JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at the Hidden Brain podcast. "My Unsung Hero" tells the stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. Today's story comes from Malcolm Campbell. His unsung hero is his high school civics teacher Don Lawson. In 1980, when Campbell was a senior, Mr. Lawson taught a unit on the 1960s and the backlash to the Vietnam War.
MALCOLM CAMPBELL: And so we were studying the protest and how people have the right to protest if they think their government's wrong. And for two days, we listened to Bob Dylan songs, which has a lot of protest in it. And so it was really helping us understand that the words in the Constitution can come to life in lots of ways. After the second day, I raised my hand and said, is this going to be on the test? And Mr. Lawson looked at me and said, no, man, this is for you. And when he said that, I mean, it was like in the movies. A light went off in my head, and I realized, oh, my gosh. He's planned this material not for the content but for personal enrichment, for my own edification. And I realized at that moment that education should be that. It really should be about me learning for myself and not trying to please teachers.
Well, fast-forward 40 years. I got my Ph.D. in cell molecular biology, and I taught biology at Davidson College in North Carolina for 30 years. And I took that ethos, that approach to education with me, and I tried to impart to my students the idea that you should be as greedy as possible in school and learn as much as possible. And don't worry about the test. Don't worry about pleasing me. Do it for yourself.
Don Lawson woke that up in me. You know, I think about my career. I got paid to set those moments up for students, and then I got paid to watch them have those moments and then take it with them. That's an amazing career - that essentially I go around flipping lit matches onto piles of leaves and watching them take fire. And that's pretty cool because once they really understand what learning is, all you got to do is add that match, and poof. It's self-perpetuating. They're going to learn the rest of their lives. That's pretty awesome. And that's what Mr. Lawson did for me.
SUMMERS: Malcolm Campbell taught biology for 30 years at Davidson College in North Carolina. He recently retired and lives in Oakland, Maine. You can find more stories like this one at hiddenbrain.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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