This column is about the intersection of finance and the law, and I hope you’ll all indulge me in stretching that premise a bit this week. I want to talk about the value a particular teacher, who we recently lost to a violent crime, added to my life, and many others.
Barry Bennett played 11 seasons in the NFL. From 1978 to 1988, he spent time on the line for the New Orleans Saints, the New York Jets, and the Minnesota Vikings.
But I didn’t know any of that when I first walked into his physical education class at Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School as a bespectacled, tiny, awkward teenager. He was just Mr. Bennett to me. He had a booming voice and he’d cruise around on his bicycle shouting encouragement and clocking us in at the end as we circled the high school running the mile. He’d jump into our games of bombardment (the Minnesota name for a close cousin of dodgeball) if we begged hard enough. He respected the students. He made us laugh — one time a friend of mine, Jerrod, who also met a brave but tragic end, bet me $20 I couldn’t wax my legs (which sprout hair roughly the consistency of a bear pelt) without making a peep. Another classmate brought in the waxing paraphernalia, and Mr. Bennett refereed the whole silly affair, cracking his own brand of tasteful jokes along with the rest of us. He made a class that could have been a chore a pleasure.
I graduated as my high school valedictorian, and my nearly perfect transcript was marred by only a single A-. It was from that first P.E. class I took with Mr. Bennett. “Wolfman,” he said, “You try harder than anyone else in this class, and I can’t tell you how important I think that is. But if I gave you an ‘A’ instead of an ‘A-,’ what am I supposed to tell the kids who don’t have to try as hard as you do but are still getting a six-minute mile instead of the eight-minute mile you’re at?”
I tried even harder, and I took more classes with Barry Bennett. By the next year, I was getting an A on my own merits. By my senior year, I was taking elective Phys. Ed. Mr. Bennett taught me how to lift weights, and lift them right. We lifted three days a week, and the rest of the days learned the nuances of everything from broomball (hockey but with no skates and a ball instead of a puck, and, you know, brooms) to bowling. He was radiant in the elective class. “Beloved” is not an overstatement. When graduation season came, he carried around a stack of cards, because he was invited to so many graduation parties, and he made the time to stop by and visit and have a little food at every single one of them. He was one of only two teachers I invited to my own graduation party. Years later, he would still stop my buddy Ingman and me for a chat when he saw us riding our bikes around town. He said he thought it was great to see his former students out getting exercise as adults even when it was no longer a class requirement.
I didn’t become an athlete. I’m not an NFL player. But I’ve completed four marathons at this point. I still lift weights. If not for the influence Barry Bennett had on my life, I might have been dead one night three years ago when a couple street thugs jumped me. As it turned out, I had the physique to fight them off, they went to jail, and I spent the night a little bloodied but safe in my own bed. Mr. Bennett didn’t create my stubbornness or drive or whatever you want to call it, but he sure helped it grow and mature. I don’t know if I would have come out of a lot of the experiences I’ve had in as good of shape as I did if Barry Bennett hadn’t been in my life.
Barry Bennett, and his wife, Carol, were murdered last week in my hometown. You can read about the details of that horrible crime in some other news source. But I want to tell you that teachers, good teachers, add real value to people’s lives. There are a lot of studies about it, and replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent for quality with even an average teacher can increase the present value of students’ lifetime incomes by as much as $250,000 per classroom. Barry Bennett was more than an average teacher, he was an outstanding teacher, and I have no trouble believing that he helped contribute to the lifetime earnings of myself and the rest of his students. But he offered so much more that you can’t put a number on. He improved hundreds of lives, including my own. That is what I am going to remember of him. That, and his big, toothy smile.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.