JOHN BECKER, S.J.

My favorite teacher died last week.

John R. Becker, a Jesuit priest, had spent the final 57 years of his time on earth teaching English to high school students. I had the good fortune to have Fr. Becker for sophomore English at Brophy College Prep in Phoenix, Arizona, during the 1981-82 school year.

Fr. Becker was, in a word, original. For example, if we students were speaking while he was trying to teach us, he never raised his voice. Instead, he lowered it. Earlier this month I was reading the comedian Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up , and Martin wrote that he did the same exact thing when his audience had too many hecklers. It's an effective strategy.

If you read this blog often, you know that I have an uncommon love of puns and wordplay (my friend Steve Rushin, and our everlasting blogstalker, G.A., endure a similar affliction). No one person did more to cultivate that ardor than Fr. Becker. Someone would ask him if he wanted the homework collected, and he'd reply, "That'll make me feel like a firefly in the rain...de-lighted."

I'll admit, I was even denser then. There were puns like that he used daily that I probably didn't catch on to for months.

Fr. Becker, a lean man with a lively face and short brown hair, taught English the way Mr. Miyagi taught martial arts: through relentless repetition. Almost daily he'd pull out a typed essay or work of literature that had had all of the grammar excised. It was our job to decide where commas and semicolons and the like belonged. On the first day of class he handed us two books, "The Writer's Handbook", which he dubbed "The Brown Bible" (due to the color of its cover), and a vocabulary tome, "New Building Word Power". To this day I use them both, as do a lot of my classmates.

As I said, Fr. Becker was an original. He never got angry, which is not at all to say that he was a pushover. One day he was giving a lesson and a friend of mine, a student who would go on to the Air Force Academy, was trying to do homework for the next period's class. We've all been there, right? Well, Fr. Becker saw what my friend Matt was doing. Without ever breaking stride, or interrupting his train of thought verbally, Fr. Becker picked up all the books on Matt's desk--half-completed homework assignment included-- walked over to the classroom door, opened it, and threw them out onto the sidewalk.

It was masterful. And remember, this was before Mr. Hand in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High".

You learned in Fr. Becker's class, but you laughed, too. He understood that he had a roomful of 15 year-old boys who all talked a much better game, socially and intellectually, than they walked. He encouraged playfulness in writing and discussion, and he never judged. After a month or two in Fr. Becker's class, you felt comfortable saying just about anything.

It seems hard to fathom now, but as a 15 year-old I was afraid to write for our school paper because I felt I lacked the skill. It was Fr. Becker who would approach me after class and tell me that I was failing to take advantage of what skills I'd been given. Were it not for his prodding, I may never have had the nerve to write my first story for a school newspaper. In other words, Mom and Dad, you can blame Fr. Becker.

Fr. Becker, whose daily regimen included a post school-day bike ride up Central Avenue in Phoenix, died last Saturday. I'm somewhat relieved in knowing that since graduating a long time ago, I'd written him more than once to thank him for all he did for me. In fact, when my Brophy class staged its 20-year reunion in 2004, Fr. Becker was the one teacher whom we invited. And he showed up, too.

I am just one student. When I think about the fact that this man devoted his life to teaching young men English, that he had more than 56 years of classes (certainly more than one class per year; many times five or six) of students whose lives he impacted, I am struck by what a worthy life he lived.

So long, Fr. Becker. Have a dry weekend.