When I think of chemistry, I think of my first chemistry classroom in McQuaid Jesuit High School and my teacher Mr. Countryman. He was probably my favorite teacher and I’m just going to go ahead and blame him for my eventual choice to major in chemical engineering. Maybe if I had taken physics with Mr. Missel sophomore year, I would have gone down a different, equally fruitless engineering path but that’s not how it happened.
The spectrum of teachers ranges from the ones you like personally to the ones you hate personally. Then there are teachers who are difficult and teachers who are easy, usually because of their subject manner. Mr. Countryman was the best of all worlds. I liked him and he taught a difficult subject that he managed to make easy to me. He could be gruff but only if you were being stupid.
He had the air of a man with street smarts but really he was just smart. He had gone to McQuaid himself and to college to double major in chemistry and something else. Yeah, I forget what, he mentioned this offhand over twenty years ago. The point is, he was smart.
He dressed like a perpetual McQuaid senior, when you had the privilege (yes, privilege) of wearing a sweater over your button down shirt and tie, instead of a jacket.
I had heard of him before I went to McQuaid. He was friends with my friend Loren’s mom’s boyfriend. She told me to look out for him when I went to McQuaid because all the kids loved him. Loren shook his head at that behind his mom’s back but it turned out to be true.
He was a hard living guy. He looked weathered. Red faced, a little bloated. I think he smoked out the window of our classroom when we were taking tests. (If I’m imagining that detail, then it’s certainly emotionally honest. I do remember seeing him leaving Topps with a couple of cartons of smokes, when my mom left with only one.) Do a google image search for Richard Yates, the hard drinking, four pack a day smoker author of Revolutionary Road. He looked like that but with a pony tail (and not like a hippie teacher pony tail, more like a George Carlin Jammin’ in New York pony tail, so it was cool).
Junior year I took AP Chemistry with Mr. Schaeffer. He had been the vice principal and main disciplinarian when I started school but wanted to teach chemistry again. He was more serious and, in his hands, a difficult subject seemed suitably difficult.
Mr. Countryman passed away a year or two ago. I heard it on social media from my friend Matt who teaches there now. We live in a world now where everyone pays tribute to a celebrity like they were a cherished relative. And on a personal level, after losing both my parents, it takes a lot to shed tears over someone. But he was a hell of a great teacher.
Hell, he was good enough to send me down the completely wrong path in life.
