The First Environmentalist

By: Laura Mirabal

Mr. Caputo was my 6^th grade math teacher.  He’s Italian, has olive skin, a lot of gray hair and wears metal rimmed glasses.  I thought he was about 100 years old, and probably weighed 300 lbs.  His arms were Popeye-shaped arms with lots of hair growing on them.  Since math class was in the afternoon, Mr. Caputo always had a dark shadow around his lips and chin where his beard would grow if he didn’t take the time each morning to shave.

Mr. Caputo hardly ever smiled; I don’t think I ever heard him laugh.  Each kid in the class silently prayed that they were never picked on to answer questions.  When he picked on you he’d look at you with steady eyes.  When we didn’t know the answer, which was often, he’d keep looking at us until all we could do was lower our eyes and hope he’d pick on someone else; the sooner the better.

I think Mr. Caputo was the pioneer of all environmentalists.  He examined every piece of paper to be thrown away.  He looked at the front, turned it over and looked at the back.  If there was one square inch of writing surface left on any piece of paper, he’d take it to the paper cutter and make scratch paper.  On the first day of class he instructed us to take scratch to use for solving all math problems.  Of course, at that time calculators were not popular for use in the classroom.  The only calculators we used were our brains.  He would also hand us a handful of scratch paper along with our tests.  I never understood why I had to use scratch paper when I had a notebook full of good paper.

Going to the blackboard to solve math problems was a matter of great apprehension for me.  I was not a good math student.  Mr. Caputo loved picking on me to go the blackboard.  I think that this is where I learned to write well on a blackboard; it was a daily ritual with him.  When I got stuck on a particular problem, he’d work me through it until I finally got it.  By the end of the session I would go back to my seat exhausted, embarrassed, and hating him.  But Mr. Caputo would still work with me, push me and challenge me.  I thought he hated me.  At 11 years old, you think all adults are mean.

Mr. Caputo would sometimes bring his camera to class.  He enjoyed taking pictures of us.  One day he took a picture of me after I had failed a math test.  There I was with a long face, my chin in the palm of my hand, leaning forward not paying any attention to him.  He snapped the picture; I was furious.  My mother thought it was comical.  She told me that she liked Mr. Caputo because he knew what she knew; I had the potential to be a great student.

My mother kept that photograph.  Every time I come across it, I’m transported back to Mr. Caputo’s math class.  He etched life values which I could not have appreciated at the tender age of 11.  Now, at 57, I think about that short time I spent in his class and realize that Mr. Caputo wanted me to learn.  He liked being a teacher.  He knew that I had the potential to learn and be a better student than I gave myself credit for.

As I get older, I realize that the people who touched us the most and remain most vivid in our minds are those who taught us the most by challenging us to learn.