If you ever get me to talk about High School, initially, I’ll complain about it. But if you keep listening, I’ll start talking about a certain individual who has touched my life and inspired me in many ways.
There is a picture in my mind, of a teacher that made me fall in love with history, learning, politics, and class participation. It is a man; maybe my parents’ age, maybe a bit younger. He’s wearing pants that have to be described as slacks, and a fuzzy-looking sweater. He is sitting in a desk chair that’s slightly worn but extremely comfortable looking. He’s holding a coffee mug in his hands.
It is the first day of class, and twenty-five 16-year-old faces are peering at him from our roughly shaped semi-circle of folding chairs. We all have our notebooks out and our pens are poised to start writing whatever he tells us to. He tells us his name, welcomes us to the classroom. He starts to explain more about the class to us.
He expresses his excitement about the subject matter. AP US History, he says, is a story. It is not simply facts in a book. It is alive and keeps on happening, and things that happened so long ago help to shape our country today. He tells us that history is about people living through events. He wants us to understand the personal aspect of historical events, to know how life was in different time periods.
There are some finer details to the course that he also explains. We can get extra-credit for doing community service. And while he knows that some of us might do the service simply for the points, he hopes we feel that “warm, fuzzy feeling” that he gets from knowing he’s done something for the good of someone else. He says that it’s the best feeling in the world, to know that you’ve helped someone.
He explains the refrigerator door that is hanging on the left wall on the small classroom. It is, he says, to recognize any achievements that we are proud of, be it an improvement in academic performance, a paper we worked hard on, something we drew, or a flier for an activity we organized.
Then he started to discuss homework in conjunction with, of all things, his coffee mug. He said we’d have reading to do, and we had to take notes on the reading. He said he wasn’t going to check them, but take our word for it that we did the work. Then he said trust is like this cup. It seems incredibly solid, but can be easily broken. And if the cup breaks, it’s very hard to put it back together again, and as he really likes his coffee, please don’t break his mug.
He set up his classroom with a love and passion for teaching and learning that was foreign to my classmates and myself. During that year, we did or didn’t do our reading, and told him the truth. We listened and took notes. We survived the 2000 election controversy together. We got into heated debates about Hillary Clinton vs. Rick Lazio and who should be senator. We talked about the progressive era in detail and at length with visual aids. We understood history as a sequence of events that are tied together by the people that live through it, and as a never-ending story.
The next year he was my teacher again, this time for AP Government. Again, we never lied about doing work. We researched someone political that we individually found inspiring. We carried our pocket constitutions that he gave us. We went to a competition based on our knowledge of the constitution that fostered group work. We debated every issue ever debated in political history. Throughout all of this, he played Devil’s advocate, making us think more deeply than we ever expected we would about these issues.
This is what he gave to the class as a whole. To me, he gave a love for the political process. He showed me the connection between history and current politics. He respected my political opinions, though they differed immensely from his. He sent me to Albany to trail my representative for a day. He asked higher order questions that would have me thinking for days. He got me to watch the news, and uncover bias in the reporting. He created the first classroom environment in which I felt comfortable being outspoken. He helped me discover in myself a yearning to help people. He was excited about my accomplishments, and about my dreams and goals for the future. He wrote a college letter of recommendation for me.
At the end of my senior year, he hugged me goodbye, wished me luck, and made me feel that he believed in my abilities to reach my goals.
Simply put, Mr. Charles Trupia is a social studies teacher at Connetquot High School. But if you state it simply, you would be ignoring the one aspect of my high school education that I think was outstanding, inspirational, thought provoking, and warm.
-- Melissa Jones, American University