My eighth grade history teacher was Mr. Stevens.  I recently reconnected with my old pal, Rob , and it has made me think of Mr. Stevens, who introduced the two of us.  Rob moved to our town from Michigan in the eighth grade and in the fall of that year, as I sat in Mr. Stevens' history class, Rob was snagged from the hallway by Stevens.  My soon-to-be-friend was wearing a University of Michigan football jersey and Stevens was a die hard Ohio State fan.  The maize and blue jersey attracted Stevens' attention and he responded by bringing Rob before the class and delivering a speech that probably referenced the horrible team from "Up North" and the whooping they would get when they played the Buckeyes.  Today such a display would result in disciplinary action against a teacher but we all knew Mr. Stevens meant nothing by it - and Rob took it well.

Mr. Stevens is the reason I love history today.  Each of his classroom sessions was a show:  part storytelling, part audience participation ("And tell us, Mr. Harden, what did General Montcalm do next?"), part acting as Stevens would throw his hands up to grab his hair in response to a poor answer.

Up and down the rows of chair-desks Mr. Stevens would walk, hands clasped behind his back, leaning forward as he explained that General "Mad" Anthony Wayne dressed smartly on the field of battle.  He would tells us how Wayne commanded a great presence with his men through his mannerisms, his confidence and his action.  "Zeal, zeal, zeal" Stevens would yell out in the classroom, quoting Wayne, but encapsulating his teaching style at the same time.

Projects in Mr. Stevens class included life-sized guillotines, 3-D landscapes of Civil War battlefields or oral presentations on some important Revolutionary War moment.  There were no standard five-page papers - at least in my memory.  Stevens' challenged you to give your all in his class.  And his students responded.  How often, for instance, would you find students moved to bring outside reference material to class in order to check a teachers' near-encyclopedic knowledge of a subject?  Yet we would furtively flip through pages of reference material to check generals' names, battle situations, document dates and other details that were included in Mr. Stevens' storytelling sessions - surely he couldn't know all those details by memory.  But he did.  His knowledge of the subject was matched only by his exuberance in passing it along.

He taught the emerging cynics that eighth graders so often are, that it was okay to be excited and passionate about a subject like history.  While other teachers copied out lessons on the blackboard, Stevens expected you to be taking notes while he spoke.  Where other teachers might use the overhead projector to show a formula or detail, Stevens would draw the battle situation out from memory on the chalkboard or note the location on one of his maps.  He would show the troop movements as he explained what happened.  He brought the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to life for us.

Mumble and he told you to speak up.  Give a partial answer and he prodded more out of you.  I don't remember his classrooms having any disciplinary problems; I doubt any student who was lucky enough to have him as a teacher does either  He was too busy teaching and telling stories.  Students were too busy keeping up and being prepared to answer when he shot out a question.  Expectations were clear in Mr. Stevens class.  We were there to learn and didn't want to let him down.

Mr. Stevens is retired now.  I can only hope that my children will experience one or two like him.