“I’d seen Mr. Chase around—coach of the award-winning Academic Decathlon team. I’d heard he was very demanding and he expected everyone to give up everything for the Decathlon, spending many grueling hours after school studying. With his thick, nerdy glasses and high-water pants, Phil Chase didn’t look like one of those cool teachers that all the students love because he uses slang. That’s why I wasn’t sure I’d like his Decathlon class.
He impressed me from day one. The first word he taught us was “erudite” which means learned or scholarly—a great word to describe him. It seemed like the man was the proverbial walking encyclopedia. I felt intimidated in his classroom. I thought he was a perfectionist who would accept nothing less than first places and maximum scores.
But there was more to his class than cramming—there were stories. Mr. Chase usually talks about his past students. We heard about Sharona, a former Decathlon team member. She wasn’t the brightest student he had, but she ended up going to Yale.
“Talent is only 5 percent of it and the other 95 percent is character,” he once told us. When he was on the track team in high school, he finished 61st out of 63 people. “I beat out a midget and a cripple,” he joked. But he continued to run and eventually became the second best on the varsity team.
One day he began to talk about Mozart and Beethoven. I thought it was a lecture and I took notes on it. But it turned out to be another story with a message: we can all do anything we set our minds to, even if we weren’t born academic or athletic geniuses. “Every one of you can be a Beethoven,” he says.
He coaches a girls’ basketball team outside of school and he tries to get them scholarships. He had a girl on his basketball team who didn’t have a decent pair of shoes so he bought her some. One of his basketball teams had no star players but they ended up being second in the city. The accomplishments of his students deeply move him. He sometimes finishes a story with a shaky voice and tears in his eyes.
Mr. Chase will help anyone with ambition. I mentioned that I needed to take a certain class before the next year begins and he offered to teach it to me. He even went down and talked to the counselors.
The door to Mr. Chase’s classroom is always open. “You’re welcome anytime,” he once told me. I usually find him in the middle of a chess game with the computer but he’ll gladly stop playing for any reason.
He truly believes that we are the future of the world. But next year, he mentioned, he might leave to be a professor at Harvard. I’d deeply miss the opportunity to learn more from him if he leaves. But if he stays, I can’t help wondering: Will he ever have stories to tell about me?”
