The first thing I ever watched on live TV in school was a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel

Mr. Wolfe's creativity extended far beyond his arithmetic lessons, and his depth of caring shouldn't be so elusive to the rest of us

Mr. Wolfe, my third-grade teacher at Eastman School in Concord, New Hampshire, was the best teacher I ever had. This seems like a strange observation, perhaps even a discredit to all the teachers I interacted with as a teenager, when my grades and performance counted objectively toward my future.

The truth is that I didn’t need any of my teachers to excel at the tasks given to public-school kids, at least in the 1970s and 1980s. I just needed the books they distributed and some time to myself. As I began looking back on my high-school years as I advanced in adulthood myself, including spending a couple of those years teaching at a parochial school in my hometown, I learned to appreciate that I was fortunate to have in fact had some excellent high-school instructors.

But none of my teachers in my adolescence were the reason I performed well or had a better-than-average experience as a student-kid. The teacher who offered me a transformative experience was Mr. Wolfe.

I started the third grade as a New Kid. My family had moved in the summer of 1978 from the South End of Concord to the extreme boonies at the far northern end, a total of maybe eight miles by car that seemed to an eight year old like eight times zones. The assurance of being reunited with my Conant School friends at Rundlett Junior High School in four more years meant nothing.

I also learned on the first or second day of third grade that, between the two third-grade classes held at this little K-3 schoolbuilding, I was the only child who hadn’t been at Eastman the previous year.

I had met a few of my soon-to-be classmates over the summer. One, a neighbor who later became a victim and was then a silent victim of extreme sexual abuse by foster parents, made an ostentatious show of introducing me, as a—the—New Kid as soon as we were settled into our seats on day one. I remember this helping things tremendously and lacked the words and the social sophistication to thank her for this. I made friends quickly, and it started to feel like Conant School, just with…country kids.

Then came the day of Snoopy.

Mr Wolfe was twenty-five years old at the time and new to Eastman School, and New Hampshire, himself. He had moved to New Hampshire with his wife from Utah, which I had heard of and most kids had not. He sometimes played an acoustic guitar at the end of reading lessons, which to us kids seemed like pure entertainment as we clapped along, but was in fact a clever way of making lessons stick (ask anyone who works on Madison Avenue).

Around a week into the fall, Mr, Wolfe brought a project to school. It was a papier-mâché version of Snoopy from the “Peanuts” comic strip. I think it was pretty high-fidelity. Maybe two and a half feet tall, with a removable panel in the back.

Mr. Wolfe placed this creation on his desk, stood alongside this diorama-of-sorts, and informed us that Snoopy would be giving a math test that day. This was met at first with amused giggles, but then Mr. Wolfe snaked a hand into the hole in Snoopy’s back, and a second later we heard—in what was obviously the goofed-up voice of Mr. Wolfe—the words “Hey, everyone! Today we will be learning the times tables!” (I don’t remember the words exactly, but it was close to that.)

It turned out that Mr. Wolfe had gone high-tech on us. He’d recorded himself on a cassette tape and put the battery-operated cassette player inside Snoopy. (You have to understand that to a 1978 third-grader, this was a little like magic.) Mr. Wolfe then explained, handing out sheets of paper, that we were to answer as many of the questions as we were about to hear as we could, writing out what we needed to solve the problem. Or, again, words to this effect.

When we were all ready and Mr. Wolfe pressed “play” again, his goofed-up voice started rattling off standard multiplication problems, with a few seconds of pause in between each, e.g.: “Two-times-four equals….six times one equals…nine times seven equals…” As this went on, I answered the questions with ease, writing out “ 2 x 4 = 8,” “6 x 1 = 6,” and so on. I had learned basic multiplication tables by kindergarten at the latest, using some book my mother had picked up at the supermarket near the crossword-puzzle books. I was not doing any computing during Mr. Wolfe’s test—which, as you may have guessed, was for diagnostic and individual lesson-planning purposes. I was simply regurgitating stored facts.

I don’t remember how many questions there were, but I remember hearing pencils drop in frustration or boredom a I worked, and eventually being conscious that the only scribbling noises in the room were emanating from my desk.

After the words “Okay, you can STOP now!” burbled from ersatz Snoopy, one of the kids in the class immediately asked “How many did you answer, Kevin?”

Genius that I was, I answered, “All of them! It was easy!” (Or genius words to that effect.)

This touched off a bit of a confusing situation. I had discovered in kindergarten that other five-year-olds weren’t really into reading, and that school stuff didn’t seem as fun for them. But this was the only time I recalled feeling like something of a freak. I didn’t think I was “smart” by any measure. I just believed I paid more attention to what teachers were saying and what was printed in the books I could read.

At recess that morning, I became the recipient of various accusations of somehow resorting to illicit performance-boosting methods, despite my never having been credibly accused of test-doping in my three long years of scholastic participation. It wasn’t torture, but it was uncomfortable, and seemed to undo almost every bit of the smooth transition from The New Kid to just a kid who rode a big yellow bus to see his friends and then got on a different one when it was over.

Mr. Wolfe, I think, saw what was likely to happen well before Snoopy was done interrogating his students. Later that day or maybe the next, he took me aside and told me, in terms I could understand, what was likely to be different for me at times going forward and that nothing about it was going to prove bad. I know he used the word “gift,” and what he told me was that I should try my best to spread it around, even if this wouldn’t always work.

