David Olive: Behind every great person is a great teacher

 

Ken was one of the greatest teachers who ever lived. That is not an exaggeration. I am a student of history and as a journalist I have studied thousands of lives. 

Most of us come up short in certain important ways. We are human. So was Ken, who

could be impatient with stupidity – that of Napoleon and of a high school principal who had reached his level of incompetence. As we all do if we fail to recognize our limitations.

Ken recognized a limitation he had, which is that he vastly preferred teaching to administration. He repeatedly turned down invitations to accept the higher pay and prestige of management. He chose instead to remain in the classroom, spending his entire days with the students who were the future of the country.

That was no sacrifice. Ken immediately earned his students’ respect, and drew from many of us our love. We always had the feeling that Ken was having the time of his life in our company.

I signed up for Ken’s history classes for three years in a row and would have signed up for a fourth in Grade 13, but history was not on the curriculum. 

Ken was what we mean when we describe teaching as a noble calling, maybe the noblest. We are grateful to the wisest engineers, nurses, states people, entrepreneurs and, of course, teachers. But each of them had teachers. The young Einstein and Angela Merkel had teachers. And if those teachers were of Ken’s ability to inspire, that is in large measure what made their students great, also.     

In the classroom, Ken was unscripted. He made it up as he went along, as the greatest teachers do in casting aside the formal curriculum when that is required in order to reach a particular student. Or a particular year of students. One year, when we were officially to be learning Chinese history, Ken abruptly decided to instead teach contemporary American history. Momentous events were underway in the US, and Ken’s accurate reading of his students told him that American studies were called for.

Later, he taught us about China – or rather, found a way to get us to teach ourselves about that great land. Ken did that in the same way he taught everything. Namely, that the official version is seldom the truthful one. It can touch on the truth, but it’s only part of the story. Some of history’s heroes were actually knaves. And so much of the history that has ennobled humanity was made by unsung heroes, whose stories Ken told us.