An Argument for Memory

Let's take the StoryTime Machine back to a year I do not like to revisit: my freshman year of high school.  It will be instructive.  This was the Fall of 1989. 

I'm telling you now: my recollection of these details might stun you. 
What's more:  I've never told this story before.  I've hardly even thought of it until just recently.  But before recent history comes ancient history. 

Hence: the Fall of 1989.

This year, my high school had hired a new Theology teacher names Cameron Cehola.  This was Czek name, he told us on the first day.  There we were, 23 or so students on our first day of high school, staring agape at a teacher who had just told us his first name. 

Forget "Cehola" and its ethnic origins.  Who in the heck is named "Cameron"? 

He had earned his Masters degree in Theology.  This was shocking, too.  You mean to say that people actually studied theology?

Mr. Cehola was a young man.  He would sit on his desk, gripping the front edge with both hands as he leaned forward and swung his legs.  To demonstrate what, exactly?  I think it was to show us how very engaging he found our young minds.  To show us he was interesting enough to dispense with standard teacher formalities and get serious, instead, about opening the world of theology to us. 

If this was his strategy, he had miscalculated.  We were not the class of kids in Dead Poet's Society who rejoiced to find an inspiring voice singing in an institution of academic oppression.  We were just in Theology because that's where the guidance councilor scheduled us in Immaculate Conception High School because that's where our parents had sent us. 

Most of us, anyway, saw things this way.

A few held Mr. Cehola in utter disdain.  I recall Lauren Guidice's older sister, who was a Junior, bragging to those of us near her in study hall (which was all ages) that she called him "Cam" to his face, repeatedly.  I remember feeling so scandalized by this older girls' boldness.  Had she gotten away with that?

Maybe there were a few others who were like me: I didn't know what to make of a guy who sat on his desk as he taught us, or who wasn't actually Catholic (we discovered early on), or who used words like "exam" instead of "test," and "hypothesis" even though this wasn't a science class. 

Part of me was Dead Poet's Society-ish.  I did find it thrilling to have a teacher who wanted to make a challenge out of his class.  Even though it was Theology.  Do you know that for our first "exam," we were to memorize the Beatitudes as found in the Gospel of Matthew???  This was an extraordinary assignment!  Memorize part of the Bible?  No way!  (I experienced 11 years of formal, Catholic school education--grade 6 through 16--and this is the only time I was required to memorize scripture!)

I responded to the challenge gladly.  I remember sitting on the Sorce's couch, where I was babysitting one afternoon, memorizing those Beatitudes, thinking that I was going to blow Cameron Cehola away by getting a perfect score on his exam. 

There were other things to know for this exam, and I studied them, too.  I went to class the day of and wrote out my answers and left confident that I had aced that thing.  Do you remember that feeling of knowing you've done well on a test after you've prepared to do well on it?  It's been a long, long time since I've taken one. . .  I miss that feeling. . . 

We came back to class the next day and Mr. Cehola had already graded our exams.  He handed them back.  There was a red mark on mine.  Points taken off.  It was surprising.  My grade was a 98%, and yet there could be no rejoicing until I looked into something.

I consulted my notes that I had transcribed from the chalkboard.  I looked back at my test.  I was not wrong.

The question had stated, "Define 'theology.'"

My answer (and I promise that I am going from memory here, sick though that is): 

"Theology is the study of all things in relation to one another in light of revelation."

(Today, I would quibble with that definition.  But back then, all I knew is that this is what Mr. Cehola had written on the board and told us to know for the "exam.")

I asked, basically, what I had lost points on.

"Ah," he said smugly.  "Theology is the study of all things in relation to one another by light of revelation."

This drew scoffs and some guffaws and a bit of outrage from several others who had also prepared for the test. 

To which Mr. Cehola took up his perch on the desk and launched into how the two words were different and their uses created a world of difference between his definition and ours.  My peers tried to argue that he was being too picky.  He easily defeated their argument because, well, he was right.  There is a difference between "by" and "in."

