being frank

I would venture to say that most of us can think of at least one teacher who left an indelible mark on our lives. Sadly, there have been emotionally traumatic examples of extreme dedication driven by the darkest elements of our human nature. But I wanted to focus – to dedicate – this commentary to the gifts of educational excellence provided by special teachers everywhere whose spirit, passion and talents shaped the course of our lives.

Change is a funny thing. Certainly, we can recall those key moments in our lives that brought about great change, but what about the imperceptible ones? Often, it’s those fleeting moments that bring about the most endearing changes. One of my uncles was a computer scientist at NASA. When I was a small child, he clearly understood how wonderstruck I was by the nature of his work – what child wouldn’t be? He loved it when we came by for a visit. He would show me all manner of tools and radio systems he worked on at home, all the while regaling me with amazing facts (well, amazing to a six-year-old) regarding the nature of communications and space travel. Of the many tidbits he shared with me, the one that really stuck was the concept of trajectories as they pertained to flight plans. He would explain that calculations had to be painstakingly accurate to account for the great distances that spaceships had to travel. If a rocket’s initial trajectory was off by even a few feet, that could translate into a course change that was hundreds if not thousands of miles off of the original path. No doubt; small, imperceptible moves could affect great change.

Teaching is very much like course trajectory. You educate your students by imbuing them with the right educational coordinates that place them on the right path towards success and empowerment. And like every rocket, each student will have his or her own course to follow. So it’s up to the teacher to recognize and aid that trajectory through small, imperceptible lessons that will help keep the student on the right path.

Back in the day, I had wonderful teachers who exemplified the spirit of what it meant to be a great educator, and I owe each and every one of them a great deal of thanks. But there is one in particular who has remained at the forefront of my memories, and it is for him – and because of him – that I share these thoughts with you now. His name was John Kenneth Bostic, and he was my high school English teacher.

Mr. Bostic was certainly an interesting fellow, and quite unique when compared to the demeanor of the average teacher at the time (it was a while ago.) Back then, teachers were more about substance than delivery; they were the embodiment of wisdom and experience, wrapped in a tough exterior of rules, expectations and knowledge checks; lots of knowledge checks. These educators were the drills brought in to crack through the recalcitrant mental shells of young students, planting seeds of knowledge in that fertile soil of youthful inquisitiveness, competitiveness and unbridled creativity.

But there was Mr. Bostic. An idealistic young man fresh out of college, ready to take on the world with a briefcase filled with school notes whose ink had barely dried. In age, he wasn’t that much older than the students in our class; eight years older, by my estimation. I recall how my first year as a teacher was fraught with ideas, regulations, taxonomies, more regulations, excitement and raw fear. If any of these floated through Mr. Bostic’s mind, he certainly never showed it. The dominant emotion that was etched on his face each day was that of determination; utter and complete determination.

As I wrote earlier, Mr. Bostic’s demeanor was slightly north of average. Whereas other teachers would come into the classroom with the usual academic aplomb, Mr. Bostic was in a league all his own. He would come running in through the classroom door and do a seated slide across the teacher’s desk while greeting the class. Without skipping a beat, he would then amuse us with the latest joke he had heard on his car radio on the way to school. Most of the jokes were horrible or corny, but Mr. Bostic was forever the epitome of cool. His course delivery was equally energized. He was well aware how quickly the teenage mind moved in and out of focus, so his delivery was swift, unpredictable and relentless. His lessons focused on the qualitative rather than the quantitative. For him, it was important that we learned more about how to use language than merely structure it. Nothing was left to chance, and there were no limits to what could be done with a fertile mind. If you were assigned a paper to write on a given subject, you could expect Mr. Bostic to take the dissenting opinion, no matter how outlandish that opinion may be. He not only wanted to ensure that your grammatical choices were correct; he wanted to test the lengths to which you had researched your material.

One of the greatest exercises on creative thinking I ever witnessed was with Mr. Bostic. In this one instance, he placed a student in front of the class and instructed him to describe the act of eating a steak. But there was a catch: The student could only use his words. To ensure that the delivery was not interrupted by the use of body language, Mr. Bostic placed a large paper bag over the student’s head (yes, he tore open a hole for his nose and mouth) and asked him to place his hands behind his back. Then, each time the student began describing any item or portion of the action of eating a steak, Mr. Bostic would interrupt him to say that he (Mr. Bostic) was from another planet and therefore knew nothing about the items or actions mentioned. The student had to describe – in painful detail – each and every item and its purpose. Think it’s easy? Try it one time; you will quickly develop a deep respect for detail, preparedness and the fine art of descriptive writing.

Despite Mr. Bostic’s humorous veneer and unorthodox teaching methods, he ran a tight ship. And when a disruptive event popped up from time to time in the classroom, he addressed it with that same wonderfully skewed demeanor. I once saw him assign a 5,000-word essay to a student as punishment for speaking out of turn during a group discussion. The subject of the essay? The sociopolitical life of a ping-pong ball. As luck would have it, ping pong was one of the student’s great passions. When he brought the essay to class the following week and began reading it out loud, it was priceless. He had followed every lesson, every trick that Mr. Bostic has drilled into us in class, weaving together a wonderfully intriguing (and hilariously funny) story that was the talk of the school for weeks thereafter. Discipline, humor, purpose, structure, determination – all the hallmarks of a meaningful and impactful lesson wrapped into a single, unforgettable assignment by way of a disciplinary action.

OK, so what about the title of this commentary? What does going to hell (and happily so) have to do with an inspirational teacher? Well, the devil may be in the details, but the message was in the maxims. One day, during one of Mr. Bostic’s lessons on creative writing, someone asked him what made for a successful writer. As usual, he turned the question back to the class, and a conversation ensued about great American writers like Hemingway, Sandburg, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, and many others. After the class had bandied about numerous ideas and theories, we asked Mr. Bostic on his take for what made a great writer. His reply was as rousing as it was memorable: Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, he said that a great writer was a person who could urge someone to go to hell in such a way that they would look forward to the trip. A skill set, I must admit, I am still trying to master.

Education is a like a seed. It can be trampled upon, left to wither away on barren soil, or flourish on fertile ground. Its survival doesn’t depend on its content, but rather on the person who bears the responsibility of planting it. Wisdom, insight and introspection are the glue that make education stick. They take facts, figures, and all manner of general information and bind them to the human condition to form a synergistic bond that will serve the recipient well for the rest of their life. All of this rests in the capable, dedicated, brave, and often humorous hands of an inspirational teacher. Goodnight Mr. Bostic, wherever you are – and thanks.