Dan Rankin, Germantown Academy Teacher

As part of our graduation requirements in 1966, each senior at Germantown Academy in suburban Philadelphia had to give a speech to the school’s morning assembly. My class was small, only 29 students, and there were about 250 students in the whole school. G.A., as the oldest school of its type in the nation (since 1759), was run by a conservative board and a headmaster who has since been described as prehistoric.

The students, however, were in the vanguard of the generation just waking up to the sexual revolution and political power. The Vietnam War was in full bloom along with an anti-war movement that I was reading about in the newspapers. I decided that the subject of my speech would be to question whether the U.S. had a right to tell the Vietnamese what form of government they ought to have. It was not a very radical speech. I said I wasn’t sure whether democracy or communism was better for them, but it was for them to decide.

The headmaster always made some comment on the student’s speech at the end of the morning assembly, so I sat down nervously hoping for a morsel of praise. Instead, he declared my talk “unfortunate” and “misguided.” I was embarrassed, devastated. But on my way out of the assembly, our civics and history teacher, Dan Rankin, who was in his second or third year of teaching, stopped me in the hall and spoke one sentence: “That was a very stimulating and thoughtful speech.”

My next stop was to see my English teacher, who would be grading my speech. “What did I get?” I asked. He scowled and wouldn’t look me in the eye: “Zero! That was just about the worst speech I ever heard.”

My first class of the day was taught by a Czech-born physics professor. As soon as I sat down he attacked me verbally, in a thick Czech accent. “Who do you think you are? What do you know about communism? You know nothing! I have lived under communism. Only an ignorant fool would say the things you did!” I left the room in tears.

The final insult came that night when I got home and my mother insisted on reading my speech after I told her I had gotten a zero. When she was done she was shaking with rage. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re a little Hitler, that’s who!” And so on.

It was just about the worst day of my academic career. I went on to become a journalist and then an author. Along the way, I recalled all the events of that day with striking clarity, but especially the comment by Dan Rankin, whose single sentence of validation sustained me. It was a moment I returned to in my thoughts time and time again, and years later, just before he retired in the 1990s, I had the privilege of seeing him again on a visit to school and was invited to give another speech to the entire assembly in which I told the tale of my senior speech and the role Dan Rankin played in giving me something to hold on to, a scrap of praise, while riding through the storm.

Who doesn’t remember such a moment, negative as well as positive? If you are a teacher, parent, or play a similar role in a young person’s life, perhaps you will remember that a simple pat on the back, a moment of positive recognition, could sustain that person for the rest of their lives, as Dan Rankin’s did for me.