There are certain days in your life that remain remarkably clear, no matter how many years pass or how much the world changes around you. You can remember your high school graduation, the day you left for college, the first time you walked into medical school, and your wedding day with a clarity that sometimes surprises you. You remember the little things, too, the things that other people might have forgotten before they even made it home that afternoon. You remember the light coming through a window, the sound of a door opening, the particular clothes somebody was wearing, or the way a room felt before anything particularly important had happened. Memory is a funny thing. It doesn’t always preserve the events that seem most consequential to the rest of the world. Sometimes, it takes an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning and puts it away somewhere deep inside you, carefully preserved, as though some part of your mind understood that you would need to return to it years later.
For me, one of those days happened in 1998, on the second floor of Ponaganset High School, in a classroom where I was supposed to be learning twentieth-century world history. I was a junior, seventeen years old, and I had absolutely no idea that a man named Mr. Paquette was about to give me one of the most memorable lessons of my life. I certainly didn’t know that I would eventually become a physician, a trauma and critical care surgeon, or that years later I would find myself running into him again in a hospital emergency department, wearing scrubs and a white coat instead of carrying a high school schedule printed on a sheet of paper. Nor could I have imagined that the teacher I was about to meet would eventually write the letter of recommendation that helped me get into Harvard, or that I would someday look back on that first class as one of the moments when my understanding of adulthood began to change.
But I remember it. I remember it vividly, and I think I understand why.
It was the first time I can remember a teacher treating me as though I were an adult.
To understand why that mattered so much, you have to remember what high school was like in the late 1990s, when the world still operated at a slightly different speed, when the internet was beginning to insinuate itself into ordinary life but had not yet colonized every waking moment, and when a student’s greatest technological assets might include a Walkman, a collection of compact discs, and a printer that could be coaxed into producing a reasonably legible copy of a class schedule. There were no smartphones to consult when you couldn’t find a classroom, no group chats to tell you whether the teacher had shown up, and no immediate digital record of every foolish thing a teenager said or did. If you wanted to know something, you either asked somebody, looked it up in a book, or tried to work it out yourself. If you were a student at Ponaganset High School, you also learned to navigate the unspoken geography of the building, the corridors, the staircases, the familiar faces, and the strange little rituals that seemed to govern the school day.
I was always taking the more advanced classes available to me, and that meant I occasionally found myself in classrooms where I was younger than nearly everybody else. In this particular case, I was a junior enrolled in Honors 20th Century World History, a course taught by Mr. Paquette that was populated largely by seniors. I don’t remember having any particular apprehension about that when I first saw the course on my schedule. I was accustomed to being in classes with older students, and the difference between being sixteen or seventeen and being eighteen seemed much more significant to the teenagers involved than it probably did to the adults who taught us. Still, there was something about walking into a room full of seniors that could make you suddenly conscious of your age, especially when you were carrying a piece of paper that announced, in perfectly ordinary black ink, that you had every right to be there.
I remember walking down the hallway, looking at my printed schedule, trying to make sure I had the right room. I found the classroom and stepped inside, expecting to see a teacher arranging his notes, writing something on the chalkboard, or performing one of those small, familiar rituals by which teachers prepare themselves to spend the next forty-five minutes attempting to educate a roomful of adolescents. Instead, there was no Mr. Paquette. There were only the students, most of them older than I was, looking at me with that unmistakable expression teenagers develop when somebody enters a room who doesn’t quite fit the expected demographic. I could practically hear the unspoken question: What is this junior doing in here with us?
I checked my schedule again, because there is nothing quite like being seventeen years old and suddenly wondering whether you have managed to get lost in a building you have been attending for years. The room appeared to be correct. I sat down, put my things on the desk, and waited. I was nervous enough to become acutely aware of everything around me, including the conversations taking place between students who already knew one another, the shuffling of papers, the scrape of chairs against the floor, and the general commotion that accompanies a classroom full of teenagers who have not yet been given a reason to stop talking.
Then the final bell rang.
At Ponaganset, as at high schools everywhere, the final bell was more than a signal that the school day had begun. It was a declaration that the grace period had expired. If you were still wandering the corridors after that bell, you were late, and the school had a whole system of rules, consequences, and administrative displeasure designed to remind you of the fact. The bell rang, the door remained open for a moment, and the usual classroom chatter continued. We were waiting for the teacher, and the teacher was nowhere to be seen.
That was when somebody inevitably brought up the fifteen-minute rule.
Every high school seems to have its own mythology, a collection of rules that students repeat with the solemn confidence of constitutional scholars despite having little idea whether any of them are actually true. Somewhere along the way, somebody had decided that if a teacher failed to arrive within fifteen minutes, the class was legally free to leave. It was presented as an established fact, as though the Rhode Island General Assembly had devoted an afternoon to the question of what should happen when a history teacher was late. There was apparently a binding legal distinction between ten minutes and fifteen minutes, and once that magical threshold had been crossed, the students would be liberated from the oppressive machinery of compulsory education.
I loved high school mythology. I still do, in a way. There is something wonderful about the confidence with which teenagers manufacture an entire body of law out of rumor, wishful thinking, and whatever somebody’s older brother supposedly heard from a senior three years earlier. We were sitting there, waiting, and the possibility of an unscheduled reprieve was beginning to seem increasingly attractive. The teacher hadn’t arrived. The bell had rung. Somebody was probably keeping track of the minutes. The fifteen-minute rule was discussed, contemplated, and perhaps quietly celebrated in advance.
We had no idea what was coming.
After approximately ten minutes, the classroom door suddenly flew open, and in walked Mr. Paquette.
I can still picture him in my mind. He had the appearance of a man who had never felt the need to dress like anybody else simply because an institution expected him to do so. His clothes were classic New England academic, comfortable and intellectual without looking contrived: a tweed sports coat in an earthy shade, perhaps with a subtle herringbone pattern, a button-down Oxford shirt, and a textured necktie that looked as though it had been knotted in the morning without requiring a committee meeting. His trousers were pressed but practical, and his whole appearance suggested a man who valued ideas considerably more than appearances. I can imagine him in a tan trench coat when the autumn air turned cold, walking across campus with the unhurried confidence of somebody who had spent enough time thinking about the world to understand that a little rain was rarely the most important thing happening in it.
