MY BEST AND WORST HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS

My Best and Worst High School Teachers

It never occurred to me to have a best or worst teacher category until some education professor in college asked us to identify a favorite teacher - hoping, I suppose, that we would model ourselves after that person.  I chose Merlin Miller. a history teacher.  He was also the football coach and exceptionally good looking.  Being good looking and smart enough to teach history and coach a high testosterone sport like football was a potent combination but it had its downsides, like rumors of being a womanizer.  A rumor that was still around when I went to our 50 year reunion in 1998.  He was the most unlikely person in the entire faculty for me to emulate. He was my American history teacher and I was so terrified of him that I worked harder than I did for any other high school course.  Under those circumstances, I absorbed and retained a lot of unimportant information, like the name of the Secretary of Treasury for Andrew Jackson.  If he had any other teaching skills, besides fear, I didn’t notice them.  One day as I was on my way home, he confronted me in the hall, noticed that I wasn’t carrying my history text, ordered me back to my locker to get it and made some comment about resting on my laurels.  Up to that point I wasn’t sure he knew who I was or that I had any laurels to rest on. He may have confused me with someone else but I believed him anyway.  I was a late-maturing adolescent boy which means that I was a face in the crowd for a long time.  The surest way to be a popular male in high school was to be good looking, athletic, and smart and if you didn’t have those qualities the next best thing was to be noticed and befriended by someone who did.  Merlin Miller noticed.  That’s how he became my favorite teacher.

I chose Miss Paxton as my worst teacher which from my teenage point of view meant that she was annoying and colorful.  She taught all of the higher math (i.e., solid geometry, spherical trigonometry and so on) so she was my teacher for at least 4 consecutive semesters. I got to know her well. Perhaps too well. Well enough to know that she was always out of patience with the young administrators who didn't know how to run the school and that she told lots of stories about her Persian cat, Smokey - the only glimpse into her personal life that I remember.  The thing that irritated me most was the way she handled geometry problems.  Instead of standing up and drawing a triangle on the blackboard, for example, she would remain at her desk and form 2 sides of an incomplete  triangle with her forearms and then identify which leg or angle of the triangle that she was talking about by nodding her head in that direction.  I thought that she was too lazy to stand up to use the blackboard but the real problem may have been old age, being overweight or having poor health or all of the above.  There were other irksome traits.  She was a stickler about having the proper credentials for entering the classroom after class had begun.  She was not physically intimidating but she had the ability to freeze any intruder in the doorway by pointing her finger at them.  Anyone who opened  the door had to visibly wave the official slip of paper, including the boy who reached in to collect the attendance slips every hour.  One of my class mates was the student body president who always made announcements every morning over the loud speaker system.  He was in the office about 50 feet away so it took him a minute or two to walk to our classroom after the announcing business was over.  On this one occasion he walked in, carrying a lot of books.  Even though he was loaded down she insisted on seeing that official piece of paper.  He ignored the request and the request turned into a tirade that followed him across the room.  He calmly laid his books on his desk, casually walked to the front of the room and with an extra flourish placed the slip on her desk.  I don’t know how he did it but that was real class!

After my 80th birthday I received a letter from, Roy Caton, the only high school classmate that I corresponded with over the years.  He was the salutatorian of our graduating class, received a PhD in chemistry and taught at the  University of New Mexico.  Without any prompting from me he wrote a letter reminiscing about our teachers in high school.   To my surprise he named the same two teachers, as the best and worst teachers, except they were reversed.  Merlin Miller was the worst and Miss Paxton was the best.  I suspect that he was more right than I was.  I chose Merlin Miller because he made me feel special and disliked Miss Paxton because I wasn’t very good at math and, therefore, I could not see past her idiosyncrasies.  She missed out on many of the good things in life that most of us  take for granted and accepted her role as a hardworking teacher and a limited social life that she shared with her cat, Smokey.  She deserved better!