The Ones I Cannot Forget

a teaching story by Charlotte Stitt Gordon | November 06, 2010

Most of us have favorite teachers that linger in our memories years after we have left their hallowed halls of learning. We remember them for their pedagogical expertise, their huge heart toward learners, their instructional style at a particular time or on a particular subject, or for a host of other reasons.

For me, it was Coach Peebles and Miss McMahon. James McAdden Peebles was a towering, gentle giant who came to my small town high school to coach the varsity football team and teach American and world history. Before entering his education career, he had been a professional football player for the Washington Redskins. After acquiring the game knowledge and skills he needed, he left the team to embark on a future with his first love of coaching and teaching.

To say the least, Coach Peebles was not the stereotypical football "meathead", a term he fondly used to describe players or students who thought less with their brains and more with their mouths. Coach Peebles was a brilliant man who came from a family tradition of attorneys, educators, and other professional achievements. History class was not a boring recitation of disjointed facts but an exciting story of power struggles, imperial domination, oppression of the powerless, and triumphs of developing nations.

In addition to unusual coachful mastery of his subject matter, Coach Peebles was best remembered for his fatherly caring and love of his students and football players. His rapport and relationship with teens was indeed a gift, including bonds of intimacy that extended decades beyond the initial teacher-student encounter.

My personal experience best illustrates this phenomenon. I was fortunate enough to know him in his actual fatherly role as his daughter was my best friend. Spending the night in her home was like being adopted by her family where I became the second daughter to her beloved "Popper". One summer afternoon, "Popper" Peebles met my date on his front porch with stern words in his baritone voice inquiring as to his real intentions. No doubt the man's size was enough to intimidate the lad, but to be blocked from entry by having to convince this sharp-witted doorman that he had no dishonorable motives must have been an ego deflator.

On other occasions at the Peebles household, I witnessed former football player after football player visit his old coach and sometimes spend several nights on the living room sofa. Coach Peebles returned the favor often as he attended football games of former players' sons. He was constantly on the invitation list of class reunions. Shortly before his death, a vanload of former history students heard of his illness and drove 500 miles to comfort the coach. Nothing else could better bear testimony to the love and respect held by all youngsters under his tutelage than this.

Miss McMahon was another unique educator who impressed generations of English pupils with her dramatic flair and seemingly personal knowledge of British poets and authors. She taught my step-father, as well as me and my siblings, who professed of her long soliloquies quoting from memory "Macbeth" or "Midsummer's Night Dream". My step-father would imitate her booming crescendos of voice across the classroom as she brought to life Lady Macbeth's anxieties or Juliet's suffering love for Romeo.

By the time I was fortunate enough to study under her, Miss McMahon's eyesight and hearing had diminished such that she declined her thespian displays before us. Mostly my recollection of her were the stories she told of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Milton, Keats, and others, which transported me to the windy moors or verdant, rolling hills of the British Isles. She knew of the poets' personal lives as if she had grown up with them. Probably they were her good friends, in a literary sense.

Rumor always had it among us romantic teenage girls that Miss McMahon had lived during her youth in New York City working near Broadway. We never knew if this work was in the theater or teaching, but imagining her on the stage or behind the scenes of a popular play was more exciting. The climactic point of the rumor was that Miss McMahon's New York fiancé had died, leaving her to a lifetime of spinsterhood and educating small town unsophisticates. Regardless of what the true story was, Elizabeth McMahon opened up a new world to me and others of fine literature, imaginative and love-struck writers, and an exotic land which I had to see for myself one day.

Naturally there were elementary teachers whom I held in fond memory as well. In first grade was Mrs. Bennett, who in her elder years managed to jump over a candlestick while dramatizing "Jack Be Nimble". In fifth grade was Mrs. McClain who made learning fun when that was a foreign concept in the late 1950's. In sixth grade was Coach Akers , who had overcome polio as a youngster to become the finest physical education teacher I have seen to this day. In eighth grade I remember Mr. Shoaf who was the school principal, eighth grade math teacher, and girls' basketball coach. He was a kind-hearted Southern gentleman who helped his girl players up when they fell down during ball practice and nervously asked if they were alright.

Besides family members, educators make the next greatest impression on children as they teach, nurture, mentor, and correct them through their youthful days. They pass on the traditions of the community, culture, country, and sometimes religion and model what it is like to be a caring, responsible, and respectful adult. Even if individual educators are not distinctly recalled, they help nourish the developing seed and pass on a bit of their own life to another. All of them are the ones we can't forget.