SOMEBODY NEEDS TO CREATE A TEACHER WELL-BEING INITIATIVE – Dad Gone Wild

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO CREATE A TEACHER WELL-BEING INIATIVE – Dad Gone Wild

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO CREATE A TEACHER WELL-BEING INITIATIVE

“Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I’m wrong? What if it’s really no good?”
― T.C. Boyle, If The River Was Whiskey

“I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.”
― Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

This past week I found out that my favorite teacher of all time had died. Clancy Dennis was tough and he was also full of shit. I was often encouraged to try and match wits with him, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that at times he put a little fear in me. He was bitingly sarcastic with a god awful toupee, along with a deep knowledge of his subject matter and a willingness to share. I can still hear his deep resonate wry laugh, forever carrying with it a deep sense of irony coupled with a sense of amusement over human nature. He was prone to slip into a fake English accent, one that however proved effective when sharing his favorite Shakespearean passages. He was a man of many contradictions.

He was a dedicated conservationist who created an environmental science class way before most people were even taking conservationism seriously. A large portion of the class was conducted in the outdoors and could be considered an early version of what is now referred to as project-based learning. He just called it good teaching. To this day, whenever I’m by a creek, I turn over rocks and look for mayfly larvae as a means to gauge the health of a waterway. Just one of his lessons that stuck.

He instilled in me a love for Shakespeare that has endured going on 40 years. He was a renaissance man in the truest sense, loving literacy, and the outdoors equally.

An argument was something to be savored, not carelessly entered into. Debate was considered by him an art form, not a distraction. An art form that he was so skilled in, he seldom entered into a CONTINUE READING: SOMEBODY NEEDS TO CREATE A TEACHER WELL-BEING INIATIVE – Dad Gone Wild