Alien

“They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.”

--from The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

When I was in middle school and high school, I had a science teacher by the name of Mr. Barker. Because I went to an arts and sciences center, I was lucky enough to have three classes with Mr. Barker: earth science in eighth grade, biology in ninth grade, and advanced biology in twelfth grade. I say this makes me lucky because as a teacher, Mr. Barker was truly extraordinary.

His classroom was full of amazing things. There was a tank of hissing cockroaches that we were allowed to pick up and handle any time. There were pipettes of every size and measuring scale and kits for making gels that separated out strands of DNA. There was a polygraph machine and a seismograph and a weather station. Because of his elaborate set-up, Mr. Barker was often on the news talking about some random scientific phenomenon. He was labeled everything from “Local Science Teacher” to “Seismology Expert” when he gave his sound bites. Everywhere around him, there was science, because Mr. Barker was, at his very core, a scientist.

He was also a skeptic; in fact, he was the most emphatic skeptic I have ever known. He took significant amounts of time out of his classes to show us videos that debunked psychics and mind readers. He had us measure the various parts of a pair of scissors and manipulate the measurements until we found patterns, just to see how easy it is to find them. (He made us promise not to be astounded and go off and start a scissors cult.) On his wall was a larger poster of Occum’s Razor: “When you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think of horses before you think of zebras.” It was his mantra.

I quite vividly remember one of the times he got worked up about alien abduction stories. To begin with, he hated, hated, how movies all show aliens to be these greenish, humanoid forms with big heads and big eyes. “Those aren’t that different from us!” he said. (Of course I am paraphrasing here.) “People think these silly descriptions of aliens are so otherworldly and different. So if I described something that had legs that bent in different directions, tasted through its feet, and breathed through its butt, people would say it’s an alien for sure, right? Well guess what? That’s not an alien. That’s an insect!”

If life on other planets exists, he argued, surely we have not begun to imagine the forms it could take. There’s no evidence to suggest such life exists elsewhere in the universe. “But even if it did,” he said, “why would the aliens go to Nowhere, Iowa, beam up Bubba, leave depressions in the crops, and leave?” He did not believe in alien abductions, and he made it quite difficult for his students to believe, either. I haven’t known anyone to be so passionate about anything, before or since.

Mr. Barker’s purpose in all of this, I think, was not so much to make sure that we did not believe in aliens. What he really wanted was for us to use science, not hearsay, to draw conclusions about the world around us. Or, more simply put, he wanted to make sure we thought for ourselves. Once we did that, he was pretty confident that we would discover that he was right about everything else.

Those stories give you an idea of what Mr. Barker was like as a person. Above all else, he was a scientist and a skeptic. Those are the things I immediately remembered when the quote above reminded me of him. Ten years ago, if someone had asked me why I thought that Mr. Barker was a truly extraordinary teacher, I probably would have listed those same things. I do still think his passion for science and truth made me sit up and pay attention, and that’s no small thing. But now that I’ve been a professional in the education field for a few years, I find myself thinking of different ways in which Mr. Barker was different. Three new things renew my belief that he was a world-class teacher.

First, Mr. Barker’s tests were hard. Every student in my math/science program lived in fear of his tests. In fact, the difficulty of the tests turned some students away from his classes altogether. You couldn’t cram for a Barker test. You had to start getting ready for them as soon as you started a new unit. I’m not sure I really understood this at the time, but now I realize that Mr. Barker’s tests were hard because doing well on his tests required not only knowing the material, but understanding it. The questions required some significant thought and problem solving. Nothing was simply regurgitated, and there were definitely never any multiple-choice questions. Mr. Barker taught us things, and then he expected us to apply them. That expectation alone raised the bar and caused me to learn more in his classes than in most others.

(As an aside, I’ll also note that he drew pictures on the board during his tests. They were cartoons meant to depict some person or thing associated with the material on the test. If we could guess what they meant, we got extra credit. I remember him drawing a picture of a large toe and a large letter O, each with faces, handbags, and necklaces. Off to the side, a speech bubble proclaimed that someone’s sisters had arrived. The answer (did you guess?) was my-oh-sis and my-toe-sis, or meiosis and mitosis. Mr. Barker’s ability to come up with these on the fly was a sure sign of his brilliance.)

Second, Mr. Barker did not teach to standardized tests. His advanced biology course was considered Advanced Placement, but the curriculum was heavily focused toward genetics, as this was Mr. Barker’s particular interest, and the lab equipment at the center allowed us to do some pretty amazing things with DNA. Finally, about two weeks before the date of the AP test, he did briefly go over some other topics that would be on the test, but he made it very clear that it would take a lot of outside studying for us to do well. He knew he didn’t prepare us to pass the test, but he didn’t apologize for it. It simply wasn’t important to him—and he didn’t think it should be all that important to us, either. I wish teachers today had the luxury of expressing that attitude to their students.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Mr. Barker treated me the same as any other student. I don’t mean that other teachers pushed me back; I mean quite the opposite. I was an academic star for most of my school life, and almost every teacher I had put me up on some sort of pedestal. I was always the favorite, the one who knew all the answers, the never-do-wrong class pet. But to Mr. Barker, I was just one among many. Being smart and having my homework done were not things to be rewarded. They were just expected.

I studied my butt off for Mr. Barker’s tests. I usually did well, and when I didn’t, I knew it was my fault for slacking. I also studied for the AP biology test, and I managed to barely scrape a passing grade. But even if I hadn’t passed, I would not have traded Mr. Barker’s class for a better score. And I always checked my attitude at the door when I entered Mr. Barker’s classroom, forgetting the pedestal I was usually perched on elsewhere. It wasn’t a conscious choice so much as a necessity. My feet had to be solidly on the ground if I was going to do well.

Now, looking back, I know that these are the things that set Mr. Barker apart as a teacher. He was brilliant, passionate, and dedicated; those things made him an exceptional scientist. But it was his high expectations of everyone and his refusal to be driven by outside forces like school boards and the Advanced Placement tests that made him an exceptional teacher.

Mr. Barker retired the year I graduated high school. He absolutely deserved the rest, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the students who came after me. Still, I know there are other teachers out there to are great the way Mr. Barker was great. Someday, if I have children, I hope they have teachers like Mr. Barker.  He was an alien of his own sort, and I’m grateful that I got to be one of the Bubbas that Mr. Barker beamed up.