Blackboard Education

School is memorable for so many reasons.

Friends. Enemies. Sports.

Life lessons.

The occasional chance bit of education that slips in and the teacher(s) who accidentally accomplish it . . .

In Lethbridge, Alberta in the early ‘40s, there a great teacher.

Young and energetic, he was one of those inspiring men with the enthusiasm and determination needed to pour knowledge into thirty-plus mostly-resistant heads.

One of which was my dad’s.

Every day, this teacher would painstakingly write out his lessons—filling the blackboard.

Then, just before the end of the period arrived, just as painstakingly review everything he had struggled so hard to put down.

And, every day, he would begin said review with these words: “Class? Watch the board while I go through it.”

Now, admittedly, to him, these words were supposed to suggest exactly what he said. The review was about to begin.

To his students, something far different was understood.

And they waited, day after day, for it to happen.

But never, in all the years this man taught my dad did he actually go through the board.

Rats.

Because that would have been an education.