Sep 23, 2022 4 min read

English composition was one of my favorite high school courses. In fact, during the first semester of my freshman year of college, my English professor pulled me aside and informed me that, he had exempted me from the next four-credit English composition course. That honor, plus a C grade in a course in my major that basically separated the truly gifted from the blindly devoted, made me think seriously about changing my major to English. I didn’t, but what did occur was my lifelong commitment to writing.

As a young teacher, I decided to try my hand at that craft. This effort resulted in endless article submissions to places like The Readers Digest, Look, Life and numerous newspapers, but the outcome of that effort was multiple rejection letters. My humor was even too dark to sell greeting card ideas. For example, a sympathy card that read, “I was so sorry to hear about your death” did not even get me the perfunctory rejection letter.

But one Sunday morning while reading the now defunct Pittsburgh Press, I saw a blistering column that was written by Dr. Benjamin Fine one year before his death. He had been a New York Times education writer and in 1947 had received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. This is the same man after whom The Benjamin Fine Awards for Outstanding Education Reporting are now given.

It was possible that Ben might have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that week because his article in the Press was a scathing indictment of the “new generation of teachers,” the Baby Boomers. He completely eviscerated us, our commitment to education, our skills, knowledge, and our quest for a better income. As a dedicated teacher who worked 50 or 60 hours a week perfecting my skills, I was infuriated by this article. My response was a not-to-be-published-ever letter to the editor which was, in fact, a query asking for the privilege of responding to this journalistic attack.

As fate would have it, the editor of that section of the Press was on vacation when my query letter arrived, and his assistant editor decided to ignore the phrase, “This is not for publication.”

The following Sunday morning, my mother and father who had driven 80 minutes to see their newborn grandson were sitting in our living room when my dad looked up and said, “There’s a letter to the editor here in the Press signed by you.” He then began to read it, word for word. That’s when I first began to appreciate the sensation of tightness in my chest.

For me to say that I had not held back in describing my feelings toward the top administration and the board members’ decision-making skills in this raging article query would be a distorted understatement. Plus, to get the editor’s attention and his potential approval for a rebuttal article, I had taken no prisoners. Each word that my dad read felt like another nail in my educator coffin because my true feelings were clearly on display.

As you might have guessed, the letter was read at a school board meeting, and, except for the fact that I had tenure and the attorney from the teachers’ union was there to represent me, I most probably would have been fired.

The discipline dealt out to me at that meeting included a complete removal of my annual budget, no student teachers that year, and a reprimand that could only be described as a CLM, a career-limiting move. The editor at the Press offered his apology to me, but that was the extent at his attempt at damage control.

My year consisted of borrowing music, instruments, repair kits and whatever else I could get from my fellow music teachers in the area. In hindsight, my only regret was this brilliant take-down wasn’t on the internet forever.

Nick Jacobs of Windber is a health-care consultant and author of two books.