This “incident” quickly blew over. It probably would have anyway, but Mr. Wolfe had more working with other kids at times in ways he knew would promote far more bonding than the transfer of academic efficacy. In fact, the whole episode catalyzes a friendship between myself and the previous unofficial math whiz, a bespectacled girl named Kristin whose slightly crossed and always-magnified eyes made her look a little like Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys. She too had been a New Kid, one year earlier, coming from Minnesota to Concord with her family; this scaled with my having given up eyeglasses by fiat as a second-grader.

Over the years, I have been given reason to flash back on something else that happened that year.

On the morning of March 26, 1979—and of course I had to look up the date—Mr. Wolfe wheeled a television set into the classroom. This was a huge deal. The school only had one television set, and it got little use because watching recorded audiovisual material was still a few years away. The VCR and Betamax devices would soon become middle-class staples, and force the drive-in-theater industry into rapid, mosquito-plagued obsolescence.

This meant we would be watching television! At school!

Sadly, I do not remember Mr. Wolfe’s preamble, but it was limited because we wouldn’t have understood it anyway.

This is what we watched.

When it was over, Mr. Wolfe explained that this could become one of the most important things to happen all year, even if it involved places we had never heard of and people with bizarre names. It was a sign that people with even the most deeply rooted differences could work past them.

Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, were awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for striving toward the ultimate signing of this treaty, which led to the withdraw of Israeli forces from the Sinai Peninsula. Sadat would be assassinated in Cairo two and a half years after signing the treaty, while Begin, a militant Zionist, served as prime minister until 1983 and died nine years later.

Everyone knows that geopolitically, this treaty ultimately meant nothing. But it meant something to me because anything Mr. Wolfe believed in, I did too. And at that age, “ interpreted the words “peace treaty” literally: “No more fighting.”

I probably went the next ten years not thinking about Israel-Palestine at all. I had some Jewish friends in Concord. Josh, Debbie, Tsipi. There was almost no one of Arabic heritage at all. This was never made a point of special emphasis, nor did it become one when I matriculated at the University of Vermont, which was heavy in Jews overall and had a physics department with at least three grad students named Mohammed.

When I wound up for a while at an Ivy League medical school, I was veritably awash in Jews. And one of my best friends was a guy from Afghanistan by way of Maine named Nassir. We had a small unofficial study group that included a woman named Rachel whom I describe endearingly as among the Jewiest of Jews I have ever met. Again, none of this ever seemed to matter to anyone, even if I was probably just blind and evaluating people on their individual merits. That seemed to be a thing at the time.

But I was a geography nut from an early age, at some point as a teenager I became aware that Israel—including all of the disputed territories in the region—was smaller than New Hampshire. About the size of New Jersey. I recall being blown away by how much news seemed to emanate from such a tiny part of the world.

And it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I learned that (using 2023 statistics) only about 2.4 percent of Americans—fewer than one in forty—are considered Jewish, with only about three-quarters of this group considering themselves adherents of Judaism. This collided so much with my everyday experience that I found it almost impossible to rationalize.

That patch of land loosely termed “Israel” that just I mentioned—Israel within the Green Line, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, both East and West Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—is now home to a staggering 13.6 million people. The Gaza Strip, all 142 square miles of it, is approximately the same size as Denver.

You can discount the loaded language in the image if you like. The point is that the region has a population density of around 1,500 persons per square mile. Concord, a city of 45,000 and the state capital, has a population density of less than half of that.

When I hear newsish chatter about Israel being threatened from both the north and the south, this seems to be missing the point. Obviously this is bad news, but Israel is too small to even be thinking in such terms. The sheer amount of death that will result if things blossom into unmitigated warfare is horrible to contemplate. The depths of the hatred in play here are unfathomable to me even if it’s all just one more workaday rendition of tribal religious warfare, this time involving very dangerous toys and a swath of people who cannot be trusted in any way with any of them.

Mr. Wolfe was an aw-shucks elementary-school teacher, nothing more. I believe he would have been concerned first and foremost with the lives of those 13.6 million people whatever they called themselves or believed about the afterlife. He was a loving man put in charge of the destinies of a bunch of random New England kids, and some of us didn’t forget him.

In the mid-1990s, I and my friend Craig, who had been in that 1978-1979 classroom, went to visit Mr. Wolfe at his house in the South End of Concord. He still looked about the same, as he was just past forty. He emphasized genially that Craig and I looked considerably different. At the time, Craig and I were both in the U.S. Army (he still is).

Eastman School was closed after the 2011-2012 academic year, and the building now houses a pre-school. And Larry Wolfe passed away a little over a year ago, not long after his sixty-ninth birthday. It happens that he was deeply religious, though not perhaps in the way one might assume given his Utah roots.

Practically every obituary includes description like, “His kind ways, genuine interest in others, ready smile, selfless service, and sense of humor endeared him to all.” This tends to be more true in the case of certain people thus honored than others. I can vouch for its unwavering and directed presence here.

Love doesn’t conquer everything, but it instills some lasting lessons. And even failing the provision of wisdom, it provides the assurance of having been touched by someone truly special, and with an unusually humanistic vision for people.

That might be even more important in most lives than anything someone could ever teach on purpose.

It is to me.