I had a professor this semester who taught a class at Indiana University about Art in the eyes of the Third Reich as Adolf Hitler took control of Europe to develop a new world power. She told the class on the last day of coursework before finals week that struck a cord in me, “You need to like people even if you view them as assholes.”
I have called many people “assholes” and I have even been called an “asshole” myself.
My little sister always says I am too far right politically believing in trans hate and self-destruction because a boy may identify as a girl, and she tells me through her liberal heart to accept people for the goodness they have to possess.
In other words, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would define her statement as not judging the color of skin, but the content of one’s character.
I have since felt grief I will share with you a story that could lead up to a high school English teacher that I hated back when I was 16, now fighting for her life.
I fondly remember writing a similar article like this one back on Thanksgiving 2015 with an opinion piece in the Herald-Times newspaper in Bloomington, Ind. titled, “His Name Was James,” a homage to my grandfather James Lents who had died from cancer just a few years before writing the article.
The article discussed me causing a ruckus at a choir concert at my middle school’s Veteran’s Day ceremony every year by dancing on the risers in a suit and tie. Making a scene for the veterans to be honored at the event, and pissing off every faculty member around me as the kids, who I thought were good kids, laughed at my mental illness during every Veteran’s Day chorus to the song “America Sings.”
Now I look back on that article and think of it differently, but that is a story for another day.
To this day, my mom says she should have taken the picture of my grandfather and me at the French Lick Hotel in French Lick, Ind. out of the photo book. I’m glad she didn’t tell me to do that now because it showed up well on the newspaper once it printed on Thanksgiving of that year, and my middle school English teacher read the article aloud in front of the whole class after the break was over.
Bringing up the topics of “pissing people off” and “making a scene” brings up the story which I am going to bring up today. It now haunts me because that teacher I am going to mention, is now dying in Hospice with seconds, not days, left to live after suffering an aggressively undisclosed cancer that has crippled my 15-year-old autistic sister Breanna who is a freshman at Bloomington South High School, and just like her brother back then, she has struggles that are more comprehensive than mine.
She bonded with this teacher because she is an outcast and doesn’t bond with kids her age, and by February, my sister wondered where she went and where she had been since she told her teacher last spoke to the class before the winter break in December last year that she was taking off for a medical emergency.
Today, my sister and my mom cried the whole day and I am writing this to both make sure she knows that I loved this teacher too and that I love her and my high school which I graduated during a different circumstance with COVID-19 disrupting my senior year more than life itself.
As many kids are graduating like me from college, we are all beginning to have those days where we will look back on the teachers that “pissed us off” and “annoyed us” from time to time only to realize some of the teachers helped us when we needed them the most and looking back we’re just saying, “Oh my Gosh! That teacher saved my life and I didn’t know it! Silly me, she helped me out when I didn’t expect her to and now I’m older thanking her for what she did at the time.”
Bloomington South High School English teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth von Buchler, as a stupid and naive male high school student only worried about finding the hottest high school girls and growing pubic hair, I believed, just like the rest of my class at the time that Mrs. von Buchler was the most annoying teacher ever.
On the Bloomington South meme pages and forums at the username, The Real B-H-S-S along with username Bhss.confessions on Instagram, wrote extensively about how they hated Mrs. von Buchler and her style of teaching.
I won’t lie, at the time, she talked about cancer and mental illness when we were only trying to learn about how to write, read, and comprehend information to draft an outline. Maybe even learn some new words and figure out how to spell them out. We hated her lectures then because none of the material she covered was ever covered in the other English classes at the high school.
We called her “too bright” as she came in with a positive attitude that just annoyed us, young teenagers. Her trademark “HEY-LOOOOW!” in this Red Skelton clown of a high pitch voice was like nails on a chalkboard, but God, she was too happy we thought!
We just shrugged and hated her words.
Laughing at a line in a lighthearted teen poetry book that never was funny to us, but only hilarious to her, made us question our teenage existence at the time.
We couldn’t wait for lunch since her period fell on C lunch, the last lunch of the day, and we couldn’t wait to quote, “… get the hell out of there.”
