Dying teacher on a quest to see if he made a difference

As careers go, it’s been a short one, only 15 years. But David Menasche has spent every minute of it teaching English at Coral Reef Senior High School in Miami, where his former students number nearly 3,000.

Now 40, he’s battling stagefour brain cancer. After three surgeries, 21⁄ years of chemotherapy and 30 rounds of radiation, he is losing his battle. So in his final months, Menasche is doing what most teachers only dream of: He’s traveling the country, visiting his former students and asking: Did I make a difference?

“I am at the end of my life,” he said recently. “I don’t know how much longer I have left, and I just wanted that sense of satisfaction that the time I did have I used well.”

After a seizure this summer led to brain swelling that took away all but a sliver of his vision, Menasche realized he’d never return to the classroom. The seizure also limited use of most of the left side of his body. But rather than sit at home, he got an idea for a “vision quest” to reconnect with former students. In August, Menasche put out a call on Facebook, asking whether any Coral Reef alumni had couches to offer.

Within 48 hours, students in 50 cities replied.

In November he boarded a bus in Miami and began what he hopes will be a wandering cross-country journey. The oldest of his former students are now in their early 30s, with lives and families of their own, and he hopes to “get caught up and at all. In fact, I don’t remember anything prior to roughly 16 or 17 years old. And even the things that I was doing as a teacher are somewhat spotty.”

So he’s asking his former students “to share their memories, to refresh my own — and that leads to pretty interesting conversations.”

As if anyone needed to be reminded, he says teaching can be disheartening. “You work hard every night to grade papers and do all these things; you come to the classroom, and you’re not sure if you’d had any success.”