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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > September > 01 > Entry
“I hate lefties!”
This is part three of three posts on my most inspiring teacher.
As I looked around a classroom full of unfamiliar faces, the burly man in the brown suit with ruddy cheeks and a shock of white hair placed a blank sheet in my clammy right hand and offered me a pencil. I took it in my left hand and wrote my name in the top right corner of the sheet.
“You’re a lefty?” he bellowed. “I HATE lefties!”
He kept passing paper and turned back as he reached the front of the room, catching my squinty stare. He stepped close and I slid back in my chair as he raised his right arm. The cuff of the brown jacket flopped over the stump at mid forearm.
“;You see?” he said with a wiry grin. “I’m a lefty, too.”
As he gazed out over the rest of the class, the students sitting closest straightened up.
“Welcome to seventh grade English,” he said. “I’m Mr. Doherty. And we’re going to learn to write great stories.”
Storytelling was Eugene Doherty’s gift. Sure, he knew the language well enough. The corrections to grammar on our papers were certainly helpful. And he had a talent for holding the attention of 12- and 13-year-old kids prone to daydreaming. You didn’t dare zone out while he was talking. You never knew what he’d do.
He once asked a question twice with no response from us on a hot, lazy afternoon just after the start of school. He stopped, put down his chalk, cranked open a window, removed the screen, stood on a chair and threatened to swan-dive head first to the pavement if someone didn’t immediately volunteer an answer. At first, stunts like this were a little jarring, but over the school year, we learned to love his antics.
It was the days he’d assign us essays that I lived for. Mr. Doherty never asked us to write a book report or analyze a poem. His assignments were always to write about one word - fear, joy, anger, triumph, sorrow, love, pity, friendship, courage. Words like that.
And then he’d show us the way.
He’d sit on the corner of his wooden desk and tell us a story from his life that fit the essay topic - about the bully he feared but felled with one lucky punch in the schoolyard of his gritty hometown, or the fishing trip in the wilderness where lifelong bonds were forged with his best pals, or the anguish of the army hospital tent where he lost his right hand.
Or that muddy night he thought he heard his father’s voice in the island brush of the South Pacific.
Those stories made me want to be a writer. And that’s why I remember Eugene Doherty, an inspired, worldly and sometimes scary old soldier, as the best teacher I ever had.
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