"You wanna
bet? All right, I've got 70 bucks right here," she said, staring him in the eye, removing a small
silver money clip from her pocket and tossing it in his direction. It hit the
linoleum floor and slid a short distance, stopping just in front of his
desk.
The boy, who we'll call Johnny, seemed slightly taken aback. He was the normal high school class cut-up who had been bragging about his
baseball skills only moments before, saying that he could score more runs than a female
softball player, who we'll call Sherry, who was also in the general
chemistry class.
My high school chemistry
teacher, who I came to know as "Boo," a shortened form of her last name, had overheard them and stepped in. She was a stern-faced woman with close-cropped fair hair and an
athletic build. Because she kept her hair so short, and loved
sports and
hunting, and wore
tennis shoes to school every day, and occasionally mentioned living with a female roommate, and expressed blatantly
feminist values in class, her students naturally assumed she was a
lesbian. I did too, though I didn't particularly care who she went home to.
"You wanna bet you can score more
runs than Sherry this
season?"
Sherry, a tall girl with all-American good looks, did not seem fazed. She smiled placidly as Boo and Johnny stood each other down in the middle of a
lecture.
Johnny caved. He picked up Boo's money clip and handed it back to her. She gave him a
smug little grin and returned to writing on the
blackboard.
Most of Boo's students feared her. She was known for being
strict, for giving
detentions, for terrorizing those who dared to talk out of turn during her class. She had a
harsh voice and a commanding presence in a room. Her
tests were hard. She sometimes acknowledged her reputation, saying that we all thought she was "
The Wicked Witch of the North." (This intentional error makes more sense knowing that I went to high school in
Florida, and Boo was from
Ohio.)
I, however, made it through her class my
tenth grade year relatively unscathed. I made good grades and was on my school's honors /
AP track, so I signed up to take
AP Chemistry with her the next year. I dreaded this somewhat, but figured that I could make it through another year as long as I remained
quiet,
studious, and
obediant.
Junior year came and I returned to Boo's
realm. She amazed me and my 18-odd classmates by warming up, becoming almost
playful with her lessons, letting us have some
freedom and even
debate with her over the best way to solve certain problems. She told us stories of her
rowdy past, explaining that she knew how to deal with troublemakers like Johnny because she used to be one. The best was a tale about a grudge match with her neighbors that culminated with her throwing a baseball-sized chunk of
potassium into their swimming pool. (
The revenge of a chemist is sweet, like an ester.)
At that point I began to love Boo. I realized that she was one of the greatest teachers I had ever known, explaining things in terms that were
simple to understand, not subscribing to the sort of
academic elitism that I'm finding to be all too rampant at my
university. She explained
ionic compounds the following way, and I've never forgotten the colorful lesson:
"Think of an ionic compound as a couple. In every couple, you have the positive woman, and the negative boy. The only time the boy will split up with the woman is if he sees another woman who's more active."
When people in her class complained at large amounts of
homework, or the fact that a test had been so difficult as to make the average score somewhere around a 53%, she would just scowl at us, saying, "Y'all are just
lazy. You're a bunch of little
geniuses who don't wanna do your homework." She was right, of course, and she spoke from experience.
Later on I learned small pieces of Boo's life story. She went to
college in Ohio intending to follow it with
medical school, but never made it. "All I cared about in college was playing
basketball," she explained to the class, and got a slightly dreamy look in her eyes. Instead of being a
doctor, she was a
high school chemistry teacher, but she still manages to help people, and to touch lives.
Machiavelli once posited that it is better to be feared than loved. Boo knew better -- she got away with both. She forced our
respect, and then we earned hers, and everyone learned a little bit about chemistry, and a lot about each other.
This has been the story of yet another unsung hero.