Marty,
You called your students kiddos. I hated that word. I can’t tell you why. Some words just bug me. “Antiquing” is another one. Go figure. Kiddos was on the list, and I told you so every chance I got. But I would give anything to hear you say it now. We lost you this weekend, and that word is going to mean something to me you never intended.
I met you in 2014, my first year, my second career. I was in my mid-thirties and scared to death that I had made a mistake walking into a classroom. You were one of the first people I met, and you were glad I was there. You showed up in shorts. You were a little messy. You did things in an order that made sense only to you. We called it a mess. To you it was a system, and you were right more often than we wanted to admit. You were the smartest man I ever knew. You knew a little about almost everything and a lot about most of it.
You were an English teacher who believed words were the strongest force on this earth, and you used yours to lift up kids who needed lifting. They would roll their eyes at you like teenagers are wont to do. Years later those same kids still bring up Coach Cole and the things he told them, the kind you only hear from a good parent.
You told people what you thought. You did not always agree with them, and you made some of them angry, because you believed you knew what was best. The maddening part was that you usually did. You did not care who you upset if their thinking was going to hurt a student.
We used to talk about the state of the world and all the casual cruelty in it, and neither of us could make sense of it. So you preached love. Black, white, gay, straight, man, woman, all of it, no exceptions. You were a follower of Jesus in a time when a lot of people claim the title and skip the one instruction that matters. Love one another. Did I stutter? Love one another. And you actually lived it.
You loved Lakeside more than anything. Johnny Rowland told me that the first week I got there, back when he was our principal. He said sometimes he had to tell you to go home. You took red Solo cups and pushed them into the fence out front, on your own time, no one asking, to spell out that we loved our Warriors, or a teacher who was retiring, or a kid going through something hard. You were the voice of the Warriors. You worked the gate. You chaperoned. You volunteered for every thankless job there was and never took a dime for most of it. You did not half-ass a single part of it. You whole-assed all of it.
A lot of our students will never know what you were like in a regular classroom. When you moved to special education, a whole wave of kids missed having you that way. They got you another way instead. To you that mattered just as much. You wanted to hand people wisdom. You wanted to push them and lift them in the same breath, then turn them loose to make the world better than they found it.
So go on home, Marty. You earned it. We will try to love one another the way you told us to.
We’ve got your kiddos from here.
Love,
Josh