He was not dressed like a man who had come to supervise a classroom. He looked like a man who had come to discuss something important.
And under his arm was a portable radio with a CD player.
That detail has stayed with me all these years because it was so wonderfully unexpected. In 1998, a portable stereo was hardly an exotic technological marvel, but there was something about the sight of a teacher entering an honors history class carrying a CD player that immediately suggested this was not going to be a conventional morning. He did not arrive with a stack of photocopied worksheets or a textbook tucked against his chest. He did not begin by writing the date on the chalkboard or asking us to take out our notebooks. He simply walked in, looked over the room, and surveyed us with the calm, appraising expression of a general inspecting a battlefield before deciding where to deploy his troops.
He said nothing.
He crossed to the teacher’s desk, put the CD player down, and began untangling the power cord. We watched him. A few of us exchanged glances. The classroom had gone from ordinary confusion to something much more interesting, and we were all trying to determine whether this was an elaborate joke, some kind of experiment, or simply the way Mr. Paquette conducted his classes. He plugged the machine into the wall, adjusted it on the desk, and pressed play.
Then the music began.
It was Rock the Casbah by The Clash.
I recognized the song immediately, or at least I recognized the music. I had heard it before, on the radio or somewhere in the background of ordinary life, and its infectious rhythm was familiar enough that I could have followed along with the tune. But I didn’t know the full story behind it. I didn’t know its historical context, its political origins, or the layers of irony embedded in its lyrics. To me, it was a great song with an irresistible beat. I certainly hadn’t walked into an honors history class expecting to spend the morning listening to British punk rock.
Mr. Paquette stood there while the song played, and the rest of us listened. The familiar rhythm filled the classroom, an unexpected soundtrack to a school morning that had begun with the mundane anxiety of finding the right room. Some students looked amused. Others seemed puzzled. A few probably wondered whether we were going to be tested on the song afterward. I suspect more than one person was still calculating how much time remained before the mythical fifteen-minute rule could be invoked, although by that point the teacher had arrived and our legal case for freedom was beginning to deteriorate.
Mr. Paquette did not interrupt the music. He let it play all the way through.
When the song ended, he reached over and switched off the CD player. Then he began to explain what we had just heard.
And this is where the story stops being a funny memory about a teacher who arrived late with a stereo and becomes something much more important to me, because what followed was the sort of lesson that changes the way a student thinks about education itself.
He did not treat the song as a novelty, a bit of entertainment to fill the time, or an amusing departure from the day’s scheduled material. He treated it as a historical document, something that could be examined, questioned, and understood within the larger political and cultural circumstances of the late twentieth century. He began connecting the music to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the rise of the Islamic Republic, the suppression of Western music, and the broader struggle between authoritarian political power and individual expression. What we had just heard on a CD was not merely a catchy song that had once climbed the charts. It was a piece of political satire, written in response to a world in which governments could attempt to regulate what people listened to, what they watched, and what kinds of cultural expression they were permitted to enjoy.
I remember being struck by the sheer unexpectedness of it. We had been sitting in a classroom waiting for a teacher to arrive, and suddenly we were discussing revolution, censorship, cultural identity, oil, international politics, and the ways in which popular music could carry a message far more complicated than its commercial success might suggest. The classroom had become something different from what I had expected. We were no longer simply students waiting to be told what to write down. We were being invited to think about the world.
The Iranian Revolution had brought an end to the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged as the dominant figure in the new Islamic Republic. The political transformation that followed was accompanied by sweeping changes to public life, including restrictions on forms of entertainment and cultural expression that the new authorities considered incompatible with their religious and political vision. Western popular music became a particularly potent symbol of that conflict. The Clash took the idea of a government attempting to control music and turned it into an absurd, energetic, and deeply political story about a ruler who could not tolerate the sight of his people dancing to a forbidden song.
The genius of Rock the Casbah lies partly in that absurdity. The song presents an authoritarian ruler who responds to music as though it were a military emergency. He attempts to suppress the sound, punish the people listening to it, and ultimately use the instruments of state power to force them back into obedience. The premise is deliberately exaggerated, but the political reality beneath it is recognizable: governments that fear independent thought often become preoccupied with controlling the cultural expressions through which people communicate, form identities, and imagine lives beyond the boundaries imposed upon them.
Mr. Paquette understood that a song could be a way into a much larger conversation. He was not asking us merely to memorize the names of political leaders or recite the dates of revolutions. He was showing us how historical events leave traces in unexpected places, how politics enters popular culture, and how something created in one country can acquire meanings that travel far beyond the circumstances that inspired it. The music was the beginning of the lesson, not the lesson itself.
I remember being fascinated by the idea that an ordinary pop song could contain so many layers of meaning. Before that morning, I had largely thought of history as a subject in which you learned about things that had already happened. You read the chapter, learned the names, remembered the dates, answered the questions, and moved on to the next unit. History was important, certainly, but it could sometimes feel like a collection of events arranged in chronological order, with the occasional war thrown in to make the examination more interesting.
Mr. Paquette approached it differently. He made history feel alive, not because he tried to make the past seem more exciting than it had been, but because he understood that the past was never really separate from the present. The people involved had been real human beings with ambitions, fears, convictions, prejudices, loyalties, and weaknesses. They had made decisions that seemed reasonable to them at the time, sometimes with consequences they could never have anticipated. Their lives had been shaped by forces larger than themselves, yet they had also helped shape those forces through the choices they made. The point was not simply to know what happened. The point was to understand why it happened, what it meant to the people who lived through it, and what it might reveal about the world we inhabited.
As the discussion unfolded, the song offered an opportunity to examine the relationship between political authority and military power. The ruler in the song is prepared to use overwhelming force against people whose offense is essentially harmless. The contrast is deliberately ridiculous, but it reveals something unsettling about the logic of authoritarianism: once a government begins to regard peaceful individual expression as a threat to its survival, even ordinary human pleasures can become matters of state security.
