One of my first outstanding students was a brilliant chap who was born 31 Oct 1939, lived on High Ridge Road, and was in my 1956-1957 honors class. In those days students joked about not trusting anyone over 30. I was 36, so we can do a little guestimating, can’t we, as to what he thought when he walked into the classroom and saw me.
I’m not guessing about him, however. I have my 1956-1957 grade book sitting right here to the side of my Mac as I type. His first month in class, he chose to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, not the easiest of choices. For the requirement that everyone write a thoroughly documented research paper (with all the “according to’s,” the alphabetized-by-author’s-last-name bibliography, and no conclusions until the final paragraph, etc.), he followed up by chooing to write on “The Effect of The Jungle on American Society.”
No, can’t accept! Too broad!
So he changed the title to “A Study of the Effects of The Jungle on American Society.”
In addition to being known as an over-thirty, I also was dubbed by some as being a tough grader who never gave A+’s. Well, this chap earned a 98 on that paper, which may have been over fifteen double-spaced pages in length at a time when I was teaching quality, not quantity.
Next quarter, he evaluated Voltaire’s Candide, and for research he dug into an “exciting” teenage choice of topic: “A Study of the Concept of Buddhist Nirvana.” This was when Graduation Day was only weeks away and scores schoolwide were slipping because of senioritis.
Well, this was the teenager his children did not know, of course. How I wish my own senior English teacher would have written about me so I could have shared it with my grandchildren . . . even if I have none. I do, however, have a non-biological 15-year-old son who helped me transfer, using MediaWiki, the following two pictures onto an entry in my online encyclopedia, a page showing a letter Jim most certainly must have held:
At the class’s 50th reunion (which I attended to disprove that I had passed on decades ago), Jim’s classmates talked about his health, were saddened upon knowing he could not be present, and lamented his very poor health. It is hoped that Jim saw the superlative reunion booklet which they produced. It’s here on my desk, and I consult it often.
Jim is very much alive in that I can still see how he tackled intellectual subjects. “So which do you prefer,” I’d ask him, “Nirvana or Heaven?” For him, this was no rhetorical question, and he would take as much time as possible to respond in detail. (Uh, Heaven, in case you’re wondering about the bottom line.) Serious, mature, helpful, curious, brilliant, dramatic (the lead in “The Man Who Came to Dinner”): he was his parents’ delight (and I remember well when they came to parent-teachers meetings – his mother was key to working with the faculty and improving our school) . . . .
Warren Allen Smith
NCHS ’54-’86
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