How one teacher’s chance on me kept me writing 25 years later
As I look back on the greatest risk anyone took on me 25 years later, it still blows my mind.
I teach 7th graders.
I love teaching 7th graders.
And I tend to take risks in education and life.
But Mr. Stern… man, what he did takes the cake.
And I’m not sure any teacher’s decision has had a more profound impact on my life.
And as an educator, I only hope I can positively influence one student the way he influenced me.
Here’s the story:
Back in 7th grade, I wasn’t in Accelerated English, not yet. But I apparently had a propensity for the class. Mr. Stern, a young, energetic teacher who suited up as Captain Caveman at a local amusement park, saw that potential.
Maybe we took a grammar pre-test.
Maybe he just knew.
I’m not sure.
But during a grammar unit midway through the year, he let me and a handful of other students leave class for part of the class seemingly every day for several weeks.
To sit in an empty classroom.
And write a play.
That’s how I remember it, anyway. And I’m 99 percent sure I’m 99 percent correct on the details.
When he’d start his grammar lesson, he’d send our small group to another, unused science room.
This wasn’t a classroom just across the hall, either.
It was down the hall, up the stairs, and on the other side of the school.
If I had to go from that empty science classroom to my English class for a bell change, I wouldn’t have had time to stop at my locker.
Yet he sent us there.
Unsupervised.
A bunch of 13-year-olds.
A small group (maybe five?) of us spent a couple weeks writing, casting and directing a play for the rest of our classmates, which we eventually put on for Mr. Edward’s English class.
We thought we were so clever. It was a Clue-like murder mystery. And we set it up so the one Black kid, Marques, appeared to be the murderer, only for it to be the soft-spoken nephew of John Cougar Mellencamp. Even as preteens in the mid-90s, we understood racial profiling and bias.
The play had love, gore (fake blood and all!) and a wicked twist.
We should’ve won a Tony.
In all seriousness, I think back on the risk my English teacher took and how that shaped my life.
I missed a grammar unit, which apparently wouldn’t hurt my development in that area; 15 years later, I’d place second in a grammar competition at the prestigious Scripps School of Journalism.
(I, a sports writer, lost to a copy writer. It was rigged from the beginning.)
What Mr. Stern did was foster a sense of purpose and excitement in a group of students.
And even if I never had to diagram sentences, my joy of writing started to bloom, which took me further in learning the skills I need to write than that grammar lesson ever could have.
As educators, it’s tempting to focus on skills and aptitude, when what students really need is passion and purpose.
Today, I teach introductory and beginner Spanish. I can beat kids over the head all day with vocabulary and grammar.
They may hate it, but they’ll learn, darn it.
And in two years, when they’ve earned their World Language credits, they’ll quit.
But if students love what they’re doing.
Want to learn more.
Pursue the subject outside of scripted school hours.
They’ll stick with it.
Four or five years in high school.
Study abroad in college.
And begin to embrace something beyond the textbook and notes.
In his highly-underrated book Range, author David Epstein uses a mountain of data to dispel the idea that immediate results in education have meaning, and instead concludes that long-term buy-in leads to greater success. Epstein writes, “(Teachers) who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.” He continues: “The most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning.”
Mr. Stern wasn’t concerned about “contemporaneous learning.” He was concerned about my passion for writing.
Twenty-five years later, I’m still writing.
And I still haven’t diagramed a sentence.
Note: Unfortunately, Mr. Stern no longer works at Hopewell Junior High School in the Lakota School District, Cincinnati, Ohio. If you happen to have his contact information, please pass it along, as I’d love to share this story with him, wherever he is.