Chapter 4

Chapter 4

A Great Education Professor Finally Appears

Second City Teachers is publishing a series of chapters from the book Teaching the Invisibles by former high school teacher. It is a raw, funny, cynical and truthful account of what it is like to teach in the rough and tumble Chicago public schools. We continue with Chapter 4:

I guess every bushel of rotten apples will have a good one from time to time, and Professor Peterson was definitely a bright, shiny one. He was young, brilliant, loved by the students, and good luck getting into his classes.  

He hadn’t been there for very long and already he was complaining about the paperwork and insipid rules he had to contend with. The anal-retentive school marms running the department had him in their jealous crosshairs, and he wasn’t going to last for long. 

But anyone could see why they’d be jealous, his lectures were like symphonies. They’d begin with the dry, useless text book and from there he’d go into rising crescendos of the origin of man, segue into delicate filigrees of the latest in human behavior, the limitations of memory the Swedish court system takes into account but ours doesn’t, and then wrap it all up with a superb ending on the fallacies of global education statistics. 

And while he was mesmerizing to listen to, the curriculum of the course was of course fucked, being last designed in 1952 and then never updated. We had bullshit group reports on what high school age students were listening to in music, totally useless if you’re a nineteen or twenty year old listening to the same music. And yet another useless observation paper he didn’t bother to read. (Observation papers involved sitting in a class for twenty hours taking notes. It’s akin to watching a carpenter for a few weeks and then  trying to remember what he did as you jump into a room addition. Teaching is best learned hands-on, so of course, that’s why student teaching lasts all of ten weeks or so.) 

He had taught at Northwestern University, but came to this lowly, out-of-the-way state school where he could really make a difference, although I thought he still had to be a star there. He had gone to Africa several times and lived in native villages on anthropology trips. He had started teaching second grade at age sixteen in Oregon because of a severe teaching shortage there, where he had tried unsuccessfully to save an abused seven-year-old girl. He dramatically shared how parents should plunk down a lawyer’s card when a school hemmed and hawed on providing special education assistance for their son or daughter because of the school’s limited budget. What if the parents didn’t really have a lawyer? Not a concern, “You don’t have to pay for a lawyer; you just drop his card on the table and tell them you have one. The school will start jumping.” 

Finally, he had originally self-trained as a teacher by reading over 700 education books subject, and written three books of his own, and he was only thirty-three. 

For my small research report, he directed me to the top expert’s academic paper in the field of role modeling. In short, he was a leader everyone naturally fell in love with, and that was the inspirational theme of his course: As a teacher you can’t help but to make an impact on your class, so make it a good one. 

Unfortunately, the positive influence of Professor Peterson did have one conspicuous flaw. He had a habit of missing every third class. We’d come in at eight a.m., sit there for fifteen minutes, then leave. But during those fifteen minutes a rumor about his absences surfaced. He was fighting bone cancer. He had chemotherapy the day before and didn’t have the energy to make it today. Next class he’d say he wasn’t feeling well and everyone nodded in understanding. We were all thankful he was providing content in an otherwise content-less program, as he made his two-hour classes seem like twenty-minutes. 

When I ran into an old classmate after graduating, I naturally wanted to know how Peterson was doing. 

“Haven’t you heard? He committed suicide,” she told me.

“Oh, God, what happened?” 

“He took a job with the Department of Education job designing national high school curriculums. On a business trip out in Connecticut, he parked his rental car at the beach, entered the water, and kept swimming straight out.  He left behind a young wife and thirteen-year-old daughter.”

“So the bone cancer got to be too much, right?” I asked. 

“It may have,” she replied. “The school isn’t saying anything.”

I went on the Internet to see if I could bring up an obituary. Before that though I thought I’d look up his three books. The public library had no listings, so I checked the Library of Congress. No mention of his name. If there were books, they had to be in the Library of Congress. I then Googled his name. His obit came up in the local paper.

Odd since he wasn’t even locally famous. But there it was. I’m guessing university professors get longer write ups if there’s room. A reporter had called out of town to his sister about his death. She said her brother suffered from manic depression but disliked the side effects of the medication and refused to take it.  

From having a relative with the disorder, I know the “too alive” feeling of mania can be extremely enjoyable and hard to give up. But after weeks of not eating or sleeping, the mania can spiral out of control and the painful crash of depression sets in. The depression must have made him swim out until he was too tired and too far from shore. 

Everything was hindsight clear now. His talking a mile a minute, all the missed days, the field work in Africa, his writing three books in three different fields, teaching at Northwestern, all dreams of a bipolar. I felt like I had just lived through a twist ending of an O’Henry story. 

And yet, all his lies and absences and promises of help not kept, did nothing to dim my appreciation of him. When he came into the room he wanted to teach. And while he covered what he needed to cover, he packed in uncountable connections from anthropology, psychology, evolution and physics and joy. He had us chasing and discovering new ideas like children chasing fireflies. He made us witnesses to the wonder of life. His final lesson, his influence, was whatever your talents and abilities for teaching, it all starts with caring about other people. He left it to us to realize he was talking about more than just the classrom.