Just thinking about this week’s Lenten programming sub-topic, generosity.
I can think of a comfortable number of people who have impacted my life whom I can easily call generous.
One does leap out at me.
He may have been best recognized, at least in his daily workplace, as the fellow who flew down the hall with what appeared to be a cape flapping behind him.
He wasn’t Batman.
He was, however, Francis J. Smith Jr.
We called him Il Professore.
Sorry: let me back up.
In every school, there are a couple of teachers whose reputations precede them. Sometimes, they’re known for how strict they are. Sometimes, as in the cases of coaches or conductors, they’re recognizable to newly-arrived students because they had some reason to be present at those students’ prior schools.
In this case, neither of those applied. But we had heard of this mythical “Mr. Smith” — particularly those of us who took Latin at the Wayland Junior High School.
By the time his public-school teaching career was complete in 1999, he had logged four decades as a teacher of Latin and classical studies at Wayland High School — nowhere else — and during one of those years, he was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year.
That was between 7:30 and 2 o’clock, Monday through Friday. Outside of “business hours,” there was more. To name just a little of it: he led a nationally-recognized Latin Club that routinely included more than a hundred student members each year. Each summer, he led fortnight-long educational trips to Italy — for students one summer, for adults the next.
And, lest ye perhaps think maybe he was just a big classical-studies nerd: for most of those four decades, he was the public-address voice of Wayland High School football.
Il Professore was easily identifiable during school hours. During passing time between classes, he could be found hurtling down the crowded hallway from his office to his classroom; sometimes pushing an AV cart loaded with classroom materials, sometimes riding it after a mighty push! And he was always moving at such a speed that the black academic robe which he constantly draped over his button-down shirt, Izod sweater, and chinos, extended out behind him — flapping like … well, like Batman’s cape.
He didn’t wear the robe out of self-aggrandizement. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek display of his respect for his profession, and for his students. This is serious business, even if the robe’s zipper up the front was never zipped. It was only himself that he didn’t take too seriously.
I didn’t get to take courses that Mr. Smith taught until my junior year at Wayland High. But I was all over that Latin Club; by the time I graduated, I had accompanied two of the Club’s annual “Saturnalian Banquet” musical shows and written another. And then wrote two more within the next few years, including the thirtieth annual. At that one, I led the cast in a song whose lyrics I’d written as a tribute to their Latin Club’s fearless leader’s thirty Saturnalian efforts. Afterward, Mr. Smith waxed poetic about how generous he thought I was for doing that extra work; I shook my head at him and smiled: aw, man, look in a mirror.
His car — a classic Triumph TR-7, because why would such an elegant guy drive a Dodge Dart? — was always in the school parking lot. As early in the morning as I could possibly arrive, even for before-school meetings or rehearsals, that roadster was always over there in the far corner. Leaving school so late in the afternoon that the sun was a distant memory? Car still there.
If Mr. Smith wasn’t re-setting his classroom, or helping build a Saturnalia show prop, or offering extra help to a student, he was at his Language-Department-head desk, grading papers or prepping lessons or writing letters of recommendation for college-bound seniors — long into the dark hours. His teaching colleagues described him as a perpetual-motion machine. And he hardly ever took sick days away from school — he felt that he owed it to his students to be there, even on days when he looked like death warmed over.
We wondered if he had any kind of life outside school. In retrospect, with the exception of his lengthy marriage, we had to suspect that he felt that his life was his students.
And that commitment, that dedication, that unusual generosity (even for the field of education, which features people who routinely work past the terms of their contracts) … it all resonated deeply with us, his students.
He would burst into his classroom, look at his assembled students, and call out, “Good morning, scholars!”
He tells us we’re scholars. So maybe we are. So maybe we’ll try to act that way.
One of the things I learned from Mr. Smith that wasn’t in the classical-studies curriculum was: dig in and do the work, and find a way to love it when you do — and give of yourself till it hurts. Not because it’s an obligation, but because it’s a privilege. He didn’t tell us; in a more effective and lasting lesson than that, he showed us.
And even too-cool-for-school, too-hip-for-the-room teenagers will get that, if it’s demonstrated to them often enough — if it’s demonstrated on their behalf enough. And we responded in kind.
On the way from class to class at Wayland High School’s multi-building campus, if students passed the floor-to-ceiling Language Department office windows, without fail we would smile and wave to him, or tap cheerfully on the section of window next to his desk (which probably spooked his nearby teaching colleagues. Or maybe they were used to it).
Kids hung out in his office — if they needed academic help, if they needed counsel, or if they had no specific reason to be there. We knew he cared about us so hard, we couldn’t help but try to return the favor. Teaching was his job; but what he did for us, the way he felt about us, went a great deal further than that.
Il Professore had doctorate upon doctorate, we were sure. But he never allowed himself to be called anything but “Mr. Smith”. Believe me: I tried “Doctor Smith” after my first freshman-year Latin Club meeting — ya know, respect and all that — and he quietly murmured, so no one standing nearby could overhear: “oh, no no no no. No Doctor. Don’t let the robe fool you, Robbie.” I walked away knowing that (1) I had not been made fun of, and (2) he was going to be one of my favorite teachers ever, whether I took his classes or not. And (3) he knew my name already. Goodness.
It occurs to me that I’ve been talking about Frank Smith (I never called him by his first name, either) exclusively in the past tense.
No worries. He’s by no means crossed the River Styx. (See, I did pay attention in class.) He’s very much still with us.
A few summers ago, I was being a turista on Cape Cod, and decided to pop in to the tiny little Visitor Information shed on Main Street in Chatham; figured I’d grab a current map and some brochures. And who, out of nowhere, was manning the kiosk as I poked my head in?
Il Professore.
“Robbie!” he called out, clambering around from behind the counter and administering a firm bear hug, with a nimble manner which belied his advanced octogenarian status, and which perfectly recalled his public-school-teaching propensity for dashing about. And apart from a few more gray hairs, he didn’t look a thing different, and I am not kidding about that.
He instantly remembered my name, and details from the last time I was his student, thirty years before. Asked how I was. Asked how my sister Kristin was doing (and I’m not even sure she ever got to take one of his classes; he just knew that too).
By the end of our conversation — which absolutely lasted at least half an hour, during which he would very briefly pause to hand a brochure to another turista visiting the information kiosk and then come right back to our conversation — he said, “well, if you’re around after today, why don’t you come over to the house tomorrow? We’ll have some breakfast.”
Goodness! Well okay then. “Mom, you come too,” he said, since my mother and I were being turistas together in Chatham that week. (By this time you will be unsurprised to know that he had recognized and enthusiastically greeted her, too, … three decades since the last time they’d been in the same room.)
As we walked away, I shook my head in wonderment: I get to be a former student of … and perhaps I get to call myself a friend?? of … this titan.
So, as bidden, we came over to the house the next morning. And he continued to remind me of the dominant impression I got of him — as a high school freshman; as an alumni contributor to Latin Club frivolity; as a decades-on former classical-studies student; as a Cape Cod tourist …
Generosity.
So, clearly I have a role model. How Generous Would Il Professore Be?
And, since, as far as I know, he’s still treading this good Earth, maybe there’s an off-chance he’ll get to read this not-brief piece of writing here. Great teachers deserve to have praise heaped on them by their former students.
Although he would probably accuse me of being far too generous.
I don’t think so; I think it’s simply telling it like it is.
I had a great teacher, though.
-Rob Hammerton
Sudbury UMC Lenten Devotions 