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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
Thursday, September 1, 2005
The best teacher ever
With the start of the school year, I’ve been thinking a lot about great teachers. I got to follow one around for a few hours on the first day of school in Dayton. And I’ve been trading e-mails with another blogger about the challenge of writing more interesting news stories about teaching.
Great teachers are all different, which makes modeling their success tough. There’s no one formula for great teaching. And in fact, even the greatest teachers don’t connect with every student. I suppose the man who was my favorite teacher, who inspired me to become a writer, is long forgotten to many of my classmates from seventh grade English.
But for me, his style and the content and message of his class were just right. I suppose some of my middle school classmates may remember our math teachers fondly, too. I can’t even recall any of their names.
So I thought I’d tell you the story of my favorite teacher with the next two posts.
After you read them, I hope you’ll tell the story of your favorite teacher, too, by posting under the comments.
Maybe we can get a sense for what these great teachers have in common.
The Story of Mr. D starts here.
And here’s the rest of the story of Mr. D
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Mr. D and the island whisperer
This is part two of three posts on my most inspiring teacher.
In darkness and mud, the young Marine, face dripping in the humidity, brushed back branches and leaves and hurried to keep up with the rest of the men. Under a green helmet bringing up the rear of the patrol, he knew better than to fall behind on one of these islands.
So with skin rubbed raw by the crease of his worn boots and a cotton tongue yearning for a canteen swig, Gene Doherty slogged on.
Chugging along quietly through the black and green of the midnight brush, there was a sound. A whisper, he thought it was, but then again maybe just the wind through the trees. He listened and heard it again calling softly.
“Eugene!”
Gene slowed his pace and turned to the bushes and trees. The Japanese could be anywhere. Stories the other guys told were terrifying. The enemy, they said, would hide along the trails and whisper American names. “Johnny!” they’d call out, in hushed tones from the dark, or “Bobby!”
An unsuspecting soldier at the back of the line might hesitate, take a step off the trail. It’s just what the enemy wanted. Those guys were never heard from again.
So Gene kept going. But then again that voice.
“Eugene!”
He stopped, for just a second. There was something familiar about the voice. A buddy? Lost, perhaps injured?
Or was it the enemy? Calling out an American name, trying to lure him, like the Johnnys and Bobbys before.
But Eugene?
It hardly seemed like a name they’d choose. Gene, maybe. Everyone called him Gene, except his mother and father.
The Marine in front had gotten a few steps ahead. Gene turned away from the bush, and quick-stepped back into line. He kept listening, but the voice was gone.
A week later, on a different Pacific island, the word reached him. His father had died. Gene took the cable from his sergeant to his pack and retrieved his journal and looked for the date for the entry he had written about the voice from the darkness. He checked the date and time of his father’s death and counted the time zones.
Same night, same time as when he heard the whisper in the darkness:
“Eugene!”
The story continues here.
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“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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