Mr. Ridgway was my 10th grade English teacher. We called him Don, but not to his face. He did not suffer fools. We were fourteen or fifteen and often foolish.
One day, he arrived in class in a red-faced rage. We’d had a writing assignment of some sort, and we had performed horribly. To our shock, the (to our eyes) old man jumped atop the wooden desk, arms akimbo, ranting furiously that our junior high teachers had permitted otherwise bright students slip by without demanding that we master the foundations of English grammar. Like the manic showman in “Network,” he was mad as hell, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. Then, he stormed out of the classroom. This was well before the end of the class period, and we had no idea what had happened or what we should do next. Shortly after, he returned, pushing a cart full of red textbooks on English grammar. And so mid-semester Mr. Ridgway tossed the official accelerated 10th grade English curriculum to take us back to basics. There would be no erosion of standards on his watch. We would learn English grammar, damn it.
When he suggested some months later that I consider joining the newspaper staff he advised, I politely declined and chose the yearbook instead. Years later I realized that I’d taken the easier road. And many years after that I saw the heroism of Don Ridgway in a way no 15-year-old could. He cared. As a former WWII Navyman, he had long fought against terrible wrongs and for what undeniably right. It was not right that high-performing high school sophomores didn’t know their own language well enough to communicate clearly. So, after he got mad, he did something about it.
I told this story to my students this week. I’d gotten some reviews on my class that were negative, and more importantly, vague and unhelpful. And so I told the story about Mr. Ridgway and what it, he meant to me 45 years later. In preparing for class, I found an obituary about him. And there I learned he had fought and won other important battles for young people and their fundamental rights long after I left Kennedy High School.
I told my students that I really cared whether they understood what we were studying and why. I promised that like Mr. Ridgway, I would work my tail off to help them learn…if they would meet me in the middle and do the necessary work. Our topic–the foundation of rigorous, reproducible, and robust scientific research–is, I argued to them, as important and essential as English grammar.
Heroes take on many guises. Thank you, Mr. Ridgway, for being an everyday hero. For being mad for us, not at us. For believing in us more than we believed in ourselves. And for demanding excellence we didn’t have the courage to muster alone. I did not keep in touch, and so you never heard these thoughts. But I am paying it forward today. We need all the heroes we can find, especially now.