“Teacher, you’re my role model.”

What a bomb to drop on the foreign teacher you only see once a week, for less than an hour. How did we get here? It’s only been a month and a half since I met you, and now you’re coming to my classroom every other period, peeking your head around the door to grin sheepishly at me, not saying a word. ‘I promise, I’m not disappearing for another 3 months,’ I imagine myself reassuring him, all the while telling him, no, I won’t friend you back on facebook until July.

Yet a year ago, I was still a student, receiving the same grades as the ones I hand out to my students now. Accordingly, I was wholly unprepared for the sudden flip in the teacher-student dynamic and the responsibility that comes with overseeing 600+ children a week. But this question of who you look up to – “Teacher, who is your role model?” – is a new, wholly second semester conundrum. How are my actions perceived by my kids? How did I learn to be an educator, rather than educated? Who am I channeling as I stand in front of 35 students, 5 days a week, many hours a day? Reflecting on this – in addition to needing an adequate answer to the “Who is your role model?” question that has come up in multiple lunchtime conversations – brought me back to the teachers who molded me along the way and whose ethos I hope to draw from.

The first lesson came from my second grade elementary school teacher. Learning doesn’t stop just because the lesson is finished. Every week, for a minute and a half, we had a Mad Minute. How many multiplication and addition problems could you finish in the minute-that-was-actually-more-than-a-minute? A simple, yet maddening task for little me’s brain, which up until then developed a hardened understanding that done meant done; that 100% was the highest honor you could yet.

Yet here was this task, with no upper limit. If you could do 25, surely 30 was within reach. 35 then 40. 50 then 51. But the only external motivation was to see how big a smile I could inspire from my parents as I waved the crumpled paper with the red number circled brightly at the top of the page. A smile that was, at least in my mind now, directly correlated to how big the number was.

No grade for a report card, no candy, no prize. The rest of the motivation was intrinsic – could I beat last week’s me? Math problems or Mario Kart, it was the same. If I could beat everyone else by a few seconds, then surely I could come to lap them.

Most teachers, inconvenienced or even perhaps daunted by students over-outpacing their peers, would pump the brakes, like the drivers ed sitting in the passenger seat does when you go 65 in a school zone during your training hour. But my teacher was different – my learning should never stop for anyone else to catch up, and the extent of my knowledge doesn’t end with the end of a worksheet or the bell, and this was the guiding philosophy of my 2nd grade instructor.

Me and my best bud in the class would always be blazing through these Mad Minute practice sheets, silently yet conspicuously competing for a top score that meant nothing more than padding our pride. Eventually, we’d exhausted the materials, and so off we went to our teacher.

“We finished! Are there any more?”

“Really? You finished already?… I’ll go get more.”

Chuckling to herself, she went to the storage room to rummage through dusty boxes. But 10 minutes of searching turned up zilch, though she promised us more later. Sure enough, there were stacks and stacks of stapled packets, on our desks the next week, and “have at it” was like a starting pistol shot for our #2 pencils.

This cycle continued throughout the year, with each new Mad Minute packet reinforcing and cementing the idea that learning was endless. Not the closed syllabus of Econ 1018 or EASTD 98ab; it’s an open library, and the library card is my desire to ask for ‘just one more packet.’

I’m certain that I did more math problems in that one year than my woodshop and ceramics teacher has ever puzzled through. High school educated and that was it, he was not the paragon of academia. Yet he somehow taught more than almost all the others.

Skin as tanned as his hair was bleached, he would stride through the shop quickly, not because he was in a hurry but because he was constantly excited. This project here, that project there, the smell of charring dark walnut or pine sap. If I close my eyes, I can see him closing his own eyes and sighing in satisfaction after finishing a long project.

The antonym to his artistic passion was his disdain for anything tougher than elementary school math. “Why would I need to go to college for all this?” he asked rhetorically, gesturing to the shop tools before erasing an arithmetic error ninth grade me had pointed out. “All I need is adding and subtracting.”

He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t quite right either. His love of learning seemed to stretch only so far as the studio threshold, like the shopping carts whose wheels locked up when you cross the yellow parking lot lines. It took just one look at a geometric table design I had sketched for him to say it was impossible, and four months for me to prove him wrong.

Yet his passion for wood, clay, and surfing was unparalleled. Even now, I wonder whether I should’ve dropped out of college to pursue a shop apprenticeship and pass away happily of wood dust congestion.

Most of the time, we are doing more seeing than looking. Physiologically, we only “see” about 20% of the surroundings, with our brains supplying the remaining 80% of the picture, drawing upon past experiences and expectations to give us an uncompleted picture that masquarades as the full image. It’s no wonder, then, that our normal neighborhoods become both familiar and boring. We tend to mentally choose the path of least resistance, whether consciously or unconsciously, which results in that 80% being filled in by the past, and not the present that we could – and should – be looking for.

There’s a reason why a course on “Studies of the American Visual Landscape” would produce an astronomically higher than average number of CIA agents, advertising executives, and architects, and all from this one class. The professor, whose class consisted of roliflex reels he’d cradle into class under his arm, demanded that we look at what we were seeing. Countless times, he would leave a 35mm slide up on the screen until we could decipher its true meaning. Why a picture of an Uncle Ben’s Cream of Wheat box from the 1950s was important (spoiler: Uncle Ben, a representation of the Southern black working class, hinted that the ‘deeply rooted’ hatred of black Americans by working class white Americans may not have been ‘deeply rooted’ so much as politically force-fed). Other slides, such as a magazine article on the existential dangers of having your data stolen from 1979 and paired with an article printout on Cambridge Analytica’s election work from 2017, taught of a world moving in spirals treading onwards yet overlapping nonetheless.

Lives seem to run in these circles, with the same conversations, people, and problems. Yet without looking, as opposed to seeing life fly by, it’s impossible to see the lessons hidden in plain sight and avoid the same mistakes as my past self as if its projected from a 35mm slide.

And this one question – “Who are those role models?” – encouraged this circling back exercise. To remember and learn, rather than letting the reflecting go to waste. The next time the smiling 1st year student peeks around my door asking about my role models, I’ll know more of how to answer.