If you took English 10 for example, you could have had Mrs. von Buchler for all three tries and if you hated her, that’s a bummer. We loved the other English teachers like Mr. Rickerby, Mrs. English, maybe even Mrs. McDermott-Sipe or Steel, and the preppy kids with the high GPAs loved this guy by the name of Mr. Rakic who had a more decorated history as a teacher being a part of the uprisings in the post-Cold War era in 1980s Chezoslavakia.
The smart kids liked him because he advanced their learning and made them think more critically than just about themselves, and Mrs. von Buchler, at the time, seemed to teach us garbage and throw everything that the English department wanted her to teach out the window.
We complained every time she told us to use a real dictionary, which was thick with so many loose pages aging like The Holy Bible, and find a word that somehow matched to the vocabulary words we needed to find in her vast array of options to read. That being, “The Catcher in the Rye”, “1984” by George Orwell, or “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Detroit Free-Press great, Mitch Albom.
We cussed and bickered about the books we had the read, the oversized dictionaries, and the “crap” we had to read, write, and watch on the news reports she showed us first thing before class as our “bell work”.
We also hated her because she was too happy and jolly for our 16-year-old pubic minds to grapple with. Generation Z was the first generation to genuinely hate our own teachers and only say hooray if Mrs. von Buchler was replaced by a new teacher in Taylor Swift, that Speed dude on Twitch, MrBeast, or Charlie D’Amelio.
When I was a student at South, I will admit, I hated her lectures because everybody else did.
My therapist at the time named Mindi said I used to feed off of everyone’s energy and react like how they reacted.
Two years before my encounter with Mrs. von Buchler, I had attempted suicide a total of eight times, ran away from home five times, and overdosed on Tylenol, allergy meds, and many other over-the-counter medications. I snuck out and ran amuck, being placed in three mental hospitals and diagnosed with bipolar disorder after jumping off a building leading to the last suicide attempt.
I had also just gotten out of placement at a boy’s school in Schererville, Indiana and I had been at my new high school, the fourth in the last two years, in Bloomington South.
It presented as a new opportunity to grow myself and my character.
During my junior year of high school, so many things happened. I forgave a soon to be serial killer in Mikey Dongwoof Ko, I had transitioned out of my wrap-around service program, and things were on the up for me as my story of resilience touched the school and it’s staff, but I was beginning to take English courses with Mrs. von Buchler and not with the teacher I wanted.
I was assigned to a sunflower and I just didn’t know it at the time.
The date was March 19, 2019 when I had come back from spring break and I thought I loved this girl named Clara S. She swindled me with her narcissistic charm and I took it personal as, since I have bipolar, I was taking this bit of mania and went to school ready to attack.
On a school computer, I kicked myself, slapped myself, and bullied Clara. Making death threats and thoughts of killing myself. I had just gotten word days before this that I was going to be nominated for an award by one of my favorite teachers.
I now was making not just him, but my support system at school and possibly my life in shambles because, I lied to a security guard about the accounts and went away with a three-day suspension.
I can still remember the meetings with both school administration after the incident, my special education counselor now retired, Barb Stork, my psychiatrist, therapist, and three superintendents after the mother of Clara went into the school and let out the worst rage anyone has ever seen, calling me racial slurs and so on in front of Mr. Jay True, one of the then school’s assistant principals.
The incident damaged my reputation not just amongst faculty, but also with myself. Barb and a man by the name of Mr. Bodnar, who acted as my security guard for six weeks, watched my ass from doing anything out of the ordinary.
I was forbidden from using social media in and out of school grounds until August of my senior year, and my scholarship for the award night was revoked. I walked into the school again after five days of suspension and a trip to Panera Bread where Barb Stork analyzed and drafted everything I needed to hear before I went back to school, but the damage was already done.
On March 26, 2019, I went back to South and had a meeting inside the counseling office with the most people I have ever met. My counselor was there, my principal of the school was there in Mr. Mark Fletcher, my therapist was there, the guy from a school computer room was there to lock my device, security guards were there, and when I apologized and said, “This won’t happen again.” it fell on deaf ears.
