noise."In Memory: David Forsyth, 1960-2018 · 3:00am May 7th, 2018
Mr. Forsyth was my high school English teacher.
This is the best picture of him I can find, from the 1995 Yearbook
He was a strange man. He claimed that he was an alien, and that he ate cats. He said that he could walk thorough walls, and he'd demonstrate it for us, except that our minds were not able to actually comprehend that he had done that, so we wouldn't see it happen.
At the beginning of every class, he'd have a quote up on the blackboard. It might be from an author, or a musician, or . . . well, really, anybody. We were supposed to write that quote in our notebooks, and say what we thought about it, and then at the end of the year, we were to hand it in. That was part of our grade.
He always wore a bow tie, and one time some of us were looking through old high school yearbooks (he taught at the same high school he'd graduated from). He'd been on the swim team, and there he was in the team photo, his goggles around his neck, looking for all the world like a bow tie.
Mr. Forsyth was one of those teachers who would answer your questions with another question sometimes, and with sarcasm other times. He constantly told us that he wanted quality, not quantity. We've probably all had teachers like that, and usually they don't mean it . . . he did. Someone asked one time how many references we were supposed to have in our bibliography, and he sarcastically said fifty.
When I turned in my essay on The Bells by Poe, there were fifty books listed in my bibliography. This was back in the days before the internet, and even before reliable inter-library loans . . . I had to physically drive to libraries in three or four counties to find fifty books on Poe. In fact, back then I think I had library cards for six different libraries, including Alma College (which was about 50 miles from my house).
He really liked Emily Dickinson, and one of the questions on our final was how to spell Massachusetts. He'd told us at the beginning of the semester that that would be on the final, and he was not joking.
I think that a lot of students didn't exactly understand him. I'm not sure that I ever did, entirely.
I don't remember a single thing that he taught us about any book or poem or anything else that was English related, but that doesn't matter. I did come to understand more about learning than in any other class I've ever taken.
Like many high school students (I'm sure), most classes I only wanted to pass with good enough grades to get into college. I didn't have motivation to go above and beyond, and in many ways I was a smarter kid than most of my classmates so I could pretty much coast. I spent my math classes reading novels instead of actually paying attention, and aced all the tests (this came back to bite me in college and I wound up having to switch degrees, because while that was good enough for high school math, I never really got the proper foundation to move on to more advanced math).
His class was different. I put more effort into those essays than I did even on college essays. I remember struggling once to come up with a way to put a double-embedded quote in an essay in such a way that it would flow naturally and I'd be able to end the quoted text with this: "'"
And I did. He circled it, because he noticed, and of course didn't mark it down because it was correct.
He always graded with a lavender pen. I'd forgotten about that until just now. He might have told us why, or he might not have.
Most of the students in class turned in notebooks that were notebooks. I did not. Since my handwriting is terrible, I spent the time to re-type it all. I changed fonts for every different color of pen I'd used, and I did my best to use underlines, bolds, italics, arrows, and so forth, recreating my original notebook the best I could with Word. It was some 80 pages long, and since I had to number the pages, I used my own invented numbering system.
I have to think that most high school teachers, when presented with a paper of that length, would simply skim it and probably give it a decent grade. I actually used that to my advantage in Government class, presenting a hundred-page paper for a group project that had all sorts of crazy things in it. It also had graphs, and transparencies, and earned me an easy A despite the fact that a lot of it was just pages and pages of numbers (it was a balanced budget project).
Mr. Forsyth read everything, and it was peppered with little comments in lavender. Things like:
How do you experiment on people?
with electricity and Butterfinger BBs
The few that are interested in this field of study wish they could be in more English classes, and lament the fact that they have to take physical education, which they'll surely fail. Those with talents that lie outside of the school try to get help from others in the field.
Specialization is for insects. Robert A. Heinlein
Why do female eyes sparkle while male eyes do not?
that's obvious
"Dead puppies aren't much fun"
not even very tasty
Inevitable--a scary little word
If it's inevitable, the Diploma means NOTHING AT ALL
Limiting our education & teaching it wrong
Not his job; his Duty. Duty is s'thing you owe
but I do have a duty. I owe you something.
