The Online Photographer

[Bloviation Alert: This might be the longest article I've ever posted on TOP.]

By Mike Johnston

When I was a teacher, I naturally had a wide variety of colleagues. There was one physics teacher who had a seemingly limitless appetite for work. She taught a formidably full load, yet she was known to be very thorough in her teaching, assigning and correcting huge amounts of homework and constantly working with kids individually. She also cheerfully accepted any other burden that was placed upon her by virtually anyone. She chaired, coordinated, facilitated, advised, etc. She showed up at all the meetings. She didn't coach a sport, but that was because she was a spindly thing with approximately the athletic ability of a sea sponge. She was the first one at school in the morning and the last one to leave at night, and I have no doubt that at home she worked late, and on weekends. Washington, D.C., is a workaholic town, and I have no doubt that this particular individual fit right in with the town norm of the 60-to-80-hour work-week.

At the same school there was a music teacher, an older gentleman, WASPy and patrician, supposedly a mountain climber by avocation, who was the opposite. He taught literally half of the nominally minimum teaching load, and some semesters he would be relieved of half of that. His only other responsibility was leading the Glee Club twice a week, and he kept no very firm hand on the tiller of that sprawling enterprise, for the most part flitting around and chatting with his charges and only occasionally waving a baton airily about. He was one of those characters at prep schools whom everyone is obliged to love because they have been there forever and everyone has always loved them. As I recall there were days that he didn't need to come to school at all, and when he was in attendance he was constantly to be found loitering in the teachers' lounge, complaining happily. He would adamantly resist any and all attempts by anyone to get him to lend a hand in any school undertaking or activity whatsoever, protesting with great feeling that he already had enough to do. My observation, from a distance, was that if this beloved personage worked any less he wouldn't have been employed at all; I think if he'd dropped into a mountain crevasse it would have been months before even the Glee Club would have noticed he was missing.