, and then pointed out a couple of missing assignments, and how I had done poorly on one section of a quiz, and that I could come in for tutoring to practice that skill...

...and all I could think was I'm making a B! This is so awesome, I'm passing the Colonel's class with a B!

In other words, teenage me completely missed the point of that discussion.

I haven't seen the Colonel in well over a decade, but I'm thinking of him as I finish my eighteenth (!?!) year of teaching. I don't regret going into a 'dead-end job', but I do wish I'd pushed myself more in his class. More importantly, I hope to show the kind of individual concern for my students that he showed for his.

Thanks, Colonel, for wanting good things for me.

Comments

[helen-c.livejournal.com]

I think it's always the more demanding teachers we remember--the ones who enjoyed their job, the ones who took an interest, the ones who pushed us to do better, the ones who taught us to love learning. Even if they terrified us back then--because most times, we also respected them a great deal.

[brickhousewench.livejournal.com]

This! Yes, I think I was terrified of all my best teachers. Because I wanted so badly to do well in their classes and to earn their approval (in the form of good grades).