There was another irony in the historical backdrop. Before the revolution, Iran had acquired sophisticated American-made military aircraft under the Shah, including F-4 Phantom fighters and F-14 Tomcats. The country that emerged after the revolution defined itself in opposition to American influence, yet it inherited military hardware purchased during the previous government’s close relationship with the United States. That complicated history offered another avenue into the broader questions of geopolitics, foreign policy, and the enduring consequences of political decisions made years earlier. Technology, like history itself, rarely remains neatly contained within the intentions of the people who first acquire it.
The Clash were not writing a textbook chapter, and Mr. Paquette was not pretending that a three-minute rock song could substitute for a serious study of the Iranian Revolution. That was precisely what made the exercise so effective. The song opened a door, and he encouraged us to walk through it. We could begin with the music, investigate the events that had inspired it, and then consider the uncomfortable questions that emerged along the way. What happens when governments try to control culture? How does political ideology become embedded in everyday life? Why do powerful nations tolerate abuses by friendly governments while condemning similar abuses by their enemies? And what happens when a work of art is interpreted in a way that runs directly counter to the intentions of the people who created it?
That final question was particularly interesting because Rock the Casbah eventually acquired a life of its own in American popular culture. Its infectious rhythm made it easy to enjoy without understanding the political satire beneath it, and the song was sometimes interpreted in ways that bore little resemblance to its original intent. During the 1991 Gulf War, American military audiences embraced the song in a context that could make its meaning seem almost inverted. An anti-authoritarian song, rooted in a critique of repression and the absurdity of military power, could be heard as a celebration of American military action against an Arab country. The irony was difficult to miss once somebody pointed it out: a song written by a band known for its left-wing politics and opposition to militarism had been absorbed into the cultural atmosphere of a war in which American forces were fighting in the Middle East.
There is an important distinction here between the documented history of the song and the interpretations that later grew around it. The Clash did not write Rock the Casbah as a straightforward celebration of Western military power, and its use during the Gulf War illustrates how easily a work of art can be detached from its original political context. Whether a listener hears the song as satire, rebellion, a dance track, or a symbol of something else depends in part on what the listener knows, what the listener believes, and what the surrounding circumstances encourage that listener to see. Music can travel farther than its creators ever intended, and its meaning can change in the hands of people who may never have bothered to understand it.
That, too, was history.
I do not claim to remember every word Mr. Paquette said that morning, nor would I pretend that I can reconstruct the lecture exactly as it happened nearly three decades ago. Memory is not a recording device, and anyone who claims to remember every detail of a particular morning in 1998 is probably giving the human brain more credit than it deserves. What I remember is the experience itself: the music, the unexpected lecture, the way the subject expanded beyond the boundaries of the classroom, and the realization that a history teacher could take something I already knew and reveal an entirely different world hiding inside it.
I also remember that he did not seem especially interested in whether we were impressed.
He was not performing for us. He was not trying to become the most popular teacher in the building, and he certainly was not attempting to entertain us with a carefully rehearsed classroom routine. He seemed to be doing something much simpler and, in my view, much more valuable. He had found something interesting, something that illustrated the history he wanted us to understand, and he had brought it to class because he believed it was worth discussing. He expected us to listen, think, and follow the argument. We were there to learn, and he treated us as though we were capable of doing so.
That distinction might sound trivial to someone who has never spent much time thinking about the relationship between teachers and students, but it meant a great deal to me. There is a particular kind of respect that comes from being taken seriously before you have necessarily done anything to prove that you deserve it. Adolescents are often told that they are preparing for adulthood, that they will one day be expected to think independently, make decisions, and take responsibility for their actions. Yet much of their daily experience can be organized around the assumption that they are not quite ready to be trusted with those responsibilities. They are told what to read, what to memorize, what to write, and when to speak. Their days are divided into periods, their movements are regulated by bells, and their intellectual lives are sometimes reduced to a series of assignments whose purpose seems to be demonstrating compliance rather than understanding.
There are good reasons for structure in education, of course. A classroom without expectations would quickly become a rather chaotic place, especially when the occupants are teenagers who have discovered that the phrase “fifteen-minute rule” may offer them a theoretical escape from an otherwise ordinary Wednesday. But structure is not the same thing as intellectual confinement, and discipline is not the same thing as treating young people as though they have nothing meaningful to contribute.
Mr. Paquette did something different. He treated us as people who could engage with ideas that were complicated, politically uncomfortable, and not easily reduced to a few lines in a textbook. He did not appear to believe that we needed every difficult subject softened into something simple before we could begin to understand it. He trusted us to listen, to think, and to ask questions. He gave us an experience that felt much closer to what I imagined college would be like than anything I had previously encountered in high school.
I remember thinking that this was what education was supposed to feel like.
It was not that the class suddenly became easy. Quite the opposite. The lesson asked more of us than simply copying notes from a chalkboard. We had to consider what the song meant, why it had been written, how it related to the political circumstances of its time, and what its later use revealed about the relationship between culture and power. The subject did not have a single neat answer that could be memorized and reproduced on a multiple-choice examination. It required interpretation. It required curiosity. It required us to tolerate the possibility that our first understanding of something might be incomplete or wrong.
That was the appeal.
I wanted more of it.
And then, after he had finished explaining the song and discussing the history behind it, Mr. Paquette did something that I can still picture with remarkable clarity. He stopped pacing around the classroom and looked at the clock on the wall. For a moment, the lesson seemed to have reached a natural conclusion, and I assumed he was about to tell us what we would be covering next or perhaps assign some reading for the following class. Instead, he walked over to the desk, reached down, and unplugged the CD player from the wall outlet.
He gathered the cord, tucked the machine under his arm, and walked out into the hallway.
Just like that.
No grand announcement. No formal conclusion. No reminder to read the next chapter. No assignment written on the board. He simply collected his equipment and left.
We sat there in silence.
And we still had at least thirty minutes of class remaining.
