Richard Baxter, 1946-2006

April 1996 in Krakow. I'm second from the left; Baxter is on the right.

I was in the International Baccalaureate program at Richard Montgomery High School at the same time that Richard Murray Baxter taught history to that collection of the young, gifted and Montgomery County-Ian, but because I spent a year and a half in special education, I only had him for one semester, at the end of junior year. Those friends from freshman year with whom I had kept in touch reported with amazement and fascination on the exploits of "Baxter," as he was universally called; in their stories, his classroom sounded irresistibly appealing, a blend of intellectual rigor, jovial banter, and contagious enthusiasm for the material. All true - but I still wasn't quite prepared for the experience.

During the second semester of my junior year, Baxter did not have a home classroom, instead pushing a cart around to rooms that opened up for periods at a time. The room for my seventh-period IB World History class was shallow, fitting maybe four desks deep; it was a little wider than normal to make up for that, but we all still had to squeeze in pretty tight. The room's one redeeming feature was the sunlight that would stream in through the windows on the back wall - on a clear afternoon, the room absolutely blazed with light and we didn't turn on the overhead lights at all.        

The sunlight shone brightest on Baxter, who contributed to the tight squeeze by commandeering much of the front of the classroom. He'd enter as he wheeled his cart in front of him, then leave it and stride to the front of the room, students in front inching their desks backward to accommodate his commanding bulk. His stentorian voice carried easily to every desk, though he had to make sure to involve himself with the students sitting near the door; otherwise, they would get less attention than those sitting right in front of the blackboard, on which he scrawled key phrases and concepts. He would pick up a stick of chalk, express bewilderment at the state in which previous educators had left the chalk supply or the blackboard, and announce that class was in session with "Guten Abend, meinem Damen und Herren!" or some equally summary English expression. Then came 47 minutes of historical thrills, chills and spills, until the bell rang and high-school life became prosaic and dull again.

Unfortunately, I'm not remembering and writing all this now because I'm such a good rememberer. Rather, I was spurred to take keyboard in hand by Baxter's untimely passing on October 15, 2006. After the apex of excitement that teaching me doubtless was, he stayed on at RM for a couple years before becoming a middle-school administrator. He then decided he didn't like the desk job and high-tailed it out of there to teach history at Walter Johnson High School, the only high school to be named after a man who won more than 400 games in the major leagues.

The WJ folks held a memorial service on November 22, 2006, the day before Thanksgiving, to give alumni scattered cross-country a chance to show up when coming home for the holiday. It was the best kind of memorial service, in which all the speakers remembered the best things about the deceased, and how much fun he was, and all the ways in which he had touched those who knew him. Baxter's wife Rosa attended and gave a short, moving address that told us all what we both felt sure of and wanted to know: His students were at the front of his mind even off school grounds, and he talked about us at home just as he talked about Rosa and his children at school.

After the service, we were invited to donate to the Richard Baxter Scholarship Fund; donors were asked to take something from a table of Baxterian memorabilia (books, CDs, etc.) that his family didn't need to keep. I dropped an Andrew Jackson in the box and beelined to the CDs. After a couple minutes of poring over the arrayed discs, I found what I was looking for: A compilation of Beethoven overtures conducted by Sir Colin Davis that I had given Baxter upon completing the one semester I had with him. When I picked it up, I was immeasurably pleased to find marks of wear on it. He had listened to it. It had been a part of his life after I had ceased to be.

Baxter gave me a gift upon the end of my time with him as well, a copy of John Irving's Setting Free the Bears, which concerns a plot to liberate the Vienna Zoo. Baxter inscribed it as follows:

Mein Freund!

This book makes for some great reading; "right up your alley" as they say in the Grenadier Guards. Enjoy!

Absorb Deutschland!

[acorn drawing]

The Grand Baxterian, Juni, '95

It really is a kick-ass book, strange and affecting and something you wouldn't normally think a high-school teacher would recommend one of his students. I read some other Irving afterward, and, at least to me, none of the rest of his books were up to the level of the one Baxter selected.

Pedagogically, Baxter employed two main tactics. He had us scour the IB's standard Eurohistory textbook, A History of the Modern World by R.R. Palmer (aka "Palmer"), for facts, names and events, which he then had us regurgitate with relatively little context on exams also known as Palmers. (E.g.: "Did you read Palmer?" "Naw, and I'm gonna fail the Palmer seventh period.") This produced a framework on which he could weave what he considered the true glory of history, the tales of events and how they could be interpreted. Baxter was equally comfortable taking history at a broad sweep or delving into its details, assessing facts or explicating philosophies, and teaching bout Europe or any other region of the world; there was nothing about which he could not speak commandingly, and nothing that seemed to bore him.

