A true teacher

My dad’s name is Bruce. He was a teacher in the Flint schools for over 30 years . Way back when, before he became a teacher, he worked in the shop for a summer. He hated this job because he said all the other guys could talk about was sports, cars, and women, so he ran out of things to talk about after an hour. For a while, he worked as a milkman, which was a job he liked, but still he wanted to teach. Besides, no one uses milkmen anymore. Back in the 60s he spent a couple of summers as a ranger in Glacier National Park in Montana. He loved that, but there again, he was taking people on hikes and teaching them things. He has always loved learning new things and sharing them with others.



At home, my dad would always teach us kids something. Remember those big roll-down maps teachers have in their classrooms? We had a set of those, and Dad liked pulling those maps down and talking to us about some place we had just seen on TV or read about. I couldn’t say how many books he recommended to us. We used to like reading hard words out of the dictionary to try to stump Dad, but he seemed to know them all. Most of all, my dad loved trees. We would go for walks, and he would explain how to identify and differentiate trees by their leaves.


Since Dad’s retirement 20 years ago or so, he has spent a lot of his time teaching us about the Bible. He has stressed the importance of regular reading of the Word of God and how to try to live it. On more than one occasion, he has told us that it is absolutely essential for us to read the Bible. (I read it every day now.) And not just us. Dad is always willing to talk about the Bible and Jesus wherever he goes, (especially at the YMCA when he used to go down to exercise). He says that we should never be ashamed to share God with others.

My dad has been on a ventilator for about a week now. He’s almost 82 years old and has pneumonia. We are not sure if he will live or not, but we are praying and trying to remain hopeful. Because he has these uncomfortable tubes down his throat, he has to be sedated heavily. So he can’t talk to us. We talk to him, and I think, through the fog, he knows we are there. But even though he can’t talk to us, I think he is still teaching us something.

Dad’s illness and possible death are, to me, like the summary of a lesson. By thinking about his current situation, it makes us examine what is important: faith, family, living a life of service to others. These are the things that matter. And his teaching will go on. We are passing on these lessons to our own children. How many of us in our 30s and 40s catch ourselves saying and doing the things our parents did? In my dad’s case, that’s a good thing.

Whenever he goes, he will leave behind a good wife and mother, two sons and two daughters, 15 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.



(He has told me countless times how blessed he is to have so many grandchildren.) He leaves a legacy of having taught thousands of other children, not his own, and some of whom still contact him by phone or letter to say that they still remember him and how to identify a tree or the names of the bones. I think even the young people at the Y will miss him. Dad is truly a teacher.