Meeting Doc Rosenquist
On passion and its applications, and nurturing strays...
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
I had a lot of amazing teachers along the way. But as a student, if you get even one who is anywhere near as special as my high school Latin teacher, Dr. Stephen “Doc” Rosenquist, you will be lucky indeed. I suppose I met him on the first day of school my freshman year. Latin 2A was a small but staggeringly intelligent group of humans who went on to lead fascinating lives. Doc lived in the freshman dorm on campus and I remember visiting his apartment early on. His cat Athena (she was grey, like the goddess’ eyes) took a liking to me. Which flabbergasted Doc. Athena was a rescue and was exceedingly skittish around other people. Her vote of confidence, I think, was important in winning over Doc, much moreso than my grades in Latin ever could.
Here’s something I wrote when he passed away, which was read at his memorial service on campus. Side note, take pictures with the people who matter in your life. You won’t regret it.
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For four years, I spent an hour of the day in Cranbrook’s Room 111 earning a steady diet of Cs. It was an anchor, weighing down my GPA and my hope of getting into the College of my Choice. I could have quit at any time -- dropped out of Latin and taken a class that I was interested in. Because, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely into studying a foreign language and a dead one at that. Yet every fall I signed on again. You could say that my teacher was a failure. That if, after all that time, I still didn't have a great grasp of the subjunctive mood, he wasn't getting through to me.
But that guess would earn you even lower marks than I did on my weekly vocab quizzes, or on the AP exam which he really couldn't have prepped us better for.
Doc, my teacher all those years all those years ago, was unlike any other. He was a man of extremes. He smoked to extremes: Gauloises, the Jolt Cola of cigarettes with all the tar and twice the nicotine. He drank coffee to extremes. He collected stray cats and stray students to extremes and nurtured both with equal zeal making sure that we would eventually be fit company and not so shy and mistrusting of others. He taught five classes with five preps, a rather unheard of course-load.
I think when most people think of “Latin class” they think of dusty books and dusty teachers, dryly declining. Discipline is a word derived from the Latin, after all and with its connections to Catholic schools as the language of dogma, one assumes that discipline and Latin remain intertwined.
Not in room 111. Or in room 112, for that matter where the outbursts from next door would cause Mr. Dagbovie, the neighboring French teacher, to glance over his shoulder from the blackboard, staring at the back wall and shaking his head. At times he would actually come knock on our door or lean out the window to see what the ruckus was.
When he looked in at the daily play going on, hour after hour, through Latin I, II, III, AP IV and AP V, he might have seen Doc banging chalk on the blackboard, or kids playing cards under his desk, or Doc passionately explaining how the use of the ablative case changed the meaning of a line in Horace's Odes, or the kids sitting up in the window sill seemingly not paying attention. Someone walking down the hall might, on rare but special occasions, find Doc standing with one foot on each door knob, swinging back and forth and making monkey noises all so he could fit in better with the circus/zoo inside his classroom.
Commotion, there's another good Latin-derived word.
All the while, he was teaching. In that classroom and especially beyond it. Teaching Latin, for sure. Teaching about having passion, even for a language long given up for dead. Teaching about the extremes you'll go to for that passion. In my case, he once told me that he was envious of the fact that I could prioritize in my own life. If something was important to me, I could drop everything until it was addressed. He was telling me, essentially, that he understood why I wasn’t getting As. He might prefer if I “applied myself” more, but he knew I wouldn’t and that maybe that was OK in the long run. He couldn't do that. Doc was binary. Every dial was set to 11 or zero, every day. Every day was coffee, class, coffee, class, smoke, cats, class, smoke, bridge, prep for tomorrow, smoke, cats and maybe eventually sleep. I think he eventually had to give much of that up. Not cut back. Zero. And somehow he also fit in making a profound difference in people's lives.
The testimonials that started rolling in after his passing this week show the impact he had on his students, not just for the minutes in his class room, but throughout their lives. Refrains of "he saved my life" echo in the comments on Facebook. "He listened." "He fought for me." "He taught me how to be myself." I can't think of many teachers who were as beloved by the students getting Cs and Ds as those getting As. And to that end, I'll share one more story of my own.
It was always a bit of a mystery how I got into Northwestern. Let's just say I was a borderline candidate to be sure. My GPA could have been higher, and likely would have been if I'd dropped Latin. Doc knew I wanted to go to NU and without prompting of any sort, just out of the blue wrote them a letter about why they should accept me. Not part of my formal application. Just an outside voice. A letter of support from the teacher of my weakest subject. He signed it Stephen Rosenquist, PhD because those letters mattered and were sign that he knew that education, that learning and teaching, mattered. Thought I'll never know for sure, I suspect it made a difference to Shep and the folks at admissions. Regardless, it made a difference to me.
RIP, Doc.
Ad astra per aspera.