Mr. Bush: You Speak Russian!?

Mr. Bush knew something about me before I did.

He knew all the fire, energy, and motion within 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 past the commotion.

He saw intelligence operating without enough supervision.

That didn’t make me easier to teach.

It made me dangerous.

I was fifteen, stretching 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 of me. More effort, discipline, physical rigor, pressure control, and whatever else I thought I had already given enough of.

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 opened choices. Each choice gave me different meanings, greater control, and new possibilities on the page.

I loved all of that.

The intellectual structure was logical.

For me, math and science are good. They require precision. They demand structure. Both are governed by logic. I couldn’t begin to imagine life without logic.

The deeper lesson would take longer.

Science had already owned a large piece of my attention because it encouraged questions I loved.

Why?

What happens if?

How far?

Proximal development.

How fast?

What is inside it?

Can it burn?

How can I make it explode?

What happens in space?

Those questions were invitations.

One day, instead of the usual vocabulary vulgerg-usex, Mr. Bush assigned a writing project. He saw a good challenge for us.

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 that could fail 203 miles from anybody’s Mom.

I began the way Mrs. Robinson, my English literature teacher, had taught me.

Cluster writing.

I wrote every vocabulary word on the page, then built as many clusters around each one as I could. The paper moved quickly because my mind already lived miles ahead of my hand.

Science words 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. I had already learned that pressure could produce language adults preferred kids not repeat.

The paper required authenticity.

I brought extra.

I did not spend much time considering whether Mr. Bush expected profanity in another language inside a science assignment. I left that problem for him.

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 change course in the hallway, come looking for a student, and carry a perplexed expression because an ordinary academic event has taken place. Something had surfaced.

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 less defensible by the second.

Mr. Bush had my full attention.

He held the paper. His brows were furrowed. His eyes stayed locked 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 know several components required supervision.

Then he showed me the grade.

A++.

Not one plus.

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, and that kept me going.

Then he started laughing too.

“I invented the cuss words. They aren’t real. I don’t think. I hope not.”

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, push teachers’ patience to the max, and still carry intelligence, discipline, creativity, and promise underneath all that motion.

His humor told me he had studied the situation carefully.

He also knew something valuable lived within 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, gave me structure, and 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 looking 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.

The entire lesson hit me.

Hard.

Fifteen words.

Two synonyms for each.

Forty-five possibilities.

Mr. Bush had been assigning vocabulary words.

He had also been building range, adding depth, and teaching precision.

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.

He was teaching a kid college-preparatory academics.

That was good.

That fire still burns within me today.

What I know now, and couldn’t understand then, is that ... he was coaching a writer.

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