I can only imagine what the students who had spent the first ten minutes discussing the fifteen-minute rule were thinking. The teacher had arrived late, played a song, delivered a lecture that had somehow taken us from a British punk band to the politics of the Middle East, and then departed with his CD player as though this were the most ordinary teaching method in the world. We were left sitting in a classroom, looking at one another, with the peculiar sensation that something had happened but nobody had been given an official explanation of what it was.
There was no tidy worksheet to complete. No list of vocabulary words. No immediate exercise asking us to identify three themes in the lyrics and explain their significance in complete sentences. The lesson had simply occurred, and now we were expected to sit with it.
I loved it.
I loved the audacity of it, the confidence, the sheer indifference to the idea that every minute of a school period had to be filled with visible activity. I loved that he had walked into a room full of teenagers and managed to make us listen to a song we already knew as though we were hearing it for the first time. I loved that he had made a history lesson feel like a conversation among adults who happened to be interested in the same subject. Most of all, I loved that he had trusted us to recognize the value of the experience without needing to explain it to us afterward.
For the first time, I had a glimpse of what I thought college would be like. Not the buildings, the dormitories, the libraries, or the idea of living away from home, but the intellectual atmosphere I associated with higher education: a place where a person could bring an unexpected idea into a room, challenge the assumptions of the people listening, and trust that a worthwhile conversation did not have to follow a predetermined script. It was an environment in which learning could be surprising, irreverent, and occasionally a little unruly, provided that the underlying purpose was serious.
Mr. Paquette had managed to create that atmosphere in a high school classroom on the second floor of Ponaganset.
I was hooked.
Over the course of my time in high school, I ended up taking four classes with him, and each one reinforced what I had begun to understand that first morning. He made history interesting because he did not treat it as a dead subject. He could take events that had happened decades or centuries earlier and make them feel immediate, relevant, and worthy of discussion. He was interested in ideas, but he was also interested in the people who held them, the institutions that sustained them, and the consequences that followed when belief collided with reality. He could be irreverent, outspoken, opinionated, and occasionally profane, and he did not seem particularly concerned with maintaining the polished, carefully neutral persona that some people assume a teacher must adopt to be effective.
Mr. Paquette spoke his mind. If he thought something was foolish, he was willing to say so. If he thought an argument was weak, he was not going to pretend otherwise merely to avoid offending somebody. He had opinions, and he was prepared to defend them, but what made his classes valuable was that he also gave you something to think about rather than simply demanding that you agree with him. He was not trying to produce a classroom full of miniature versions of himself. He was trying to get us to engage with the world intelligently.
That is a distinction I have come to appreciate more with age.
A good teacher does not merely transfer information from one mind to another. Information is important, and a teacher who knows nothing about the subject being taught is not going to accomplish much, but the deeper task of education is to change the way a student approaches a question. It is to cultivate the habit of looking beyond the obvious, asking why something happened, examining the assumptions beneath an argument, and recognizing that the world is often more complicated than the first explanation suggests. The best teachers leave you with questions you continue to ask long after the examination is over.
Mr. Paquette did that for me. He made me curious, and he made curiosity feel like something worth pursuing.
I have thought about that lesson many times since, particularly because my own career eventually took me into medicine, a field in which the ability to ask questions and challenge assumptions can have consequences far beyond a classroom discussion. As a trauma and critical care surgeon, I spend my professional life dealing with complicated situations in which the obvious explanation is not always the correct one, in which a patient’s condition can change rapidly, and in which the difference between a superficial understanding and a deeper one can be extraordinarily important. Medicine requires knowledge, discipline, and technical skill, but it also requires curiosity, intellectual humility, and a willingness to keep examining a problem when the first answer does not adequately explain what you are seeing.
In the trauma bay, I cannot simply accept the first explanation for an injury because it seems convenient. In the operating room, I have to understand not only what I am doing but why I am doing it, what the anatomy tells me, what the physiology is revealing, and what might happen if my assumptions are wrong. In the intensive care unit, I have to consider how different organ systems interact, how one intervention may affect another, and how the patient’s broader condition changes the meaning of an individual measurement. The work requires the ability to look at a problem from several directions, recognize patterns, and remain willing to revise an initial conclusion when the evidence points elsewhere.
Those habits do not begin in medical school. They develop over years, through experiences that teach us how to think and through people who challenge us to do better than merely repeat what we have been told.
I would never suggest that a single history lesson made me a surgeon. That would be a ridiculous simplification of a life that involved years of education, demanding training, difficult decisions, and more than a few occasions when I had to learn something the hard way. But I do believe that teachers such as Mr. Paquette helped shape the intellectual instincts I carried into those later experiences. He encouraged me to look beyond the surface, to question the conventional explanation, and to recognize that understanding something properly often requires examining the circumstances that produced it.
Those lessons travel.
They travel from a high school history classroom to a college lecture hall, from a university library to a medical school laboratory, and eventually into a hospital where the questions are no longer hypothetical and the consequences of getting the answer wrong may be measured in human lives. The subject matter changes, but the habit of thought remains remarkably similar. The willingness to ask why, the refusal to be satisfied with an inadequate explanation, and the understanding that knowledge becomes more meaningful when you can connect it to something larger are qualities that serve a person in nearly every serious intellectual endeavor.
There was another thing about Mr. Paquette that I appreciated, although I probably did not fully understand it when I was seventeen. He seemed comfortable being himself. He did not appear to need the approval of every student in the room, and he did not seem especially interested in conforming to somebody else’s idea of what a history teacher should look or sound like. He could be eccentric without seeming to know or care that he was eccentric. He could make an unconventional choice in the classroom and trust that the quality of the lesson would justify it. He was not trying to win a popularity contest, and he did not confuse being liked with being effective.
That sort of independence can be difficult to appreciate when you are young, because high school is an environment in which so much energy is devoted to figuring out how you fit in. Students are acutely aware of clothing, social groups, reputations, and the endless small judgments that seem to accompany every ordinary interaction. The fear of looking foolish can be powerful enough to prevent a person from asking a question, offering an opinion, or trying something unfamiliar. You spend a great deal of time thinking about how other people see you, and not nearly enough time thinking about whether the things you are doing are actually worth doing.
