Flowers in the Paperweight

Among the “pieces in an exhibition” is a small hand-crafted glass paperweight. It is a transparent sphere, perhaps four or five inches in diameter, with green and blue-green forms suspended within it. From some angles these forms look like flowers, their stems rising from the bottom of the sphere into broad, translucent blossoms. From other angles, the “flowers” seem to refract the incoming light.

A small label on the paperweight’s underside identifies it as Kanawha Hand Crafted Glassware, Dunbar, West Virginia.

To anyone else, it might be an attractive but ordinary paperweight. To me, it carries much more meaning. It is an object that connects my present life in Bohol with a key teacher in my learning journey and with an adventure that began more than half a century ago.

This paperweight once belonged to Mr. Ed Taylor.

My first encounter with Mr. Taylor came when I was a sixth-grader at Thornville Elementary School in my hometown in Ohio. My teacher that year was Mrs. Redd, a demanding older teacher who opened her students’ eyes not only to the demands of learning but also to the wider world.

I still remember Mrs. Redd’s emphasis on “people as actors in their own story” in her social studies lessons. History, as she taught us, was not simply a collection of dates, governments and events. It was about people living through events in particular places.

That perspective became even more memorable when our studies turned to the Soviet Union and its people. To give us a deeper understanding, Mrs. Redd invited a guest to share his experiences and slides from a trip to the Soviet Union.

This was Mr. Taylor.

My role in the visit began before the presentation itself. Mrs. Redd asked me to walk out to the teachers’ parking area, help Mr. Taylor carry his slide equipment into the school auditorium and assist with the setup. I remember the projector and slide carousel, but what has stayed with me even more clearly is the experience of meeting the man himself.

Ed Taylor was direct, engaging and cheerful, even with an unknown kid. In those few minutes of helping him, his personality made an impression. I was only a sixth-grader, of course, and could not possibly have understood the significance of that encounter. Yet something important was planted that day.

A few years later, at Sheridan High School, Mr. Taylor became my English and Russian teacher.

By then, my curiosity about the Soviet Union had grown. In Russian class, I discovered that Ed’s engaging personality had not been limited to that first encounter. He brought the same energy and warmth into the classroom, and his approach to teaching Russian was unlike anything I had experienced before.

He spoke to us in Russian from the very first day. We were expected to learn by doing. We memorised dialogues and presented them in class. We did not simply study vocabulary and grammar from a textbook. We were expected to use the language, to hear it, speak it and become comfortable with it.

He also found ways to make the learning more personal. Each of us was invited to choose a Russian name to use in class. Mine was Viktor Veinovich, or Vitya for short, essentially “Viktor, son of Wayne.” It was a small thing and probably seemed like no big deal at the time, but I still remember it more than fifty years later. I also remember Mr. Taylor calling me “Khlebchik,” or “Little Bread,” playfully connecting my name Brad to the Russian word for bread.

For those classroom hours, I was not simply a teenager from Thornville studying a foreign language. I had a new identity. In that way, the learning experience became even more personal.

Mr. Taylor also took us beyond the classroom. Each year he brought his Russian students to Slavic Day at Ohio State University. For a teenager growing up in small-town Ohio, these experiences widened the world considerably. Russia and the Slavic world were no longer distant subjects in a textbook. They became languages, cultures, music, people and places that I could begin to imagine experiencing for myself.

Eventually, my interest in Russian and the Soviet Union led me to Ohio State University, where I studied Russian language and literature and Soviet Area Studies. Later, I lived and studied in the Soviet Union myself, and as a graduate student, I taught Russian.

Looking back, I can see Mr. Taylor’s influence not only in what I chose to study but also in how I came to teach and how I spent much of my life stepping beyond my comfort zone, travelling and learning.

Which brings me back to the paperweight.

When I look closely at it, I see the flowers suspended inside the glass. Their stems rise from the bottom of the sphere, spreading into green and blue-green blossoms. They seem to have been caught at a moment of growth and preserved there.

I don't know whether the glassmaker intended them to look like flowers. But that's how I see them now, and flowers seem an appropriate image for what happened in my own life.

After Mr. Taylor died, my mother purchased the paperweight at his estate sale. I do not know how long it had sat on his desk or exactly what significance it held for him. I know only that it was once among his possessions and that my mother recognised it as something worth acquiring and keeping.

Though my roots were firmly planted in Thornville, Mrs. Redd taught me that all of us have a place in history and that we are living as part of it. Then came Mr. Taylor, with his slides of Russia, his enthusiasm, his classroom and his insistence that we learn by doing. He opened other doors.

What began as curiosity eventually flowered into university study, travel to the Soviet Union and a career in teaching. In my own classrooms, I found myself carrying forward some of the very approaches my teachers had shared with me: making learning personal and inviting students to enter the world they were studying.

The paperweight now seems to be a miniature version of that experience. Something was planted. It took root. It grew. It flowered in ways that neither my teachers nor I could have anticipated.

And yet the story doesn't quite end there.

Maybe that's what objects like this can do. They preserve things that otherwise exist only in memory. When I look into this glass sphere, I see a sixth-grade boy beginning a journey he could not possibly have imagined.

I see Vitya. I see Russia. I see countless classrooms, students, colleagues, friends and a lifetime adventure of teaching and learning.

And I see the enduring influence of real people who planted something inside me that kept growing long after our lessons.