THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE ABOUT JOHN O'CONNOR WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE ALBUQUERQUE ACADEMY SCHOOL NEWSPAPER. JOHN HAD WORKED AT ALBUQUERQUE, WHERE BRUD HARPER WAS HEADMASTER AND BOB PHILLIPS (AKA "YOUNG MR. PHILLIPS") ALSO TAUGHT.

'Remembering John O'Connor"

by Jeff  Lowry '87 (Albuquerque Academy) 1/19/2007 Albuquerque Academy school  newspaper

Many months ago, I saw John O'Connor shuffling on a sidewalk  in Los
Ranchos. For those of us who remember Mr. O'Connor prowling around  the gym and the classroom in his wrestler's stance, railing  against the passive voice and the weakness of his students' minds and  bodies, his gait was unrecognizable. News of his death in the fall of 2006  saddened but did not surprise me. I could tell that the man who taught at  Albuquerque Academy from 1965 to 1993 was shuffling out of this  world.

Whenever Mr. O'Connor's students discuss their experiences with  him,
one of his more famous assignments inevitably surfaces: Write an  entire essay without using the verb "to be." Try it sometime. We struggled  with every sentence. Contrary to rumors, however, Mr. O'Connor used the  verb "to be" in his own writing ("This is crap!" comes to mind), but he  preferred active verbs. He knew that students relied too heavily on  sentences beginning with "There is" and "There are," and his
assignments  and comments forced students to find and use more vigorous words and  to think more carefully about sentence construction.

Mr.  O'Connor's dislike of the verb "to be" was well known,
but his loathing  of the passive voice was legendary. To this day, I avoid the passive voice  except on those rare occasions when its mealy-mouthed weakness serves a  good purpose. I am not alone: Any student in Mr. O'Connor's English class  learned to think of the passive voice as a pile of dog nuisance (to use  a wonderful euphemism from the Chicago Park District) befouling one of Mr.  O'Connor's beloved North Valley ditch banks. We regard it with a mix of  annoyance and disgust.

Mr. O'Connor also despised laziness. One of my  papers had an interesting turn of phrase that Mr. O'Connor appreciated, and  he put a coveted "good!" in the margin. Having proven the worth of that  phrase once, I used it again in the next paper. If Mr. O'Connor liked what  I had written before, he would like it again, right? Wrong. "You  used this before. Lazy!" His comment stung because it was the truth. A  new assignment requires fresh writing.

As with other great teachers,  Mr. O'Connor had his flaws. His students
found it easy to distract him from  the curriculum. Frank Peloso and Shane Rodgers would conspire before class  to introduce a topic likely to keep Mr. O'Connor occupied for most of  class. The Montano Bridge, "redneck politicians," and clever insults all  were topics that could keep Mr. O'Connor from discussing writing and  literature. Despite some notable successes, however, our sustained attempts  to evade learning ultimately failed. Mr. O'Connor enjoyed talking politics  and trading insults with Shane and Frank, but he also enjoyed searing the  minds of high school students with principles of solid writing. We learned  to "cut and combine" sentences, to think carefully about each word and  phrase, and to tradecircuitous nonsense for streamlined clarity.  Above all, we learned to pay attention to our writing.

If Mr.  O'Connor merely taught and enforced the important but sometimes arbitrary  rules of English grammar and convention, we might remember him as a gifted  pedant. He was much more than that. He tempered an unforgiving insistence  on clear writing with a genuine love of good literature. His favorite  writers were those who stripped away pretense and exposed folly. I still  can hear him reading passages from George Orwell and Mark Twain. He shared  with Orwell a fondness for short Anglo-Saxon words (although he explained  that sometimes a writer needed a ten dollar word, and he taught
us dozens  of them), and he shared with Twain the wisdom that teenagers think they  know much more than they do. Mr. O'Connor taught us the infamous  funnel-body-inverted funnel essay format that college professorslove to  lampoon,but then he unshackled us from it. Perhaps  most surprisingly, he insisted that his students write fiction as well  as criticism. Writing well was hard work, but the results, he showed  us, could enrich the world.

Mr. O'Connor's other great talent was  coaching. Years before I arrived,
Mr. O'Connor was the head football coach  at the Academy. He preached
discipline and "sustained dedication." As Rich  Adam, our school
archivist reports, Mr. O'Connor's methods worked  wonders. In 1966, shortly after Mr. O'Connor arrived, the football team  earned a record of 9 wins and no losses, winning the district championship. Unfortunately, not every high school football player followed the program,  and Mr. O'Connor meted out harsh punishment. In 1972, Mr. O'Connor  dismissed eight players for violating training rules - specifically, for  drinking alcohol at a weekend party. The team and season collapsed, and  even those of us who arrived on the scene in the 1980s remember  the vague whiff of scandal that wafted around the room whenever that issue  arose. One thing is certain, however: Mr. O'Connor had no regrets, and he  stood by his decision.

Wrestling was his other great love. If his  attitude and standards were
tough in English class and on the football  field, they were brutal on the
wrestling mat. He loved to regale skinny  boys in singlets with tales of a
wrestler he had coached who avoided a  humiliating pin by arching his back for so long and with such fervor that  he passed out at the end of the match. Mr. O'Connor saw the young man as a  hero whose fanatical effort averted certain defeat, but some of us drew  other conclusions from the story.

For Mr. O'Connor, failure on the  mat resulted not only from poor
technique, which required more practice,  but also from a lack of will,
which required more discipline. I was a  poor wrestler long before I was a good English student, and I  never could master the moves and throws and pins. Given Mr. O'Connor's  Weltanschauung, I considered it a
fundamental defect in my personality.  I once lost a scrimmage to one of my teammates because his body odor  overwhelmed me. I told Mr. O'Connor as much when he asked why I had stopped  struggling. He looked at me with steely eyes: "Must you smell the boy?"  That was a good question, and I still ponder it sometimes. ("Must I  smell the boy? No, I mustn't!") It is a wonder that I did not pass out a  few years later when I learned that this man would be teaching me high  school English.

Back when John O'Connor and F.X. Slevin both roamed the  Academy campus, one of the jokes was that if they graded each other's  papers, each would give the other a B minus. Having endured and enjoyed  both of them, I know there was some truth in that joke. Before  revealing
 her parentage, Tania Nichols, the daughter of New Mexico  novelist John Nichols, once asked Mr. O'Connor to give his opinion on one  of her father's books. According to Mr. O'Connor, the book was good but  much too long. He applied his high standards to everyone.

Mr.  O'Connor grew up in New York, and he never lost his East Coast
toughness.  He emanated contempt for faddish teaching and
"huggy-kissy"notions of  self-esteem. Any honest appraisal of the man must admit that he sometimes  could cut too sharply and deeply. His style worked miracles with many  students but hurt a few. Nevertheless, his methods sprung not from meanness  but from a deeply held belief that only through determination, discipline,  and sustained dedication could a student or athlete thrive and succeed. Mr.  O'Connor's strictness and uncompromising attitude was a welcome antivenin  in a world that too often praises mediocrity and  settles for third-rate achievement.

Mr. O'Connor's students  live and work all over the world now. We push
through barriers, we struggle  with weakness, we take chances when safety calls, we overcome the thousands  of obstacles that block our way, we stretch ourselves and our peers and  coworkers, and we excel. Mr. O'Connor taught us well.