Here’s a pet peeve of mine.

I hate when a speaker says, Close your eyes.

There are exceptions, but they’re rare.

But when the speaker opens with, Close your eyes, and think of this thing, I just find it annoying and grating.

Mr.

Rogers said it once, and I thought that worked really well.

When he did it at an award ceremony.

And I thought about leading this podcast unironically with, Close your eyes.

You don’t have to close your eyes, particularly if you’re driving or doing anything that requires your vision.

But take a moment and think about your favorite teacher.

Listen, I try to be goofy on this show and silly, whatever else, but I really mean it.

Try to think about your favorite teacher.

I don’t care if it’s elementary school, high school, college, whatever.

Your favorite teacher.

Think about that person.

Can you keep thinking about them when my stupid theme song plays?

I hope so.

Your Daily Lex.

My favorite teacher was my sixth grade teacher, Mr.

Miser, George M.

Miser the Ninth.

The Ninth.

Amazing.

Mr.

Miser taught all the subjects.

I didn’t stay in his class for math.

I went across the hall to, the teacher’s name I’m thinking of, I’m not sure if that was sixth grade.

I’m thinking Mrs.

Florio, but I could be wrong.

Regardless, I went to a different classroom for math, but he taught everything else.

His passion, I guess, was history.

He’s published many, many books on the history of Berks County.

The Passing Scene is the name of his series.

But what I loved him for was he was an incredible English teacher.

I am a good writer, in large part thanks to Mr.

Miser.

I have excellent grammar when I want to.

Almost exclusively, thanks to Mr.

Miser.

Mr.

Miser used dots.

By the way, this is not in memoriam.

He is, I mean, he’s up there, but he’s alive and well.

Mr.

Miser used dots, and what I mean by that is he had a grade book, and he had different pages with all the students’ names written on them for each subject, and you got dots for class participation.

So if you answered a question correctly, you got a dot.

And the first quarter of sixth grade, my best friend, Jeff Chang, got more dots than I did in English, and I was mad.

He didn’t get that again.

After that, after that, I got all the most dots awards.

One term that Jeff could never remember, that I always remembered, was the word for words like however, which Mr.

Miser taught us as parentheticals.

And Mr.

Miser’s rule was you don’t start or end the sentence with a however.

Like, However, I think you should do these things.

No.

You should, however, do these things, and you’re always going to offset that parenthetical with commas on either side.

He was a great, great teacher, and his love of language and his love of history were—I was going to say infectious, but that seems a little cliche, and he didn’t love cliches.

And I didn’t find his love of history infectious, but I found it impressive.

I liked how much he liked it.

He’s literally published, according to his website, which I don’t know how current it is, 25 volumes of The Passing Scene, this history of— Berks County in Reading, Pennsylvania, each of which is at least 256 pages.

That’s a lot of pages.

Wow.

My goodness.

But yeah, I love this guy.

So roughly 10 bajillion years ago, it was actually going to be in 2008, I emailed Mr.

Miser to tell him how great I thought he was and how important he had been to me as a teacher.

And he never replied.

I thought that was odd.

A year or so later, one of my closest friends from school, after Jeff Chang and I had grown apart, Josh, Josh emailed me.

And he’s like, I’ve been exchanging some emails with Mr.

Miser, and he wrote this to me.

I’m going to quote Mr.

Miser in his email to Josh.

About a year ago, Lex sent me the nicest email I’ve ever received from a former student.

I planned to reply to him the following morning.

That night, my computer literally crashed and burned.

Now, like you, I’m wondering, did Mr.

Miser use literally correctly in the email, or we’re just going to let it slide?

And I lost his communication, along with over 5,000 filed emails, my address book, and my master list of 3,500 CD sets, including complete operas with casts, parts of which I sent to you, a project that required four years.

Two separate computer experts were engaged to work on my computer in an effort to retrieve the lost material.

Both men agreed it was a lost cause.

I was sick over the loss, as in reality, time probably will not allow me to start over on that list.

While I no longer have Lex’s email letter, I do want to reply to him so that he knows I didn’t ignore his message.

May I have Lex’s email address?

Not in Zendesk.

Since the replacement computer purchased after the first meltdown also failed, I’ve been backing up everything, especially photos and text from my netbook, using those flash drives and a My Book backup.

So that email was sent from Mr.

Miser to my pal Josh in 2009.

Josh gave my email address, and I never heard.

But I wrote to Mr.

Miser again several times.

I don’t know every single time because I don’t always have my email, but I wrote to him in 2019.

I wrote to him in 2022.

I wrote to him in July of this year.

October 6th of this year, Mr.

Miser wrote to me, the first time I have received an email from him.

He said, Greetings, Lex.

Kindly give me a call when you can.

I am most appreciative of all your emails.

I’ve called the number that he left a couple of times, but I haven’t been able to reach him yet.

So today I emailed him and said, By the way, this is my number, so if you’re seeing calls from here, it’s me.

Feel free to, you know, answer it.

I said it nicely, but yeah.

So we’ll see.

I’d love to talk to him just because, well, I was trying to do the math.

I think he’s got to be close to 90, and yeah, he was just awesome.

So anyway, if you have a great teacher and they’re still able to be reached, I encourage you to reach out to them because I have, even though I didn’t get replies for a long time, I have always felt wonderful when I emailed Mr.

Miser because, man, that guy really helped to shape me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a wonderful Thursday, October 29th, and yeah, sorry for your loss if you’re a Star Trek fan.

Rough day, I guess.

But hey, we’re still alive, and that’s something, right?

Lex.