Re: Teachers to Remember

12/24/11 - posted by Paul Judge

I too posted on this topic in a previous thread
Re: Favorite, Memorable Teachers
http://www.outsidelands.fun/cgi-bin/mboard/stories2/thread.cgi?1713,19#msgtitle

However, I held back describing the teacher who had the greatest impact on me and many other students at George Washington High School in the late 1960s.

As a teacher and human being Colin Covey singularly influenced my life. He took me, a fairly straight 16 year old Irish Catholic kid and jump started my social and political education. More than that, outside of my own family and kin, he was a major influence - befriending, provoking, and supporting me to take on the world I was coming of age in. Colin was singularly inspirational as a social studies teacher. His over the top vitality and progressive interpretation of history influenced scores of curious, impressionable, and wildly indifferent kids. Whoever you were Colin took the time to listen and talk to you at your level. He managed his classroom effortlessly. He reached his students through incandescent lectures delivered with self depreciating quick wit and dramatic improvisation. During the span of my junior and senior years I felt my values and world view expanding and taking shape. Figure this, the only times that I cut school were to sneak away to his classroom to listen to his presentations and fascinating class discussions.

Housed in Room T-5, a WW II era 'temporary' building out behind the Gym, Colin's classroom was like no other that I or other kids in our school of 4,000 or more students had ever experienced. He presented a multidisciplinary view of history that I would later find wanting in many professors that I'd meet in college. His lectures were provocative and passionate drama. He evoked discussions that drew all students to listen and participate, no small deed considering the teenage habit to sleep walk through high school. He delivered viewpoints that challenged our assumptions and values. His respect for us was reciprocated regardless of the differences of our outlook and background. Still, if you acted like a self absorbed dumb jock or a kiss-ass and remained unaffected, he'd nail you to the quick.

In any given week we were introduced to a variety guest presenters: a machinist and veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a longshoreman, a muralist, a Black Panther, a member of the Digger Collective from the Haight Ashbury, an organizer from the United Farm Workers Union, a draft counselor, previous students of his who'd returned from combat tours in Vietnam, etc.

I met Colin when I was hawkish supporter of the American war in South East Asia. He respected me but he also brought to me an understanding of a broader regional history of colonial rule and foreign invasions. Slowly but certainly the solvency of my opinion eroded with doubt and then dissolved by the time I graduated. A year later when I submitted statements to my draft board declaring my conscious objection to the war, amongst my best letters of support was Colin's.