More and more these days, I find myself longing for the simpler times of childhood.
I certainly wouldn’t want to be a child in this day and age, and I can’t imagine trying to learn the building blocks for the future while a pandemic is going on.
Earlier in the week, my high school biology teacher, Dale Swanson, passed away. And I started thinking about high school and what I learned. I can’t say that I’ve ever had the need to dissect a cow’s eye, but I’ve always remembered how much I liked the class.
On his desk, Mr. Swanson had a small aquarium with fiddler crabs. He would be in the middle of teaching and randomly shout, “Look at’ em go!” as one took off skittering sideways through the sand.
And then, somehow, everyone was paying attention.
Mr. Swanson was always different from the other teachers. I never found his class difficult — I was a bit of a nerd — but I watched with admiration as he took the time to work with anyone who was having difficulty. With a smile, a joke and a wry chuckle, he’d break through that student’s anxiety and in many cases, create a love for science in that student that surprised everyone but him.
He had been at Otto-Eldred High School for many years before I landed in his class, and had taught many of my siblings. As with most of my teachers, they knew I was a Whiteman before I knew who they were.
“Ah, Miss Whiteman,” he said, as I walked in. I was shy and rather quiet in high school, so I probably just smiled back.
“Just remember,” he said, leaning forward in an attempt to be ominous — but the wry smile gave him away — “I know your mother.”
In that way of small towns, Mr. Swanson was a pseudo-relative — his wife and my aunt were sisters.
I remember that he would carpool to work with another teacher, Ralph Burton. We would always see the two of them on our school bus route, and I remember thinking how strange it was to see teachers outside of their habitats.
I never realized how lucky I was back then. It’s been 29 years since I graduated from high school, and I still remember being in the classroom.
I remember in physics class when my lab partner and I caught a paper on fire while trying to do an experiment with waves on water. I remember the look on Mr. Flexman’s face as he told the two of us to go sit down, while muttering under his breath that we were the reason the tables had fireproof material coating them.
Typing class with Mrs. King is fresh in my mind — using electric typewriters, not computers. At Christmas time, she’d give us instructions to create a picture of a reindeer with letters. I’d listen to her directing us “J J J space J J J” and think “I’m never going to be typing, why do I need this?”
Well, Mrs. King, I was wrong and you were right.
I remember Pete Palumbo would be teaching us something difficult in chemistry, and we’d all look to the basketball players to see if they could distract him before he started calling on us. He loved to talk basketball. Sometimes it would work.
I’ve worked with an array of people over the years, many of whom — not locally educated — couldn’t name more than one or two of their high school teachers. And that would make me sad.
In today’s world, with the pandemic causing so many changes to education, I often wonder what children will remember. Will there be a teacher who stands out in their minds?
Will they run into a former teacher in a grocery store and spend a few minutes reminiscing? Will they have a child who has the same teacher they did, and share memories and stories?
There’s so much more to education than taking classes. And I was lucky enough to have wonderful teachers who taught not just via a lesson plan, but through their interactions with students as well.
(Marcie Schellhammer is the Era’s assistant managing editor. She can be reached at marcie@bradfordera.com.)
