An Appreciation

For a teacher whose main objective was to see students learn

I made one of my occasional research visits to Huntington Library in southern California a couple of weeks ago. Poking around the shop (near the exit, naturally, but at least they don’t make you walk through it to get out of the place), I spotted a copy of Joshua Hammer’s 2016 book, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (and their race to save the world’s most precious manuscripts). It tickled my growing appreciation for manuscripts, and besides, the title was irresistible. I picked it up, and I’m now about a third of the way through it.

The Bad-Ass Librarians tells the story of a determined effort by a small group to save thousands of manuscripts representing the attainments of mostly medieval writers and scholars in the Sahel, the arid strip south of the Sahara. This literary efflorescence pretty much came to an end when European colonizers subdued the region.

This book brings to mind an extraordinary day - probably in 1972 or 1973 - in my large, suburban high school in the St. Louis area. One of the social studies teachers, Roy Johnson, had given over his day to a special presentation. Pretty much every social studies class, instead of going to our regular classrooms, trooped into a large classroom (with other students scheduled for social studies at the same time), for Mr. Johnson’s presentation. He must have repeated it half a dozen times that day.

I had never had Mr. Johnson for social studies. I only knew him as a slender, mild-mannered teacher, distinctive mostly for his practice of riding his bicycle to school and his crew-cut. Not really knowing him, I had somehow formed an unfair impression that he was kind of a hick or hayseed. Turned out he had something important to teach us - a bit of hidden history that shouldn’t be hidden.

Source: https://greatwestafricancivilizations.weebly.com/kingdom-of-songhai.html

Once we had settled in, Mr. Johnson sat on a high stool, picked up a guitar, and sang for us a series of songs he had written, in a kind of twangy, country style. But they were not your usual country ballads. Their subject matter was the great medieval kingdoms of West Africa - Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. These were the kingdoms from which much of the subject matter of The Bad-Ass Librarians emerged. I don’t really remember the songs (though I do recall that one began, “I sing a song of Songhai,”) but a half-century on, I remember the day. We obviously didn’t get past a basic introduction, but I think the point was just to make sure we knew those kingdoms had existed. That way, if we later read somewhere that Mansa Musa, on the way to the hajj, splashed around enough gold in Egypt to cause inflation there, we might have at least a little context.

I still don’t know exactly why this special class took place when it did. Was it in response to some incident? Were we about to read some of the less-enlightened views of the great Enlightenment thinkers? Or was is just a special project of Mr. Johnson’s come to fruition, and a way to expose us to an important bit of history that wasn’t part of the regular curriculum? Whatever the reason, I’m grateful to Mr. Johnson for going out of his way to show us something he felt we really ought to know.

I do remember one more thing from that day. Some of us, who had never had him in class, asked him about his crew-cut (we were all pretty shaggy then). He explained that when he was our age, he came home with it one day, and his father objected, saying, “A young fella like you oughta have a full head of hair.” He kept his crew-cut as a nod to his own act of teenage rebellion. We understood completely.

So thank you, Mr. Johnson. There’s a special place in heaven for teachers that go beyond the minimum requirements of the job because they care about the kids.