A golden anniversary for Saint Bernard teacher

Fred Smith has hit the half-century mark teaching English

Uncasville — Don’t get Fred Smith started on “The Natural,” the flick in which a middle-aged slugger — bleeding through his jersey days after doctors removed an old bullet from his gut — hits a pennant-winning homer that smashes into the stadium lights and kicks off a firework show.

“They changed the ending,” said Smith, arguing Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, in which Roy Hobbs unheroically whiffs on strike three, easily tops Hollywood’s 1984 makeover. “The movie is one of the worst adaptations of a book.”

Smith, who lives in New London, hit his 50th year teaching English at Saint Bernard School this year. His passion for Malamud’s book, rather than its Robert Redfordization, parallels his classroom philosophy: don’t dumb anything down.

“We’ve moved away from the idea that students need to, and should be, challenged,” said Smith, who favors fiction over the Common Core’s focus on nonfiction. “The textbooks themselves are leaving things out, and people say, ‘It’s too challenging. It’s over their

heads.’ Part of my job is to raise the kids’ heads.”

That said, Smith, 71, admits he’s grown more flexible over the years. A 1964 graduate of Saint Bernard, Smith started teaching at Saint Bernard’s allgirls’ division at the age of 21, fresh out of Canisius College in Buffalo.

“I had to be rigid,” he said. “They would have walked all over me. Some of my current students — their parents were students of mine and they say, ‘Boy, have you mellowed.’”

Kim Hodges, the school’s director of admissions, said former students often credit Smith for helping their transition to college, where classmates may struggle with fivepage papers that “Mr. Smith had the students do for breakfast.”

“Fred has prepared them so this part of the college adjustment is easy: they know how to write,” Hodges said. “You get a C in his class, and you’ve done really well.”

At the Saints Gala in late April at Mohegan Sun, the school honored Smith with its Clairvaux Medal. Smith called it an honor to be recognized and described his colleagues and the Saint Bernard community as “a family in many ways.”

Roger Williams, who retired last June after teaching math at Saint Bernard for 58 years, worked with Smith as a colleague for decades. But he also taught Smith when he was a student at the school.

“You’re asking me to think back 50 years,” Williams joked when asked what kind of student Smith was. “As I remember him, he was the same type of student as he is a teacher. Very thorough. Very determined.”

Williams added, “He’s always been a fantastic person. He’s easy to work with and a good teacher. One of my daughters had him in class and said he was ‘tough to deal with but at the end, I felt like I learned a lot.’”

Smith said he saw his longtime coaching career — 20 years in softball; six in girls’ basketball — as an extension of his teaching, “but with more immediate results.”

While Smith doesn’t coach anymore — in 2010 the school inducted him into the high school’s athletic Hall of Fame — he doesn’t show signs of slowing down.

“God willing, my health is good,” he said. “At the end of each year I talk with the headmaster, ask him if there’s been a bunch of complaints. If there aren’t, I say, ‘I’ll see you in September.’ I enjoy what I’m doing. It doesn’t make much sense to retire ... as long as I’m effective. I certainly don’t want to be the Carl Yastrzemski in his last few years.”

When not in class, Smith said he enjoys listening to music, camping, fishing and he’s active in his church, St. James Episcopal in New London. He also has nine grandkids — enough to field a ballclub, he noted.

“I find things to keep me busy,” he said, adding that it might be cliché, but he loves to read. “That’s the problem — they don’t stop publishing books.”