Saturday, June 4, 2016

Teachers vs Educators - Bernard A. DiNatale et ux

This may seem redundant that I would pit two words against each other like this, but I should say that we have many teachers in the United States, but few of them are truly educators.  This is much like what Saint Paul had said
I Cor 4:15 For if you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, by the gospel, I have begotten you.
This of course is the classic refute to the Protestant who holds up St. Matthew 23:9-10 as evidence that the Catholic Church is wrong to call priests by the title "father".  St. Paul is clearly calling himself "father" and distinguishing himself from the ten thousand instructors in Christ.

I was having a talk with my high school friend Andy Wallace, that began as a face time session, but I was talking too fast and starting to hyper ventilate, and we switched to IM chatting.  We were talking about one of our outstanding educators Bernard A. DiNatale Jr. and Andy had found his obituary from 2013.

It's a nice obituary to be sure, but I feel that between Andy and I, there's more to be said about the man.

With a tiny bit of googling I found that his wife Carolyn a.k.a. "Candy" is still living in Dunstable, MA.  As I had told Andy, he was not aware that "Candy" (who I can't get out of the habit of calling Mrs. DiNatale) was also my 3rd grade teacher at South Row Elementary  in Chelmsford.  Though I was living on the West side of Chelmsford, I was placed in Mrs. DiNatale's towards the end of my third grade through a state special needs program called 766.  Actually, on that year, Mrs. DiNatale's class was being taught at Byam Elementary which was for the West side of Chelmsford, but for the following year, I repeated third grade and the class was moved to South Row, though it was on the other side of town.

As would be my legacy, I would often find myself in the care of teachers who were barely qualified for the job, and I could often embarrass them by pointing out their errors to the class. Well, that didn't win me many friends among the faculty, so the best thing was to get me tested, and make it seem like it was my problem and that I needed a special educator that was beyond the training of the teacher that I had been assigned.  This was my first experience that taught me that people can tell small 'white' lies about others to manipulate the situation.  Sure, my parents were divorcing that year, but does this mean I was so emotionally distraught that I needed special handling?  Apparently it was enough to get me off of this one particular teacher's back even though I wasn't really that upset that my father was living somewhere else.  To be honest, I was a little too self absorbed to really care much about such things. I still saw him on occasion, so it wasn't like he died or anything.  But people were able to make the argument that I wasn't behaving right and this must be the cause.

These are the sort of teachers whom I would never remember, but Mrs. DiNatale was an educator of great talent.

She was tremendous help to my early formation. She provided the space I needed to grow, and a lot of good self paced lessons.  I don't think I needed much more encouragement to have confidence that I was a smart kid.  On the contrary, Mrs. DiNatale was able to talk me down gently and learn to better interact with my educators and peers, and not embarrass them quite so much.  I recall we had a student named Jamie who suffered from a severe epilepsy and wore a hockey helmet all day long.  In a typical classroom environment kids can be cruel, and Jamie certainly was getting the brunt of that cruelty.  In Mrs. DiNatale's class, we all learned to be more accepting of people that were just a little strange.  She created the right kind of environment for us all, so that we were able to grow through those years. Jamie found a safe place of acceptance, and we all learned that people come in many sizes, colors and abilities. Long before diversity education became all the rage, I was already well ahead of that trend due to Mrs. DiNatale's guidance.

Mrs. DiNatale got me to learn more about respecting other people's feelings than any could at that time of my life.  This also included respecting the feelings of teachers.

I was able to phone Mrs. DiNatale yesterday, and though Mr. DiNatale had passed in 2013, she was able to describe the hole he still left in her life. 

Later in high school, as Mr. DiNatale's student, one of the things that I saw was he taught his electronics class with the intent of making sure each student right then and there had learned enough about the trade that regardless of any further education they might receive, they were already prepared to meet the working world as an electronics technician.  Here again, beyond the typical curriculum of electronics, Mr. DiNatale was able to provide space for individual students to explore beyond the course material.

There was a digital electronics board with discrete and-gates and or-gates and inverters from which I was able to make a three digit decimal counter and drive a seven segment display of this count.

I'm a little more comfortable calling Mr. DiNatale by his first name, because ironically he suffered from a touch of dyslexia, and had trouble being able to distinguish a small letter b from a small letter d. and since of course, those were his initials we had some fun with that.

I had created a custom logo for him that was a parody of the Atari logo, and I added to two outside symbols or regions of color a couple of semi-circular lobes to turn these into the small letters 'b' and 'd', and the center was turned into a stylized 'a'.  the black "Atari" was turned into "Dinatari" which of course you'd pronounce with a thick Japanese accent.   Of course it was hard for Mr. DiNatale to see all that because of the symmetry involved, but he seemed to enjoy it.

There was also the day the Mr. DiNatale had discovered that I had brought a camping knife to school.  And he did a perfect job of seeing to it that I never brought it back, and without reporting it to anyone.  I can't tell you much about the circumstances of why I had brought it to school, but Mr. D had done the right thing to get me to reverse my conduct.

I owe quite a bit to each of the DiNatale's for keeping me out of trouble and setting me on the best course I could get in my life.

One of the things Mrs. DiNatale and I were talking about last night is the trouble that current teachers have to face where there are the forces of political correctness that would make it difficult for any such motivated educator to actually educate today's children in equally effective ways.

That should be a whole other post - but for now I will simply express my gratitude that the DiNatale's were the educators that they were and that the benefits of their efforts also reach down to another generation as I pass these lessons onto my children.

2 comments:

  1. I had just thought to look up Mr. Dinatale a couple of days ago and I found his obituary. I too had him for Electronics 1 and 2 in High School and he was my absolute favorite teacher. In fact, I had a pretty huge crush on him :)

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    1. Yes, he was very charming in a lot of ways. I'd also like to point out that while I found him to be a profound influence in my life, I'm sure there are thoussnds of students who could easily say they benefited in the same or more measure. No different than any of the classic characters of fiction such as a "Mr. Chips".

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