Mr. Paquette seemed to have escaped much of that machinery long before I met him. He had interests, convictions, and a way of approaching the world that did not appear to depend on whether the people around him approved. He was willing to stand in front of a classroom, play a song by The Clash, and deliver a lecture about the politics of the Iranian Revolution because he believed the material was worth our attention. If somebody thought it was strange, that was their problem.
There is a certain freedom in that, and I suspect it was part of what made his teaching so memorable. He was not simply telling us that independent thought mattered. He was demonstrating it.
The older I get, the more I recognize how unusual and valuable that quality can be in a teacher. A teacher who is comfortable with his own intellectual identity can make room for students to develop theirs. He can challenge them without trying to humiliate them, disagree with them without making disagreement feel dangerous, and expose them to unfamiliar ideas without insisting that they adopt his conclusions. The objective is not to make students comfortable at every moment. Sometimes the most productive thing an educator can do is make a student uncomfortable enough to reconsider an assumption that has gone unexamined for years. But there is a difference between discomfort that comes from being challenged and discomfort that comes from being belittled, and the best teachers understand the distinction.
Mr. Paquette took his students seriously, and that made us take his classes seriously in return.
When I think about the people who have influenced my life, I inevitably return to that classroom. I think about the young man I was in 1998, sitting among a group of older students, trying to work out whether I had found the correct room. I think about the bell ringing, the conversation about the fifteen-minute rule, and the sudden arrival of a teacher carrying a CD player. I think about the opening notes of Rock the Casbah, the unexpected discussion that followed, and the sight of Mr. Paquette unplugging his stereo and walking out into the hallway while the rest of us sat there wondering what on earth had just happened.
And I think about how little I understood, at the time, about the significance of that experience.
At seventeen, I was interested in the future. That is what young people are supposed to be interested in, after all. I was thinking about college, about where I might go, what I might study, and what sort of life I might eventually build. Harvard was an ambition that would require considerable effort, and I knew that getting there would not be a matter of simply deciding I wanted to attend. There would be applications, examinations, recommendations, and the thousand small requirements that stand between a student’s aspirations and the opportunity to pursue them. I was accustomed to working hard in school, and I understood that academic ability alone would not necessarily be enough.
What I did not yet understand was how much the people who teach us can influence the direction our lives take, sometimes in ways that become apparent only years later.
Mr. Paquette eventually wrote my letter of recommendation for Harvard. I was later told that the letter helped put me over the finish line for acceptance, a piece of information that has never ceased to mean a great deal to me. I have no way of knowing precisely how an admissions committee weighed every part of my application, and I would not pretend that a single letter explains the outcome of such a complicated decision. But I know that his recommendation mattered, and I know that it came from someone who had seen me as a student, had watched me learn, and had a genuine sense of the person I was becoming.
That is an extraordinary thing for a former student to be able to say.
By the time he wrote that letter, I had spent years being educated by many capable people. I had encountered teachers who knew their subjects, teachers who were patient, teachers who were demanding, and teachers who could explain difficult material in ways that made it easier to understand. I am grateful for all of them. But Mr. Paquette occupied a different place in my life because he had influenced not only what I knew but how I thought. He had seen potential in me before I had a complete understanding of what that potential might become, and he was willing to put his own words behind his belief in me.
A recommendation letter is, in one sense, an ordinary document. It is a few pages of prose, written for an institutional purpose, submitted alongside grades and test scores and the other evidence by which an admissions committee tries to determine whether an applicant is likely to succeed. But a meaningful recommendation is also an act of trust. The person writing it is saying that the student is worth taking seriously, that the student’s accomplishments are not merely a collection of numbers, and that there is something about the person behind those numbers that deserves consideration.
For a young man hoping to attend Harvard, having a teacher whose judgment I respected write that letter meant more than I probably knew how to express at the time. It connected the ambitions I carried as a student to the encouragement I had received in his classroom. It was one more reminder that education is not an impersonal process in which students move through a system and emerge with credentials. It is a relationship between people, and those relationships can have consequences that last for decades.
When I think about the years that followed, I can see how many different individuals contributed to the path that eventually led me into medicine. There were professors, physicians, mentors, colleagues, and friends who helped me learn what I needed to know and become the person I needed to be. Medical school taught me an enormous amount about the human body, disease, and the scientific foundations of clinical practice. Residency taught me how much I still had to learn, and surgical training demanded a level of discipline and persistence that can be difficult to appreciate until you have lived through it. Every stage required effort, and none of it happened simply because I had enjoyed a particularly memorable history class.
But Mr. Paquette had helped cultivate something that remained important throughout the journey: the desire to understand.
I have always believed that the best education gives a person more than the ability to pass an examination. It gives them a framework for approaching unfamiliar problems, a willingness to question their assumptions, and an appreciation for the fact that learning does not end when somebody hands you a diploma. In medicine, that attitude is essential because the science is continually evolving, and even the most experienced physician will encounter patients whose conditions do not conform neatly to what they have seen before. The physician who believes that education ended with medical school will eventually find himself dangerously out of date. The physician who remains curious has at least a chance of recognizing when the world has changed, when an old explanation no longer fits, or when a new piece of evidence demands a different approach.
That spirit of lifelong learning is something I associate with the best teachers I have known, and Mr. Paquette was among the very best.
There is a temptation, when writing about a beloved teacher, to turn the person into a flawless figure, a saint who never made a mistake and whose every classroom decision was an act of pedagogical genius. That would not do him justice. Part of what made Mr. Paquette memorable was that he was a real person, with opinions, quirks, and a personality that was unmistakably his own. He was not some carefully manufactured educational ideal designed to fit neatly into a graduation speech. He was an individual who brought his interests into the classroom, spoke with conviction, and seemed to understand that the world was too interesting to be reduced to the pages of a textbook.
He was memorable because he was himself.
And the fact that he was willing to be himself in front of a classroom full of teenagers mattered. It showed us that an adult could be intellectually serious without being stiff, authoritative without being pompous, and unconventional without being unserious. He could swear when the situation called for it, speak frankly about his opinions, and refuse to pretend that every question had a tidy answer. He could challenge the assumptions of the people around him while making it clear that the point of the exercise was to think, not merely to obey.
