We have all had those teachers that leave an impact on our lives and make us want to learn and blah blah blah. My story isn’t like all of those. Yes Fish is the one that told me he would love for me to be a teacher someday and yes I am going into teaching because of him. He didn’t just make me want to learn, however…he brought me to life and more than that, gave me a reason to live.
As a middle school student I was always fairly quiet and withdrawn. I wasn’t friends with the “in” crowd, but when I tried to be, they did their best to make my life a living hell. I was that kid in the cafeteria that was always being teased. I was afraid to leave my lunch tray unattended to go to the bathroom for fear the popular girls would tamper with my lunch. I was afraid to get up at my seat at any point because they would put food there in the hopes that I wouldn’t look before I sat down. It got to the point that I would throw my lunch away when I got to school. The lunch that my mother had spent so much time meticulously packing in the morning to make sure I got all of the food groups that a teenage girl needed, trash. I became skinny (too skinny) and I started wearing makeup (though I was only in seventh grade) to try to make myself pretty like the other girls I went to school with. I always fell in love with the boys I had no chance of ever obtaining and I just didn’t care about doing schoolwork. Summer passed and things didn’t get any better. I still had no friends, I still thought about how much better the world would be without me, and I still thought I didn’t want to live anymore. Then I met Mr. Ed Fischer.
For a girl who NEVER got the well liked teachers in elementary school, I was certainly surprised to see “Science-Ed Fischer” printed on my schedule. After the first day of class I realized why he had such a wonderful reputation. This man was incredible. He introduced himself as Fish and said we could call him what we wished. He never lectured in front of the class but always sitting on a lab table with his legs dangling off of the edge. He was a very thin man with a balding head, a little bit of grey hair, pants that always seemed too short for him, the scent of a long time smoker and a pair of thick glasses. On paper it doesn’t sound like much, but to me he was statuesque; a true embodiment of everything a teacher should be.
Generally in school I liked to fade into the background. I never spoke up in class unless I was called upon to do so (despite the fact I never volunteered an answer even when I knew it). Fish wouldn’t hear of it. He saw something in me that no one else (no peer, no teacher, not even any family member) ever took the time to look for.
I remember perfectly the first day he pulled me aside in class. We had been watching a movie about killer whales and it depicted a scene in which a killer whale gobbled up a group of seals that had been on the land and my mouth dropped. I just looked at the screen and said something along the lines of “why wouldn’t they show something like that in a movie like Free Willy and show what killer whales are really like? That is awful!” and after the movie he pulled me aside. I thought he was going to yell at me and tell me what a stupid comment I had made but instead he just looked me in the eyes and smiled.
“M,” he said, “you are possibly one of the most sensitive and caring students I have ever had. Never lose that. You are such a special person.”
Never in my entire school career until that point, had a teacher or anyone else for that matter ever given me a compliment like that. I didn’t know what to say in response, but I didn’t have to say anything. Fish knew he had found what it was that I needed, a friend.
The year progressed and day by day I began to come out of my shell, speaking up in class and talking to students who I normally would have considered too popular to look at. I still wouldn’t consider them my friends due to their previous treatment of me but I was no longer the object of their torment. Fish on the other hand, was my friend.
My mother took a job in the office working the copying machine when our family needed a little extra money so she knew all of my teachers and they all knew she was my mother. Most teachers never really acknowledged it, but Fish loved it. He would come in every day with a new compliment about me for my mom, but there is one I recall with particular clarity. Fish was always telling stories about his daughter and his grandson. He loved that boy. He called him Justin the Wonder Boy. But even more than he loved his grandson, he loved his daughter. She meant everything in the world to him. And one day he walked into the office and looked at my mom and smiled and said: “I am going to give your daughter the greatest compliment I could give anyone. I would want her as my own.”
Fish retired at the end of that year. He said he wanted to go out with the best class he had ever seen pass through Radnor Middle School. Funny, every other teacher had always said we were the worst…but it was just like Fish to see the good in a group when no one else did.
He looked old at our graduation. He was only about 50 at the time, but he looked so much older than that. I could see that it was really hard for him to leave this place that he had known as his home for so long. When he gave his speech, I could see the tears welling up in his eyes even from the back row and when he began to choke on his words and break into a sob, I wanted to run down the aisle of the church (where our graduation was held) to hug him. I wanted to tell him that everything was going to be okay and that there was life beyond Radnor Middle School. I couldn’t though, and he wouldn’t have wanted it. He had to say goodbye no matter how painful it was and I had to let him. For the first time since I had known Fish, I felt I needed to be there for him instead of the other way around.
After the ceremony I hugged him goodbye we both cried and I walked away with my mother sobbing hysterically but not looking back. I saw him once after that. I stopped into his classroom with a couple friends during the summer to help him clean it all out. He handed me a tape of old ‘50s songs he found in one of the cabinets. I never listen to it but it sits in my bottom drawer even now as a constant reminder of him.
He retired to Florida and I moved to California. Both of us went on with our lives writing each other sporadically to catch each other up. In one of his letters he told me that it would make him so happy if I became a teacher like him. He said that I could add so much to the teaching profession and now here I am an elementary education major at American University.
I am determined to touch at least one student’s life the way he touched mine. For years I wanted nothing more than to muster up the courage to take my own life and this one man gave me a reason to live. Now he writes me to update me about life in Florida and we share a little motto in our letters since we both left Radnor behind us: “There is life beyond Radnor.”
-- Melissa Evans, American University