My Favorite Teacher

Did you ever have a favorite teacher in school? Is there that one person that seemed to make the world of difference for you in difficult situations growing up? That person in my life was Ralph Radecki. My Latin teacher. He still teaches at Clay High School in South Bend, Indiana to this day. He teaches 30 classes a week of Latin...amazing really.

I remember wondering what the big deal was with Latin - why did so many people want to take Latin? There was a waiting list to get into the class. Amazing. Everyone wanted to take this old, dead, foreign language. I was stunned. And...I wanted to take it too. I had to. Everyone wanted to, and I wasn't going to go against what everyone else wanted. The reason they wanted to take Latin? We all heard that there was very little Latin-learning going on. And it was true. Sort of.

For the first six months of Latin class we listened to stories. Greek mythology stories. The. Whole. Time. We did not learn a single piece of Latin in that six months - but we learned about the Trojan War, Psyche, Zeus, all of the great gods and their stories...stories of their mothers and fathers, adventures, trials. We heard six months of stories. Every day was fun - learning something new.

After the first six months, Ralph threw in some Latin, although it didn't really felt like we were learning anything. We would play risk, watch movies, plan our bi-annual party. It just didn't feel like traditional learning.

We continued in this odd learning manner for the next few years. We would spend weeks watching I Claudius. We read Spoon River. We watched Fellini movies. We wrote essays - in English, about movies - in English. We played games, we had class outside... we just didn't seem to be learning any Latin. I later learned, while taking placement tests for college, that we had actually learned more Latin that needed to get the required 8 credits...no idea how that happened.

My 4th and last year of Latin took an interesting turn. We spent months discussing why Ralph had spent the first six months of class telling us stories. He had actually done all of this - his teaching method - with a plan in mind. There was a method to his madness and it was now up to us to figure out what that method was. As you can imagine, there were as many guesses as there were kids in the class.

Did he tell us stories to:
- help us learn from history
- make us think for ourselves
- rope us in and then teach us before we knew what was going on
- teach us his beliefs so that we make a better place for him
- entertain us because it was fun for him
- show us different ways to learn
- make us loyal to him so he would have teaching jobs
- trick us into learning Latin without knowing it

and a million other reasons... all of them wrong according to Ralph. He claimed to have students coming back to him years later - after finally figuring out what he had been doing - what his goal was. I saw a few of them come back myself. I too have thought of going back to see him...to talk about what he was doing. I think of him often and wonder what the goal was.

Years later I read a book - Tuesdays with Morrie. It reminded me of Ralph - of the teacher I had such respect for. I understood the bond that Mitch had with Morrie...it made perfect sense to me. All of the lessons that Mitch learned from him, and didn't really realize it until so much later...

"So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."

I still don't know what we were supposed to learn from that experience in Latin class. But I have learning many things just thinking about it.

I have learned that:
- you can learn from a single experience for years and years
- that a person can make a difference just by caring about people
- that time invested in relationships is worth it
- that it is okay to trust people
- that learning can be fun
- that the act of learning is important - learning to learn, and not so much the things you are learning
- that a good teacher will stay with you forever
and so many other things

I read something from The Once and Future King that fits well here:

"The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."