Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.
My daily walk through Contoocook takes me past Hopkinton High School four times a day. Seeing the school building always reminds me of the excellent education our daughter received there, and sometimes makes me think of my own school experiences and how some of them have followed me into adulthood.
In seventh grade, my art teacher showed a film on the French impressionist painters, and to this day I remain impressed by what that film had to say about how those painters saw and handled light. Inspired by that film, I jumped at opportunities to visit the National Gallery in Washington and the Tate Gallery in London when I was in college.
Ten or twelve years later, Nancy Jo and I began to collect art. Since then, we have become friends with dozens of artists, and I have organized, juried, or hung more than three dozen art shows in galleries across the state.
It is fair to say that my interest in art, all the satisfaction it has brought me, and everything that has resulted from it, grew from the seed that Mr. Berg planted by showing my art class a movie in 1970. Based on that, I would advise teachers to treat every moment with their students as potentially life-changing, and I would advise students to pay attention to everything that comes along.
For teachers and students the message is the same: you just never know what tiny little experience might end up having monumental consequences.
In the eighth grade, I managed the basketball team. Because I was a screaming Luddite even back then, I chose to keep the scorebook, with a pencil, rather than run the electronic scoreboard during games. Forty years later, when our daughter took up basketball, her coach told the team’s parents that he needed volunteers for various tasks, including keeping the scorebook. Based on my junior high experience, I offered to keep the book. Our daughter ended up playing a couple of hundred basketball games, and I kept the book for every single one of them, which always gave me a prime courtside seat.
Keeping the book allowed me to meet bookkeepers from other schools, who are often pretty interesting folks. I’ve also gotten to know a number of referees, including one who asks me to play Santa for his granddaughter every time he sees me and my white beard if he happens to ref a game in December.
One night while riding home from an away game with the team, our daughter got an email from the University of Delaware, and I heard a shout from the back of the bus “Sophie just got into college!” Later that season, when her team made the Division III Final Four, her coach listed me as a team manager on the paperwork he filed with the NHIAA, which put my name right near our daughter’s name on all the Final Four sweatshirts. Thanks to an experience from junior high school, I now have a gym full of wonderful father-daughter memories.
When I was in high school, I took journalism because it was a requirement for holding an editorial position on the high school newspaper. Several of my classmates went on to become professional journalists, but for me, it was just a sidelight. Even so, high school journalism set me up for an editorial position at my college newspaper, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Beyond that, all the graphic design I learned in journalism class was invaluable fifteen years later when I was put in charge of producing a newsletter for the state agency that employed me.
My bosses got a much more professional-looking newsletter than they had any right to expect from an archaeologist. On top of that, I continue to use the graphic design principles I learned in my high school journalism class when I hang art shows.
I even had a bad high school experience that developed a silver lining when I went to college. My high school had two French teachers, and the one I had three out of four years had a teaching style that didn’t mesh well with my learning style. With all the bad French grades that littered my high school transcript, it is a wonder that any decent college would have me. At the more-than-decent college that did take a chance on me, I learned that I was actually capable of learning French.
Because I was a dink, I decided to major in French, just to teach my high school French teacher a lesson. As I said, I was a dink, but a dink who made straight As in college French. My senior year, I had the best class ever. My professor and I spent two hours a week in his office, one-on-one, discussing French romantic poetry, in French. At the end of each session, we’d assign each other another batch of poems to read for our next session. If not for my awful experience in high school French, I’d never have had that wonderful experience in college.
Again, my message for both teachers and students is that you just can’t predict the decades-long shadow that just might be cast by some seemingly small thing that happens in school today.