Wes Anderson Looks Back Fondly on His Middle School Pre-Algebra Teacher

Famous people talked about their “life-altering” educational experiences in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

The New York Times Magazine released an education-themed issue this week that begged the question: “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” It’s a rather bold statement, which is nothing new by New York Times standards, however it has validity. Our education system appears to be pretty obviously stunted, and going through the motions to earn degrees seems to be easier than ever.

Nevertheless I failed to read the entirety of those articles that challenged our country’s educational system to make a change because I was tired — plus, have you seen the font size in that magazine? It hurts my eyes.

Instead, this morning I found myself reading the rather pointless vignettes about the lives of our country’s academic and cultural elite. The New York Times Magazine asked the likes of Mike Bloomberg, Gay Talese, Junot Diaz, Wes Anderson and plenty more to relay their stories of their own life-altering educational moment.

Anderson’s “moment” wasn’t a specific moment per say, but rather the experience of having a genius academic who challenged him far beyond the level of a typical 7th grader. “The Fantastic Mr. Burris” tells the tale of Anderson’s mother’s college friend, who pointed, had exotic handwriting and hooked up with the Spanish teacher in front of a Baskin’ Robbins.

I thought it was pretty cussing good.

He was a friend of my mother’s. They studied together in the anthropology department at Rice University. This was in the late 1970s. He must have been in his early 30s. He had always been an academic, and he had just finished some degree or other, and I think he was not quite sure what he wanted to do next. She suggested that he consider teaching at the middle school where her sons were students. My brothers and I had to stop calling him Harold and switch to Mr. Burris.

He was nothing like our other teachers. For one thing, he was a man. The only man in the school who did not teach P.E. Also, he had a computer. I think he built it himself. His handwriting was neat but somehow exotic. He spoke briskly and seriously, and he pointed his finger at us a lot. It was immediately apparent that the range of his knowledge went far beyond anything we were ever going to touch on in class. He invented games for us. In the fall, we were each assigned countries that we represented in an international trade market. Wars were declared. Mineral deposits were discovered. Fortunes were made and lost. In the spring, he put up a poster on which he had pasted a hundred faces cut out of newspapers and magazines. All semester we searched for clues and slowly learned who they were, but he had to finally give us Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (This was in pre-algebra, by the way.)

One day, he came back from lunch in a dark mood. He made a few mysterious remarks, then coldly dictated his qualifications to us. It was a long list, and somewhere in the middle of it, I remember: “Two years Indonesian, intense.” Shortly after that, he quit our school and became head of the science department at a bigger school on the other side of the city. On a Saturday at midnight a year later, we saw him kissing our former Spanish teacher in the parking lot of a Baskin-Robbins.

[NY Times Mag]