The Rarest Breed

Years ago, my father told me that if one is lucky, they wind up having had just a couple really good teachers during their life. "Really good" should be understood to mean that they teach you about far more than the subject they're employed to teach, and are good enough to make a whole lot more money in other endeavors. Perhaps two or three are not unreasonable to hope for, and one might get lucky with even one or two more among the dozens of teachers each person has. Reader, I think that you will be inclined to agree with that based on your own personal experiences. Isn't it interesting how at odds that is economically with the value of a teacher's services as established by tangible financial compensation? It's well known that the good ones don't do it for the money.

I'd say that I had something like three or four really special teachers. In grade school, the administrators set up a kind of shadow school for the best students. It was what would just be called a gifted program. For part of the day, the rest of the kids would be doing regular things, and we would be singing in circles, learning metric and making hot air balloons the size of moving vans out of tissue paper and glue. Those teachers we had in that program were very much of an elite caliber. They fostered in me- and I presume in us- a feeling of actually being special, and not the mediocre kind of special that gets doled out like tic tacs.

Sometime later, I wound up with a teacher who one wouldn't envision in that role unless some warlord spotted him in a business periodical and kidnapped him to teach his children. He was way too good to be doing what he did. I think he cared about spurring us into excellence in a sense because he cared about creating excellence in the world about as much as he cared about us ourselves. I think he found the work of it stimulating for as long as he found anything to be that, and when he didn't anymore, he was on to the next thing. He remains extremely important to me because it was him that got me into every worthwhile interest and field of human accomplishment I'm presently in. He had us working with computer animation and non-linear video editing programs before we were in high school. He taught us chess, business, politics and everything. If you want to find someone to blame for what I'm up to these days, he's probably the number one guilty party.

After that came another very, very special teacher. I was a student who read the memoirs of Anais Nin, and she was a teacher who knew who that was and how to pronounce the name. She had a narrower focus, and consequently led me to focus on film to the exclusion of most other areas for some time. She was even good enough to have me acting just a bit at that time in my life, when I was capable of teaching Howard Hughes lessons about being introverted keeping to himself. If there were more female directors working in the film industry, I think many of them would be like her. I don't know what she might have done other than teach, but she might have done very well creating in that capacity rather than developing something out of me. I wish I were in closer contact with her. I rather imagine she would often have insight that I flail around as best I can in the absence of.

Another teacher comes to mind, and he's one who for some reason wasn't on my mind when I began to write. I think most schools don't have a Latin language program. Those that do are probably private or parochial schools. I went to public schools primarily, and in high school I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to take Latin. The man who taught it was without exaggeration one of a kind. I have always figured that when he finally retired, there would be no successor. It was probably a one in a million fluke that my suburban public high school (regarded as a good one as far as those go) got a Latin teacher in the first place. He was an amazing man- a powerful personality and force who was as good an instructor as I believe the Scottsdale Unified School District to have been capable of containing. He was confident enough to confide in us that he only had any control over us if we chose to validate it. Of course we did. He also had a standing challenge: he would summarily give you a perfect grade (or something like that) if you could figure out the one thing that would sway him as a bribe. We expended considerable energy trying to figure that out. Needless to say, it was not money.

Maybe it's something like that Malcolm Gladwell book. I didn't read it, but I seem to recall hearing about it delving into how random chance shaped some very exceptional men. At my age, there's still a chance I might prove to be exceptional someday, so I hope I don't sound arrogant having written that. If I ever do, it will be because of the above people, who I hope got the reward they deserved for how they shaped me in some form, because we don't make a sure thing of properly thanking teachers. I still don't know quite why that is. This is some kind of society we have here.