When I think back to high school I don’t exactly hold a lot of good memories. I remember preppy girls and douchey guys who liked to mess with me ten ways from sunday. I remember security guards who allowed the preppy girls and douchey boys to make my life harder than it really needed to be, only to yell at me for cutting in line later. They had their eye out for me, I was the bad one. I remember the meal plan that eventually fell through, the bathroom I ate my lunch in before I found friends, the room where detention was served, a whole lot of bad choices and more dumb actions that I’m proud of.
But what I really remember, is Tolliver’s class.
Mr. Tolliver, or just Tolliver as we tended to call him him taught history, geography, and psychology. He liked to say they were all connected. History was what people did, geography explained where they did it and psychology explained the why.
I had Tolliver for psychology 101 and it was one of the few classes I remember for multiple reasons.
The first thing I remember about him was I didn’t want to skip his class.
Back then I skipped for literally any given reason. Sometimes, it was because the kids picked on me, whispered nasty things from behind me or banged on my desk until I flinched. On one particular occasion it was because the teacher joined in with them; he was a past jock and I guess he never understood why I buried myself in fiction books, I remember him at one point asking me why I read so much, what for. The four kids sitting around me turned to look at me with bared grins at the comment and I knew I was in for a rough class.
Sometimes however, I just felt like skipping. There wasn’t any particular rhyme or reason behind it, I just didn’t wanna go. West Boca High had what we call the tardy room, if you’re late to class you get to sit in a room with your music, books, and whatever else you had on you and…just do a whole lot of nothing. There was a horde of usual suspects, including a sullen teenage me that were ‘accidentally’ and coincidentally late multiple times. Some people met up with friends there, others made plans to be late together and enter with their friends. I was a regular but also a loner, the only time I remember seeing anyone I knew there was when my entire row decided to miss a history test in fourth period.
The tardy room was a refuge for me and usually a place to read and have some peace for the cacophony that were my peers. As a kid with a mother who had depressive episodes and a father with anger issues who liked to fight her when she had the aforementioned episodes, I valued that peaceful time quite a lot.
So no one was more surprised than me when I didn’t want to skip fifth period. Not even when my only friend had the lunch that started during that class. I wanted to go.
I was somewhat miffed by this. I told him he was the reason I wasn’t in the tardy room and it was all his fault, he smiled.
Tolliver made the class enjoyable, and that wasn’t something I was used to. He made me want to learn, and outside of english class, that was also a new feeling.
He was never upset when I asked questions.
I had an undiagnosed disability that gave me the attention span of a squirrel hopped up on expressos. I also had a language barrier no faculty or teacher was aware of. What this all added up to was I got lost in class a lot. I’d listen to the notes then not understand a word, wonder what the word meant, wonder why the word was written like that, one tangent after another my mind would wander until after going completely off topic I would tuned in back into the lecture and find myself completely lost. Assigned reading was only slightly less sisyphean, reading and writing were always my strong points, but a lot of the time I didn’t understand completely what the teacher was saying, and out of pride I didn’t ask. My work was usually undone. Everyone assumed I was dumb or lazy. I was okay with that.
The first thing Tolliver said to us was to not be afraid to ask questions. It’d help us both he said, it’d make him a better teacher to know what needed explaining, and that in turn would make us better students.
This wasn’t something I was often told, but it was something I apparently needed to be told. The first thing I did was raise my hand. I asked a question, he answered. I did it again, he answered again. He’d often go into stories that would make the notes more interesting and being one for tangents myself I’d ask questions about that too. I’d ask follow up questions when he answered. He never once snapped at me not to.
One of the girls-I never got along with girls-did snap once. Asked why the questions and tangents were important and if they were gonna be on the test. My defenses instantly went up, she was totally out to get me and everyone was looking at me and I shouldn’t have been asking questions, I just knew it.
Tolliver told her everything was gonna be on the test, and to never ask that question again.