He interwove into his lectures his own fancies: his continued advocacy of the Acorn Intellectual society, and his constant pushing of us teenagers to make ourselves worthy of membership; his claims of German and Belgian heritage, which seemed tough to square with his African-American appearance; his service in Napoleon's Grand Armee, which seemed tough to square with his having a human lifespan. But these had a canny rhetorical effect: Baxter's enthusiasm for history, to the point of inserting himself in it, taught a bunch of smart high school kids that learning was a joyful thing and that every additional increment of enthusiasm for what you've learned just makes things more fun. When you are a young person attempting to somehow control and perhaps marshal your intellectual impulses, your hormones, and your budding (or, in my case, still-dormant) social skills, it is a great and profound comfort for someone to show you through his own life, rather than telling you in the manner of an after-school special, that knowledge is something to pursue with unreserved ardor.

And then there was the gruff yet affectionate manner in which he addressed us, a manner I have noticed in many of Baxter's fellow veterans who have entered "caring" professions like teaching and medicine. He would scornfully intone the word "teenagers," or bark orders at the class in German, or instruct someone that hats were not allowed in his classroom by slapping his baseball cap off his head. He would encourage students to push onward in their endeavors with a genial scold, or flatly refuse to tell people their grades to encourage learning rather than percentage-minding. He was also just silly sometimes; I have an assignment sheet from my semester with him that instructs its readers to prepare an oral presentation "between five and seven point eight minutes in length."

On certain days, he would give up on teaching and station himself at the back of the room, allowing us to petition him on any subject on which we wanted his input. It was on such a day that he told us that "The thing about Cal Ripken is, he's got a high butt," an utterance that remains unparalled in my academic history. I have heard tell of him simply playing Monty Python episodes while running out the post-exams string at the end of the year. Yet he would engage in intellectual discussions at such times, too, without limiting himself to the topics on the course syllabus. During my senior year, when Baxter had garnered his own classroom, this atmosphere carried over into the lunch hour, when like-minded folks would gather to talk about school and knowledge and to sit at the feet of the Imperial Baxterian.

My relationship with Baxter was not all sweetness and light. I went on a spring-break trip to Eastern Europe with him, his wife, a few other faculty members, a bunch of other students, and a few students' parents in the spring of 1996. As is made amply clear by reading the journal I kept during the trip, I spent much of the time I was overseas acting inappropriately or cowering from all human contact (both of which were attributable to an ongoing slow meltdown I was having that would climax before the end of the year). At one point while our group was prowling the streets of Budapest, I punched another student in the chest; meaning to inflict just a tap, I disastrously caught him right in the solar plexus, where any blow can make it difficult to breathe. Without actually naming me, Baxter rightly reamed me out in front of the entire group. I apologized to my fellow student, but I'm not sure if I apologized to Baxter, and I should have. He let me back in his orbit eventually, though; I was trying to be good, and I think he knew that. Or I hope he did.

Baxter was actually one of the few people at RM who knew where I had gone for a year and a half. After a first month of his class in which I displayed a near-boundless enthusiasm for (1) his near-boundless enthusiasm and (2) the German cultural history we were being taught at the time, he asked me, essentially, where I had been all this time, since it wasn't in his class.

Because I already liked Baxter a lot, I made a very quick decision to tell the truth rather than drawing on my stock of well-used evasions. "Do you know what Frost is?" I asked, naming the school at which I had toiled to return to socio-behavioral respectability.

"Yes."

"That's where I was."

Baxter looked at me in disbelief, at which point I enlisted my classmate Jeff Jacobs to confirm that I never ever lie. Baxter immediately became solicitous, as much so as I ever saw him, in praising my eagerness to learn. Later in the semester, he gave me a couple little helps in the class that I didn't really need; I attributed them to his knowledge of where I had come from.

Other students invited him in further into their lives than I did, and he liked to be invited — at the memorial service, people talked about him showing up for softball games, trading mix CDs with him, and letting him weigh in on their career choices. When I went to Berlin and Prague with my family during that junior year, he read the entire journal I kept of that trip, remarking the next day on some curious encounters I had had with Czech women, trying to draw me out. I sometimes wonder what would have gone differently if Baxter and I had been closer, even though I know the answer is probably "not much." He wasn't superhuman, even if it sometimes seemed that way.

It was a few weeks after we discussed Frost that he asked me if I had a recording of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony that I could bring in to class. Alfred Lord Tennstedt's version with the London Philharmonic Orchestra came to RM in my backpack the next day.

Baxter began the day's lesson with a disquisition on Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, that desperate chronicle of the title character's unrequitable love for Lotte, which seemed to resonate sharply with his teenage audience. He then passed out copies of the close of the work, in which (spoiler alert!) Werther finally gives up on it all and writes a letter telling Lotte why, put the second movement of the Pastoral ("By the brook") on a boombox, and had us sit silently and read Werther's finale. The sunlight was once again streaming bountifully through the windows, Werther was pleading with heaven and earth to give his love a chance, and the music of the stream swirled lovely, limpid and unaffected from the speakers behinds. We teenagers were rapt and silent. I have never felt anything in a classroom as deeply as I felt Werther's sorrow that day.        

That's how Baxter taught - with everything he had, by any means necessary, showing you that this was worth caring about, worth immersing yourself in. And from that flowed everything else that was great about Baxter for his students. It is a sad thing indeed that there will be no more of us.

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