I spent my A-term break back where my family currently resides in Connecticut. Naturally, I didn't have anything to do, so I made a visit to my high school. There were teachers who I wanted to see, anyway. Mostly because I genuinely liked them both as people and as teachers.

However, I was slightly disappointed when I stopped by the English department. Many of the teachers I had hoped to see there were already gone, vanished into their mysterious lives outside of school. It was a shame, there was one man in particular who I wanted to see. Mr. D, I'll call him.

Anyone who has ever had a class with Mr. D will likely remember the man for his quirky sense of humor and the enthusiasm he had when it came to English. I had the honor of taking AP Literature with this teacher my senior year of high school. Boy, it was something unforgettable.

I walked into class my first day of senior year, not really sure what to expect. I had already met the teacher; Mr. D had introduced himself to me at the AP Lit meeting a few months ago. As it turns out, he had my brother, and made it a point to ask me "how's that son of a gun doing?" (with that exact wording).

And he asked me that again on the first day of his class as he handed me a poem. "I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. For those of you who haven't been indulged with the poem, it's actually a sonnet (a poem composed of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme) about the narrator attempting to control a personified chaos. Why this particular poem on the first day of school? Well, I may get to that later.

"Who wants to read the first sentence?" Mr. D's voice echoed throughout the room, waking students if they were dozing off from the previous class. No one answered. An awkward bout of silence. Since no one else would do it, I raised my hand. And read the first sentence, which was the majority of the poem. Someone else volunteered to read the rest. The remaining class time was spent picking apart the poem; the class was asked question on syntax, diction, and other such elements of the poem until it was almost the end of the class period.

"And we have just gone over the second day of school." Mr. D announced before people could pack up.

"What?"

"I have taught the second day of school on the first day of school. I teach the first day of school on the second day of school. I invented that."

Mr. D made it clear that he was eccentric, but also that he had high expectations of his students right off the bat. For example, we didn't have fishbowl discussions over whatever we read. We had Life-Altering Discussions of Literature, or LADOLs. And everyone was expected to participate. If you didn't, well Mr. D would ask your opinion on the piece anyway. He didn't care what it was, just so long as you read the piece and had some form of opinion on it. And if you had something to say, you were given an opportunity to say it. Mr. D would either listen to you and announce that you had something to say, or yell:

"Hey guys, I think [insert name] has some great stuff to say" in an attempt to give a student a little bit of spotlight.

I couldn't tell you anything about the content of those life-altering discussions, or the content of the majority of our projects (which included a mock trial based on "Medea" as well as making a mobile that demonstrated rising and falling in literature). However, I do remember Mr. D taking an avid interest in the lives of his students. He always started class off by asking students (both individually and in general) what was going on in their lives. He also announced every single college admission, every college decision, and every good thing that was deserving of applause.

I still remember Mr. D teasing me about looking into WPI. The man himself was a graduate of Holy Cross, not too far down the road. And he even shared with me a little joke:

"At WPI, the odds are pretty even, but the evens are always odd." Yes, that is a jab at the skewed gender ratio of WPI. He told it to me again, when I told him I was going to WPI. He told it to me again, one last time, at graduation. I haven't seen the man since, but I like to think he'll tell another prospective student that, and treat them to the same experience I had.

Now, such an experience included little tidbits that applied to real life. Take, for example, the poem I mentioned earlier. The poem about trying to control chaos. Fate vs. freewill was a hotly debated theme in the course, and the first theme we actually discussed. Perhaps Mr. D wanted his students to start out the year by taking control of the chaos of their lives, and take control of the unwritten future. Maybe that's why we first read about controlling chaos in fourteen lines.