What do maggots and teachers have in common?

A friend of mine dropped a Lord of the Flies reference right in the middle of a recent conversation about her working environment.

My pithy response was not forthcoming because I remembered reading the book in 10^th grade English, but I was bored to sleep. I retained none of the book, which was my loss.

What I did remember was my teacher that year, his insistence we read classic works like The Odyssey and The Iliad and that the Isle of Lesbos is how we now have the term “lesbian.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t accurately spell his name.

The staff directory at Booker High School noted he was no longer working at the school. Eventually an internet search revealed I did spell Mr. Kulikowski’s surname properly.

That internet search led me to look at whether other teachers I remembered were still working at the schools they taught me. Though I hardly kept up with any of them, and it’s very likely they have forgotten about me, it seemed like a fun exercise.

Teachers may be undervalued and underpaid, but they have immense value in our society. It seems incomprehensible that the starting teacher’s salary is just $35,672. What’s worse was the legislatures that used the recession as cover to slash funding for schools, eliminate classroom positions and devalue public education.

Not every teacher is a memorable one, or someone worth exalting. There are parasites in every profession.

But as I looked back at the four public schools I attended I saw many of the people who molded my life are still molding the lives of others.

My fifth grade teacher, Dwana Washington, is still teaching at Emma E. Booker Elementary as a data coach. My seventh grade Social Studies teacher, who was the son of one of my Sunday School teachers, has probably been teaching my entire life and is still at Booker Middle School. Mr. Kulikowski is gone, but there are others who still remain at Booker High School. Meanwhile Skip Arrich, the hilarious physics teacher and very accomplished soccer coach — who once promised to let me start at striker if I aced his test — has been at Rockledge High School for at least 35 years.

The 90s seem like an eternity ago to me. To those professionals, it was probably back when they had fewer gray hairs and more control over their classrooms, but I digress.

Thinking about spending a couple decades at the same place is a bit mortifying. Though a handful of people have suggested I become a teacher, I immediately respond I’m not mature enough to teach.

I like learning, but was not a great student. I like sharing ideas and information, but abhor the prospect of teaching. Longtime journalist Bill Moyers may have summed up my attitude earlier this week in a conversation he had on “Charlie Rose” when he said “journalism has been a continuing course in adult education.”

Not all of us can be, or want to be, journalists. But Moyers struck a chord. Those of us who care to learn something every day should thank those who initially made learning fun — teachers.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

What type of legacy will you leave?

By W.W. Brown

James Hawkins was loved by so many of his students because he was always willing to spend time with them. Which makes it fitting James Hawkins died about to do the one thing he was known for doing throughout his career — visit with a student.

Hawkins spent 35 years on the journalism faculty at Florida A&M University. The last eight years of his career were as dean of School of Journalism and Graphic Communication. He was the embodiment of “the college of love and charity.”



News of his passing hit me harder than any similar announcement in my life. It was a sucker punch to the solar plexuses that I wanted to believe was a rumor—the type of rumor Dr. Hawkins and other professors would have told us to investigate, but ignore.

The rumors were devastatingly true. Students, graduates, professors and so many others were stunned by the fact a man with such a huge heart was killed by a heart attack. Emotions reverberated around the J-School family faster than breaking news around Orr Drive because everyone had a story about how James Hawkins’ lessons touched them.

For a three semester period my grades plummeted. At other schools I would have been discarded, or ushered aside. At Florida A&M there were conversations with Dr. Hawkins and other professors to try and figure out the cause of my uncharacteristic academic performance.

When it came down to it, I graduated — barely.

Receiving my degree from Dr. Hawkins remains one of the happiest moments of my life.

Years after I graduated I would stroll into his office to shoot the breeze and see what was going on. Every time I did, Dr. Hawkins was always happy to see me and hear about how my life progressed.

He would ask about my girlfriend, who eventually became my wife; how my job was going; how I was doing. He was always eager to hear what I had to say, even if he had students waiting outside his door.

A move to Texas eliminated those infrequent visits. It had been a couple years since my last visit to Hawkins’ office.

The last time I went to the J-School, in January, Hawkins was retired. There was someone new in the corner office of the fourth floor of the still-to-be-named journalism building. Our conversation was cordial, but it wasn’t the same.

Trying to recreate what was so natural with the Dean— I was only at FAMU for a semester when Dean Robert Ruggles retired so Dr. Hawkins will always be “the Dean” to me — was not going to come easy. As the months went by, I once again realized just what a gem we had in Dr. Hawkins.

