Learning by Heart

{Prompt: Who was your favorite teacher in high school?}

I had a lot of great teachers in high school.

Mr. Braddy was one of the first. He was my 10th grade biology teacher, introducing me to the fantastic world of plants, animals, and microorganisms. He started by teaching the fundamentals of Linnaean classification — taxonomy and binomial nomenclature — big words to describe some basic concepts.

We went through the Helena Curtis textbook, simply called “Biology”, chapter by chapter. I loved every page of it, and I still keep it on a shelf of honor.

We also went on field trips to learn, for example, to identify trees by there twigs using a dichotomous key, or to search for Spring ephemeral wildflowers in the understory of an oak-hickory forest.

I asked Mr. Braddy to write my nomination for the NC School of Science and Math, and he did. He got the ball rolling, and made my tutelage by other great teachers possible.

Here are some examples.

I learned to think about the context and meaning of English Literature from Jon Miller — a man with a natural look of amusement (or bemusement) on his face at all times. He always wore khaki pants, a light blue button-up shirt, and a tie (usually ever-loosening as the day went on), and he spoke in a sonorous baritone voice, with which he wielded both wit and sarcasm in equal measure. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if he was serious or not.

I learned to understand the intricacies of chemistry from the bespectacled Dr. Rufus Owens. A kind and scholarly man, his class notes were always copied in a faint but legible lavender ink. He used the word “facetious” a lot, telling us “Don’t be facetious” or “I’m not being facetious when I say…”. He was quirky. Maybe great chemists are a little funny, that way. He certainly was.

Chuck Britton, who taught physics, was quite the opposite. He was bearded and unpretentious. He was rambunctious and entertaining. He would have us run up the stairways as fast as we could, to demonstrate some principle regarding energy and kinetics. He would do gyroscopic demonstrations with a bicycle wheel to demonstrate the principles of angular momentum.

And there was John Molena, who taught Astrophysics. He wasn’t unusually charismatic, or professorial, or dynamic; but he was amazingly good at teaching the complexities of a super complicated and esoteric subject. He made the subject matter surprisingly understandable, or else he managed to increase my capacity for understanding more than even I expected. He simply taught, step by step, building knowledge from the ground up (literally).

All these teachers have one thing in common.

Have you noticed what it is?

They are all men.

And I needed these men in my life. I was lacking a male role model. These teachers were great role models.

Of course, I also had female teachers in high school and in junior high, just as demanding and inspirational. I just wasn’t able to connect with them in quite the same way.

Branson Brown

I had another male role model in high school; maybe the most impactful of all. His name was Branson Brown.

Strictly speaking, he was my teacher for only one and a half hours of actual curriculum. Believe it or not, he was my physical education (PE) instructor. He taught PE during the two years that I lived in Durham, at NCSSM. He taught me virtually nothing of an academic nature, but I think he taught me quite a bit about being a real human being.

He had a big advantage compared to my other teachers. You see, he lived in the dorm, with me and about 2/3 of the boys in the 80-81 school year, the first year of NCSSM. He was the resident advisor (RA) for my floor, the second floor, one of four male RAs that I can recall (along with Warren Baskett, Andy Minnis, and Zack Smith). As he was testing our physical stamina, during our basic PE class by day, we were testing his patience by night.

First let me tell you a little about his background. Branson was born in 1942. He played minor league baseball during the same year I was born, 1964. (He played for the Sarasota Yankees in Florida as a right-handed pitcher. You can still find his stats online.) At some point he married (his wife Joanie) and he became a physical education instructor.

(Photo of Branson Brown by an impressionable young man.)

Somehow he was chosen to be the “Physical Activities Coordinator” for the School of Science and Math. I don’t know how he got the job. He seemed like an unlikely choice – a retired, semiprofessional athlete at a school for science and technology geeks.

Perhaps the school had low expectations for physical activities in the academic curriculum. (According to Branson himself, the school had absolutely no plans for a varsity sports program.) Perhaps they were in need of someone who could be both an RA and a teacher. Or maybe they saw someone with something intangible — someone with fortitude. I like to think it was the latter.

I think that’s what I learned most from Branson — fortitude and determination.

Branson was the one faculty member with a conspicuous lack of support — the one most handicapped by budgetary and time constraints — and yet he persevered. There were no athletic facilities. None. And by none, I mean there was no baseball field, no football field, no gymnasium, no basketball or tennis courts, no weight room — in fact, no exercise facilities of any kind.

There were no uniforms (but, of course, the school colors and the school mascot were still to be chosen).

There was precious little athletic equipment.

And there were no coaches.

In short, there was no sports program to build on — no history. The school was not a member of any high school sports league, and of course there was no schedule for competition since most competitions required an opponent.

That all changed when a couple of students in my dorm approached Branson to see if they could compete in cross country. Before you knew it they had thrown together a team, manufactured some embarrassingly rudimentary jerseys, and they were competing with credibility against other schools. (They finished the year with a 6-4 record.)

Branson also arranged for a men’s soccer team to practice at an elementary school on Club Boulevard. We had to jog to the field, a mile and a half each way. He arranged for us to play against the NC School for the Deaf in Oxford and against the NC School of the Arts in Greensboro — only two games. But in the following year, we had scheduled games for a full season.

He launched programs in baseball and softball, volleyball and basketball. He found facilities. He found competition. He found coaches from the faculty, or he coached himself.

He even arranged for the only two football games in the school’s history — one away (at the School of the Arts) and one at home —a “home-coming” game, which was played on the intramural fields of Duke’s East Campus.

