When a Special Teacher Can Change Your Life

She calls, like she always does, her voice full of urgency. She has one of those conference call devices on her phone that lets her put a second person on the line with you, someone who is doing something worthy of notice, invariably someone who is helping children--someone whose voice she feels you need to hear.

Her name is Wini Jackson. She’s 55 and she lives in Long Beach, and today the person she puts on the phone is her old high school teacher, 83-year-old John Redfud of Inglewood.

She wants to talk about a memorial service they recently attended, the life they celebrated there and the values whose loss they are still mourning.

The man who died was Kenneth Washington, a well-known educator who early in his career taught with Redfud. Jackson had them both as teachers. The school, where she graduated in 1962, was Centennial High in Compton. Compton is the school district known best these days for failing its children, and that’s what Jackson and Redfud are mourning this morning.

Because it used to be so different.

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Jackson remembers what a lot of people who grew up in an earlier time remember: A teacher could change your life. One teacher--maybe more than one, if you were lucky--said or did something that made you take life more seriously, or more purposefully. Something about their sternness or their empathy set you on a different course.

This still happens. But Jackson, who fills her free hours with aggressive phone calls on behalf of good causes, remembers a different sort of magic about it back then, and over the phone you can imagine her head shaking in awe as she talks about it.

“They taught us self-discipline, and to devour the atmosphere we were in,” she says. “They taught us that we shouldn’t wait to get something done when we could get on it now.”

As you listen, she asks her old teacher a question.

“Mr. Redfud, why did you guys pour so much into us? Why did you make us so aggressive?”

His answer comes back quickly, the voice weathered but clear.

“I’d hear people talk about what good schools they had in Beverly Hills and Fairfax. I didn’t want to be teaching anywhere that wasn’t competitive with the outside world. I spent 14 hours a day creating learning experiences, to expose my class to things other people would be getting. I made sure they learned how to compete. Basically, if a person knows what is going on around him, he becomes aggressive. Every day you bring to his mind that self-perception is seeing yourself as other people see you, that you’ve got to do these things to compete with people.”

You could call Mr. Redfud to tell him you were sick and not coming to school that day, Jackson remembers, and he’d say, “OK, then send your homework here in a taxi.” Translation: You get away with nothing.

The subtext here is history. Both Jackson and Redfud are African Americans, and the early 1960s were a time in which legal segregation was crumbling, and those old enough to have lived through it recognized that the next generation would live very different lives. They took special pains to prepare the children.

“We were going to make sure you didn’t fail,” says Redfud, who grew up in Louisiana, came to USC to get his master’s degree and began teaching in the Compton district in 1950. “Because we knew what was lurking in the recesses of society to take you over.”

“They gave us that edge,” Jackson says. “They gave us an inner power: Close your eyes and go for it, and don’t come back without it. They would stay after school with us, investing money, driving us where we needed to be to show us what we were trying to win. They didn’t let the future be an unknown, an abstraction. They never settled for that.”

“If you’re a teacher,” Redfud says, “you teach people and they learn. You stop looking for excuses. I didn’t like people coming in late. Some other people made excuses for them: ‘That poor child has trouble getting to school. . . .’ I said, people have to learn what their priorities are. That is your job. You go on time and do your best while you’re there or you get fired, just like on the job.

“That was their job. Like I told them, you’re going to be the future leaders of this country. Even if I’m dead, you mess up my retirement and I’m going to come back and get you.”

*

Wini Jackson still calls him Mr. Redfud and he still calls her Winifred. A few other Compton teachers from the old days joined them at Kenneth Washington’s memorial service three weeks ago, remembering him as a tenacious teacher who goaded and mentored and befriended students.

“We are an extension of those teachers,” Jackson says. She thinks of all the children whose lives need shaping, the children who don’t have teachers like Mr. Redfud. The violence and the amorality and the absence of a vision of the future--it all began to overtake us, she believes, when the teachers of Mr. Redfud’s generation retired as the 1970s dawned.

“They should take all these old teachers and interview them about where they came from, why they did what they did,” she said. “Then they would have a formula to get what they need.”

It’s probably been a long time since you talked to one of your high school teachers. Jackson has a suggestion:

Find them. Thank them.

“There is no point to honor them when they’re gone. For those people who had us more hours than our parents did, for us not to honor them while they’re living is ludicrous. Drop them a card, send them something to say, ‘I appreciate you.’ ”