The thing about the public school system in big cities is that it is a mess. I had a social studies class in highschool wherein we watched movies about 80% of the time. Movies like Rambo. The teacher next door called him Mr. Movies.

My algebra teacher kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk and was often drunk in class. Despite being pretty handy with the mathematics, I still have this odd hole in my algebra knowledge that irritates me. It most embarrassingly reared its ugly head while I was taking my doctoral qualifying exams at MIT and I found myself having to re-derive the quadratic formula. That's the sort of thing I should just know.

The students at my highschool were no better. We would have an average of three of so fire alarms per week, which was especially aggrivating when I was in my lifeguarding class during a pleasant Minnesota February. We were allowed to take our towel with us when we left the building...

However, just as there was the occasional student who was actually there to learn, there were also some teachers who were interested in teaching. One such teacher was Betty Richardson, who taught English.

Now you must understand that English is not my subject. I never really enjoyed being forced to read the classics, most of which I found rather tiresome. Luckily, English classes are often graded very subjectively. And being an excellent bullshitter and a quick talker, I was generally able to do very well in English classes and not do any of the reading.

Richardson was the first teacher who ever got me interested in the subject matter to the point of actually wanting to read the books. And to read supplemental material that wasn't required. She opened my eyes to Throeau, and to the power of philosphy.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that she didn't approach the curricculum as something to be marched through from beginning to end. She didn't deliver the contents of the syllabus - she saw it as her job to deliver inspiration to her students until they desired to walk the path of the syllabus on their own.

I remember she had a little clay troll on her desk holding a small flag that said something like "no whining." She was very protective of her troll. I saw it as my duty to kidnap the troll for a period of one week. I managed to get it back onto her desk without her noticing and for the rest of the term she would watch it through the corner of her eye and make occasional comments as to the great troll ordeal. For my final presentation, I had a slideshow to accompany my talk [real analog slides - this was pre-powerpoint]. During the talk, I would occasionally quickly skip past a slide or two that would only be on the screen for a moment, but if you got a good look at them you'd see the troll sitting in a microwave, or in a frying pan, or on a small raft in a lake. By this time Betty and I had become friends and she appreciated the joke.

I got an A in Betty Richardson's English class, as I generally did in all English classes, but when it was over I felt I had earned my grade for the first time - and that I'd truly gotten something out of the class. I came away from high school very jaded with "the system" but Richardson and a scarce handfull of others stood out as beacons of integrity and enthusiasm in a sea of apathy.

I still keep a copy of the complete works of Thoreau in my truck for occasional contemplation while camping.

Betty Richardson was killed on Monday when a driver going the wrong way on the highway collided with her car.