I suspect that some of us appreciated those qualities more than others. Teenagers are a diverse population, and no teacher can reach every student in exactly the same way. Some students may have preferred a more conventional classroom, and some may have found his methods unusual. But for me, the effect was profound. I felt as though I had been admitted into a conversation that adults usually reserved for one another, and that feeling made me want to learn more.
It is difficult to explain the importance of that experience without making it sound more dramatic than it actually was. Nothing extraordinary happened in the conventional sense. There was no award ceremony, no speech about my future, and no moment in which Mr. Paquette turned to me and announced that I would one day become a surgeon. He did not know that I would eventually be standing in an emergency department in a white coat, and I did not know that I would one day be writing about him from the perspective of a middle-aged physician looking back on high school.
There was only a classroom, a CD player, a song, and a teacher who approached his subject in a way that made me see education differently.
Sometimes that is enough.
Years later, after college, medical school, residency, and the long process of becoming a physician, I encountered Mr. Paquette again. This time, it was not in a classroom at Ponaganset High School. It was in the emergency department of the hospital where I was working. I was a doctor by then, and my life had changed in almost every conceivable way since the day I first sat in his history class. I was no longer a teenager trying to find a room on the second floor of a high school. I was a surgeon, wearing scrubs and a white coat, working in an environment where the pace could be relentless and the responsibilities were very real.
I will not say why he was there or whom he was there with. That is not my story to tell, and some details deserve to remain private. What matters is that I saw him, recognized him, and had the opportunity to speak with him again.
There is something deeply strange about encountering a teacher from your youth after you have grown into the adult you once imagined becoming. When you are seventeen, your teachers seem to belong to a separate category of human existence. They are the adults who stand at the front of the classroom, who know the material, who write the grades, and who appear to have already figured out how the world works. You may know that they have lives outside school, but those lives remain largely abstract. You see them in the context of the institution, and it can be difficult to imagine what it would mean to meet them somewhere else.
Then, one day, you are standing in a hospital corridor, and the person who once taught you about the Iranian Revolution is looking at you as a surgeon.
I can only imagine what that must have been like from his perspective. He had known me as a young student, a teenager who was eager to learn and who had sat in his classroom years earlier. Now I was a physician, working in an emergency department, wearing the uniform of a profession that had once existed somewhere in the future I was trying to imagine. The roles had changed, the setting had changed, and the years between us had accumulated in ways that neither of us could reverse.
But the recognition was immediate.
I remember telling him what an influence he had been on my life. I wanted him to know that his classes had mattered, that I had carried the lessons with me, and that the effect he had on me had extended far beyond the years I spent at Ponaganset. I wanted him to understand that I remembered the teacher who had walked into a classroom with a CD player and turned a song into a lesson about history, politics, and the world beyond the school walls. I wanted him to know that I had never forgotten what it felt like to be treated as an adult before I had actually become one.
There are things we assume the people who influence us already know. We imagine that our parents understand how much their sacrifices mattered, that our friends know how much their loyalty has meant, and that our teachers recognize the lasting effect of their work. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they have heard it from enough former students to understand that their influence extends beyond the classroom. But there is still something meaningful about saying it directly, especially when enough years have passed that the person you are thanking may not realize how vividly you remember the experience.
I wanted Mr. Paquette to know that I had not forgotten him.
I wanted him to know that the young man who once sat in his class had carried a piece of that experience into every stage of his education, even if he could not have explained it at the time. I wanted him to know that his recommendation had helped me take an important step toward Harvard, and that his teaching had left an impression that no amount of time or professional accomplishment had erased. I wanted him to know that when I thought about the people who had helped shape my life, his name was always near the top of the list.
And I wanted him to know that the student he had taught had become a doctor.
Not because becoming a doctor made me more important than the teenager I had been, but because it represented the distance I had traveled from the possibilities I was considering in his classroom. It was a tangible reminder of how much can happen between the beginning of a person’s education and the moment they begin using that education in the world. I had spent years studying, training, and learning how to care for patients. I had become a surgeon, taken on responsibilities I could not have fully imagined as a high school student, and built a life that would have seemed extraordinary to the seventeen-year-old version of myself.
Yet standing there, seeing Mr. Paquette again, I felt an unexpected connection to that younger person. I could almost picture the classroom on the second floor, the students waiting for the teacher, and the portable CD player sitting on the desk. I could remember the sensation of being surprised by an experience that made school feel larger than I had thought it could be. The years had changed me, but they had not erased the memory of the man who had helped me understand what learning could be.
I do not know whether Mr. Paquette remembers that particular morning as clearly as I do. For him, it may have been one class among hundreds, a lesson he devised because he thought a Clash song would provide an interesting way to introduce a discussion about the politics of the late twentieth century. Teachers see so many students over the course of their careers that it would be unreasonable to expect them to remember every classroom interaction with the same intensity as the students who experienced it. He may remember the song, the class, or the general approach, but perhaps the exact sequence of events has faded from his memory.
That is perfectly all right. The importance of an experience does not depend on both people remembering it in precisely the same way.
For me, that morning became a landmark. It was one of the moments I carried forward, not because I understood all its implications at the time, but because I recognized something about the way I wanted to learn and the kind of teacher I respected. It helped me understand that education could be an invitation rather than simply an obligation, that a good teacher could make a complicated subject feel accessible without making it simplistic, and that the greatest lessons often begin with a question you did not know you needed to ask.
There is also something fitting about the fact that the lesson began with music. Songs have a remarkable ability to attach themselves to memories, preserving not only a melody but the atmosphere of the time in which we first heard it. A song can transport you to a particular car, a particular summer, a particular room, or a particular person with an immediacy that is difficult to explain. You may not have heard it for twenty years, and then it comes on the radio, and suddenly you are back in high school, remembering the faces of people you have not seen since graduation and the small details of a life that once seemed as though it would continue forever.
For me, Rock the Casbah will always belong to that classroom. I can hear the song and think of Mr. Paquette walking through the door with the CD player tucked under his arm. I can picture the students sitting at their desks, waiting to see what he would do. I can remember the unexpected quiet that followed the music, the lecture that transformed the song into a historical discussion, and the final image of him unplugging the machine and leaving us to contemplate what we had just experienced.
