One of the best teachers I’ve ever had was one Mr. Bussard, my calculus teacher in high school. I cannot, with any confidence, say he was THE best teacher I’ve ever had, due to the fact that I seem to have been generally blessed witha run of excellent teachers, especially in math. This is probably to contradict the short run of impossibly bad English teachers I had to endure from 8th grade to 10th grade.
What makes Mr. Bussard stand out in this long list of of great teachers was two facts: the first, and most important, was the fact that he did not, in any way, attempt to teach me calculus. He recognized early on that this owuld be a futile excercise as I had the, quite possibly incredibly infuriating, habit of paying attention about once a week, and never, ever, doing my homework. This would, in most circumstances, point to me being an exceptionally bad student, rather than to him being an exceptionally good tacher, if it weren’t for the fact that I still managed to make at least a B, and usually a high A, on every single test he gave me.
The simple fact that has kept me from being a scientist or a methematician is that I catch on to them too quickly. What took Mr. Bussard five days of 55 minute classes to explain to your average high school senior taking advanced math classes took me approximately 20 minutes to grasp to my satisfaction. As a result, mathematics (and to a slightly lesser extant, science) bored me to tears. The problem was that there was one answer. No matter which direction you looked at an equation from, you could only ever reach one correct, inevitable conclusion. This, it seemed to me at the tiem, left out the entire creative side of the human brain. And indeed, HIGH SCHOOL math does. HIGH SCHOOL math is the process of taking all the basics you’d learned in the previous 8 years, and showing you one generally acceptable way of using it. The same, of course, was true of high school Englishg, but I realized the inherent absurdity of this much earlier in my life, and could thoroughly enjoy approaching a paper from my own end, and tricking my tehacers into thinking I did it their way.
I could have done the same with math and science, I realize now, and probalby have made MUCH more money doing it. In fact, I can remember one startling occasion on which, in physics, my lab partner and I effectively DISPROVED a fundamental law of physics. I’m not making this up. My lap partner (I do not, just now, remember which lab partner it was, whether it was Justin, the red head whom I’d crushed on for years, and showed me, through physics, that I did not really want him, or Ziggy, who did the exact opposite, and on whom I subsequently crushed for years, but I realize that this detail is entirely unimportant. Let’s just say it was Chip, who was never actually my lab partner, but who seems, in my memory, much more likely than either Justin or Ziggy to disprove a law of physics), Chip, and I had had performed the experiment, and executed the math, flawlessly. Even Ms. Valli, another of my exceptional teachers for much the same reasons that Mr. Bussarde was, could not find where we must have gone wrong. We simply did not come up with the prescribed answer, or even come close. So we did the experiment again, and ended up with the same impossible answer. Eventually, Chip Ms. Vallie, and I agreed to take a pabge from the then-not-yet-late Douglas Adams, and say that it was Thursday, and we never could quite get hte hang of thursdays anyway.
Now that I think about it, that might not have happened in physics class with Ms. Valli. I think it did, but all of my highschool science classes happened in essentially the same room, so its difficult to be sure.
This even, tin which I realized that for all its supposed quantitative perfection science and math were basically a bunch of bunk wwhich we hoped, desperately, would always work, was quite possibly what set me up into the perfect position to discover and appreciate the second thing that made Mr. Bussard a great teacher.
Mr. Bussard was a great and unapologetic liar.
Mr. Bussard was such a good liar, in fact, that its entirely possible that everything he said was the truth, but the important thing was that we never believed a woord of it, and were kept thoroughtly entertained and attentive by no-believing.
I was first informed othis phenomenon by my friend Liz, who had taken Bussard’s calculus class the year before.
“Hey Liz,” I said, “I have Mr. Bussard.”
“Mr. Bussard is a liar,” Liz said.
“I’m going to tell him you said that,” I said.
“Go ahead,” Liz said, “and tell him that I said ‘hi’.”
The next day, before Mr. Bussard could start his daily completion of the homework on the classroom overhead projector, I raised my hand.
“Liz Porter says you’re a liar,” I said.
“I am not a liar,” Mr. Bussard said.
“I’m going to write down all of your lies, this year,” I told him. I was quite enraptured witht eh idea of recording what people said, and kept up the habit, which was thoroughly annoying especially to many of those being quoted, for years.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Bussard said. “But I am not a liar.”
And thus began the Mr. Bussard List of Lies, which distracted me sufficently from the tedium of calculus for the rest of the year.
It is only now, this year, more than four years after Mr. Bussard’s List of Lies was completed and almost forgotten, that I realize that most of the items on the list probably were not lies. I realized this when I noticed taht one of the most memorable of his innumerable lies, the one that sticks in my head the most due to its clever turn of phrase, is absuolutely, infallably true. More so, in fact, than the basic law of physics that Chip and I disproved in Ms. Valli’s classroom.
The lie was this (sort of, its paraphrased): “I would probably get better faster if I did not work in a center for communicable diseases.”
It is now, of course, that I finally DO work in a similar center for communicable diseases. Mr. Bussard’s was called Colonel Zadok Magurder High School. Mine is INCAF Montessori Preschool.
I now sit, writing this, in a Starbucks Coffee establishment a short distance from a Florida state school. The foolishness of htis is nto so much the fact that I’m in a Starbucks, though that is probably remarkably foolish, but that the sate school is not University of Florida in Gainesville, where I live, but rather the University of South Florida, in Tampa, some two hours of highway driving away from where I live. I am sitting here, writing and sipping cooling tea, with a cold.
Calling something a “cold” is entirely misleading, when it is generally accompanied by sweats. Also by a stuffy, runny nose, and “sinus explody”. I have, thorugh the miracle of sudafed and vitamin C, managed to get rid of the stuffy nose and sinus explody. Instead, all of that icky stuff has traveled down the back of my throat to my lungs. This means that I can breathe through both nostrils, but am still incapable of smelling or tasting anything but “ick”. It also means that I have an apalling cough.
I am in Tampa because I did not let sinus explody stop me from going to work, and I am sure as heck not going to let it sotp me from beating up a good friend who also works in a center for commuincable disease (known as “Busch Gardens’ Howl-O-Scream”) and has contracted a throat infection, and in beating him, remind him that, to quote Lisa Loeb, he’s “not too tired for this life”. I am a firm believer that most people who are forgetting that life is generally worth living, if for no other reason than to enjoy its ironies and perverseness, are in need of a good beating. Nothing reminds a person of irony and perversity than a beating when they are feeling bad.
So, Mr. Bussard, I apologize. I believe, no, in your center for communicable diseases, your tie with microscopic tequilla from MADD, and yes, even in your calculator camp. I do not, however, believe that I would have “liked those notes”, had I ever taken them. So you are still a liar.
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