Peter Perich

I’ve known Peter Perich for over twenty years and consider it my good fortune to have worked with him and learned from him.  There are people like Pete that you follow not because they rile you up, though ask Pete to lead the Memorial High School cheer, and you’ll know he can rile you up. You don’t follow them because they demand it, though I’m sure he is capable of demanding something when necessary.  You don’t follow them because you’ve known them your whole life, though plenty have known Pete through generations of their families.  You follow them for something much scarcer.

You follow them because they embody something that you need to be around.  Something that is most easily described as a contagious aura.  You want to learn how they do it and hope you can steal just a little of it. You hope that whatever sliver of it you can steal will take hold and grow so that you can be the kind of person that Peter Perich is – a selfless, generous, kind, big-hearted, loyal, funny, patient, intelligent, family-oriented, well-rounded man.  I could have simply said he is a Renaissance man, but I think it would shortchange him to lump all of his qualities (many that I didn’t mention) into one term.

In sharing a memory that reflects what I think of when I think of Peter Perich, it would be easy, even fitting, for me to default to a story about his participation in every single Memorial High School Faculty Play that I ever put on, such was his dedication to the Memorial Community.  Not only was he up for anything, but he somehow came up with an idea to wear the most ridiculous (sorry, Pete, but it’s true) overalls and headdress but with no shirt.  To call it risky would be apt regardless of the person.  When you consider that Peter did this roughly a dozen times while an administrator in the building and still got elected to the school board for multiple terms says a lot about what others think of him.  Or it’s a commentary on what people think of politics.  Maybe it’s a combination of the two.  But that is not the memory that takes top spot on the “How Peter Perich Impacted My Life List”.

The moment that left an indelible mark came when I had already been teaching for a number of years.  I felt that I had a good handle on things, generally speaking.  I had very few problems within the classroom.  It was uncommon for me to submit a discipline referral for a student let alone to send students to the office.  But of course, there was a day when a student was pushing my buttons.  Not to the point that it required outside intervention, but still, I was in no mood for it.

Furthermore, I knew that if I said something in just the right way, it would almost assuredly elevate the student to the point where I would have just cause for sending him to the office and that I would likely get a few days without him in class.  At the time, I would not have admitted that.  I would have told you that I simply made an off-the-cuff comment, and an explosion occurred, but truthfully, I knew what I was doing.

So I said it.  And sure enough, I got the desired response, sent the kid out and submitted a referral.  A day or two later, I got the referral back with the note that the student had been suspended for what he said on his way out of the room.  But I also got a visit from Pete.  He wanted to let me know that he suspended the student because I was deserving of the support.  He also let me know that he had spoken with the student about the incident, and the student explained that one thing that I had said struck a nerve because it hit close to home, and he basically couldn’t contain himself.  It should come as no surprise that it was the line that I said specifically to elicit the elevation – I’m not proud of it, for the record.  Pete explained to me that he knew the family and their situation – of course he did, Pete knows 80% of the Memorial families, maybe 75% since his retirement – and I probably didn’t know how close to home my comment struck.  He was right.  I didn’t.  I had not yet made it my top priority to build positive teacher-student relationships.  I built them, sure, but mostly by luck and not as a specific goal.

I’m not going to go so far as to claim that Peter Perich taught me to recognize that everyone has things happening in their lives that I don’t know about and that these things affect them daily.  I certainly understood that, even if I didn’t always keep it at the forefront of my mind.  I will categorically state that he gave me the best, most enduring example of why it is so important to always try to keep that concept at the forefront of my mind, and it is something I try to share with others, be they students, staff, people in the world, or my own kids.  But he also showed me a different perspective on what it means to be loyal.

Standard loyalty would have simply been suspending the student as a way of having my back.  True loyalty was caring enough to come and speak with me.  To provide me with a chance to see things from a perspective that I was lacking.  To remind me that my goals as an educator should be to never stop reflecting and learning and to remember that we are all human beings and are fallible.  It’s one thing to consider those ideas from an academic standpoint.  You can read about them.  You can hear or read others’ stories.  But Peter helped me experience it, and he did it without chastising, condescending, or making me feel lesser.  These lessons may not have been the reason for his visit, but oftentimes, the best, most impactful lessons are not necessarily the ones we list in the plan.  Ultimately, what matters most is that he did what all educators – and, dare I say, all people – should aspire to do: he made me a better person for knowing him.

– Ben Dick