I cannot hear that song without thinking about Ponaganset High School in 1998, and I cannot think about that morning without feeling grateful.
It also reminds me of something that becomes increasingly apparent as the years pass: our lives are shaped by people whose influence extends far beyond the time we spend with them. We encounter teachers, mentors, supervisors, colleagues, and friends at particular moments in our lives, often without recognizing the significance of the meeting. We may remember the conversation, the advice, or the small act of encouragement, but we cannot always see where those things will lead. A teacher writes a recommendation. A mentor asks a difficult question. Someone takes the time to explain something properly when it would have been easier to offer a superficial answer and move on. At the time, these acts may seem ordinary. Their consequences can be anything but.
Mr. Paquette did not train me to be a surgeon. That was not his responsibility, and I would never suggest that a high school history teacher should receive credit for the entirety of a student’s later accomplishments. But he helped shape the person who eventually became one. He taught me that knowledge was worth pursuing for its own sake, that intellectual curiosity was something to be encouraged rather than suppressed, and that a classroom could be a place where students were trusted to grapple with difficult ideas. He helped me develop an appreciation for the connections between subjects, for the importance of context, and for the value of looking beyond the obvious answer.
Those things mattered when I went to Harvard. They mattered in medical school. They mattered during residency and fellowship, when the demands of surgical training required me to absorb enormous amounts of information while learning how to apply it under pressure. And they continue to matter in my work today, when I teach residents and help younger physicians develop the judgment and confidence they need to care for patients.
I often think about the responsibility involved in teaching someone who is still learning. It is easy to underestimate how much an interaction can mean to a student, especially when the teacher is simply doing what he or she does every day. A lesson that feels ordinary to the person delivering it may become one of the defining memories of the person receiving it. A few words of encouragement may help someone persist through a difficult period. A thoughtful explanation may change the way a student approaches an entire subject. A teacher who treats a young person with respect may help that person begin to see himself differently.
That is part of why I value teaching in medicine. When I work with residents, I try to remember what it felt like to be the person who did not yet know everything, who was trying to understand a complicated situation, and who needed someone to explain not only what to do but why. The work of teaching can be inconvenient. It can mean taking extra time when the service is busy, answering questions at an hour when everyone would rather be asleep, or explaining a decision that seems obvious to someone who has been practicing for years but remains unfamiliar to someone who is still developing clinical judgment. There are always pressures to move faster, finish the task, and get on with the next thing.
But teaching matters precisely because it is more than the efficient transfer of instructions. It is an investment in another person’s ability to think independently, recognize a problem, and eventually make sound decisions without someone standing beside them. The objective is not to produce a physician who can repeat my words. It is to help produce a physician who understands the reasoning behind them, who can recognize when the circumstances have changed, and who has the confidence to ask a question when something does not make sense.
In that respect, I have always believed that one of the finest compliments a student can give a teacher is to carry the teacher’s best lessons forward and use them to help somebody else.
I hope I have done some of that.
I hope that when I teach a resident, I can occasionally give that person the same feeling Mr. Paquette gave me: the sense that learning is not merely a requirement to be completed but an opportunity to explore something meaningful. I hope I can make a complicated subject interesting enough that the student wants to keep asking questions after the formal lesson has ended. I hope I can encourage someone to look beyond the immediate task and understand the broader principles that make the task meaningful. And I hope I can remember that the person standing in front of me, however inexperienced that person may be, deserves to be treated with respect.
I cannot promise that I will ever manage to reproduce the effect of a man who walked into a high school classroom with a CD player, played The Clash, delivered a lecture about political history, and then left the room with thirty minutes remaining in the period. That would be a rather difficult act to follow, and I suspect that attempting it in a modern hospital conference room might generate a few questions from the administration. But the underlying principle is worth preserving: take people seriously, give them something worth thinking about, and trust them enough to let the lesson do its work.
Looking back, I sometimes feel that the morning I met Mr. Paquette was my first real day of adulthood. Not because I suddenly became mature, and certainly not because I stopped being a teenager with all the usual adolescent shortcomings, but because I experienced something that made me feel capable of participating in the world of ideas rather than merely preparing for it. I was still in high school, still following a schedule, still sitting in a classroom while the school day unfolded around me, but for a little while I felt as though I had been invited into a larger conversation.
That feeling stayed with me.
The strange thing about growing older is that the events that once seemed so far away eventually become the memories you use to measure the passage of time. In 1998, the year 2026 would have seemed impossibly distant. A career in medicine, the years of training, the responsibilities of adulthood, and the experience of returning to familiar places with an entirely different perspective all belonged to a future I could imagine only in broad outlines. I could not have known which experiences would become important, which ambitions would change, or which people would remain significant long after I had left their classrooms.
But I knew, even then, that I loved Mr. Paquette’s class.
I took four classes with him because I wanted to keep learning from him. I carried the memory of his teaching into college and beyond. When the time came to apply to Harvard, he wrote a letter on my behalf that helped me reach a goal I had worked hard to achieve. And when I encountered him again years later, standing in a hospital emergency department as a physician, I had the opportunity to tell him that his influence had lasted.
There is a particular kind of gratitude that comes with being able to thank someone while they are still there to hear it. Too often, we wait until the opportunity has passed, assuming that the people who mattered to us already understand their importance. We imagine that they know what they did, that they recognize the effect they had, and that there will always be another chance to tell them. Sometimes there is. Sometimes life intervenes, years accumulate, and the conversation never happens.
I am grateful that I had the chance to speak to Mr. Paquette again, to tell him what his teaching meant to me, and to let him see the person I had become. I hope he understood that my gratitude was not merely a polite expression of appreciation for a former teacher. It was something much deeper, a recognition that he had helped shape my intellectual life at a time when I was still figuring out who I wanted to be.
I hope he knew that the young man who sat in his classroom had never forgotten him.
