I don’t know how this is even possible, but it has been four decades since Generation X gathered around clunky old televisions wheeled into classrooms all over the country to watch what we assumed would be a fairly ordinary space shuttle launch.
My classmates and I were excited. The Challenger was carrying Christa McAuliffe, the winner of the Teacher in Space competition. We had mixed feelings about that, because our teacher, Edd Little, had been a runner-up in the competition, and we were a bit offended that he hadn’t won. We still thought the idea was pretty cool, but we couldn’t figure out why the judges had snubbed OUR teacher, who had a working darkroom in his classroom, gave us worms to dissect in science class, and let us take turns playing Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe next to his desk whenever we got done with our work early. How could anybody one-up that?
Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, we stared at the screen with a strange mix of gratitude and sorrow, trying to make sense of what we had just witnessed and feeling terrible for all those students whose teacher had won the contest and whose elation at her accomplishment had exploded into fiery tragedy against a cobalt sky.
I don’t know how Mr. Little got through that day. I don’t know what went through his mind. He never told us. He came within an eyelash of being aboard a doomed spacecraft, watched that spacecraft explode on live television, stepped out for a minute to catch his breath, came back in, and kept teaching, because he wasn’t about to hand his kids off to a sub after we’d just witnessed a traumatic event that no one in the building could understand or explain better than he could.
The magnitude of his dedication didn’t register with me at the time, but looking back now, it occurs to me that Mr. Little is probably the main reason I don’t take personal days.
After watching a runner-up for the Teacher in Space program make it through Jan. 28, 1986, without ducking out early to go day drinking, I can’t really justify taking a day off for anything less than a dire emergency.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 