Sittin' and Thinkin', Part 1

Yesterday I went to the memorial service of a man that had lived a good life serving others.  He was my first water polo coach, the activities adviser my senior year and the second principal I taught under.  I thought I had a reasonable understanding of his life, but I learned so much more sitting in the small country chapel listening yesterday.

Willie Mac was the youngest son of a Scottish immigrant born in Texas. The family moved during the Depression to Kansas, then eventually Oakland, CA.  The father died when Willie Mac was a young teenager, and the son eventually graduated from college after serving in the Air Force. He went to work for a pharmaceutical company "selling drugs" but was unhappy in that line and became a teacher for much less pay.  He moved his wife and newborn daughter to a town none of them knew and started a new life in Exeter.  He never left and we are the better for that.

Those are just the facts though. Willie Mac molded and shaped many young people in our community.  He had three "biological" children, five adopted children, but thousands of children at school.  He like many men of his age shaped our towns and country for a time.  What would possess a man to enter a career for less money, and then stay there for decades?  As I sat in that church, I thought of my other teachers.  I thought of my friend's fathers.  I thought of my father.

I realized that the men that influenced me most while I was growing up were shaped themselves by a unique time in US history.  They were children of  the Depression, raised by the Greatest Generation.  They had little, but knew that hard work and effort would get them what they needed.  They knew that their career had more to it than the salary they collected.  They may not have been the Greatest Generation, but they understood the responsibility that came with living the life provided for them by the sacrifices of the men and women before them.

After sitting through the service; then talking to friends, former teachers and colleagues afterwards; I rode home with a friend.  Our talk was of Willie Mac, his colleagues, growing up in our small town, then how we both become teachers at our alma mater.  We also talked of the turns the teaching profession has taken from when we began to now.  We realize now as we are thinking of retirement, we had a foot in two different eras of education.

We grew up in that era made possible by the Greatest Generation, but directed by their offspring.  We started teaching when character was shaped everyday by the actions and modeling of the adults around us, not a program or system we talk about, then give pins to students that display the character components. I have heard it said this era was more restrictive. It was in many ways.  If you taught in our town, you were expected, no required, to live in town.  If you chose to buy some beer for your barbeque, you went to the back door of the liquor store and you were served.  Outrages that many today would rail about as being unfair and restraining.

But those restrictions also gave them boundaries.  As my generation fought for "freedoms" and against the social enslavement of that time, we destroyed those boundaries.  What we didn't see until too late is that within the boundaries, there was much freedom.  It was with those freedoms that educators like Willie Mac prospered.  Instead of raising test scores, he thought of raising young people to be adults.  This is the era that my friend and I find our other foot placed.