I asked more questions, I conversed, I engaged, I learned. With that simple stand, Mr. Tolliver made it safe for me in that classroom to ask the questions I needed in order to grasp a concept. Back then, even I didn’t know why learning was hard for me, let alone if I should ask for help. In Tolliver’s class I never had to. I never felt bad asking questions either, or giving an opinion and asking for feedback. His class was the only class I engaged so much it felt like a different part of the school.
No one picked on me in that class.
I don’t think if I had a year I could go into all the things kids like me put up with when someone figures you out as a target. I had a weird accent, I was at the time undiagnosed with a mental disability, had a house with wheels in a school where kids spent 50 dollars on an outfit, I was just plain weird. It called attention.
A girl in english class threw a wad that was half-spitbal half something else at my hair, a boy threatened to jump me with his brothers, when I was eating lunch with my best friend someone decided to throw at bottle at him, nailed him in the face ( it was plastic thankfully)
I never did figure out why.
Tolliver’s class was different, no one really picked on anyone. If they did, everyone was in on the joke, it was teasing, friendly teasing. Kids that I would have never talked to outside that class, took part in classroom discussions. Tolliver kept the class fun, there was never any hostility. My theory is we liked the class so much no one had the disposition to be mean to anyone. He made the jokes-sometimes at his expense, and we all laughed along.
I felt safe. Tolliver’s class became the only reason I bothered with school. I looked forward to it every day.
It was weird. I was a slacker, we tend to not enjoy school on principle.
I learned.
To this day words fail me to explain that feeling of eureka I got when I looked down at my notes and found that I knew what they said. I understood, and I retained, I passed the tests because I knew it. It’s like something literally lights up in your head, you can connect everything and you understand.
I was ahead in reading and writing, I didn’t learn anything. I read the assigned books ( usually in the tardy room), finished it before the class did and slept through the rest of the lessons ( I still got As, without studying)
I was behind in every other class that was english. I couldn’t understand the teachers, I didn’t know how to learn something I didn’t already know. I failed, I got frustrated, figured I couldn’t learn it.
But with Tolliver clicking through slides, going through and explaining each point. I learned
He cared that we learn.
Tolliver at one point said he wanted to be the change he wanted to see in education and I wholly believed he would be. He cared if we learned, made himself approachable for problems as easy as forgetting your lunch or having to go to a friend’s funeral. He always stopped to explain something.
He cared, and it made me care. All of a sudden, understanding and doing well in class mattered to me.
I had to drop out of his class. My GPA was too low and for some reasons the counselor decided taking me out of the one elective I wasn’t miserable in. I cried, I went to my last class wondering if he had been told already. I didn’t ask, I was too ashamed. The one teacher I cared about would remember me as a screw up, just like everyone else in that school.
I learned a lot in that class, I learned that actions have consequences, and that just as you can find that one wonderful thing, foolish actions can cause you to lose it. Not being able to stay in that class would not only be my first ( but not last) regret, it would also be my first ( but not last) wake up call.
My journey after that point took twists and turns I will someday explain to a therapist. It hasn’t ended yet but sits at a nice middle point, the rising action. I’m a contributing writer for a publication. I’m working on my college degree, and majoring in journalism with a possible concentration in ecology.
Through it all Tolliver’s lesson stuck with me. I looked back at the only class that taught me how to learn and applied the same methods to my college classes. Taking notes in the same way I did back in his class, forming studying habits and learning methods by thinking back on the one class they had proved effective.
When I found the memory problem that came with my epilepsy, or rather someone finally diagnosed it, I remembered his words “if you write it you know it, if you read it, you know it, if you hear it you know it. Do all three..something’s gotta stick” I did all three, studied harder because I had to, things stuck.
I remembered that I had already been proven that teachers who cared existed. I kept that whenever I got a lousy teacher, or an insensitive one, reminding myself not all teachers were like this, and that you couldn’t blame it on them anymore.
I’ve come far, but a defining moment in where I am is that room upstairs in the 12 thousand building. Where I was taught how to learn.
I never got around to thanking him, or even giving a proper goodbye before I left and saying how much that class, and that teacher changed me, bettered me, made a difference.
I figured writing for Teacher Appreciation Week would be a good way to do that.
Thank you Mr. Tolliver.