On Father's Day--"To Sir, with Love"

“His teaching career was notable for his personal involvement with his students, to whom he became a mentor as well as a teacher.” (From Jack Saboeiro’s 2011 obituary)

Father’s Day was a non-event for me when I was growing up. I remember telling anyone who asked about my father (and it was something people asked little kids about a lot back then, especially in suburban Connecticut, where virtually every family looked the same: two parents, an older or younger sibling or two, a family dog or cat), “My father died before I was born.”

I didn’t feel deprived. I had three wonderful much-older brothers, several fine uncles, and a grandfather who, although he was rather gruff and reserved, told me stories about the Maine woods, lifted me up to pet the deer head on which he hung his hats, and taught me to play croquet in his backyard.

My friends’ fathers worked a lot, came home tired, watched TV, carved the roast on Sundays, fixed the occasional dripping faucet, grilled hamburgers, and disapproved of their daughters’ clothing choices. My mother could do all of that and more—she built shelves, repaired the lawn mower, installed a toilet, and rewired lamps. She emptied mousetraps, baited fishhooks, and cleaned white perch without flinching. She showed me the official way to keep score of the Red Sox games, and took me to Fenway Park. I almost never thought I had missed out on anything.

But for about a couple of years, when I was a teenager, I was privileged to have a wonderful, special relationship with a short, rumpled, absent-minded-professor-type with shaggy hair and a trench coat. (No, I’m not talking about the TV detective, Columbo, although I was a big fan of him, too, and some people commented on the resemblance.)

Jack Saboeiro was my sophomore biology teacher, and hands-down my favorite teacher of all time. Funny, quirky, thoughtful, and sensitive, he made science, a subject which had never held much interest for me, suddenly seem fascinating and essential. He filled every class with bits of his own unique anecdotes and world view, and taught us all much more than the life cycle of a fruit fly and how to dissect an earthworm.

As a teacher, he was fair, engaging, open-minded, philosophical, and wise. As a human being, he was kind, compassionate, respectful, and perceptive.

I called him “Sir,” like Sidney Poitier in “To Sir, with Love.” I think he liked that.

My high school had a tiny Portuguese custodian named Gemma, who appeared in the halls late every afternoon with a bucket and mop. I don’t think she spoke English, and I don’t think any of the students ever bothered to do more than nod to her. In fact, we barely noticed her. But whenever he saw her, Mr. Saboeiro, who spoke fluent Portuguese, made it a point to stop and speak with her. He may have been the only person at the school who did.

My junior year, I had chemistry with the dreaded Mrs. McCann, and I hadn’t made it more than two or three weeks into the class when I realized that I was in way over my head. Mrs. McCann was known for homework overload, challenging classes, killer tests, and a lack of patience. I was terrified of her.

Finally, after a particularly frustrating chem lab, when I was in, as my mother would have said, “a bit of a snit,” I decided to drop the class. After all, knowledge of chemistry was nothing I was ever going to need—I already knew I was going to be a liberal arts major in college. I needed one more science credit, but the physics teacher, Mrs. Nicholson, was known to be an easy A, so I figured I’d just skip science my junior year and take physics as a senior.

When I saw Mr. Saboeiro, whose classroom was across the hall from my homeroom, I mentioned that I was going to the guidance office to drop chemistry.

“No, you’re not,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“No, you’re not,” he said.

“Yes, I am!” I said. “I don’t understand anything about it, and everyone else gets it but me. I’m going to flunk the class anyway, so I might as well drop it.”

“Don’t go to the guidance office now,” he said. “Come to my classroom after school.”

When I got to his room after school, he took my chemistry textbook, a sheet of paper, and a pencil, sat me down at a lab table, and I’ll be damned if I can remember now anything he did or said—all I know is that it was absolute teaching sorcery. It was as if I had been trying to read that chemistry book upside down in the dark, and now it was right-side up, under a bright light. In a large-print edition.

I got through chemistry. Whenever I ran up against a wall, I hauled my textbook and lab notebook into Mr. Saboeiro’s room and he set me straight. Not only did he have me convinced that I could pass the course, he believed I could get an A, and I did. In the spring, he told me I could take the chemistry Achievement Test (now they call it the SAT 2) and do well, and I did. More than that, he convinced me that the study of science, all science, was valuable and interesting and even a little bit magical.

Pretty soon I was spending nearly every afternoon in Mr. Saboeiro’s classroom. Sometimes I brought along a friend, but often it was just the two of us. We talked about chemistry, of course, but also so much more—biology, physics, environmental science, evolution, philosophy, religion, politics, the state of the world. I shared my adolescent angst with him, my brilliant analytical theories, my incredibly astute assessments of the world condition. As hackneyed and cliché as most of my ramblings must have been, he listened to all of them, and always made me feel that I had something interesting to say.

I wish I could remember the specifics of even one of our conversations, but I can’t. I only know that that year changed me for the better, in ways I’m still figuring out. It wasn’t that he taught me everything I needed to know—but more that he opened the door for me to learn everything with a whole new perspective.

If I am even a little bit wise, Mr. Saboeiro deserves much of the credit.

In 1975, after my junior year, he left Milford High and moved to Arizona, and in the decades that followed he lived and taught all over the world—in Brazil, Greece, Hong Kong, Portugal. I never saw him again, but for the next 35 years, wherever he was, we stayed in touch through cards and letters. Always a Darwin fan, he traveled to the Galapagos Islands—probably the world’s most coveted destination for a science guy—and when my daughter Annie was born he sent her a tiny Galapagos Islands t-shirt.

When Mr. Saboeiro passed away in Florida in 2011 at the age of 83, he was still teaching, substituting in every grade from kindergarten through twelfth. His obituary included this line: “His teaching career was notable for his personal involvement with his students, to whom he became a mentor as well as a teacher.”

There are certain people who born to be teachers…and fathers, mentors, philosophers, and friends. Jack Saboeiro was one.