My favorite teacher was in "Point Break"
This is what I remember about Gordon Vaillancourt.
In junior high, I was a glasses-wearing, asthmatic, book-reading, chess-playing nerd kid who didn’t know any popular music (it was banned in our home for being “sinful”) and who wore clothes from the Goodwill (since our extra money went to church donations). The Goodwill clothes were always comfy and I liked them fine, but they were well out of date and it was another thing that made me stand out as a “different” kid.
Most of the incessant teasing/mockery I got was verbal. Not all of it. Some of it was mildly physical — the standard-variety wedgies and shoving your face into drinking fountains. Some of it was worse. I remember one jock who would have his girlfriend come over and start fondling one of the nerds’ pants, and when you inevitably got a boner, the jock would start punching you in it. There was similar stuff in the gym class locker rooms.
What made this particularly nasty is that some of the teachers just didn’t care. We had daily announcements over speakers in every room, and if the daily announcement had anything to say about the chess team (or any other “geek” activity like theater), some of the “don’t care” teachers would just leave the room. It was time for the nerd abuse to begin, and it was too much bother for them to stop it.
Looking back, that really mystifies me. I had a nice French teacher, not a tough guy, a real sweetie, Mr. LaVoie, and there wasn’t any bullying in his class. Or in Mr. Diaz’s science class, and he wasn’t a big guy. It wasn’t an especially tough school, or in an especially tough neighborhood. One vice-principal did get roughed up one time, but he was headed for the very hidden entrance to school grounds where everyone knew the drug dealers hung out, and those were much older teens. The kids in my classes would have been 13, at most. How hard is it to stand up to 13-year-old bullies?
My favorite teacher, though, Gordon Vaillancourt, he didn’t just get the bullies to quit it. He scared ‘em. Mr. Vaillancourt was a gentle, friendly guy, but he looked like someone from the pages of Backwoods Logger magazine. Here’s a photo of him being really great to kids, but when he turned that beard on someone and told them to “knock it off,” off it was knocked:
(That looks a little earlier than my time in class — by my time, Mr. Vaillancourt had a greyer beard and a bigger belly, less Allen Ginsberg and more “grizzled old coot.” And he used it well.)
I’d have loved him just for making the bullies back down — I also liked the bigger kids in grade school who did that at the bus stop. (My teachers told me to stop being friends with them because they were “bad kids,” maybe they were — although the worst vice they ever introduced me to was Richard Pryor albums. I knew they stood up to the bullies for us wimpy kinds, and that’s what mattered to me.)
But Mr. Vaillancourt wasn’t just good at protecting the wimpy kids. He was also a helluva teacher. I learned more from his classes that I still remember today than almost anything I learned in college.
On my first day in his Social Studies class, he had us all dutifully come to his desk, sign our names on the textbook sheet, and pick up our Social Studies textbooks. “Take care of these,” he said, “you'll be turning them in at the end of the year.”
“And now put them away. They're useless and you won't be needing them.” (So everyone put the books in the wire cages under our seats, that's where you put books.)
“Take out a piece of lined notebook paper. Write down the numbers 1-50. One on each line.” (So everyone did.)
Mr. Vaillancourt then put an image up on the screen that he pulled down over the front blackboard. It was a map of the U.S., with the outlines of each state, numbered 1-50.
“Write down the names of each state. If you don't know, take a guess, or leave it blank. Just do your best, nobody's going to get it right. You have five minutes. Begin… now.”
And we were going to retake that test, at that start of every class, until everyone passed. And by “passed,” I don't mean getting 60%. Until everyone got 50/50.
One day, Mr. Vaillancourt announced, he was proud. We'd all gotten 50/50. Congratulations! You all deserve it.
Now take out another piece of paper, and number it 1-50.
Because that new map was also of America, but, instead of states, it was rivers and the Great Lakes. Plus the numbers “1” and “2” for the two oceans.
(Because this was Mr. Vaillancourt, he mentioned that “some of the jocks always get wrong which one the Pacific Ocean is.” And this was in Oregon. I LOVED that guy.)
And then, after all the jocks got 50/50, it was 50 cities. And then drawing a map of America freehand.
To this day, I dare you to challenge me on a test of which state is which, which rivers are which, where the cities are. And, unless knowing this stuff is your job, I will beat you. It's not because I'm unusually bright, it's because Mr. Vaillancourt taught me.
