Colleen Sell - A Cup of Comfort Stories for Teachers: Celebrating the people who mentor, motivate, and inspire us

Avon, Massachusetts

Whether youre a teacher on the front lines or a student grateful for the dedication, passion, and generosity of a favorite mentor, these stories are just what the principal ordered.

A Cup of Comfort Stories for Teachers celebrates inspirational teachers and the students and mentors who inspire them. I hope you enjoy their uplifting and insightful true stories. And I hope they inspire others to become teachers too.

By Priscilla Whitley

The traffic is light at 4:45 a.m. He zips to the golf course first. After putting in an hour and a half at that job, he is back on the expressway by 6:30. Down through the back streets of Philadelphia to pick up a student and on to the high school by 7:10. Up three flights of stairs, unlock the classroom door, and by 7:30, he has started another day at Edison High School. Not a bad morning for a fifty-seven-year-old man.

Inner-city Philadelphia is a tough place. The kids are tough because life hasnt dealt them the privileges that living in the suburbs offers. Their home life can be smattered with broken families and constant change. Hope is not always evident. Young girls too often become young mothers, and young boys dont always live long enough to become young men. Going to school could offer them a way out, but first they have to get through those four years. Their start is the freshman seminar class, with Bob Schlichtmann as their teacher. Now, they have a chance.

Mr. S, as he is known in the hallways, would not be happy in the well-to-do suburbs of Pennsylvania. That is for a different type of teacher. He chooses to teach in the inner city because children there are often the first ones in their families to have a chance at success. But it is not the Ivy League he shoots for. Graduation for them is being able to break out of the poverty and escape the influence of the street.

I met Bob Schlichtmann in the summer of 1965. We had grown up in neighboring towns. He had just completed his freshman year at college, and I had just graduated from high school. He was studying to be a teacher at the University of Toledo on a baseball scholarship. But in 1968 young men fresh out of college who didnt have the means to go to graduate school were getting drafted. We parted, and Bob became a captain in the United States Marine Corps. He served for four years, which included a tour of duty in Vietnam. Then came marriage and six children. A teachers salary doesnt go that far, so he followed a different profession for the next thirty years.

At fifty-one, he changed direction and went into teaching. But he wanted to teach only the ones who needed him most.

Freshman seminar class stands to be the most pivotal course at Edison High School. There, students learn how to get along with each other, how to have a dialogue instead of a battle. Bob has nine months to teach them that words are the tools for expressing themselves and that writing gives them a way to personalize how and where they want to go. He teaches them that the world is about how to get along with different people, how to express themselves with words (not violence), and how to acquire a job that lets them stand on their own. He teaches them to take chances with their minds. It is not the grade they make, but the effort to make themselves better that he encourages.

The attention span of the kids can be short, so the energy level in the classroom must be high. The seminar class is tied in with Bobs world history class, and it is filled with hands-on projects. They make pyramids, sew Renaissance costumes, and act out the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Students coming to this class are not bored.

In his own boyhood high school, Bob was a top athlete, a jock. Baseball was his passion. Now, still fit and active, sports have given way to computers. His philosophy is that if each student can master and operate a computer, he or she can get a job. A job can take these students out of poverty. And then they stand a chance. His goal is to get each student trained on a computer so that he or she has the opportunity to take care of him or herself. And he has a plan.

Working with the National Cristina Foundation, a nonprofit organization that accepts donations of used computers, Bob spends his weekend afternoons and many a weekday evening driving through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, picking up donated computers. He brings them to school and his home and gets them into working shape. He has students with whom he has worked help him after school to get the computers in running order and connected to the Internet. Many of the computers are used in the classroom, but the rest are used for something even better.

Bob has put into effect a reward program. When a student has accomplished deserving work or makes an extra effort or just shows that he or she is trying, Bob gives that student a computer of his or her own. He offers students an opportunity to put themselves in touch with the world, and he enables them to learn that there are possibilities and imaginable options out there if they are willing to try. Being given a computer by their teacher raises their self-esteem and gives them hope that they can succeed, which is the best possible tool a teacher can give his students. They are being prepared to get a decent job.

When I heard Bob Schlichtmann was a teacher, I wasnt surprised. Bob was always the leader in high school, in college, and in the Marines. He invariably looked out for the ones less fortunate than him, and he never went for the big glory. You could count on Bob to do the job. He was always the last one out.

Oh, and there is still that other job at the golf course. He is back there at 7:00 p.m. weeknights and again on weekends to caddy. It may be difficult to live monetarily on a teachers salary, but you can live with pride and gratification. Because you are a teacher.

Priscilla Whitley studied journalism at the University of Missouri and enjoys writing autobiographical essays and stories about the extraordinary experiences of real people. A freelance writer, she also manages a gourmet cooking store and cooking school in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where she lives with a dog, a cat, and a horse. Her daughter attends college in Massachusetts.

By George Malsam

A red-headed boy was struggling with tests in my sophomore woodworking class. Pat was one of my most enthusiastic students, and I wondered why he was having so much trouble. I discovered the cause of his problems one day when I asked him to check a posted message in the attendance office and to report the information back to me. He walked slowly out of the room and came back in a few minutes.

With tears in his eyes, he said, Mr. Malsam, I will do anything for you, but dont ask me to read anything. He lowered his head and confessed, I cant read.

I could hardly believe that he had progressed to the sophomore year of high school and not learned to read. Apparently, he had managed to get through school by memorizing the teachers words in the classroom and verbally repeating them back. I dont know how he was able to complete the written work and tests necessary to pass his academic classes, but I suspect he was simply passed on.