The Teacher who opened my Mind

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Soon Lears started bringing things into class. Every Friday we got some music: I remember hearing Billie Holiday, Mozart, the Velvet Underground. He also showed us art books, read a poem from time to time, and brought in friends of his to explain themselves. A panel from Students for a Democratic Society appeared one day to discuss the Vietnam War with us. (Most of us were in favor.)

One February day, a group of black students burst into the room and announced that this was the anniversary of Malcolm X’s death. Lears looked up mildly from his place in the circle and asked the foremost of them, “And when was he born, Malcolm Little?” The young man gave a date. Lears nodded and invited them to sit down. It was the first time I’d had an extended conversation about politics with blacks. More discussions followed and, though they didn’t stop the ongoing racial guerrilla war at Medford High, they were something.

When the weather warmed up, the class occasionally went outside to sit on the grass and hold discussions there. This sometimes resulted in one or two of us nodding off, but Lears didn’t much care; he had most of us most of the time now. He sat cross-legged, and laughed, and we answered the questions he asked, because what he thought mattered. It was a first, this outdoors business; no one at Medford High would have imagined doing it. One Thursday afternoon, just as we were wrapping up a discussion of Thoreau, Lears gave us a solemn, mischievous look, the sort of expression shrewd old rabbis are supposed to be expert in delivering, and said, “There’s been some doubt expressed about our going outside.” Then he told a story. Jingles McDermott, the feared school disciplinarian, had approached Lears in the faculty cafeteria as other teachers milled around. What would happen, McDermott asked Lears, if everyone held class outside?

Now this was familiar stuff to us all. McDermott’s question came out of that grand conceptual bag that also contained lines like “Did you bring gum for everyone?” and “Would you like to share that note with the whole class?” McDermott was trying to treat Lears like a student, like one of us—and in front of his colleagues.

McDermott did not know that Lears, however diminutive, thought himself something of a big deal and so would not have been prepared when Lears drew an easy breath and did what every high school kid would like to do when confronted with this sort of bullying. He didn’t fight it, didn’t stand on his dignity. He simply ran with it.

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