And if I could go back to that morning in 1998, I would not change a thing. I would still walk down the hallway carrying my printed schedule. I would still enter the classroom, wonder whether I had found the right room, and take a seat among the seniors. I would still listen to the conversation about the fifteen-minute rule and entertain the possibility that the school day might offer an unexpected reprieve. I would still watch the door fly open as Mr. Paquette entered with his CD player tucked under his arm, looking as though he had something much more interesting to do than explain why he was late.
I would listen to the song again, and I would listen to the lecture that followed. I would watch him unplug the CD player, tuck it under his arm, and disappear into the hallway while the rest of us sat in stunned silence. And I would feel that same sense of possibility, the realization that a classroom could be a place where ideas mattered and where a teacher trusted his students enough to treat them as people capable of understanding something complicated.
I would probably still laugh about the fifteen-minute rule, too, because some things about high school never lose their charm.
Most of all, I would want to tell that seventeen-year-old version of myself to pay attention. Not because he needed to know that he would one day become a surgeon, attend Harvard, or find himself working in a hospital where he would encounter his former teacher again, but because he was sitting in the presence of someone who would have a lasting influence on his life. I would tell him that the lessons he was about to learn would extend far beyond the classroom, and that the teacher standing at the front of the room would become one of the people he remembered with the greatest gratitude.
But perhaps that would spoil the experience. Perhaps the beauty of that morning was that none of us knew what it would mean, and Mr. Paquette certainly was not about to stand there and explain that we were participating in a formative moment. He simply taught his class in the way he believed it ought to be taught, and the rest of us were fortunate enough to be there.
That is how the most important lessons often arrive. They do not announce themselves. They do not come with a certificate or a formal declaration that something significant has occurred. They appear in the middle of an ordinary day, sometimes in the form of a song, an unexpected conversation, or a teacher who refuses to follow the conventional script. We recognize their importance later, when we have lived enough life to understand what they gave us.
I have spent a great deal of time since 1998 learning about the human body, treating critically ill patients, operating on injured people, and teaching the next generation of physicians. I have accumulated degrees, professional responsibilities, and experiences that the high school student I once was could scarcely have imagined. Yet when I think about the people who helped me become the person I am today, I still return to that classroom at Ponaganset High School, where a history teacher showed up with a CD player and reminded a roomful of teenagers that the world was far more interesting than the pages of a textbook could ever contain.
I think about the way he taught, the way he spoke, the way he challenged us, and the way he made learning feel like an invitation into adulthood. I think about the recommendation letter he wrote, the opportunity it helped me pursue, and the fact that years later I was able to stand in front of him wearing a white coat and tell him how much he had meant to me. I think about the countless students who must have passed through his classroom, each carrying away something different, and wonder how many of them still remember a particular lesson, an unexpected discussion, or a moment when he made them see a subject in an entirely new way.
Perhaps some remember a particular lecture. Perhaps others remember a debate, a joke, a pointed observation, or one of his wonderfully unconventional approaches to teaching. I remember Rock the Casbah. I remember the CD player. I remember the second floor of Ponaganset High School in 1998, and I remember the feeling that I had finally encountered the kind of education I had always hoped existed.
To me, that morning was more than a history lesson. It was a glimpse of what a teacher could be and what education could accomplish when somebody cared enough to make the material come alive. It was a reminder that learning does not have to be dull to be serious, that intellectual independence does not require a lack of discipline, and that a teacher’s influence can reach far beyond the subject written on the classroom door.
I am where I am today because of many people, and I would never diminish the contributions of those who helped me along the way. But Mr. Paquette holds a special place in that story. He was one of the teachers who helped me recognize what I was capable of, who made me want to learn more, and who gave me an experience I have carried with me through every subsequent stage of my education and career. He helped shape the way I think, and that is a gift far more enduring than any individual fact I could have memorized for an examination.
When I look back at my high school years, I remember plenty of things: the people, the classes, the ordinary absurdities of teenage life, the excitement of thinking about what would come next, and the peculiar sense that adulthood was always just around the corner. But among all those memories, one morning remains unusually clear. I can still see the classroom, the desks, the students, and the teacher who walked in carrying a portable stereo. I can still hear the song, remember the lecture, and picture the moment he picked up the CD player and left us to sit there for the remainder of the period.
I suppose that is the real measure of a great teacher. Not whether every student remembers every lesson, or whether every lecture follows a carefully prepared plan, but whether something remains after the classroom has disappeared from a student’s daily life. Whether the student carries away a new way of thinking, a deeper curiosity, or a lasting appreciation for the subject. Whether, decades later, that student can look back and identify a particular person who helped set the direction of his life.
For me, there is no ambiguity about the answer.
So, to Mr. Paquette, the teacher who made history fascinating, who treated a seventeen-year-old junior like an adult, who trusted his students to engage with complicated ideas, who wrote the letter that helped open the door to Harvard, and who continued to occupy a place in my thoughts long after I had left Ponaganset High School, I want to say thank you.
Thank you for the lessons that went beyond the textbook, for the willingness to speak your mind, for the unconventional classroom experiences, and for the simple but powerful act of taking your students seriously. Thank you for making history feel alive, for showing me that education could be an adventure in thought, and for helping me understand that learning was something worth pursuing long after the final bell had rung.
And thank you for that morning in 1998, when you walked into a classroom carrying a CD player, put on The Clash, and gave a young student a glimpse of the adult he might one day become.
I still remember it, Mr. Paquette. I have never forgotten it.
I hope you know that you were not simply one of the teachers I had in high school. You were one of the people who helped make me who I am. You knew me when I was a teenager, eager to learn and still trying to figure out the world, and years later you saw me again as a physician, wearing scrubs and a white coat. The distance between those two moments represents a lifetime of learning, but your influence was part of the journey all along.
To the greatest teacher in my life, and in my humble opinion one of the greatest teachers Ponaganset High School ever had, Mr. Paquette: thank you for everything.
Somewhere in my memory, on the second floor of that high school, the CD player is still plugged into the wall, the opening notes of Rock the Casbah are beginning to fill the classroom, and a seventeen-year-old kid is sitting among a roomful of seniors, about to discover that sometimes the most important lesson of the day is the one you never see coming.