As is perhaps obvious from these particular selected quotes, the journal did not exactly stay on-topic with English.
The purpose of the quotes he put on the blackboard was to get us to think, and it worked. In fact, I would say that it's a fair argument that English class my junior year of high school was the best philosophy class I've ever had.
I got an A+ on my journal.
Mr. Forsyth gave out so few A+ grades that when I went to my history class the day it was returned, my history teacher congratulated me on receiving it.
I know exactly where my journal is. And I'm not one of those super-organized people that has everything neatly sorted and arranged and can get you something at a moment's notice, no. My approach to organization is what some people call 'organic.' Those who are familiar enough with Asimov's works to remember Wendell Urth . . . that's my style of arrangement.
My journal is in my bedroom, on my dresser. And that's where it's always been, for nearly 25 years.
Rest in peace, sir.
Damn
Also I know how old you are from the shirt you gave me, but I still was surprised you typed it up in word versus on a typewriter.
I swear, every teacher I had in High School vanished off the face of the planet the moment I graduated. Well, except for Miss Sumners, who taught computers. (When I graduated, the school actually had a TRS-80 Model I. I was better at programming it than she was. :)
You know how to use a semicolon, so he taught you better than most of the schmucks getting through highschool nowadays.
(My sister teaches college freshman English and world literature, with a PhD in Middle English and medieval literature. I keep telling her she should make her students read Dionysius Thrax first and learning Aristotle's Triangle later).
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Mrs. Reese was my favorite teacher (history). Though I was a bit of a jerk and teacher's pet. I almost made a girl cry when we were given a mound of modeling clay and told to make a reasonably-accurate Norman castle and she wanted to put cannons on it like those Fischer Price playsets and I was (quite correctly) pointing out how they hadn't come into use in Europe until a good 300 years later.
But then, she never cut any slack; deducting points for misspellings like when I wrote "deposted" instead of "deposed" or made jokes like saying Charlemagne's dad was a Hobbit.
(Indeed, Tolkien himself probably would have approved of the pun, since "Pippin" and "Pepin" both come from the same Old French name.
safrance.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/pepin-the-short.jpg?w=588 )
He sounds like a great guy. I wish all teachers could be more like him. May he rest in peace.
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I keep wearing mine, hoping someone will think I'm him and while disappointing them with the truth I'll also be elated to find them. But alas, like my Noble Jury hoodie I've yet to have someone say anything.
This was one hell of a teacher. I envy you. Thank you for sharing his memory with the rest of us, and treasure your memories and what he did taught you - that's what truly matters in the end.
PS: I loved his feedback - a man with a great sense of humour if I ever saw one.
I never quite had that teacher. I did have the middle school teacher who gave me an A on my creative writing project even though it was late because I'd wanted to finish the illustrations... She was an encouragement, but she didn't do anything that unusual. There were little bits and pieces and snippets of help all the way along, all my English teachers were fine with my habit of reading novels in class and I got to write book reports on things that interested me. And I suspect that my AP English teacher wanted to be a little more than he was, but was doing the best he could in small-town Utah. It was radical enough to find him playing devil's advocate on tiny little issues of commonly accepted thought.
I sometimes wonder if anything would have changed if I'd been in some other school for my formative years. But I don't know. I dreamed my way through with easy A's, barely paying attention to material that had been familiar to me for ages since I read non-fiction just for fun. I think the only real work I ever did in high school were AP literature essays, and even then I found reading the material trivial and bullshitting my way through a thesis grabbed more or less at random for five pages only took time, not effort. How many schools are there where somebody would have been willing and able to yank me out of that and make me actually work? Probably not many. Maybe I'd have had a totally different life if I'd learned to really buckle down as a kid. I never did. I still only sorta have.
Wow.
He sound like he was quite something. Something great. It is a big loss, that is for sure.
