Most teachers don’t drop the “f” bomb. He did. Most teachers don’t explicitly express their religious views. He did. Most teachers don’t spend a whole class dedicated to telling students how bad public education in America is. He did. Most teachers don’t make a positive difference in my life. He did.
On my first day of high school, I met one of the most influential people I’ve ever known. He was a teacher. Now most people assume that teachers always change your life. After all, there are quite a few stories and even a couple movies about an awe-inspiring teacher that transforms a community. The fact that such a notion is special enough to be made into a movie should be enough evidence for the point I’m making. Nine out of ten times, the only thing a teacher does it jam a bunch of information in students’ heads, then test them to make sure it all hasn’t spilled out. As soon as summer hits, it does. For the next many years you just wash, rinse, and repeat the process until graduation. Sure, some teachers are really nice, friendly, and you can be very close to them, but few have a lasting influence on you. If you took every friend that you have in high school, try counting how many really impacted you, who taught you a lesson that you will never forget. Chances you aren’t going to be counting very high.
This had been the case for me until ninth grade. At first I assumed all the teachers would continue being nothing more than what they’d always been. That mindset of mine stayed that way for a couple months, but I then realized that my assumptions were perhaps too quickly assumed. Well, at least for one teacher anyways. His name was Mr. Orsini, and he taught my Honors Algebra 2 class. Mr. Orsini was strictly a down to earth kind of person. He told it like it was, even if it could easily get him fired. If the principals had known everything he said in that class, he would have been fired right away. He definitely didn’t just teach math, he also taught philosophy. The lessons consisted of Mr. Orsini at the front of the room sitting on a stool and talking about a topic that he felt strongly about, which happened about once every month. The topics ranged anywhere from religion, to education (and mainly how much he hated its current state), to relationships and dating. He said he wanted to make an impact in the world, and by teaching what he believed through his job, he might achieve that. Most kids liked the days he did this mainly because he didn’t assign homework those days, but some of us liked them because we actually listened to him. We understood what he was saying, and much of it related to us. We developed our own opinions. We became better people.
I believe that teachers should teach more than a curriculum. They should teach about life, how to live it, and how we can change what we don’t like about it.
The usual series of his interesting rants continued up until the last couple weeks of school. Should school have ended right then and there, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. The final speech he gave to us wasn’t just his opinions. It was also a story. One about how his father died. As Mr. Orsini calmly sat on that stool in the front of the room, he told us how he found his father dead. He told us about the gruesome scene, the blood spattered everywhere, and how in that moment he had never felt so alone. He told us to value the ones we loved. He told us to stop whatever we were doing and tell someone we valued that we loved them today because we’d never know when they’d be plucked off the Earth. He also told us to spend two hours completely alone with our thoughts sometime during the summer. I ended up doing both, which I believe made me a much more mature, secure, and intelligible person.
Mr. Orsini wasn’t just a teacher; he was an inspiration to develop my own ideas and my own identity. I believe that teachers nowadays need to teach not only from a textbook, but from their own experiences as well. You can ace every AP class there is, but if you don’t learn from what others before you have learned, you’re a moron. Mr. Orsini gave me that push to become who I am, something that is infinitely more valuable that anything that regular school teachers can teach.