Editors Note:

This website is dedicated and inspired by the work and teachings of Thomas Waleski, grade 7 Life Science teacher, retired from the Warwick Valley Middle School. Mr. Waleskis irreverent take on life and science, his three piece suits that never repeated day to day, his ranting, musings, unbelievable dance moves at school dances and his remarkable way of making students cry are only a few of the aspects that make him a pretty incredible human being.

Waleskis Friday Notes were a note taking exercise where over 30 definitions or words of disparate origins were written on a blackboard. Over the course of a weekend, students had to draw connections, create definitions and explain these bizarre words or definitions.

Waleskis ethos has defined my art practice. I strive to be diverse, bizarre, challenging, difficult and obscure. I desire to draw connections from tenuous threads and to create worlds whose reality is suspect. Mr. Waleski is a teacher who has influenced and scared scores of students who remember his class as a tour de force of learning and discipline. To this day I keep the notebook from his class under my bed and reference it from time to time, just like he said I would. And that’s what great art does, you keep coming back to it time and again.

Timothy Hull June 2005

Will You Let Me Teach a Little?

An Analysis of the Waleski Epistemology

By Jeffrey Doolittle, M.A.

Much work has been done in recent years to illuminate how it is that we as individuals come to know what we know, or as the great orator Cicero himself once said, Id quidem me cupere, nisi et ante acta vita et reliqua mea spes tacente me probat, dicendo vincere non postulo.[1] A discipline in its own right, epistemology seeks to understand the essence of knowledge and the very process of education. And while much of the esoteric dialogue on sensory integration, memory, perception and so on is now taking place in academic circles, far removed from the still-prevalent common sense conceptions of education as a clearly defined activity, the battle of what it means to learn was waged in all classes conducted by Tom Waleski, teacher of Life Science in Warwick Valley Middle School. His notion that “we dont know that we dont know,” formed the foundation of his education method, and indeed, for him, it seemed that his role as an educator was a personal struggle with little chance of success. To Waleski, the classroom was the stage upon which the epic battle between order and chaos was fought, period by period, quarter by quarter, and year by year. He, as the teacher, believed that he stood as the beacon of order amid a seething sea of adolescent angst and irrationality. He alone had the power and wisdom to set our lives right, but due to our inherently disordered nature, we resisted his efforts with everything we had.[2] He would literally beg us to stop asking questions, imploring us to be silent, so he could “teach a little.” Waleski knew the forces of chaos he was up against, and if his concepts of order were to ultimately triumph, he would have to take drastic measures to control and direct the class.

Almost fourteen years have passed since I entered T. Waleskis seventh grade science class. Over the intervening years, I have been in many classes, but I have never once been in another like his. Other teachers beg for participation, but Waleski was ambiguous. Participation was necessary, but too much was a distraction and an evil excess to be avoided.[3] Other teachers used the core textbook, while to Waleski, the text was an added formality, secondary, indeed even tertiary to the convoluted message he was trying to send us. Other teachers had generally shifted away from an authoritarian educator role, but Waleski, ever a throwback to “an earlier, more civilized Golden Age,” embraced it wholeheartedly, and used his near absolute power in the classroom with aplomb.[4] With the aforementioned struggle between order and chaos, light and darkness, as a backdrop, he employed a careful, studied combination of arbitrary berating, outdated theoretical models, and non-sequitur logic to meet his educational ends. He had a singular talent to see connections where indeed none existed, and exerted all his energy and authority to make sure we remembered it all. If we didn’t remember something, it was evidence both of the limits of his power as an educator, and his own failure to defeat the encroaching darkness of ignorance, to which we were naturally susceptible. [5]

