One of the people who got me where I am today died too young last week after a tough fight with cancer.
Jack Breen taught me what they used to call "Bonehead" English at Marin Catholic High School 24 years ago-I was so boneheaded, in fact, that I had to take two of his classes back to back my freshman year.
He was Mephistopheles and St. Francis in a short, stout package, with bushy, graying hair flying around his head like a mad scientist's.
Jack, descended from one of the surviving members of the Donner Party, was a no-nonsense teacher who seemed old-school even in the 1970s. His wit was without peer. Of Irish descent, he quoted Shakespeare like Laurence Olivier and had Bob Hope's timing. He used his ice-blue eyes the way conductors use a baton. He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. One grinning boy came in once and proudly announced that he'd gotten a date for the prom. "I thought Lassie was dead," Jack said, stone faced.
No one talked about self-esteem in school back then, but we learned it. One by one, we had to stand in front of Jack and the entire Bonehead English class and recite lengthy poems from memory, arms at our sides, no gesturing, no podium. You might as well have been buck naked. But if anyone so much as snickered during your recitation, that kid was gone for the day. That one exercise taught more than rote memorization. It broke down fears and built confidence.
Jack, in 30 years of teaching, not only repaired what the grammar schools failed to do, he launched rockets. His students learned the nuts and bolts of English prose and literature, but he also taught us to marvel, explore, fail, succeed and wonder. His praise was gold, and his magic was that when you did poorly, you knew it before he did.
In the 1970s, convinced that private-school teachers shouldn't have to drive milk trucks to make ends meet, he went to jail as part of a teacher's strike. He wasn't a rabble-rouser. He was a man of conviction, pure and simple.
We've all got Jack Breens. We wouldn't be here without them. They taught circuit theory or turned us on to analog design or motivated us to stay up for days straight on Cokes and Milky Ways, working on some cool design project. They taught us possibility, hope instead of despair, risk instead of cowardice. Somewhere in that algorithm, code or layout trick you're so proud of is a Jack Breen, part of the DNA we acquire after birth.
Jack Breens don't clamor for publicity. They're not out making a fortune in Silicon Valley or pulling their hair out worrying about self-enlightenment, their higher purpose or inner child. They seek nothing in return. They tend the garden of the future.
Jack made me see language as music, each work a symphony of my own composing, each word, its sound, its rhythm, its placement, sacred. Since that class in 1974, I've never written a sentence without him perched in my subconscious. On his last teaching day two years ago, the farewell line stretched out of his classroom and snaked through the school. His funeral Mass, Dec. 9, was standing room only. Would that we all pack 'em in like that when we go. What do you say we all toast our Jack Breens this holiday season?
