memorial

Last updated on 8 December 2020

“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”  ~Kahlil Gibran

 

My sixth-grade teacher was a man named Smith Clifton. He was tall and thin and had a thick brown beard he stroked when he sat at his desk grading papers while the rest of the class and I took tests. He had a tall beat-up thermos he kept to one side. It was the kind with the plastic top that doubled as a cup he would screw off and fill with black coffee all day long.

Mr. Clifton was one of the most influential characters in my life. He was the first person to get me to write. Every week, Mr. Clifton had us record our thoughts in a journal. He gave us no direction on topics so we wrote what we wanted. Once a week or so he would collect the journals from the class, read each entry and then write comments to each of us. I was always excited to see what insights Mr. Clifton would offer and I was never disappointed.

Mr. Clifton was among the most affable people I have ever known. He was peaceful as a forest. He reminded me of a hippie, he was so laid back, but more grown up. He dressed in jeans and denim shirts and beat up boots so he looked more blue collar

Mr. Clifton was among the most affable people I have ever known. He was peaceful as a forest.

than he was. He displayed a kind of refined deliberateness that one might expect from a gentlemen farmer. In fact he owned a small farm in Mt. Airy, about an hour’s drive northwest from our school, but he also seemed a renaissance philosopher or poet.

I loved this man.

My 11th grade English teacher was a man named Hans Gaussman. Mr. Gaussman was German. He was short, perhaps 5 foot eight. He kept his hair close-cropped and he had a mustache and goatee, which he kept sharp as a razor. In fact, Mr. Gaussman’s personality was as sharp as his goatee. Mr. Gaussman was almost military in demeanor. He intimidated a lot of my classmates and pissed off others.

He was by far the hardest teacher I ever encountered, even in college. Mr. Clifton was the first to get me to connect thoughts to paper, but Mr. Gaussman was the one who taught me how to write.

He was by far the hardest teacher I ever encountered…Mr Gaussman was the one who taught me how to write.

Mr. Gaussman’s favorite implement was his red pen. He wielded the pen like a dagger on our papers, ripping our grammar and our thinking. Mr. Gaussman would not simply pass us on to 12th grade English. His brutality in grading was also his gift. He made us think better.

I came to love this man too.

Shortly after the start of the school year, Mr. Gaussman held conferences with us. This was a private conversation, out of the hearing of our peers, where we had the chance individually to learn the failings of our work. We all dreaded these sessions as much as we did the school lunches. With a Cheshire smile, Mr. Gaussman systematically dismantled any notion we might possess of being smart or good writers.

“So, Mr. Gaussman,” I ventured once, “what do you think of my writing?”

He only paused for a second before he stabbed me in the chest: “I wouldn’t make it a career.” That was all he had to say.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t wander the halls in a daze after such an overt criticism. It was one of the few times in life that I didn’t pack up my toys and move to a different playground.

He said, “I wouldn’t make it a career.”…I was going to show him just how wrong he was. I was going to show him that, in fact, I was a writer.

I took Mr. Gaussman’s words as a challenge. I was going to show him just how wrong he was. I was going to show him that, in fact, I was a writer. This is the part in the movie where the main character–me–drops the f-bomb in his face. When Anthony Michael Hall’s Brian Johnson tells Mr. Vernon in his essay that he can’t diminish his classmates with his bullying. Or when, in the last scene, Jud Nelson’s John Bender defiantly holds up his fist, flipping off every self-absorbed and bullying adult in addition Mr. Vernon.

I put everything I had at age 16 into changing Mr. Gaussman’s mind. And I did. In a couple months, I was getting A’s and I noticed Mr. Gaussman treated me differently. He engaged me with a respect he reserved for very few of his students. I felt elevated, more important. But not like a teacher’s pet. It was one of the first times in my life I felt respected for my brain and especially for my work ethic.

Mr. Gaussman instilled in me a sense that good writing and thinking requires hard work. He helped create in me an identity as a writer. It doesn’t matter that I have never since written a novel or even a got a short story published.

If we are lucky we have one or two significant teachers in our lives. People who care about us.

It was his gift, his hard-assed, judgmental criticism of my work set me on a path I could not change. A few years later I would remember both teachers when I sat at my typewriter, trying to finish a story for deadline for  the newspaper on which I wrote. While my red-haired and red-faced editor yelled for my copy, I paused and silently thanked them for their efforts on my behalf.

If we are lucky we have one or two significant teachers in our lives. People who care about us. Who take time to challenge us to push toward our potential and who expand our abilities. People who are like bridges to better, more enlightened versions of ourselves. People like Smith Clifton whose peaceful demeanor taught me about kindness and how to get stuff out of my head and onto paper. People like Hans Gaussman whose disciplined approach forced me out of the comfort of slushy, unrefined thoughts to greater competence upon which I could build a career, even if that career is still blossoming.