Everyone has a favorite teacher or two growing up. I have a handful of gems that I look back on very fondly. People who treated me like they saw something special in me and wanted to help me achieve great things…
Mrs. Little and I shared our favorite books after school. She was my 5th and 6th grade teacher. I recently visited my old elementary school in Woodland and it looks more or less the same, just smaller like everyone always says. Wandering around the empty campus on a Friday afternoon I was stopped by a current teacher who appeared to be close to my age. She questioned why I was wandering around an elementary school and I explained I’d graduated from there 25 years ago. She got very excited and wanted to show me all the new things, the amphitheater that was flattened and the new multipurpose room in its place, the tetherball courts they are taking out this summer (no!) and the new soccer field. I only wanted to know what had become of Mrs. Little. I learned she is now teaching in another city nearby. That made me happy. I believe one of her sons still has a library book of mine that is seriously overdue.
Mrs. Castle was my core teacher in 8th grade. I was a new kid at a new school for the second year in a row and wasn’t making friends easily. She purposely pronounced my name wrong every day for a week until on Friday a girl named Aimee exasperatedly said, “Mrs. Castle, it’s not that hard, her last name is Mac-in-tire. Really, it’s not hard.” Mrs. Castle winked at me, agreed, and never got it wrong again. Neither did anyone else. She encouraged us all to write and gave us some of my favorite assignments. My most memorable was a movie review of the Gregory Peck classic, To Kill a Mockingbird (which I recall I titled “How To Kill a Book” and upon further review, I’d like to issue a retraction).
In college my favorites were Dr. Madison and Dr. Merrifield (Andy, really), and they both made my little world a lot bigger. Dr. Madison taught me that a dot on the map (Burundi?) is just as important to its people as any in the largest empires. Everywhere is home to someone and home is always worth fighting for. Andy was just Andy, the sounding board for all of projects, my path for my future and biggest critic of the pajamas I wore to his morning classes. My only regret there is not being more open and expressing myself more because I think he was interested in what I had to say, but my shyness won every battle. At graduation he told my parents that I’d been a wonderful, thoughtful student but that I was too quiet and hadn’t found my voice (for the record my step-dad couldn’t have disagreed more about me being quiet).
This brings me to the big one; the teacher who taught me the most about myself and probably wasn’t even trying. Mr. Schroeder was the band director at Loara High School for as long as anyone I know can remember. This is a man who was able to make hundreds of kids arrive early for 6:45am practice, in the misty fog on a cold morning (ok, in So Cal so it wasn’t that cold). There were days we stayed after school until the stars started appearing the sky. We marched in the blazing sun, in the dirt, in the mud, in high heels (!), in the most uncomfortable uniforms ever created (we were rarely cute and the Zorba getups were the absolute worst), and we gave up every weekend for the priviledge to do so. With a very few exceptions we never came in first, always took home the little trophies (if we took one home at all – and court doesn’t count), and still we gave him hours and hours of our precious adolescence. We rode in busses to competitions all over Southern California and to this day I still remember secrets I learned on the ride to Mount Carmel in my sophomore year. In a time in my life when I didn’t have a well-developed father figure in my daily life, Mr. Schroeder was always there. He was my conscience (that man had some serious rules!), and he forced me to make decisions about what I really wanted, pushed back when he thought I was making the wrong decisions, then commended me for sticking to them. I still have a bond with every BG I’ve found since then that comes from the shared experiences and how much we loved every bit of it, even when we hated it. There really were blood, sweat, tears, a separated collar bone, and a concussion that knocked me out of AP English my senior year – and it was all worth it.
Mr. Schroeder retired last week and over 100 former students showed up at his retirement party (with a little warning I would have flown across the country to be there). I really can’t imagine how he can be leaving as he was in his 40s when I knew him and I’m still a kid, aren’t I? Realizing almost 20 years have passed is harder than I thought. Seeing what that means to that school, the program, those kids – that really made my heart hurt a little bit. I have no idea how the new generation of BGs have fared because like everyone does, I grew up and moved on, leaving Mr. Schroeder right where I left him to watch over the new kids, the practices, the initiations, the uniforms, the run-throughs (let's do it again!), the camps, trips, competitions – the next waves of BGs. I was lucky to have him in my life and know those kids lost something last week. I congratulate him on a career of actually reaching kids and making them care about something bigger than themselves, and more importantly, each other. Thank you Mr. Schroeder, from the bottom of my 17-year-old heart.