Thanking My Teachers (Some Of Them)

I watched the Oscars this morning (Asia time).  Ellen D. was great, blah, blah, blah . . . I enjoyed it.  One guy got to thanking people and he added, "I'd like to thank my teachers," adding with a smile, "some of them."

So I wondered: which of my teachers would I like to thank?  The list is longer than I thought it would be.

I'd like thank:

1.  Sister Joseta (second grade).  What a beautiful, kindhearted woman.  I was totally smitten.  She was very young and she was not yet suffering the inevitable bitterness of being a nun of the Order of Dominicans.

2.  Brother Etienne Cooper (high school).  The only teacher in my Catholic high school who treated me with any kindness and respect at all.  He was a very nice man, the "art teacher."

3.  Professor Sterling Callison (Pace College, now "University.")  My first Art History teacher.  A wonderful man who seemed to believe that I had something on the ball in spite of my grades.

4.  Professor Peter Fingesten (Pace College.)  Fingesten is Googleable.  He was another Art History teacher at Pace.  He was also a kind of famous Surrealist artist.  He was also a very, very funny man, in all of the good ways, and a great teacher.  He also taught us, by example, to curse in Italian.

5.  Professor Irene Winter (CUNY, Queens College.)  Still alive as of this writing, and Googleable.  She was/is a very accomplished and successful Art Historian.  She only taught at Queens for five years; now she's teaching at Harvard and Oxford, no less.  She was very encouraging, and she seemed to be genuinely interested in me, like maybe even I had some potential.

6.  Professor Robert Pincus-Witten (CUNY, Queens College.)  Still alive and famous, very Googleable.  He's a highly accomplished and serious Art Historian and curator.  Nice enough but not overly so, he nevertheless grudgingly praised my work on several occasions and allowed that I might even have had a future in that business.  (I was considering the Art History PhD career model at the time.)

7.  Professor Martin Anderle (CUNY, Queens College.)  My German professor for German 3 and 4.  He was a great teacher and a very tough task master, he worked us hard and was quite demanding.  I unsurprisingly thought that my German was shitty ("manglehaft").  He smiled once and told me, with an amused chuckle, "no, it's pretty good actually."  I learned a lot from him.

8.  Daniel Broderick, Esq. (Pepperdine University School of Law.)  I had a few very good teachers at Pepperdine, and my professors there were generally respectful (I was a "mature" student, after all, older than many of them).  Although the rest of them never actually lifted a finger to help me, Dan Broderick went the extra yard.  He was very impressed with my efforts in setting up a Public Interest Law Foundation for Pepperdine law students, and he felt that the school should do something for me in return.  Through his efforts, I got a decent law clerk job that lasted for my last year and a half of law school. He was also my Evidence teacher.  That was one of the hardest finals that I have ever taken, or ever even heard of, much harder than anything on the bar exam.  I learned a lot from him. 


I believe that I learned a lot from everyone on this list.  They were a good bunch, I smile when I look at their names, I think that I was very lucky to have encountered them.

Thank God for them!  Without this precious few adults who were decent to me and were somewhat approving and encouraging, I don't know what would have become of me.