David Jack is one of those students I will never forget. He loved to play chess and was good at it. Often, he would come to my room and haul out the chessboard. He’d hold a castle in one of his hands, and I would have to guess which hand it was in, kind of like a bone game to see who got first move. Then we’d start moving those pawns forward, we’d jump those knights around, move those bishops corner to corner, and it was quite the battle. Sometimes, when I heard the words “checkmate” it smarted because here I was a college grad being beat by one of my students.
Another thing David loved was dolly fishing in the Swinomish Channel and Skagit River. One day we were fishing the Johnson Bar in Burlington and David hung his lure on a snag, thinking it a fish, he set the hook and his fishing pole broke. I know a lot of people who would have been done fishing at that point, but not David. He went to the parking lot and found a piece of broken glass. He walked the bar, finding a flat sandy rock, he proceeded to shave and sand the broken halves of his fishing pole until they fit perfectly!
One day, I cleared the room and went to lunch. I didn’t know that David had tilted the storage cabinet out from the wall and hid behind it. When the cabinet tilted back, he was stuck and could not get out. The poor guy was stuck there the whole lunch period. After lunch, unlocking the door, I heard a muffled yell, “Help Mr. R. I’m stuck!” What if David had done that on a Friday afternoon and got stuck there the whole weekend? I could just imagine the newspaper headlines, “Teacher Leaves Student Trapped For The Weekend.”
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