|
ing decisions facing them as they each chose different answers to their pregnancy. But remember this was at a point in time that we actually had a girl at our school denied the right to accept her graduation diploma on stage because she was some 4-5 months pregnant.
That was when stuff hit the fan.
The school administration, having no prior knowledge of the installment series, went nuclear. Parents were outraged. Advertisers were upset. School board members were incensed.
Throughout it all, Sharon Keiser stood by her students. She spent more time in the principal's office than any student ever did. But she never backed down from defending our right to responsibly examine that issue. In the end, subsequent installments were forced cancelled.
As sports editor, I wrote a two part series on the F Club, a lettermen's club which, to my mind at least, served no purpose and I wrote exactly that. The sponsoring teacher for F Club was our football coach, a highly thought of person in our city and throughout state high school athletics.
Again, stuff hit the fan. Advertisers threatened to pull support. Some parents were outraged. The coach threatened to sue the school and my family. Life on the planet was near extinction according to some.
Sharon Keiser again stood her ground. Again she spent countless hours at meetings fighting school administrators for my right to print those columns. A few months later those same two columns on F Club would win a college scholarship and a first place in national high school sports writing competition.
My best friend was the managing editor of the school newspaper. When President Eisenhower died and was to be buried in Abeline, Kansas, he and I told Sharon we were going to skip school and drive down to Kansas and cover the funeral. I don't know her thoughts when we first told her but to her credit she encouraged us to go ahead and see what we could do and off we went to Kansas on a two-day reporting trip. We didn't realize we were actually learning, being challenged by an almost impossible task and doing what real journalists would do. At the time I think we thought it was just a great scam to get out of two days of school. The result of the trip was a full-page story with pictures about the funeral in the school paper. Our story won a Creighton University By-Line Award.
There were many more battles Sharon fought for us that year. Throughout it all she supported her students, secure in the knowledge we were indeed learning instead of just parroting back pages of information. And throughout it all, we did learn. We learned journalism but more importantly we learned what loyalty was. We learned what integrity was. We learned the definition of backbone. We learned to fight for principle.
Those were intangibles that came as a bonus to our senior year in journalism. We learned from a real teacher what was important in life and to stand up for your beliefs.
Unfortunately, her teaching methods were not widely appreciated in the school system. School administrators were much more comfortable with an attitude that did not rock the boat. Regurgitating pages of facts soon to be forgotten were more important than a teacher's inspiration. For her support of our classroom activities she was "blacklisted" as it were. She did nothing overt for which to be fired but she was made such an outcast that it was easier to move on in a couple of years rather than be denied tenure.
I lost track of Sharon over the years as is often the case as we move on in life. But I never forgot the lessons I learned from her as an individual. She impacted a great many people in her few short years at Fremont Senior High School. Some of her students are now editors at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Whatever any of her students are doing they have benefited in their lives from knowing her.
I often thought about contacting her to tell her how much I appreciated her as a wonderful teacher. Once I went so far as to make some phone calls and discovered she had remarried and lived in Phoenix. Not knowing her husband's first name she could have been any one of the sixty last names in the Phoenix phone book. But, I vowed to dig further and eventually contact her to thank her.
By way of a long grapevine of former high school students I found out the other day that Sharon Keiser had unexpectedly died a couple of years ago. She died young, probably about 58.
She died without my thank you. Maybe she never heard a thank you from her students, most teachers don't. But just in case she's able to hear me now, let me say thank you. Thank you for your abilities, your skills and your inspiration. Today's students would be far better off with more teachers like Sharon Keiser
|
|
