One Day I, Too, Shall Join the Dead Poets Society

There exists a point in my life where theory met practice, where words flowed like honey and I was told, personally, to seize the day. At that point in my life, I was a teenager just finding the words to express my feelings. Just then finding out what it meant to be a person, to join society. To think not just to get graded for my thoughts, but to express reason, logic, emotion, empathy, greater meanings beyond mere “words”. I joined the Speech and Debate team where I was met with a teacher whom much like Mr. Keating in the Dead Poets Society or Mr. Hundert in the Emperor’s club told me to "seize the day”, “to suck the marrow out of life”, “be a good person, not a good citizen.”

Scott Woodhouse, Mr. Woodhouse, the Wood House. We called him many names, sometimes in jest. But, in truth, we all looked up to him dearly. He was the only educator in our system that was attempting to teach us not just to think but how to think. I spent many hours after school with Mr. Woodhouse talking through ethics, moral theory and philosophy, what it means to be good in a world so profoundly not. I wanted to divine the truth out of the ether and seek meaning in a life that was so, so ripe and beautiful to mold. We had chats about metaphysics, what it means to think. What it means to exist, and how the universe relates to our experiences. It was the first time in my life that an educator, someone in a mentor position, would extend their hand to me as not a student, not a lesser, but a colleague just ignorant to his trade.

In college, I had another mentor like this, Dr. Wayne Tarrant. The man was crazy in his right but was a truly amazing person to have met as a freshman in college just learning the ropes. Dr. Tarrant saw his students not as lesser but as equals in the conversation. It made his classrooms electric. I still remember the day that I realized that the form of the Laplace and Fourier transform were similar in my freshman year and asked him if they had any relation. His eyes lit up, like I finally understood what he was saying. He told me to meet him at his office after class where we talked for nearly 3 hours about the simple beauty of frequency transforms, their applications, how those transformations are related, and all of the still shrouded mysteries of number theory that they hold. When I'd pass him in the hallways he'd call me "Dr. L" and really saw a future for me in academia. I still wonder if he'd be disappointed that never happened. I don't think he would. After all, he was the person I called crying before I dropped out of my PhD program.

In my life, I’ve received a lot of mentoring in these ways. By people who cared about how to think. Why to think. They asked me to question everything, and so I have. 

I’d like to find such a connection again. Maybe not a mentor. Maybe not from someone in some position of authority. But just someone, some people to share these curiosities with. I think about all of the time slipping me by as I slowly inch toward being ashes and dirt. All of the beauty passing me by as I stubbornly refuse to move my feet from the comfort of my home. I’d like to be found spilling words from my mouth about the oddities of the universe, the complexities of the numbers wherein, or the feeling that I just don’t know how to be a person. But I want to learn. The ritual and tradition of being so part of something, so deeply connected with something bigger than me -- it makes me want to experience the feeling of being so small in a world of thought like I used to feel.

I’d like to find that connection to thought again.

- AEL, 05/20/2026