The late bell rang as Mr. Knight locked first the back door to the classroom, and then the front.

“If you can’t make it to class on time, I don’t care where you go but you won’t disrupt the other students by arriving late,” he said in an eerily calm manner.

It was the first day of eleventh grade College Preparatory English — “With an emphasis on college preparatory,” Mr. Knight would tell us. We had never seen this particular teacher before, but his reputation already preceded him as he had already contacted all our parents and told them this would likely be the most difficult class their child has seen.

Mild mannered and soft spoken, Mr. Knight still possessed an imposing demeanor that made students shuffle uncomfortably in their seats if they thought they were going to be called on.

The first day of class, Mr. Knight went around the room and shook the hand of each student, formally introducing himself. Adding to his already unnerving stature, Mr. Knight’s hand, when clasped in mine, reached all the way up to my wrist.

“You will remember my name and I will do my best to remember yours,” Mr. Knight said during his introductions. This was unheard of in our 11 years of classroom instruction. I myself had several teachers over the course of a couple years, who would still have to check the seating chart to get my name right.

Likewise, when he handed out the syllabus for the quarter, he said that he expected us to work hard and turn in all assignments on time, so we should expect the same of him, returning corrected work promptly. Most of us had also never seen a syllabus before and were amazed to see the whole quarter laid out for us.

From the start, he was a demanding teacher who assigned weekly five-page essays. If you missed punctuation or misspelled a word (pre-spell check), he would put a red line through each page, make you find the error, and rewrite the essay for the next day.

Apprehension gave way however, and most of us began to take pride, considering ourselves among the few chosen for his class. One moment, you would be squirming in your chair because you didn’t think you grasped your Shakespeare assignment adequately and the next, Mr. Knight would be stuffing his cheeks and performing a scene from MacBeth as The Godfather.

Mr. Knight taught problem solving in a time of rote memorization and regurgitating set answers on your weekly quiz. Once, he left the whole class a week to learn the prologue to the Canterbury Tales — in Middle English — learning pronunciation from one of the four copies the school had to be recited in front of the class. We set up times to check out our copy, time to memorize and time to get it into the hands of the next student.

We were assured by Mr. Knight that we would never forget the prologue once learned and that one day, after a few too many martinis at the company party, we would stand on a table and once again, recite the words. It’s been 29 years and I’ve yet to attain “martinis at the company party” status, but I’ve recited it to motivate a student who only had to read “The Wife of Bath” in modern English and in the first week of a Medieval literature class I took in college. I bombed my analysis of a selected book of hours but my recitation earned me an easy A for the course.

One day, he brought in a hideous piece of ceramic work from the art room. Beside it, lay a hammer. After asking several students to take a shot at smashing the offensive pottery, he finally had a taker, who blew bits of glazed monstrosity far and wide. We laughed. Next, he produced a simple picture of a tiger and asked someone to tear it up which they readily did.

He then simply asked, “ If I gave you all the raw ingredients to make a tiger, could you do it?”

Silence

Sure, he could have had us read something from a text book or literary anthology, but a simple lesson on how much easier it is to destroy than create was a far more poignant prelude to stories of war and loss.

He was the man who referred to me and my lunch cohort as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and once, when he heard us giving our friend, Rick, a hard time regarding his home’s proximity to a sheep farm, left “have you any wool” scrawled on the blackboard with no explanation.

He would make those tasked with teaching future educators wince today and would probably not last a week teaching now. But in a time before a “mentor” was someone assigned to you at work so that middle management wouldn’t have to answer your questions, he was the real deal. When shaken from our initial terror, we wanted to make him proud — he actually made a bunch of 17- year- olds want to learn.

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Douglas McIntire is a Times Record staff writer who can still recite a great deal of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. He can be reached at [email protected].