A STUDENT'S TAKE ON SUSPENDED TEACHER

There were three types of kids at summer school: those who hated
school and failed their classes, those who loved school and needed
extra room to take more classes, and those who had nothing better to
do.

I walked onto campus the summer before my freshman year at Westlake
High School to take a required course, health. I wasn't a particularly
unhealthy kid (although my current strict diet of red meat and french
fries suggests otherwise), and I wasn't interested in taking more
classes than I had to. I was a kid who had nothing better to do over
the summer.

On the first day, high school seemed scary. The buildings were big,
the students were big, and I was small.

Before class started, all the smart kids who were trying to take more
classes talked quietly in their corners using big, intimidating words.
The kids who failed their classes yelled loudly in their corners using
much smaller, but equally intimidating, words. And the rest of us
walked around, using no words, looking intimidated.

I couldn't see much hope for the next four years.

Finally the bell rang and I went to health class. I honestly wasn't
expecting much: maybe a few more state-funded "Just Around the Corner"
videos about puberty and a semi-scary talk about how smoking leads to
a robot-voice, but not much else.

Thanks to my great teacher though, I was mistaken.

Courtney Stockton, the WHS teacher who was recently accused of having
less than an ounce of marijuana in his car on campus, was my teacher
that summer for health.

His teaching methods were as ordinary as his first name is masculine.
He talked, just talked, for whole class periods about the nature of
life, as if it was a course in philosophy.

His lectures may have started off with health-related topics like the
negative effects of drugs, but he eventually would find a tangent and
run with it. The class never got bored.

He talked about the s t ruc tur e s of time and space according to a
physics professor he heard on the radio. He talked about meeting his
wife at a camp. He talked about swimming in an Olympic pool.

No matter what topic, he had a ton of stories in stock. But he always
had a method to his madness-each lecture had a purpose, a logical and
lucid flow that helped the students retain the material.

At lunch, the kids from other health classes said they had fallen
asleep after the last lecture on sleeping. All of Mr. Stockton's kids
would talk about his different stories and somehow relate them back to
the topic at the beginning of the lecture.

Mr. Stockton turned a boring curriculum into an interesting class,
and, at the end of the day, we learned the same stuff and probably
retained more of it than the bored classes did.

Plus we learned a little about life according to Mr. Stockton. He was
my first high school teacher and was one of my best.

Mr. Stockton's anti-drug teachings and his recent alleged drugrelated
actions may be contradictory; however, his actions may actually add to
his teachings.

His alleged drug possession has led to his suspension, a true
testament to his health lessons of how drug use will hurt someone in
the long run. And I'm sure he will use this story of his suspension to
teach kids in the future before moving on to some memorable tangent in
his lectures.

So, as the district decides how to act with regard to Mr. Stockton's
alleged possession of marijuana, I hope that it takes into account
that he was, and still is, a great teacher.

Students need his ability to make the classroom interesting, and they
need to hear this story, along with the rest of them, firsthand.

Dashiell Young-Saver is a senior at Westlake High School. He is a
regular Acorn contributor.