Finally, I had the chance to weigh in.  "The point is not that we got the definition wrong.  The point is that we all wrote down the definition you put up on the board."

This shut everyone up.  They liked what they were now hearing. 

Mr. Cehola, not so much.  "I would not have put up the wrong definition," he said.

"Let's check every one's notebooks," I said.  "If we all wrote down 'in' instead of 'by,' we'll know what was written on the board." 

He refused to check.  He hopped off the desk, made another comment from the previous argument--the one he could win--about the differences between the two prepositions.  And he tried to go on with the lesson.

I couldn't let him.  I couldn't.  The injustice of it consumed me.  It was so logical for him simply to fix the problem.  Recollect the texts.  Award 2 pts to each student who deserved it.  Move on.

But he couldn't admit that he'd made this mistake.  And that's when I decided he was a fraud, and my disappointment crashed on top of the injustice.  I was incensed.  I would not let it rest.  There was nothing he could say that would make me stop arguing the point, which the rest of the room found very entertaining.  They cast their lot with me.  This teacher now had a full-blown uprising on his hands. 

He announced that we were all to write out answers to some BS chapter questions.  It was seat work.  Silent work.  Nothing was resolved about the test.  I was crying.  Seriously.  It was that important to me to hear him admit that he was wrong and I was right.  But it wasn't a pride thing.  Everyone in the room knew I was right.  In this way, I had "won." 

I just needed to hear him say it out loud.  I never did. 

Something clicked over for him, though.  Something about that day, plus all the days of upperclassmen calling him "Cam," plus, most likely the biggest dynamic of all, something about seeing this high school for a couple of week and realizing that there were a lot of average kids inside of it--something made him quit.  His job.  I mean, he left the school. 

A replacement came soon after, Mrs. Diesing.  We loved her.  And she either stood at the podium or sat behind her desk.  And though she was one of several people who taught, as the text book did, that the wondrous stories we read in the Bible are "biblical myth," she also confided to us one day that she, "Reads the Bible while take a bubble bath--it's corny, I know, but I do it because it relaxes me," thus making her my first teacher ever to say that she read scripture. 

So much for ancient history.  Flashing forward now:

The other day, Joshua was still in his pajamas.  We were ready to start our school work, for which we all must be dressed.  I asked him to go upstairs and change.

"But Mommy," he said, calmly, "Sometimes you stay in pajamas all day."

"No," I said, calmly, "I get dressed every morning before we start school work."

He insisted, "There are times when you stayed in your jammies for a long, long time."

"No there aren't," I told him.  Then, sternly, "Please go upstairs now."

He headed upstairs, but was now perturbed.  Seriously.  "I know it's true," he pleaded.  "You stay in your jammies sometimes!" 

"When, Josh?  Like when I was sick???  Like when I was doing chemotherapy?  Is that when I stayed in jammies????"

"No," he said with certainty, now at the top of the stairs.  Talking down below to me through the railings.  "When we came home from Betsy's and Daddy brought us but you were here and it was all day, that's when."

I had no idea what he was talking about.  Still don't. 

But he said it with conviction.  There is something he knew that I didn't and he wasn't stalling to avoid getting dressed.  He just needed to hear me validate his point.  I remember that feeling.  I remember that it wasn't about getting a different result out of the other person--100% or 98%?  who cares?--it was about the argument itself.  It was about what I knew and needing the other person to acknowledge that what I was saying was important.

I could hear his frustration.  What others would take (understandably) and have taken (understandably) to be an argumentative spirit or bratty-ness, I understood this was just what God built into him.  He loves words.  They are important to him.  It is impossible for him to move on from the place of being misunderstood.  I know that feeling. . .  

"OK, Josh," I told him, "I don't remember the time you are talking about, but I agree that there have been some days when I have stayed in my jammies for a long time.  Today is not one of them.  We both need to be dressed."

He nodded at this.  Clearly, I had scratched his itch.  He stood and the galloped like a horse to his room where he got dressed in just a few minutes. 

I kind of feel like I passed this exam.  Blessed are they who remember the past well enough to apply it to the present.