HNN

A Good Teacher, High School Dances, and the Morning News

The “Spring Fling” was a hit. Kids flood out of the doors, smiles over their faces, their hair damp with sweat, the usual signs that a school dance went well. My chaperone duties are almost over, all that remains is supervising the student clean up crew. I work at a boarding school on Vancouver Island and my duties range from dorm parent to outdoor educator to school dance chaperone. As the kids clean they recap the night, talking about everything that happened at the dance, who went with whom and so on. I hold a broom in my hand and see time stretched out far yet wrapping around in a circle. I see lines intersecting: fate, decisions made, deja vu all twisting together.

If I pull at the lines I can ferry myself back in time to October 2016, I am in grade 10 and I am sweeping up the fallen banners and decorations from the floor of our cafeteria turned dance floor, the Homecoming Dance successful as ever. Over the speakers our chaperone Mr. Latessa plays Spirit in the Sky as I help two of the cool seniors with the clean up. Sixteen year old me ravenous for their attention, doing everything I can to make them laugh.  While we clean Mr. Latessa fiddles with the speakers against the back wall of the cafeteria looking awkward yet content, an alien who has just put on a suit for the first time in a while. As always, days old scruff covers his face. He’s making jokes with us and he stays until we have cleaned everything up, locked the doors, and our parents have picked us up. I remember that more clearly than the dance itself. 

Besides chaperoning Mr. Latessa taught video production, ran the morning news, and did a whole lot of other stuff to help the school run. When you walked into my high school his classroom was the third door on the right. His hair was always a bit greasy and slicked back,  he smelled like the tobacco he sometimes chewed. I hated that smell. He always looked disheveled in some sort of Hawaiian shirt like he was waiting for the day to end so he could go to a Jimmy Buffet concert.  As a freshman I took his video production class and produced some of the most mailed in, last second, no effort videos of all time (for an example I made a stop motion movie called Chick Magnet where I cut out pictures of baby chickens and a picture of a magnet and the chicks moved towards the magnet, Spielberg who?) Mr. Latessa knew I wasn’t trying and gave me plenty of shit for it. Despite my lack of effort in his class he saw something in me and brought me into the fold of his baby, the morning news production team, HNN (Husky News Network, our mascot was a husky). 

That’s me, dead middle. Also for the non-Rhode Islanders Cardi’s is a furniture store and they had donated some couches to our studio

If you are not familiar with the highs and lows of high school morning news let me give you the rundown: it’s chaos. Every morning someone had to put the announcements in the teleprompter, make sure the hosts showed up, that it wasn't raining too hard outside (if it rained too much the internet slowed wayyyyy down), ensure that someone had turned the computers on in time to warm up, and make sure the Pledge of Allegiance went off without a hitch so the history teachers wouldn’t riot. All while being staffed exclusively with ADHD riddled teenagers at 7:30 am. It was a pressure cooker for 20 minutes and I reveled in it. That was my life for the first half of high school and then some. 

The morning news was Mr. Latessa’s world and for sophomore and junior year I saw him everyday all the time. Mr. Latessa and I would strategize and plan, we laughed and joked and recapped the news. We talked politics and society, my political ideologies on my sleeves, his more veiled, asking why, making me think through our disagreements. Then he would laugh, his eyes were always expressive, I knew when he was excited or disappointed or fed up or tired just from his eyes. It got to a point where he felt like family, a distant uncle I just found out I had. My senior year I saw him less, I got pulled to other parts of the building, the morning news took a backseat but we would always stop and chat ideas for live stream possibilities and where HNN could go. 

I got a call this past summer from my mom. Mr. Latessa had died. He was in his late 50’s and the cause of death wasn't given but he died at home with his family by his side. I felt weird and sad and that hasn't changed much since then. My mom mentioned they were asking for people to film a video talking about their favorite memories of him. I didn't film one. There was a tight deadline and I was living in my car, surf instructing, hanging with friends at the beach, and somehow couldn't fit it into my busy schedule (sarcasm). Maybe I was overwhelmed or maybe I didn't want the shadow of death hovering over my summer in the surf. Whatever the reason, I justified it to myself. 

With as much time as I spent with Mr. Latessa, I didn’t really know him. I never saw him outside of school, I never ran into him on the street or at a restaurant. I never called him Brian. I read his obituary and learned he was from Pennsylvania, I never knew that. He also was a college wrestler, I didn’t know that either. I never met his wife or his kids. He existed in my mind on the first floor of my high school in that room three doors down on the right. Yet now I sit on my computer and watch a slideshow of photos on the funeral home's website and see a man I thought I knew and a man I had no idea existed. 

Mr. Latessa really liked the Tim Allen show “Last Man Standing”, he liked when people put effort into things, and he did more for me than probably any other teacher did. I was Class President throughout high school and he signed on to be our Class Advisor because no one else would. Life is busy enough for a public school teacher in the U.S without signing on to help kids organize dances, fundraisers, prom, trips, etc. Yet he said yes for three years to help me out. During my senior year life got too busy even for him and he stepped aside (I never knew the reason and I’ll probably never now know). Other teachers came to take over his role as advisor and help him out. I could tell they loved him a whole lot. 

The last time I saw him was Christmas break my freshman year of university. I walked into my high school to say hi to old teachers. His door is close to the entrance so he was the first teacher I saw.  We had some laughs and then I had to leave. Too much was the same and enough was different that it didn't feel right. You can’t visit your teachers right away, you have to give it time. I gave it too much time. I sent him an email a couple years later thanking him for all he had done for me. He called me “mountain man!” and told me good luck in everything. He sent another email in November of 2023, asking about someone in my class and asking how things were. I never responded. I don’t know why or maybe I didn't see it. We didn’t always get along and he had his flaws and I’ve got mine but he gave me everything a teacher could: kindness, encouragement, and his time.  

Time is a circle, which can be annoying and repetitive but at the same it lets magic happen too. Time lets Mr. Latessa exist forever in that classroom three doors down from the entrance on the first floor of my high school. Time lets me walk into that room whenever I wish, whether I’m sitting in traffic or going for a run. If it happens that I walk into that room right before first period any Monday - Friday, September - June I will see a scene that is all too familiar. Kids will be running around trying to find the hosts, the teleprompter is begging to be updated, and there in the midst of all the chaos he is holding court. Shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, in my mind his shirt is an untucked orange short sleeve button up. He has found the person with the most to do and has stopped them to tell some joke about a dog with no punchline. He plays dumb in the face of their collective anxieties, asking them what's the matter as the studio burns. As I stand in that room again I realize he knew something we all didn’t, he knew that the chaos wouldn’t last forever, that our time here is so extraordinarily fleeting. A lesson it seems he decided to wait to teach until the very end. 

Mr. Latessa  1964 - 2024

If you would like to watch an HNN broadcast I’ve linked one of them below, I was 18 years old in my senior year of highschool. I hosted and it’s funny to see how much I’ve changed and how much I haven’t. Skip to 1:50 for it to begin: HNN Broadcast