Peter Sipe

Ruth Batson

“She always gave back to the community, quietly and effectively.”

I asked my students this question: “What do people who live elsewhere think of when they think of Boston?”

Responses included the city’s distinctive accent, Revolutionary War history, and strong sports culture.

When I asked if there were any negative associations, however, the only suggestion – to our great amusement – was “dirty water.” Boston’s former notoriety for racial division was unknown.

In fairness, I didn’t know about it either when I was a 6th grader.

Moreover, that painful history wouldn’t be obvious from looking at the students, who look a lot like the city. Our classroom’s diversity is a tribute to the work of Ruth Batson, whose Boston Globe obituary we read together.

John F. Baker, Jr.

“In all, Sgt. Baker was credited with recovering eight fallen U.S. soldiers, destroying six bunkers and killing at least 10 enemies.”

When Sergeant John F. Baker, Jr. received the Medal of Honor, President Lyndon Johnson remarked that he and his fellow recipient, a former West Point basketball player, looked like Mutt and Jeff:

It probably wasn’t the first joke Sergeant Baker ever heard about his height. But the real joke was on the Marines, who had refused him for being an inch too short.

Baker’s heroism extended beyond one terrible day in 1966. For the remainder of his tour he scouted Viet Cong tunnels, and, after receiving his Medal of Honor, sought to return to combat duty. Although his requests were denied, Baker devoted the rest of his life, both in and out of uniform, to serving fellow soldiers and veterans.

His obituary, from the Washington Post, gave us the opportunity to learn about different medals and ranks, as well as the military’s custom of saluting Medal of Honor recipients first.

Sergeant Baker’s obituary also taught us the following vocabulary: diminutive, disparate, mortally, evacuate, valor, indomitable, and gallantry.

Sergeant Baker’s father was a trapeze artist. Oddly enough, so was the father of the mathematical genius whose obituary we read last week.

Shakuntala Devi

My instruction has, I’d like to think, a reasonable degree of academic rigor. If pressed, however, I might concede that it’s not daily I transport students to the boundaries of human mental ability. Shakuntala Devi’s Telegraph obituary gives us a glimpse.

Known as “the human computer,” she could, upon hearing your date of birth, tell you its day. In about the time it takes to fish out your phone and find the right app, she mentally calculated 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779.

Ms. Devi, for whom the term “gifted” seems dissatisfyingly insufficient, had no conventional schooling, and attributed her powers to divine endowment. Still, she sought to share what she could: “I cannot transfer my abilities to anyone, but I can think of quicker ways with which to help people develop numerical aptitude.”

Her obituary taught us the vocabulary prodigy, prowess, aptitude, innate, and cognitive.

To explain what a cognitive meant, I showed them the test below, allowing that I hadn’t yet figured out the solution. Most students got it very quickly, thereby offering a glimpse of their mental abilities, and mine.

Grace Cyr

Grace Cyr was a foster mother to 98 children.

According to her Boston Globe obituary,

Ms. Cyr often cared for multiple children, including many with complicated medical needs. They joined whoever of Ms. Cyr’s daughters were living at home, along with grandchildren. For a time, she fostered three children under age 6, all of whom required wheelchairs.

Ms. Cyr, a stylish dresser, kept her chandeliers sparkling and was “never boring, ever.” A lovely 2010 profile contains this example of her ingenuity and devotion:

A boy born without a brain stem could neither speak nor see. Grace put his bassinet near her grandfather clock, whose ticking seemed to soothe him, and took care of him until he died.

She couldn’t get everything right, though:

Grace still laughs at the story of sending one of her foster sons to school on St. Patrick’s Day. She had dressed him in green and carefully packed his lunch for the occasion, including green Jell-O and a green can of ginger ale. Then she got a call from his teacher… Mistakenly, Grace had thrown in a can of Heineken instead of Canada Dry.

Vo Phien

“What he created – it’s incredible and valuable.”

I put this unhappy question to my students: “If you could take only a handful of books to start a new library in a new country, which would you choose?”

To give them some historical perspective, we read brief accounts of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, and of the fall of Saigon.

Then we learned about Vo Phien, who worked to save his country’s literary heritage. As his Los Angeles Times obituary describes, he began his mission in the final days of the Vietnam War:

Fearful of what to come, he resolved to collect and preserve literary treasures, essays that had appeared in newspapers and magazines, books that might soon be banned, even diaries…

His success in doing so is all the more remarkable because for years this was his side gig: by day he was a benefits specialist for the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association.

Crunching numbers (which he did “with such speed”) was among the vocabulary Vo Phien’s obituary taught us, along with banned, scour, refugee, mentor, prolific, diaspora, and expatriate.

Also, since Vo Phien was his pen name, we all invented ours. (My favorite was Liam Lemon Lime.)

And the books students were most likely to preserve? The Harry Potter series made many lists, as did the Divergent trilogy, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and The Fault in Our Stars. The Day the Crayons Quit also appeared more than once.