When I think back on my high school day, I remember all the great teacher I had the chance to have. While none of them were quite as intense as Mr. Forsyth, they still had all these little quirk that made them unforgettable and that made them push us to think rather then just learn.
Just to point out the few who stood up the most to me, in no particular order: I had that history teacher that made us (among other crazy awesome thing) reproduce the battle of the Thermopylae outside the school, with foam weapon; that french teacher who prepared me so well for college french class I actually aced all my test in college, including the one I passed so sick I stared blankly at my sheet for half an hour, he was also that teacher who finally managed to get me to write properly structured essay, quite the feat considering how I could be (and still can sometime, sadly) stubbornly set in my ways; that math teacher who got me into doing light and sound technique for show; that physical ed teacher who ran an outdoor activity club; that science teacher who build an enrichment class program from the scratch, a mix of science, history of science and craftsmanship: we had to build a photo camera (and develop our pictures in a dark room), a musical instrument and a am radio; that history teacher who supported the student council through everything, including fighting against the school board decision to impose school uniform -and from a more personal point of view, she was one of the few people who treated my tendency to be negative as a strength: "He's good to have on the council, give him an idea and he will try to find and point out any weakness it have. Anything still standing after that his a strong starting point.".
Thank to them I went through five amazing years in high school and learned way more then what a regular curriculum would have had. They are in short, great peoples.
It's those kind of thing that inspired me to be a teacher too, to be able to give that chance I had to other.
It's a pity none of them ever managed to get me off my high horse and get me to learn how to study and work rather then just cruise through thing and rely on me being smart to make up for it. College ended up being a nightmare.
Wow! I don't think I've had a teacher that memorable for something positive since fifth grade. And, on an unrelated note most of my math teachers were nasty, and the tutors I looked for to help me weren't much better. I believe I told off some incompetent thieving douchebags after I graduated from college that I'll just have to be satisfied with knowing the math they used to get us to the moon. (Somehow, ironically, that __one__ bad grade in math saved me from being trusted alone with a cash register. Oh those
russianscommunists. If only they knew how a high tide lifts all boats.)I really wish I could have found more than one math teacher that wasn't evil encarnate- which is ironic because I try to remain as objective as possible when evaluating a person and actually got into the habit of buying and occasionally reading math books to review basic skills. Sadly, I never did figure out the trick to solving all the problems in my head. I hold to the belief that everything can be beaten and that diplomacy with an axe is the swiftest course of action in spite of the fact the strategy yields diminishing returns in times of crisis.
I'm glad that someone was able to teach others how to capture lightning in a bottle, I've been hoping to learn how myself... sharing a bottle filled with hot air isn't exactly making 307 ale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5K2xxgVHJE
RIP Sir, and thank you for giving us this comestible of life such as to give Heston Blumenthal the Vapours.
I failed English so bad, that I only heard about a near identical occurance recently, Thirty years later. Cant run, cant act, cant sing, cant write, cant paint, can only do basic math, was taught how to program(! spelling, programme) a computer correctly which means it takes me a lot longer to get the tested and checked offering out, if Im doing it properly, so even 5 line routines can take years to get sortted out.
When I finally went down the job centre, employment exchange to sign off permanent work search on the sick, the lady in charge just happened to be my old primary school teacher. Her words on hearing my request?
Its about time.
You know he was a terrific teacher if he influenced you so greatly. There should be more like him to provide a true education to the next generation.
This makes me wish I could remember things better. :(
May he rest in peace, he was one of the individuals that shaped you, and since I like you I as such owe this man my gratitude as well.
Damn, not even 60. He sounded like a cool guy.
GG no re
rip. Sounds like he was an amazing person. Amazing teachers like that are few and far between. If only we had more, maybe more people would be intelligent.
On a side note, my 3rd grade teacher insisted that she was from Mars.
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Clearly she was pulling one over on you. After all, women are from Venus.
..I wanted to write something important, but what important can be said in our age? It all was said before, multiple times ... But someone who was able to make another human think - is not trivial... so, thanks for remembering him, in (writing) action.
That was a touching eulogy. Thanks