Sic Semper Tyrannis

A Remembrance

Watching re-runs of The Wonder Years as of late has me contemplating my younger days...

I was in sixth grade. It was the week approaching summer vacation. All of the other kids and I were enjoying our last week of being the kings of the hill, the oldest, and therefore the coolest, kids in the building. At the end of the summer we knew we faced a total reversal. We would be seventh graders, lowest ones on the totem pole- peons in a totally new school building, new teachers, new expectations...in short, a new culture.

Which is what made this last week of sixth grade so memorable. And I remember Mr. Springer had been building up to that last day. He was our English teacher and he looked like a cross between the teacher at the beginning of Red Dawn and Adolph Hitler, with the body of J. Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons. He was also greatly feared amongst the kids I knew for a couple reasons. 1) He was a stoic man, hard to read. He was never overtly kind or rude. Just very matter-of-fact. Those kinds of people are trouble for the sixth grade brain. I at least imagined how horrible it would be in the event that he actually did explode. 2) Other than the gym teacher Mr. Fowler, he was the only other male teacher in the building. I remember the absolute shock I felt when I first found out there was a man who was teaching in the building. It was a whole new world. All of the other men I knew at that point merely tolerated children. None of them chose to spend eight hours a day amongst them.

Like I said, that last week Mr. Springer had been hinting at his yearly speech he made to all of his sixth grade students on their last day. He would mention how kids in the past would always be blown away by how great his yearly speech was. There seemed to be this tacit understanding between teachers and students that we were about to be released for battle or thrown to lions or other such life-changing struggle.

Well, that kind of anticipation was enough to pique my curiosity. And the last day had finally arrived. The class hour was drawing to an end and I wondered, "Has he forgotten?"

But he hadn't. He calmed the class down to an expectant hush. "And now I will give you this important speech I give every year to my students going into seventh grade. Listen closely..." he said, slowly lifting himself from the stool behind his lectern, where he spent the majority of time that year, challenging us to correctly diagram sentences, distinguishing between nouns, verbs, commas and all sorts of other things I now misuse all the time.

With the class absolutely silent by this time, he spoke:
"Make.
Good.
Decisions."

He said it just like that. Each word a seeming philosophical treatise of its own.

Here it is, almost twenty years hence and I can still hear Mr. Springer's voice in my head, how he took those words and turned them into something important. I wonder whatever happened to that man. I knew him for a total of about nine months, but still his gruff voice rattles around in my head from time to time, when the chips are down or I'm straining against an adverse wind.

God bless Mr. Springer, wherever he is.

posted by Mike @ 8:39 PM