Some Great Teachers #2

I had two teachers in high school that fell under this category. I had a lot of good teachers over the years, but we are talking great here. Miss Faye and Mr. P. were great. It took a year or two of university until I realized that.

Miss Faye was an old maid who taught junior and senior English. You had to jockey around to get into her class, but I was lucky and got her both years. It was a good thing too. She taught on a university level and prepared you for those weekly themes. She was a no nonsense lady with a single purpose. That being to get you to upper levels without being less than well prepared. When term paper time came, she said we could choose any subject we wished. I was working part time at a funeral home then, so I chose "Some aspects of Body Preparation for Burial, past and Present". I had a wealth of reference material at the home plus more from the usual sources. After each stage of the paper's preparation, you had a conference with Miss Faye. Each time we met, she always said, "I don't know why a nice young man like yourself wants to write about these things". She did give an A- on the paper though. I always suspected the topic is what got me the minus. I still get the willies if I try to end a sentence with a preposition.

Mr. P was another matter entirely. He taught chemistry and physics. One you took as a junior and the other as a senior. Mr. P was also an assistant football coach, but he as different as daylight and dark in and out of the classroom. We didn't realize it then, but he taught on a university level. When I went through an entire year of freshman chemistry in college without seeing anything new, I knew that Mr. P was the reason. In reality, I had a better physics course in high school than I got in college. One of my good friends who was something of a genius, and I decided to make some gunpowder. We bought all the ingredients at the drug store, mixed it all up, and then made a pipe bomb to blow up in the woods. It worked fine, but a year or so later I read of a boy who blew his legs off doing just what we did. Grace of God got us out of that one. Then my friend got the idea of making some nitroglycerine. Now that is bad stuff, needs a water bath to prepare it in, and is mighty unstable in its raw form. Anyway, we decided we needed a consultation with Mr. P. He quickly ended our aspirations by telling us that if we did that or he even heard that we had done it, we both would fail the year. That was that.

Both those teachers are dead now. I wish they had known how valuable they were to me and others.