Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien
I got word today that my fifth-grade teacher, Edd Little, passed away last week. Mr. Little was a spectacular teacher of the sort I aspire to be. He was probably best known for his love of science: Mr. Little’s students dissected earthworms; inspected compost piles; processed black-and-white film in the darkroom he’d set up in his classroom; wandered through the woods in search of ferns to put in pickle-jar terrariums; cracked walnuts; made compasses from a magnetized needle, a cork, and a dish of water; peered at lake water under microscopes; and participated in a hilarious prank he set up to demonstrate the concept of osmosis. We also played Oregon Trail and Mastertype on the Apple IIe next to his desk, wore paper Houghton-Mifflin “Thinking Caps,” watched a documentary about the making of “We Are the World,” assembled tiny paper models of colonial villages, and listened to an eccentric but entertaining guest speaker extol the virtues of running a pick along a small model of a picket fence and counting the clicks to improve our math skills.
Mr. Little didn’t mind differentiating instruction for gifted kids, and he seemed to enjoy challenging me. In his class, I read The Hobbit (which I was kind of excited about, because my dad loved J.R.R. Tolkien’s work) and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (which I was less excited about, because I didn’t enjoy The Hobbit as much as I’d hoped and didn’t want to read another 1,500 pages about Middle-earth). I balked and cried and whined and pleaded and grumbled until Mr. Little assured me that if I kept it up, he would add the notoriously dull Silmarillion to my reading list, and Mom assured me that if I made anything lower than a B on my Tolkien test, she would give some other kid the old beach cruiser she was restoring for my birthday. Seventeen hundred pages later, I made an A on my test and swore I’d never read another fantasy novel. I’m sorry I never got a chance to tell Mr. Little about this Harry Potter-inspired blog, or the Hobbit-hole I painted on one wall of my old classroom, or the YA fantasy novel I wrote for my master’s thesis. I imagine he would have laughed his arse off.
Given his wizardry with a lesson plan, I could almost believe Mr. Little was one of the Istari.
Foolish Wand-Waving 