The North Star of Teachers: Mr. Frank Scholar

Assuming I'll retain a modicum of cognitive clarity on my deathbed, I'll vividly recall with much fondness and a flicker of trepidation my middle school social studies teacher, whom students and their parents either fiercely and uncritically adored or loathed to the marrow of their bones. 

He was the most original and colorful of characters. There was much method to his madness, though many of us were puzzled by the stylistic integrity and marriage of his despotism and decency, which supernaturally didn't clash.

He ran his class with unyielding but puckish authoritarianism. His rules seemed petty and sometimes sadistic. I was among the classroom miscreants privileged to wear his circus clown-like neckties, gigantically misshapen, with deafeningly loud colors and wild motifs. There was also an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe-like headwear accessory, which served admirably as a dunce cap. 

It was an honor being treated as an object of ridicule in his class. A Marine Corps drill instructor was a soft touch, by comparison. It was his "way or the highway," except the "highway" was a woodchipper. 

I had flunked all my subjects and was also rated hopelessly lacking in every area of social adjustment. I was placed in a heterogeneously grouped class of losers. That premature and unforgiving recognition was the excuse that his colleagues gave for literally giving us all a pass. They were flexible to a fault, and this guise for indifference had the collateral benefit of keeping their blood pressure under control. 

They had given up on our learning potential, they flattered us, gave us credit we didn't earn, and nobody was any the wiser for it. By making it easy on us, they made it easy on themselves, which was, at least subconsciously, their objective. 

But my teacher was a renegade from convention.

He was an inimitable, iconic eccentric and occasionally mercurial disciplinarian who treated all students equally. He had perfect class control, dominated the classroom, and didn't bend the knee to vapid authority, no matter how "official." 

He would never have had to use the "I was only carrying out orders" defense, if the directives or policies were foul.

He didn't subscribe to pedagogical fads and wouldn't change students' grades if he was ordered to do so by a supervisor who was pressured by parents who threatened, if they weren't appeased, to go to the superintendent, chancellor or member of Congress. 

All grades and rewards had to be earned. There were no substitute pathways.

Were he around today, he wouldn't have been a thorn in the side of the Department of Education. Instead, he would have been flesh-eating bacteria acting as a Good Samaritan. 

He would have been piqued and amused about many things, such as the Department of Education’s Office of Language Access including among the list of languages available for translation to parents, Wolof, Twi and Soninke.

Sometimes his rules seemed petty and arbitrary, but his non-negotiable enforcement gave us a heads-up about how life works. He focused on standards before that word became a buzzword for just the opposite. By being a taskmaster, he showed faith in us academic "lost causes"

My teacher was not a team player when the team didn't play by the rules. One of his tests stands out.

We were given a map of Africa consisting only of an outline of the continent and boundary lines of unidentified nations. We had to fill in their names,  and identify major rivers, deserts and natural resources. 

One student deliberately mispronounced the country Niger. He corrected her in such a way that, if she's still alive, she'll be reliving the experience. And the lesson.

Painting a picture of his personality using words would require the application of "small dots or strokes of color to a canvas, so that they visually blend together when viewed from a distance" (as AI defines "pointillism"), using anecdotes instead of oils.

Over his career, he taught more than 5,000 kids. They would all say that he was the most memorable, colorful, unorthodox and indefatigable. I wouldn't be surprised if his alumni held reunions, like D-Day survivors. As adults, decades later, they'd swap stories like soldiers did who fought along Blood and Guts General Patton in WWII.

For many years, he used to take students on extended trips to Washington, D.C., and other historical sites and regions, and he did so on his own time and dime. Couldn't happen today. Litigation paranoia.

He lived in the same house from around the attack on Pearl Harbor until his death 10 summers ago. No computer. No cell. No voicemail. He refused to move with the times. 

For many years, he was the supreme leader of a very active and influential civic association, and politicians sought his approval and feared his wrath, especially when there were controversies affecting quality of life, adherence to commercial codes, etc. He made sure the police were proactively on top of breaches to the peace.

He was a eucharistic minister at his Episcopal church and even there he made his voice heard, as choirs and parishioners and the trees outside could attest.

When I sat in the fifth seat of the sixth row of his class, he had a buzzcut, but in later years he looked like Rip Van Winkle in a Hawaiian shirt of red, blue and gold. His shirts were louder than the explosion of Krakatoa. 

His frequent published letters centered on local good government issues. At one time he mulled over running for office, but as a godfather of conscience and community watchdog, he accomplished much more than he could have in Albany.

He was  much more than a "gadfly,” serving, not passively, a dozen years on a community board, put together coalitions for major restorations, created an alumni association and retrospective books for one of the city's largest and most historic high schools, and was awarded New York State's highest civilian honor for "exceptional heroic, selfless and noble acts performed on behalf of one’s community and fellow citizens."

Added together, still an understatement.

Around 15 years ago, I spotted him jaywalking and shouted to him. Although we had almost no contact for decades, he recognized me instantly, and came to my car to give my wife and kids an unsolicited  hilarious narrative about my being the most chaotic and neurotic kid he ever taught, describing the pages of my looseleaf spilling out and wafting to the floor like leaves in a gust of wind. 

A few years ago, an intersection in his dominion in Northeast Queens was co-named after him. It should have been the main boulevard. 

The gentleman is buried upstate in his ancestral churchyard. But his ghost keeps sentry over his old bailiwick.

Just to keep it honest.