Mr. Bush: You Speak Russian!?
Mr. Bush: You Speak Russian!?
Mr. Bush knew something about me before I did.
He knew all the fire, energy, and motion inside me had stories to tell.
Most adults saw the motion first.
I talked.
I moved.
I questioned everything.
I tested rules, theories, patience, household objects, groceries, babysitters, teachers, and whatever else entered my field of curiosity.
Mr. Bush looked through the commotion.
He saw intelligence operating without enough supervision.
That made me dangerous.
I was fifteen, moving into the spring of 1985, old enough to believe I understood how the world worked.
My coaches had years of experience working with me. They knew how to handle me. They saw what I could do, then demanded more.
More effort.
More discipline.
More physical rigor.
More control under pressure.
Then they pushed me harder.
In the end, I earned several championship titles.
Mr. Bush believed language could be coached the same way.
Every week came fifteen science vocabulary words.
Fifteen words were only the beginning.
Roget’s Thesaurus entered the work, and each word required at least two synonyms.
Fifteen became forty-five.
The math made sense to me.
One word opened two more.
Two more created choices.
Each choice offered greater precision, greater control, and new possibilities on the page.
I loved that.
The structure made sense.
Math and science made sense too. They demanded precision. They required logic. They gave curiosity somewhere productive to go.
And I had plenty of curiosity.
Why?
What happens if?
How far?
How fast?
What is inside it?
Can it burn?
Can I make it explode?
What happens in space?
Those questions felt like invitations.
One day, instead of our usual vocabulary work, Mr. Bush assigned a writing project.
He saw a good academic challenge.
I saw a runway with clearance for takeoff.
Freedom to create meant telling a great story, and space offered everything a fifteen-year-old boy could want.
Distance.
Danger.
Mystery.
Planets.
Astronauts.
Equipment capable of failing 203 miles from anybody’s Mom.
I began the way Mrs. Robinson, my English literature teacher, had taught me.
Cluster writing.
I put every vocabulary word on the page, then built as many clusters around each one as I could.
The paper moved fast because my mind already lived miles ahead of my hand.
Science gave me structure.
Imagination gave me flight.
Facts entered.
Danger developed.
Personality moved into every available opening.
Then I hit a wall.
Brain freeze.
Writer’s block.
That was when I wrote the Russian cuss words.
Their presence made perfect sense to me.
Space exploration involved Russians.
Russians spoke Russian.
Difficult missions created pressure.
Pressure created colorful language.
The paper required authenticity.
I brought extra.
I gave very little thought to whether Mr. Bush expected profanity in another language inside a science assignment.
That sounded like a problem for Mr. Bush.
I was there to write an original story.
I turned the paper in with a flicker of mischief alive inside me, then went on with my life carrying the easy confidence of a boy who had completed the assignment on time, entertained himself, and given the Russians exactly what the moment required.
Less than forty-eight hours later, Mr. Bush came looking for me.
I was standing at my locker when he approached and asked to speak with me.
The temperature inside me changed immediately.
Teachers rarely alter course in the hallway, hunt down a student, and carry a perplexed expression because something ordinary has happened.
My mind began taking inventory.
The science was solid.
The story was good.
The Russians were authentic and in character.
The cuss words were becoming increasingly interesting.
Mr. Bush had my full attention.
He held the paper.
His brows were furrowed.
His eyes stayed on me while I tried to read his face.
He had humor in him. He also carried the expression of a man who had studied my operating system long enough to understand that several components required active supervision.
Then he showed me the grade.
A++.
One plus would have impressed me.
This had two.
I had never seen a grade carrying that much force.
“Mr. Scott, I need to ask you about your paper.”
I lit up inside.
He pointed to several words circled repeatedly in red, each surrounded by giant question marks.
I started laughing.
“Those are Russian cuss words.”
He stared at me.
“You speak Russian!?”
Oh, for the love of pizza.
I laughed harder.
His face ran nine directions at once, which kept me going.
Then he started laughing too.
“I invented the cuss words. They aren’t real. I think. I hope.”
He grinned and nodded.
Mr. Bush loved what I had done.
He saw the research, imagination, nerve, humor, and voice moving through the science.
I had completed the assignment, then taken fifteen vocabulary words and built new territory around them.
Right there, my Russian cuss words entered Bush science lore.
Kids know when adults are tolerating them.
They also know when an adult sees something worth developing.
Mr. Bush saw it.
He understood that curiosity could arrive loudly. Energy could tear through a room, test every adult within range, and still carry intelligence, discipline, creativity, and promise underneath all that motion.
The science paper gave him evidence.
The Russian cuss words gave him a laugh.
The A++ gave me a marker.
The greater gift came afterward.
Mr. Bush kept working me.
He treated me the way serious sports coaches treated me.
He challenged my vocabulary.
He gave me structure.
He showed me how one word could become three, then how three choices could change the depth, precision, and movement of a sentence.
He expected more because he knew more was there.
At fifteen, I understood the mathematics.
Fifteen words.
Two synonyms for each.
Forty-five words moving through the mind instead of fifteen.
The exercise made sense.
The full meaning arrived two years later.
I was on my own in Kansas City, seated in a theater at Penn Valley Community College with other writers.
A scene played involving a teacher staring in complete perplexity at something a kid had written.
We laughed.
Then memory took me straight back to Fremont.
Mr. Bush walking toward my locker.
The paper in his hand.
The red circles.
The giant question marks.
“You speak Russian!?”
One of the writers seated near me pulled out a college edition of Roget’s Thesaurus.
Everything stopped.
Fifteen words.
Two synonyms for each.
Forty-five possibilities.
The lesson finally opened.
Mr. Bush had been assigning vocabulary words.
He had also been building range.
Adding depth.
Teaching precision.
Giving language more choices.
Giving thought more room.
He had been placing structure around the fire so it could produce something greater than heat.
Mr. Bush saw the fire.
He taught me how to feed it.
At fifteen, I thought he was teaching college-preparatory science.
He was.
He was also doing something I understood years later.
He was coaching a writer.
That fire still burns inside me today.
And every time I reach for the more precise word, the stronger word, the word that makes the sentence finally click into place, some part of Mr. Bush is still standing there with Roget’s Thesaurus, asking me to find two more.