We were neither the slum kids of Sydney Poitier's To Sir with Love nor the privileged boys in Dead Poet's Society. We were New England kids raised in the mid 1950s with varying degrees of enough.
Besides being one of my favorite teachers he had a profound effect on my life, his words and lessons wending their way into the next six decades of my life.
He didn't know he was teaching critical thinking. The term would not be used until the next century. But his insistence on us looking deeper into whatever we developed opinions about, stuck. Things could not be just "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." The why not or why only became a part of my mental DNA but went beyond literature into all aspects of my life. It also made me look deeper into detail that carried over to my writing. Thus I notice the flowers blooming in January outside my door, an interesting cloud, the movement of a man running his finger under his shirt collar in a movie or real life.
Reading or watching a movie, play or DVD, I see the character as well as the story. If I reject something, I know why. If I enjoy it, I know why. If I'm neutral I know why.
It was his opinion on the Oxford comma that has gone from his lips to my husband's ears. The squiggly mark or punctuation, a substitute for the word and was never mentioned by name. I would be retired before I gave it a title, but it was there in everything I wrote.
My first two tastes of censorship came from my senior year.
One was in anatomy class where diagrams of the sexual organs were cut from every text. The other was from the authorities denying him the right to teach Othello. Of course many of us were able to obtain copies of the unbutchered texts and we read Othello if not the manuscript, but at least the Cliff Notes.
At the time, I was thinking of going into teaching or journalism and when there was a day where each teacher selected one student to teach for a day, he chose me.
Ten years older than we were when ten years was a lifetime, he spoke lovingly of his wife.
His classes seemed to last a few minutes between the starting and closing bells. They were mostly fun. He even had a couple of the tough football players appreciating poetry without being teased.
When he went on to be Vice Principal then Principal, I felt sorry for all the students that wouldn't have him as a teacher.
I don't mean to claim that I thought of him every day or every week or even every month, but every day his lessons made a difference in my life. I probably thought of him more in Geneva where there is a big construction company named D'Orlando. When I see the signs, I think of my teacher more than the work going on behind the signs.
I wonder if he or any teacher is aware of the power they have over the future lives of their students. It is a profession, undervalued in today's money hungry world.
The death of my father evokes memories that I had somehow suppressed, perhaps as an unintended consequence of the complicated nature of things between fathers and sons.
ReplyDeleteI'm so very privileged and thankful to be made aware of the profound effect he had on others through stories like this.
When my mother became ill, his devotion to her care gave me new perspective of how thoughtful a man he was. When she died, he kept breathing but stopped living. Our relationship took on new form as he struggled with dementia and the rest of us struggled to keep him comfortable and safe. Although his deteriorating condition practically rendered him a stranger, he still worried about us first, never himself, and I needed to see that part of him.
These stories and anecdotes seem to come frome everywhere the past couple of weeks. They're priceless to me and my family. This blog is something that I can wait to show his grand daughters!
Thank you.
Len D'Orlando Jr.
A very, very special life gift.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful tribute. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIn 1969, I had the privilege of learning from Mr. D'Orlando in my Problems of Democracy class. 15 years later, I found myself dedicating my dissertation to him. For me, he was an illuminator, a person who brought light to the complexity of our world, and he saw something that took me a decade-and-a-half to see in myself.
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