Arno Kracht

Mr. Kracht taught English at Normandy High School in St. Louis. Somehow I would up in an Honors English class in my junior year and he got stuck with me.
That would have been the school year of 1971-72 and I would say he was about 30 at the time.
My high school had the honor of being the first in St. Louis to experience race riots. I'm talking fights, bats, chains, desks being thrown out upper story windows, teachers with nervous breakdowns, the whole nine yards. That was followed by chain link fencing, school IDs, security guards, etc.
A really great environment for an already semi dysfunctional teenager like me.
Like so often happens in troubled schools today there are always teachers who just keep trying to do their job in the midst of the turmoil all around them. Thus was Mr. Kracht.
One day we had to do an in class assignment on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Even a screw up like me had a hard time avoiding an assignment due in 20 minutes. We had to take one of the tales and rewrite it from medieval English to modern. I chose the Miller.
At the end of the class, much to my chagrin, he chose mine to read aloud. Then he kept me after class to talk to me.
He said he knew I could do that kind of work all of the time and he just didn't understand why I didn't.
I looked at him and said I knew I could too but saw no reason to prove it to anyone other than myself.
Wasn't that just a terrible thing to say? It embarrasses me to this day. My behavior didn't deserve a teacher like him.
I made a brief attempt at doing a blog about 5 years ago. I wrote about Mr. Kracht then. For a variety of reasons I stopped blogging and sometime after I would up learning that someone read the post, knew him, sent it to him, and he tried to contact me. The person said Mr. Kracht had indicated he didn't remember me being such a jerk to him. Unfortunately by that time I had stopped checking the blog and never got to talk to him.
I owed him a thank you for his effort. Even if he didn't remember my behavior I obviously do and he deserved  better from me.
Every one of you has somebody like Mr. Kracht in your past. You better find them and thank them before it's too late for either of you. Otherwise you will just sit and around and remember your own personal Mr. Kracht stories and wish you had done better.