The first time I gave money back to the university that conferred a degree on me, and my father before me, was when I was told a scholarship was being endowed in Hawkins’ name. The minimum donation was $100. I gave a little more than that. It was the least I could do — give more in honor of a man who did that until his dying breath.

The official announcement came on Facebook, from an alumna who is now a Senior Producer at CBS News.

“He was traveling back from Atlanta this afternoon and decided to stop and have an early dinner with a former student in Macon, Georgia. We all know that is just one of the reasons we loved Doc. He kept in touch with all of us and made us feel special. He texted the former student at 3:18 to say he had arrived, but when he had not come inside the restaurant by 3:30, she went outside to look for him and found him unresponsive in his car.” 

As the swift and heartfelt reactions came in from classmates, friends and former Rattlers, I wound up liking the status of every person I knew who posted a tribute on social media. It was cheesy, but one of the few ways I knew to show them I was mourning with them.

In lieu of flowers, the Dean’s wife asked people to send donations to the James E. Hawkins Endowed Scholarship Fund. A donation would be a fitting way to continue the legacy of a man who gave everything for his students.


Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb

What is your calling in the happy valley of life?

Paul William Bryant died the year before I was born. But he apparently was a legend in his occupation, one who was so revered that those who didn’t call him “Sir” simply called him “Bear.”

He was not a perfect man, but one who was an excellent molder and motivator of young men.

Joseph Vincent Paterno was like Bryant in that respect. Neither man was perfect, but there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people that were inspired by the lessons both men taught.

Paterno died Sunday after complications from lung cancer at 85. Until November 9, 2011 Paterno coached at Pennsylvania State University since 1950. For context, the man who coldly told him of his termination over the telephone was born in 1954.

Paterno spent 31,442 days on this Earth. For all but a quarter of one percent of those days he was known as an honorable man who tried to do things the right way.

There will be some who say he died because of a guilty conscience in a child sex abuse scandal that has rocked his former employer. Others will claim he died of a broken heart because of how his career ended.

I would argue he died because his time on Earth was complete because Paterno, like Bryant, was put here to use athletics to mold boys into men. Both were humble men, yet idealistic about their legacies because of their unprecedented success. Sadly, both died within 90 days of coaching their final game.

Everyone has a coach or a teacher in their life that has genuinely touched them. If you do not, all I can do is pity you for missing your blessing. The lessons may not be evident immediately, but with reflection they will become apparent. While you are at it, thank those teachers, professors and coaches that have helped you along the way. Many of them are monetarily underpaid, so reimburse them with compliments.

Mike Shannon was the parent of a teammate. But to me, he was my first coach, back when I was a 4 year-old playing in a soccer league in Sarasota where the home field has been converted to a Par-3 golf course. I will never forget Larry Laskowski and Charles Stockton telling me to not wallow in self-pity, but celebrate with my teammates, after missing three extra points in a football game we won 47-6

But the most important coach in my life was a man named Bob Rowe. He is a small man in stature, but his lessons in kicking a football 50 yards and using football as a means to an education cast a larger shadow.

When I had a mental block that was preventing me from reaching my on-field potential, Coach Rowe told me “If you have done it once, you can do it a thousand times.”  To this day, I remind myself of that comment when an obstacle appears too conspicuous to overcome.

No one would deny Jim Tressel, Barry Switzer. Bobby Bowden and Jimmy Johnson are great football coaches. What separates those national championship winners from people like Jake Gaither, Eddie Robinson, Tom Osborne, Paterno and Bryant is that the latter group were highly successful AND used education to mold men.

"If you're not a man when you get there, you'll be a man before you leave," former NFL linebacker LaVar Arrington said of his Penn State experience. "Joe has his system so that you're prepared for life. Joe trains you more mentally than physically so that nothing will rattle you."

Ten days before Paterno’s career unceremoniously ended, I wrote a blog congratulating the champion and for taking some of the sheen off of himself to recognize others. Few people read it, which doesn’t bother me, but while people in my business were eviscerating the coach for all that he could and should have done a week later they were ignoring his humility in the limelight.

A family spokesperson told Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post one of Paterno’s final lucid thoughts to anyone outside his immediate family were used to think about others, a constant characteristic throughout his life.

“I’m happy in one sense that we called attention, throughout this state, and throughout the country probably, that this is going on,” Paterno said of the scandal that indirectly cost him his job. “It’s kind of been like a hidden thing. So maybe that’s good.”

Paterno’s life, legacy and death is another reminder that we must all find out why we were placed here on this earth. Through prayer, thinking, actions and occasionally failure our calling will come to us. There is as much honor as being a maid as there is in being the president if that is our calling.

Put more bluntly, without sanitation workers our lives would stink.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb