Let’s just start by getting this out of the way: my 6th grade teacher was leaps and bounds cooler than yours.
Imagine a dude who was around 6’4″-6’5″. Easily pushing past 300lbs. Voice deep enough to make Barry White shudder.
That was Mr. Cohagan, or Mr. C as he was affectionately known.
He was the kind of man who would walk around campus, the grocery store, the movie theatre, anywhere and spot some little punk-ass kid with his hat on backwards, pick up the little sonofabitch by his cap, and turn it back around, saying, “that’s the way it was meant to be worn, son.” Imagine John Wayne as Mr. C and that’s about as close as you’ll get without having met him.
He didn’t have class, he held court. Our desks were arranged in a semi-circle around him, where he would bellow loud enough for kids three doors down to hear.
His classroom was like a miniature Smithsonian. Every fossil, rock, marine life, paleontology item you could imagine coated every surface of the class, every wall was pasted over with layers of marine posters and graphs, all punctuated by an enormous taxidermied shark literally coming out of the wall. Between these relics and the years and years of Glade plug-ins, the room acquired a wholly unique aroma that seeped into the hallways. The first few days it was off-putting. By the end of the year it felt like home.
His class had a soundtrack. Three CDs that played on a loop to where you knew every song by heart before Christmas (NOT WINTER) break: Remember the Titans soundtrack, O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, and the Coyote Ugly soundtrack. Any of his ex-students could kick ass at karaoke for any of those songs now–we all know the words by heart.
I could say he made learning fun, but I would be lying. He didn’t just make it fun, he made it a journey that was engaging, passionate, memorable. He wasn’t a “by-the-book” guy. He made up his own materials, his own curriculum, his own class–which chafed against the anally-retentive, federal-funds-seeking administration (namely Principal Uyeno, whose presence eventually caused Mr. C to retire when he still had a few years left in him. Hope that $3000 rug for the front office paid for with federal funds and your St. John’s stretch pants worked out well for you.) His class became the most popular and difficult to get into at the school–and it was all luck of the draw. That of course pissed administrators off. Why, everyone should be equal! How dare a teacher go above and beyond! We want each child to receive an equally mediocre education (teaching the standardized tests). Mr. C staved them off as long as he could, providing his class as an experience for kids to learn and not minding how many kids were in it. His departure a year later caused the entire school to suffer–after all, he opened the damn thing two decades earlier.
September 11th happened just days into that year of class. I remember my mom waking me up to show me the TV and seeing the horror unfold. We showed up to class in a daze, some late, all anxious. We didn’t know about the world. We knew there was just an election and that nobody liked Bill Clinton or Al Gore. As we all sat, Mr. C lumbered up to the front of the class with his traditional gait. He looked up solemnly and then away–unusual for a man who would look you in the eye to the point where you’d piss your pants–and said that “things just aren’t gonna be the same” after what happened that day. It sounds paradoxical, but it was comforting to see an authority figure address what was going on in adult terms instead of lying and telling us everything would be ok like the “grief counselors” and other bullshit artists who pretend like they know how to deal with kids.
Like the movie “October Sky”, he helped us build rockets in class (which are likely against some bullshit regulation these days along with banning tag and kickball and everything that makes being a kid fun). He gave us weeks to work on our rockets and build them however we wanted. But when we tested them, we learned an important lesson–simplest was best. My Finship Fantastica went at a diagonal into the dirt. The one that was fooled-with-the-least soared into the sky, at least into flying altitude. That lesson alone prepared me for physics–in my senior year of high school. Mr. C’s lessons were simply innovative. He didn’t think we had to learn 6th-grade-stuff in 6th grade. He believed it was best we learned more complex things earlier while our brains were still growing and malleable than as disillusioned teens.
We also had to collect insects. Literally, like 50 insects and put them in a box to explain what each one was. Note to 6th grade self–avoid the crickets because they stink like hell. Ants smell like Pine-Sol. And for God’s sake, don’t scrounge around the garage the morning of because you’re 20 bugs behind.
We watched Bill Nye, we read “Harrison Bergeron”, we created our own countries, we had the “growing up” talk–we got an education that studying for a mind-numbing standardized test would have robbed us of.
Before our Sonora camping trip, affectionately referred to by the hardworking and stressed Parent Club moms as a “Dads Trip!”, the dads asked Mr. C at the school PTA meeting if they could bring a little wine and some appetizers to enjoy after the kids went to bed. Mr. C told them “now…we can’t do that”, but after the meeting came up and said, “I’ll bring the cigars”.
At the end of the year, we had planned to go to Asilomar Beach to check out the tidepools–to see firsthand these little pockets of diverse life we had studied with such fervor. Mr. C was incredibly excited about the trip he took his class on every year, until the school scuttled it due to scheduling conflicts. I’ve never seen a grown man look so disappointed as he when he had to inform us we couldn’t go.
I remember kids going into his class being painfully shy. The kind of kids who would cower if you so much as spoke a word in their direction. Their social hesitance was no match for Mr. C, who would literally reach in and drag words out of them. By the end of the year he turned the agoraphobic into chatty Cathy’s.
That quality also made him one hell of a football coach (unlike the other coach, Mr. Armendariz, the anti-Mr. C: a gladhanding, administration-suckling, corner-cutter who didn’t give a shit about his class or kids in general). We were damn lucky to have an ex-49er lineman teaching a bunch of kids more interested in picking clover to play against the tough kids from the other side of the tracks (Pinedale, Nelson).
Mr. C’s favorite line: “my grandmother can run faster than you, and she’s dead.” He would never miss a beat–and had a laugh that could echo through an open field like it were Carlsbad Caverns. My buddy Jared Deaver got the grandmother quip a lot amongst others, mostly because he was a slow fat fuck and deserved it. But I’ll be damned if he didn’t run faster by the end of the year.
Mr. C retired the year after our class, and the field was named in his honor. As a last dig, Principal Uyeno put up an $80 QuickSign that said “Cohagan Field” instead of springing for something a little more long-lasting. Last time I drove by Valley Oak, the sign was down. Thanks, you bitch.
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” came on at Starbucks earlier and I began to tear up thinking about Mr. C and what a positive effect he had on my life. He was the kind of man a kid could look up to and say, “I want to be him someday.” And he’s the kind of man who could look down at you, hand on shoulder, and say “son, if you work hard, you can be anything you want.”
I was consumed with grief upon hearing about Mr. C’s passing a year and a half ago. When we were in middle school, he had a severe boating accident that he miraculously survived. Luckily, he got a few more years to enjoy his well-deserved retirement, and to go back to his true passion besides teaching–fishing and becoming a new grandfather.
We all had teachers growing up that inspired us to learn a little more, work a little harder, and light the fire on that intellectual curiosity that blazes for a lifetime. I’ve had my share of good teachers, and great teachers, but Mr. C was in a league of his own. Rest in peace as you fish that heavenly lake, and know that you influenced a generation of kids to become superlative adults.
