To Sir Finley, with love

My brother in-law Keith doesn’t have to wonder what kind of impact he made on the students he taught in the Milwaukee Public School System.

He can read about it in “Life Tools,” a graphic novel featuring him and the specific lessons he shared, and written by his former student André Lewis.

Both men have inspirational stories to share.

As I’ve written about before, Keith and his cousin Priscilla integrated their high school. Later named Florida’s “Mr. Basketball,” Keith went to college on a basketball scholarship. He earned a Master’s Degree in Education and enjoyed a stellar career at MPS, where he taught about math and life. He eventually retired as an MPS administrator.

André Lewis fought his way through a peripatetic childhood to become an aviation engineer, a commercial pilot and the author of 26 books.

The two crossed paths early in Keith’s teaching career, when André landed in Keith’s sixth grade classroom, a little scurrilous at having been made to ride a bus to a school outside his comfort zone. Keith knew a little about that.

Assigned to teach math, Keith offered his students so much more.

He taught them about the stock market by assigning them to choose a growth stock, a blue-chip stock and a bond, and to track their choices each week. He told them a little about his life, and offered them specific mantras he’d learned along the way.

André soaked it all in with such rapt attention, he wrote about those lessons more than three decades later.

Keith noticed the young student’s aptitude for math, and told him he should consider becoming an engineer some day.

That’s exactly what André did.

I offer this story to teachers as a way of encouragement. As you pack up your classrooms in the next few weeks, and ponder the impact you’ve had, just know that somewhere in that classroom sits a student who is filing away every lesson you impart and using them for motivation.

Maybe some day, you, too, will be immortalized in a graphic novel featuring every wise thing you said

I hope so.

But, even if you don’t become a literary character, I’ll bet somewhere in your classroom sits a students hanging on your every word.

Teachers change lives.

We’re all grateful for that.