Mr. Anthony Saverino
He's probably an odd choice to start this section. There were
many more
popular teachers, hipper, funnier, cuter. He was easy to mock. In fact,
the mind reels at the range of targets: the black-shirt, white-tie outfits
that made him look like "Henchman #3" on an episode of "Batman";
his
predilection for taking over a plodding class reading of, say, "West Side
Story" by playing all the parts; the fun of watching him corner some kid
by
a locker into a never-ending lecture. That trap was sprung when his
briefcase inexorably came down to the floor. Now, nothing short of a bomb
scare could end his rap. He was windy. The favorite word of 9th graders,
"boring" fit him all too often.
And yet. And yet.
Nobody, nobody prepared better for class. He had goals for each
day, and he
met them. If he had to cover 30 pages of "Romeo and Juliet" and we
couldn't
read aloud "I bite my thumb sir" without smirking, then yeah, he'd
read it
for us. But finishing all the syllabus meant we had more "specific
examples" to cite in the final exam. I appreciated his blitzes through
drama in the spring, because I tuned out "Something Wicked THis Way Comes"
and any poetry, and still didn't feel empty-handed in June.
He cared, and conveyed his passion. 9th-grade english was largely
about
adolescence (the plays, "Great Expectations", "Black Boy",
"To Kill A
Mockingbird", with oddities like "King Solomon's Mines" thrown
in around
May, to keep eyes open in the heat) and he never lost sight of the
adolescents he taught. OK, he sounded ridiculous badgering us to reread
what was going on in "Sixteen" or "Split Cherry Tree". Reread!!
Those
stories were 33 years old in the fall of 1971, and could have been 233 years
old for all they offered to a man-of-the-world, age 14. Who cares if the
skater never called her? But, without pontificating nearly as much as this
paragraph, he suggested that the emotions of that story, and others in that
black-paperback collection, meant something now, or would in time, and I
didn't have to be a teenage girl in 1938 to feel them. He was right.
He was tough too. He slapped the "automatic D" on any
essay using the
indefinite "you", but that was department policy. More useful was
his
refusal to permit coasting. I had him for 9th and six weeks of 10th -grade
english (that odd year of "units" and "book journals", when
english teachers
changed faster than game-show contestants) and again for 11th-grade regents.
That was American lit, kicking off with "A Farewell To Arms". I thought
I
had him profiled, and scored "A" on six straight weekly essays, banged
out
in front of "Columbo" or "Kojak". But sometime in November
I shoveled six
desperate paragraphs on Teahouse Of The August Moon" without reading it,
or
even watching Brando, and the "C" hit me before I got four steps from
the
seminar room. Con jobs on "Catcher In The Rye" and Langston Hughes
also
received pithy comments, and a bright red "C" on the front page, festive
as
a Christmas wreath. He was never in my pocket. Excellence, even
competence, depended on sustained effort, not a rep as a good kid.
As for the briefcase, well, he did talk a lot, but he usually
talked with
purpose. He wasn't a buddy but he offered advice when I asked, drawing on
his experience in college ("I learned to get by on 4 hours of sleep a
night"), with the Knights of Columbus, with his own kids. One of them,
a
wrestler for Mahopac High, rolled his eyes when a Hastings wrestler gently ribbed
him
about the old man at a tournament, sighing "and we have to live with it".
But whenever the old man talked about his son in our class, the pride was
there. He enjoyed kids and he worked to leave us with something more than
the obvious, laughable memories all teachers generate.
I am the better for having been in his class.
David Virrill
I had a semester/block (or more ?) of English with him in 11th or 12th grade.
I was fairly down on
most of the teachers I had at Hastings: after having attended another high
school and sitting in on a bunch of college courses while traveling about I
think I had some :) perspective. I remember him especially as being one of
the most unpretentiously 'real world' teachers I ever had. I both liked and
respected him over all of the others whose classes I took in English.
Geoff Greene