Branson was the referee for our homecoming game, which sadly was lost, 27-21, despite the adulation of our student body, who produced a makeshift cheer squad, and a pre-game pep rally, planned on short notice.

Branson never seemed discouraged, bitter, or angry. He just got to work, and he did what had to be done.

He was living with his wife, and forty or fifty adolescent boys in a boarding school. He was dealing with teenagers who were pulling late night study sessions and late night pranks. We once completely covered a dorm room door with rows of aluminum soft drink cans, and joyfully listened to them come cascading down in the morning as the unlucky dormmate cast them aside in his bid to escape.

And his wife was pregnant! Joanie Brown lived with Branson in a room at the front of the building — a structure completed in 1910 in a Mission Revival style, with terracotta tile roofing, overhanging eaves, and stucco walls. Their room was adjacent to, and opened onto, the open-air balcony above the front porch.

They could go out on the porch in fair weather, and observe the campus from a nice pair of lightweight foldable beach chairs. My room was right next to theirs, but sadly, I had no balcony. When we came back from winter break, we all discovered that their first son had been born on December 21st — Brenen James Brown: 9 pounds and 6 ounces. Now there was a full-fledged family with a baby, occasionally crying for food, right next to me in the dorm.

Jodi, Brenan, and Branson Brown.

If Branson was “knackered”, I never could tell. If anything he seemed focused and energized. He never got angry… at least he never seemed angry — he never lost his temper. There was sometimes a stern look — a look of reprehension. But, as often as not, there would be a look of amusement — a suppressed smile at the humor of our little escapades.

In January of 1981, I asked Branson if we could have a table tennis tournament. (I guess I wasn’t really overly concerned with the demands of his personal life, or his new found fatherhood.) We had had other intramural activities in the Fall, but some of us were getting pretty good at table tennis, which we were fortunate to have available to us in our recreation room. And we would use it at any hour of the day.

So Branson thought about the table tennis tournament for a minute or two — thinking about the logistics — and then he suggested that I go ahead and set it up. It was my turn to step up to the plate—to contribute.

He suggested a ladder tournament format, which I had never heard of before. But this format meant that we could basically play games at any time convenient to the pair of players. One player on the “ladder” simply had to challenge a player on a “rung” somewhere above, and the two players would compete at an agreed-upon time.

The competition was a great success. And it gave me the confidence to be the intramural coordinator for my dorm at NCSU a few years later.

In the Spring of 1981, in March, Branson organized a fundraiser for the American Heart Association, called “Jump Rope for the Heart.” Students were encouraged to form teams of 4 to 6 participants, solicit donations based on how long we could keep jumping rope, and then take turns continuously jumping, until 3 hours had elapsed (if possible).

It seems easy, right? Well… We discovered that jumping rope like Rocky Balboa is hard to do for more than a minute or two at a time. Within 5 minutes, each one of us in turn was skipping like an elementary school child, with one exception, Percil Watkins.

Percil was a member of my team (or maybe I was a member of his team). Either way, Percil saved our team that day. He was small, but he had true cardiovascular fitness. He was a long-distance runner, and he could jump rope seemingly forever. (It was almost a perfect recreation of Breaking Away, the movie released about a year before, where Dave manages to cycle the majority of the bicycle race on his own, along with three other hapless teammates.) Of course, we learned a lesson in humility from that experience.

Quite possibly, this was a lesson that Branson had anticipated.

In the following school year, 1981-82 — my senior year — I was living in a new dorm, with a new RA. Branson was no longer an RA. He was the new physical education and recreation coordinator.

He was busy organizing more teams, with real schedules, for real competition. He must have gained at least a modicum of funding from the school, and some concessions by the administration that students be given more time for sporting activities. They were starting to realize that if they expected students to work hard, they should at least let them play hard too.

It would take time for the equipment and the facilities to follow, but eventually they did. Eventually the school had a competitive varsity sports program (except for football, which was never played again outside of intramural flag football.)

In 1982, Branson had a baseball team with great promise, including a real good pitcher and a bona fide catcher. They were a winning team. I went to watch them at practice once or twice. I got some good photographs. I couldn’t go to the games. They were all on other schools’ fields, and I only had so many hours in the day.

I played varsity soccer instead. That was the game that I loved. Kevin Bartkovich was the coach — one of the mathematics teachers, and he actually knew how to play soccer. He had a n inkling of the strategy and skills that were needed.

I was also a team assistant for the girls soccer team in the Spring — another way for me to participate in sports as something more than a player.

I never took up running or jumping rope, at least not for my own pleasure or fitness. I did attempt to run hurdles for my dorm’s intramural track and field team, once, when no other natural hurdler stepped forward. It wasn’t pretty. And I did run in a 5K with my classmates in medical school when they needed a fourth member for a team.

And much later, I ran three different ridiculous 5K events (a nighttime trail run, a zoo run, and a “bootleg” run), when my daughter showed interest in training for a “Color Run”. I think she may have learned something about cardiovascular fitness that summer, just like I did at the Jump Rope for the Heart event, years before.

So what did I learn from Branson Brown? It’s kind of hard to say. I just know that I left school with greater maturity than when I arrived — ready to act independently, think about my actions, and take responsibility.

I don’t think Branson ever taught me anything in a didactic sense. It wasn’t really his nature to give a wordy lesson with lots of exposition or discourse. He lived by the maxim, “Actions speak louder than words”. He believed that talk was cheap. He believed in setting an example.

That’s exactly what he did. And he did it well. He put his heart and soul into his work. He never expected credit. He never asked for thanks.

But I’m going to give him the credit now—and the thanks that he deserves.

Everything that I learned from him, I learned by example.

And I learned it by “heart.”