To Waleski, learning was a concrete process founded upon repetition, clarity, attention to minute detail, and authority, and this belief was most evident in the keeping of our notebook. As students, we had to keep a formidable notebook, a cohesive work exhibiting the full body of Waleski’s teachings that he intended to serve as a guidebook for the rest of our lives. We had to write our classnotes twice, once on “scratch paper,” and the second time neatly in our hallowed tome. Our notebook had to be strong, sturdy and bound; any student who brought a spiral notebook was an immediate target of ridicule. Furthermore, like our textbook, our notebook had to be covered with a brown paper bag to “keep it intact and untainted.”[6] Everything in the notebook had to be canonical in the strictest sense of the word; if Waleski did not say it or direct us to look it up, it should not be included. Waleski subjected our notebooks to routine inspection, and he checked to make sure we were keeping up with copying the notes, but also verified that we were maintaining a proper level of legibility in writing and duly recording the proper body of knowledge. His attention to missing detail was astounding, and it was detail on which we were tested.[7]

Reading through the notebook now, after many years have passed, I am struck by the randomness of it all. The material covered in a single day appears disjointed and haphazard, and I remember that it had only the slightest relevance to the chapter in the textbook we were on. It was as if Waleski utilized an 1800’s world atlas, a Latin dictionary, and a book of world fairy tales in addition to our class text in devising his classroom lectures and homework. The minutiae that he felt vitally important now appear lifeless, bizarre and in a sick sense, hysterically funny. How could a single science class really have combined a discussion of the parts of an amoeba with an introduction to pseudo-linguistics together with sound capitalist strategies to make money selling lilacs? Golgi bodies, mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum mixed with fragmentary language lessons, local folklore and recipes for “pasta fazool,” the most perfect food on the planet to create a pungent mass of utterly unusable information, which was nevertheless inculcated into our memory, almost as a kind of social experiment.

This is not to say that I despise the man. Nor do I find what he taught to be completely useless. In fact, I applaud his prodigious effort at creating a corpus of information, a stable body of knowledge that incorporated elements from a wide variety of disciplines and sources. As a clear product of the Age of Reason, Waleski believed that the world in all its variety and complexity was capable of being fully comprehended by the mind of a single human being. The information he gave to my class was the same that he gave to the class the following year and so on, and buttressed this belief. His hope for us to finally catch on, shake ourselves out of our ignorance, and see the world as he believed, was what inspired him every day. To my own skeptical eyes, I know that the world is far too immense for anyone to fully appreciate and rationalize. However, I now recognize that Waleski was, more than anything else, an artist in his flamboyant synthesis of the products of thousands of years of human thought.

Real Testimonials from Waleski Students

(sent to fridaynotes.com)

Timothy,

I happened to run into your web site and ode to the great Tom Waleski.  I had him for both 7th and 8th grade science from 1979-80.  You are absolutely correct to note his uncanny ability to teach science, discipline, life and just about every other subject in a way that makes learning interesting.  I remember the Friday notes, but didn't realize they all connected in some way.

Other students and I would spend some of our lunch periods just talking with him.  I mostly listened and soaked up what he had to say about everything from the Hapsburgs to the Krups to the breakdown in discipline in our country.  "You better brush up on your Japanese and Chinese because they are taking science more seriously," he would caution us.  This is a guy who was educated all over Europe and took graduate classes with Einstein, so it was scary to think about the firsthand knowledge he had of when societies become unglued.

I recall that the other teachers treated him like a bit of a nutty professor, which is unfortunate.  I understand the administration did not appreciate his straying from topics and criticizing anything he felt was unjust, including the school.  My only regret is despite getting a perfect 100 in two of his marking periods, I was not inspired to stay on the path of a career in science once I got back to the normal, uninspiring teachers in high school.  At the time, I wanted to be an astronomer and sometime philosopher like Dr. Carl Sagan -- and Tom Waleski.

I hope I didn't fail the Old Boy in some way.

William Berezansky

Albany, NY

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[1] Marcus Tullius Cicero, A Book of Latin Letters, ed. R. G. C. Levens, (1965), 41.

[2] The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, (1977), 87.

[3] Western Europe Phrasebook, Lonely Planet Guides (1997), 110.

[4] Gildas, De excidio Britanniae, XXV, 3, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Sources, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (1978).

[5] Hermes Trismegistus, The Corpus Hermeticum, (1999), 23.

[6] The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N. K. Sandars (1972), 81.

[7] Leviticus, 21:13