One thing any good teacher knows is that students never forget and still deeply appreciate the efforts made on their behalf, even when these efforts were made long ago. When it comes to Bob Cheney, this may be doubly true. My classmates and I were blessed with Mr. Cheney in his first year of teaching, and for many more after that. His presence was not just transformative for us, but for the entire school and Cambridge community.
Mr. Cheney swept into Cambridge on the winds of change with a young person’s energy and an obvious intent on making a difference. His classroom, to the untrained eye, might look a bit chaotic at times, but it was a functional, beneficial energy driven by numerous educational and social objectives. Of course, as dumb kids we didn’t know anything about this, we just enjoyed whatever happened to be on the day’s social studies menu, one that was as diverse as the teacher.
We were all in the 7th grade when Mr. Cheney arrived at CCS, a most difficult time for many if not most students. Seventh graders are commonly in a biological boiler, rapid and often traumatic growth spurts couple with a huge identity crisis and kaboom! Also true, it’s still an age where we’re extremely receptive to positive influences, a bunch of human puppies chasing after the bright red ball with a ringing bell inside. Mr. Cheney never stopped rolling us balls, both literal and figurative, and left his mark on just about every one of us, and this very much includes those who often felt isolated and unpopular. More about that in a bit.
In many if not most ways, Mr. Cheney was far ahead of his time. We were still very conventional in just abut everything, and most certainly education. Mr. Cheney replaced “Read chapter seven and answer questions one through ten” with project driven methodology now very much in vogue because it’s proven a most effective method of imparting knowledge and life skills. If you showed up to Mr. Cheney’s class, it was impossible not to learn something of value, and if you really wanted to learn, then the boundaries were limitless.
I think it’s accurate to describe Mr. Cheney as an activist, not just inside of school, but in the community and wider world. This has not changed. He’s at an age now where many just want to sit and watch TV, but Mr. Cheney is still out volunteering on one service project or another and mentoring young people who may well be the children of his previous students. We all knew he walked the talk, another reason he was so influential.
To me, the real indicator of a master teacher is the ability to teach those who are normally difficult to reach and often down right troublesome, pretty much the definition of me as a kid. I was also oppositional. If you said green, I’d scream red, and vice versa. Mr. Cheney saw me coming from Pluto as he did my rebellious compadres. He was almost magical in that regard, and the darn guy tricked us into active participation when we’d do almost anything but comply.
Mr. Cheney instilled critical thinking and accurate self-reflection skills, perhaps the most important of all. He was also very much concerned for our overall welfare. Not only was he the originator of CCS soccer and a long time head coach, he wanted us, athlete and non-athlete alike, to practice healthy lifestyles. His anti-smoking campaign and related lessons in psychology and debate were brilliant and remain invaluable.
Instead of bombarding us with facts that my gang would have rejected and ignored, he harnessed our negative energy and turned us into a big part of his project. He did so by appointing and encouraging the “school woods smoking crew” as a most important part of his lesson design. We couldn’t believe it; we’d actually advocate for smoking and get academic credit for it. What a fool the man was! We took the bait and swallowed it whole, just as Mr. Cheney planned.
Fifty years later I can still remember some of the facts I assembled as a spokesman for tobacco. For example, I argued that tobacco provided amino acids that were essential in a healthy body, and a lot of other tripe I’m sure came from places like the Tobacco Institute, outlawed by the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 that finally stopped a lot of evil practices that led directly to many deaths. It’s very important to note that at the time of Mr. Cheney’s project, the Marlboro Man still rode across our TV screens nightly. While just kids, we were being saturated daily by tobacco advertising. Mr. Cheney set out to show us the truth using our own energies and minds in the process.
It was a spectacular lesson, one of hundreds, even for those who argued against the tide of reason. On my end, I tried so hard to block and counter the avalanche of medical and scientific evidence linking smoking to all sorts of diseases, I couldn’t help but learn much about how bad the drug really was, even if I wouldn’t admit it out loud. During this process, Mr. Cheney also inoculated us from other harmful advertising and propaganda by teaching us to recognize the cleverly hidden intent and seek the truth instead of buying into lies.
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” read a poster on Mr. Cheney’s classroom wall. I thought it came from some famous historical figure, and had no idea until years later the quote was wisdom from Pogo, a comic strip character. As a cartoon character myself, I’ve used that quote, and the philosophy, what seems like a million times, but it all started for me because Mr. Cheney thought we needed to understand ourselves first before passing judgments on others, a lesson many apparently never learn, maybe because they never had a teacher like Mr. Cheney.
Like any human, Mr. Cheney made mistakes too, but they were always the sort caused by trusting some of us more than we really deserved. He would have been justified in handcuffing me to my chair for what I was prone to, but, no, if we wanted a hall pass to go to the library “to research” he never questioned the motive and off we went. Since he frequently had us running all over school for some project or another, Mr. Cheney was often swamped with hall pass forms at the beginning of class and frequently signed these without carefully reading the form, which I observed, and then used for my wicked designs.
I’m not sure what happened to them, but over a year I amassed a collection of Mr. Cheney signed hall passes. One was to Saturn. Another gave me permission to go to the Cambridge Hotel. A third gave me license to visit President Johnson. I wish I still had those paper scraps because I’d mount and frame the set and present it as a gift, knowing Mr. Cheney would laugh for hours at the joke and probably display the collection.
I never realized it until decades later, but I unconsciously incorporated into my own teaching style what I think was the greatest practice of this outstanding teacher, and that was deliberate efforts to include those who might normally feel left out. I think we all missed this as kids, but I’m absolutely certain this was a big part of Mr. Cheney’s master plan.
Because he was so popular, he never had any problem attracting the best and brightest students at school, but he used his power with us to encourage inclusion. Consequently, in both organizations he formed and group projects he designed, it was almost always the case to see the most popular boy in the class working and eventually socializing with the girl who, until Mr. Cheney intervened, always ate her lunch alone. The football star sat next to the school nerd and they soon told jokes together. The shy were gently nudged into conversations with popular students, and a hundred other variations on the same theme. What was truly brilliant was that none of us had any idea this took place intentionally. We thought it just happened naturally, and in truth, it eventually did, because we all became better people, and that is precisely what a great teacher like Mr. Cheney sets out to accomplish.