Bluefield's 'X' man had the answers

William Ward said, “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”

One of these great teachers passed away last week. His name was Robert L. Russell, and he taught math for 36 years at Graham High School in Bluefield, Va.

That’s a lot of years and a lot of students to inspire. Attesting to his greatness are the students who became better doctors, engineers, coaches, farmers, ministers, mechanics and housewives because of his influence. He also won the student-polled best teacher award so many times that he finally retired his candidacy to let other teachers have a chance.

Like other inspirational teachers, the students didn’t vote for him because he let them get away with everything in his class, and he didn’t hand out A’s as if they were candy. He garnered their respect through his unflappable personal code: he expected them to give their best; to think, not memorize; to embrace competition; and to listen to his stories that contained nuggets of truth about life.

My daughter flourished in this environment. But it didn’t happen automatically. She remembers taking an algebra test and failing it. “I didn’t care,” she said.

He did. “He took me out in the hall and fussed at me,” she said. “Then he made me take the test again. I did and made an A. He gave me a B. I took the test again, because I didn’t want to let him down. It meant a lot to him for me to do well.” She wasn’t the first nor the last student he refused to let give less than his or her best.

She bought into his code, and when she did, he began to trust and believe in her. That’s why, at a regional math contest, she and two other classmates hated to disappoint him. A competitive man, he had practiced them for hours.

“When he asked me how I had done, I had to tell him, ‘Not well,’ ” she recalled The other two felt the same. “He looked downcast, but he told us that was all right. He knew we had worked hard preparing for it.”

That practice turned out to be enough for them to place first, second and third. Their less-than-stellar performance, as measured against their teacher’s standards, was the best of the day. Mr. Russell and his students became marked men. For other regional schools to compete with Graham, their teachers had to raise the level of their teaching and pre-competition preparation. Everyone benefited from Mr. Russell’s passion.

In the mold of inspirational teachers, he connected with students because he could laugh at himself. Tall and lanky, he didn’t mind when they called him “Lurch.” When they turned their desks toward the window, he worked out the homework problems on the window panes. On his birthday, he posed for the annual staff photographer with a mound of cupcakes on his desk. Everyone had baked him one. When a class made up a silly song, he danced for them. He wore two pairs of glasses, one over the other; his favorite color was chalk dust.

When his students tried to get him off topic by begging him to tell one of his stories, he obliged. The life-lessons they gleaned from his personal stories were on a par with the knowledge they got from his algebra, trigonometry and calculus lectures.

While he was one-of-a-kind, you can find a Mr. Russell-like teacher in many schools. It doesn’t matter how large the school is, how wealthy the school district, or how educated the teachers.

Inspirational teachers raise the educational standards of the schools they teach in. If you go to the No Child Left Behind Web site, and look for Graham High School, you will see that the school is 20.8 percent economically disadvantaged. That’s high. But the school’s performance shows that this statistic doesn’t spell disaster. Good teaching and high expectations can trump a poverty index.

For all of these students, he modeled a level of achievement that got sucked into their DNA. My daughter says that she majored in accounting in college “because of Mr. Russell.” Like many of his other students, when you see her, you see a part of him.

That’s a good enough reason to take algebra. Have you heard people say, “I don’t know why you have to take algebra. I have never used it again”?

Maybe they never again sweated bullets trying to figure out what time a car and a train would meet when they both left at the same time, from different places, traveling at different speeds.

That’s solving for X or the unknown. Figuring out the unknown is one of the most powerful things we do. It’s a way to have some control of our world, to make sure that things run smoothly.

We solve for X when we figure out how long we should cook the Thanksgiving turkey to have it done before company arrives. We use algebra when we step on the car’s brakes in time to avoid running into the truck in front of us. We use algebra when we estimate how much wood we need to burn in the winter fireplace.

Mr. Russell could figure these out easily. But there’s one problem that he could not solve. It’s what Henry Adams is talking about when he said: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”