“Connor’s Corner: My Mr. Keating”

By Connor Danz, Creative Editor

I did many things that I enjoyed doing over my Christmas vacation back in December, biking, running, writing and my favorite, spending time with my family. One way my family spends time together, especially on a cold winter’s night, is to snuggle into comfy clothes and watch a movie together.

For this occasion, my mom was the one who got to pick the movie and it would end up being “The Dead Poets Society”. This is a movie my mom loves this movie but held it in the bag for a few years before showing it to me. The reason is that she believed that for some movies, such as “The Breakfast Club” and this one, you should have some life experience under your belt to fully “get” the movie. As I have gotten older, I agree, I appreciate these movies much more than I would have if I watched them when I was younger.

For those who don’t know, the movie is set in 1959 and is about a group of boys at an elite, all-boys prep school that trains the boys to be firm, single-minded, and rigid individuals. This is until they get a new English teacher, John Keating, a graduate of the school, who teaches the boys how to think freely and for themselves, not be shackled to the plans their parents had for them. 

It is an incredibly inspirational story about boys learning to think for themselves and becoming men thanks to their new teacher. This was thanks to the teaching style of Mr. Keating who went off the well-worn path of most teachers with their hard-held curriculums and instead, doing very atypical activities for his English position.

I firmly believe that every student, no matter what kind of school they go to, public, private, or even boarding school, at the end of their time in school, can say they had their own Mr. Keating. At some point or another, everyone has had a teacher who deeply inspires them and has a fundamentally different style than other teachers that simply makes them stand out amongst the crowd.

In my case, the first teacher that helped me learn to express myself, the one who started me on my path to being a free-thinking individual, my Mr. Keating, was my seventh-grade history teacher, Mr. Gilooly.

For me, he truly was the teacher who stood out from the rest at that point in my life, and looking back, I can see how much his class changed me for the better. As with Mr. Keating, his class was very atypical from the status quo, Mr. Gilooly ran our class like a college course, where we would have to take our notes, write weekly papers to improve both our writing and argument ability and open discussions to express our ideas. 

This incredibly alien class structure was hard to adjust to at first, but not only did I learn to thrive in it, but it also taught me many things about myself. The weekly essays we wrote helped me learn to enjoy writing and the principles of forming a good argument. Most importantly for me, the new style of note-taking helped me realize that I memorize material best when I had written it like it is imprinting on my brain. 

Mr. Gilooly’s style of teaching was also incredibly engaging and gave me the urge to try and always participate in his class. Not every day was cut and dry lectures from him, on the days leading up to quizzes, we would infamously do games of pie face with quiz questions. Whoever would get a question wrong, had to give the game a crank until it ended up pieing someone in the face. This was amazingly fun and truly did help reinforce the material for the kids who got and right and were pied. And believe me, I got pied quite a few times…

He taught us all to work hard every day.  You might have been a rockstar on one exam but don’t get cocky because tomorrow is a new day and new chapter. Going along with that was don’t let your failures let you down.  Tomorrow is a new day and your hard work can make it a better one.

However, the most beautiful things in life are the things that don’t last, in “The Dead Poet’s Society”, Mr. Keating is forced to leave the school after a tragedy involving one of his most dedicated students.

This Valentine’s Day marks the fourth anniversary of Richard Gilooly’s passing from a sudden heart attack. He was a herculean inspiration to me, being one of the people in my life who has helped shape me into the person I have become today.