Doing Eighty

Ted Reads Doing Eighty

0:00

I began my professional career in 1967 as a schoolteacher.  Eighth grade remedial English to remedial students (all boys) in a windowless, science lab classroom outfitted with working gas jets, functional water faucets, glass beakers, test tubes, Bunsen burners, chemicals, the whole deal.  Three of these classes, sixty boys a day, fifty-five minutes each, for 180 days. What could possibly go wrong? Anything that you might be able to make up actually happened.

That’s what they do with first year teachers.  Give the newbies all the kids, classes, and classrooms that none of the veterans want.  Professional hazing.  If you can stick it out for the first year, then you become one of those who sticks it to the newbies the next year.

The other two periods I taught Civics: “How Our Country Works.” In windowless “portable” classrooms, which are really mobile homes with no windows and two windowless doors. 

Curriculum?  Three branches of government, checks, and balances. Peaceful transitions of power.  All that was actually true sixty years ago.  Now if this subject matter was allowed to be taught, it would be more accurately placed in the American History curriculum.         

For all of this, I was paid about thirty dollars a day. For 10 months. Like most of my colleagues, to make ends meet I hustled for extra gigs: coaching, sponsoring school clubs, summer work; anything to pad the “before taxes” paycheck.  

I had a wife who encouraged me to work every possible hour. She even started one of the first tool-rental businesses—if a neighbor wanted a shovel, she expected fifty cents or a dollar. She was a visionary, really.

I took on teaching Driver’s Education as a way to make some extra money. DE was mandated by state law.  The school was required to provide that service for every eligible student. 

They provided a new car, along with gas, maintenance, and insurance. The pay was decent (better than mowing grass, etc.) thanks to a state subsidy.

The only cost was the years taken off my life by stress.  I rode along, my life and limb being in the hands of a 15-year-old with two of their buddies in the back seat, with only a brake and a long arm to avoid disaster.

What the typical student lacked in experience they generally made up for with a degree of unwarranted and over-rated confidence.   A very potent mix.   

I’ve been thankful all my life for being wired to run cool emotionally.  That came in handy for the experience.  Coaching baseball and basketball for twenty years, (and teaching Driver’s Ed) I was quite often accused of not caring because I didn’t rant and rave. Truth is, I’d learned growing up that he who loses their cool usually loses. 

I think I ran a little too cool for relationships though.  I often told my first wife if she would only calm down, we could probably work things out.  That is a tool I wouldn’t recommend if one is interested in relationship longevity.

One summer, already holding a master’s degree, I discovered that if I took a six-week course I could earn a 5% certification salary bump. I signed up.

The first day of my Driver’s Education graduate class, I was shocked when I walked into the room.  The professor was ancient - eighty years old as I later learned. He looked like a candidate for that point in life where the car keys are taken away. 

We later learned that he had spent nearly sixty years teaching philosophy at Michigan State, eventually chairing the department until he was involuntarily and unceremoniously dumped and forced to retire. But he wasn’t done with teaching or students.

He signed up to teach whatever classes the university couldn’t staff. Paid at lecturer rates, not professor rates. “Teaching, true teaching, is far bigger than the subject matter.  In fact, the subject matter is mostly irrelevant,” he eventually told us.

On the first day of class, the first thing he asked us to do was stand one by one and tell our story. We were to fill five minutes.  He pointed at me and said, “You first.”   Later when he was asked why he had done that, he said, “Everyone has a story, and it deserves to be heard.”

By the second class, he knew all of our names. He greeted us at the door. No one else in my eighteen-year educational career had ever done that. When we later asked why he had done that, he said, “Because everyone has a name and deserves to be known by it.”

I honestly don’t remember a single thing about driver’s education from that class. But I remember the other things about life he taught me. 

He taught me about three ways of learning. 

1.    Hearing something brand new.

2.    Being reminded of something you once knew but had forgotten.

3.    Allowing yourself to be exposed to something 180 degrees opposite of what you already know to be true.  This he suggested is the biggest opportunity and least likely to happen because of our hubris and resistance.  That last one, he said, is the rarest and most valuable form of learning—if we can stay open to it.

He taught me one way to do eighty.  On the last day of class, he told us he and his 91-year-old wife had just purchased two new snowmobiles.  I remember thinking, Wow. How cool!!!!  He’s Eighty!!! I want to be like him when I’m eighty.

I wasn’t into snowmobiling.  I hate cold weather.  “The older I get, the colder I get,” is an adage that applies to me. But a Gnarly, 4-wheel drive, go anywhere, off road truck?  Absolutely.   

What I meant about wanting to be like him was the way it seemed he did life. The way he seemed to refuse to let age dictate his experience.  The way that he didn’t let others and circumstances outside of his control (the university) determine his actions. The way he seemed to flow with the river of life, no matter how rough, bent and twisted it was. How much vital energy he brought to the mundane, and the age of eighty.  Still teaching at a university, and there seemed to be more than a little bit of rascal in him.     

It seemed he was doing his version of white-water rafting the river of life.  Rather than spending his final years floating gently along in an old pontoon boat dozing off while someone else captained the boat. 

It was about fifty years ago, when I muttered to myself.  “I want to be like him when I am eighty.”  The other day I realized I AM eighty, and the memories of him and that class came rolling back to me.  I realized that quite remarkably and without knowingly trying, I have pretty much mirrored his experience. 

I haven’t allowed outside circumstances to determine what I do, where I do it, who I do it for and with. I am a bit of a rascal.  I say I have “pretty much” replicated how he did life because I don’t have snowmobiles.  But I do have that big gnarly, off-road, go anywhere, (bright orange) truck.