After the morning's test, Mr. Vaillancourt would teach us civics basics — how the branches of government worked, and so on. And tell offbeat history stories, he had a ton of them. But everybody got an “A.” Everybody learned their geography.
At the end of the class, you were given the option to take Mr. Vaillancourt's “Exploring Oregon” class the next year. Which functioned in much the same way, but it was optional. Of course I took it, the guy was my hero. And it was great. Plus, it had trips!
I don't remember Oregon's map of counties the same way I remember the U.S. states, but I loved those trips. To the Oregon Caves, and Crater Lake! To the coast, and stories of that one time a Japanese sub shelled Oregon in WWII. And because this was before education funding cuts meant parents had to pay extra for everything, all my parents had to provide was a camping tent and sleeping bag for our stays at state parks — we knew people who had those.
(There was something so great about camping out with the nerd girls on these trips — only the nerd kids took Exploring Oregon — and realizing that you were so much more attracted to the nerd girls than the cheerleaders, and everyone still being so relaxed and happy. Because everyone was having such a great time seeing scenery and setting up tents and stuff and listening to Mr. Vaillancourt's weird Oregon history stories that you didn't think about how cute the girls were, you just noticed over the campfire conversations how cute the girls were.)
Gordon Vaillancourt made my junior high years bearable. He was a great, kind man.
When I moved on to high school, I got wrapped up in the various dramas of one’s older teenage existence, and forgot about my time in junior high.
But, my first summer back from college, I was working in a movie theater. And the theater was showing Point Break. And I happened to catch a little scene at the end, and Mr. Vaillancourt was right there, on the big screen (and it was BIG — 1050 seats).
How’d that happen?
Point Break is a movie about surf bums who rob banks. Which sounds pretty funny… except that the movie is not meant to be funny. It’s meant to be thrilling, dramatic action. Mixed in with a dose of Buddhism Lite — the head bank robber is named Bodhi, as in “Bodhisattva”… who’s a body surfer. Get it? GET IT? Bodhisattva/bodysurfer? Yeah, you got it. The whole movie’s that fuggin’ dumb (but thinks it’s really clever), so naturally it was a mild success and was eventually remade.
The final scene has head goodie Keanu Reeves tracking down head baddie Patrick Swayze in Australia. Rather than arresting the baddie, who was his friend/idol for a time, Reeves decides to let him die the way he’s lived — surfing the biggest wave that’s ever been.
And, for some inexplicable reason, they decided to shoot this scene in Oregon. Not the giant wave! That’s filmed somewhere else. (You don’t get waves that big in Oregon… not until a giant earthquake creates one, which WILL happen sometime in the next few hundred years.) It’s unintentionally funny — the level of cloud cover keeps shifting from full sun to overcast drizzle and back again.
As Keanu makes his way down to the beach, he goes by a number of bystanders on the trail — and one of them’s Mr. Vaillancourt. Who loved this part of the Oregon Coast. That’s him in the screenshot up top — that’s exactly the kind of hat and sunglasses he’d wear on “Exploring Oregon” trips. (That’s Keanu’s hair behind.)
Wow, did THAT bring back memories. And it sure still does.
I’m not advocating any particular type of teaching method, here. I’m not saying teachers should tell students to put away their textbooks and teach them maps, instead. I think it’s neat to know geography, especially world geography (which I’m not so good at), but whatever method your favorite teachers used, on whatever subject, is a good method. Wanting the kids to all do well is a good method. And making the bullies quit it should be universally cheered.
One last thought on Mr. Vaillancourt. I remember we had a writing assignment in Exploring Oregon, I don’t remember what it was about or what I wrote it on. I think it was to write about some aspect of Oregon history. So most of us all wrote about governors and such. Something like that.
Mr. Vaillancourt held up one student’s paper for special praise — the only time I ever saw him do this. Because that one student, who was a nerdy, shy kid, had written about the different Portland bridges over the Willamette River. The kid was such a bridge nerd, he wrote about Bridge Facts. And Mr. Vaillancourt said that was cool.
He said that, if you really put some effort into it, you can find things to learn that you will enjoy learning about and enjoy writing about. And that it’ll make your studies more interesting to learn, and your writing more interesting to read. It’ll be an expression of who you are, and everyone has something in them worth expressing.
That stuck with me, too. It’s what I still try to do. And I can still beat you on a test about States.