It was a worthless apology but I had something written out and shook my head in laughter that I forgot my apology, but no one believed me.
Knowing what I know now about Barb Stork and the cash that she confiscated, I don’t. view her the same, but I will not go there since there are people from the South High School subscribed to my newsletter.
The whole day was horrible as I was with Mr. Bodnar during every class, every bathroom break, and every lunch period. I couldn’t be a free kid and I felt lost from my friend groups.
The girl got away with manipulating me and I just had to suffer with the consequences of bullying a girl on the internet for something she also caused.
But it was the last period of the day, when the kids got on the bus, that changed my view of Mrs. von Buchler and her teaching forever.
At my high school, we had a library study session after school run by Mrs. Nancy Voskuil and the other library workers to help us work on homework that we couldn’t get done in class.
Mr. Bodnar had left and went home at 2:50 p.m. and I sat in this empty library alone until the last bell rang. I had left class five minutes ago for my own safety. Barb was in charge of me along with Nancy. The other librarian with her severely autistic daughter also was going home.
The only interaction I had outside of Barb and Nancy was a girl by the name of Lia Sokol. A blonde hair, blue eyes, intelligent Senior who was a class in front of me in high school who understood mental health and me well at the time. According to records, she is a junior at Cornell University, but she even forgave me for what I had just done and even gave me a hug before she studied with her friends at another part of the large library.
As teachers left and right were headed home, they gave me over 30 different homework assignments that I missed because of the suspension, but it was the last one that made me think differently.
Before 3:30 p.m., Mrs. von Buchler wasn’t like the other teachers were bitchy about me spewing violence to an innocent girl at school that both at the workforce, could have sued me, locked me up, and thrown away the key. I should have been in a Lake County Juvenile jumpsuit, dealing with a prosecutor in court with my mother crying spewing rage saying, “Mr. Braydyn Lents is a repeat offender and a highly dangerous human being, and a danger to himself and others.” I should have been next to my father, Demetrious Welch, in the same prison cell he was in. I should have gotten a worse punishment… but thanks to the glory of God, I could heal and most importantly graduate with my new cuffs and shackles, freedom but also security.
I was lucky to be in school and not with any other factors, but Mrs. von Buchler, with her smile and warm presence, didn’t care about any of these things.
She treated me like a son. She hugged me and said, “I am so happy to see you back in school!”
I rolled my eyes being the naive kid I was, but then she gave me an unexpected hug. It was warm and very tender, but she said and I will never forget this to this day, but she was almost too calm, like a priest or a Catholic nun, and she said, “I think the world will forgive what you did. I love you and I deeply care about your success and I am just so happy you are here. I am proud of you.”
I HAD JUST BULLIED A GIRL ONLINE, MADE DEATH THREATS, AND WANTED TO HARM MYSELF AND HER, PUT THE SCHOOL IN DANGER, AND SHE SAID SHE WAS SO PROUD OF ME?!
I couldn’t believe it!
My mom said, “She was proud that I faced my punishment,” but I clearly was on the verge of crying it was beautiful.
No one up to that point believed in me when I went through trauma except for a man by the name of Mr. Wendell, a staff at Campagna Academy, the boy’s school I attended before coming to South, but no one else.
No one ever praised me for losing and then built me up to win. She then guided me through the rest of her English 11 class and just didn’t care if I had an aid or not, she guided me and coasted me through the rest of the course and put smiley faces on my homework assignments saying, “I am proud of you for your hard work.”
Let me say it again, no one ever praised me and built me up to learn how to change. I was always torn into pieces. I had no one to praise me and build me up before she did.
My view of her as this annoying teacher with smiles and sunflowers went away from my mind.
One thing about Mrs. von Buchler that still captivates me was that she took the wildest of society, children who love anything but school, who were rebellious and wild, and who also may have not done so well in the Indiana state school testing, and put them into a room where we had to learn about mental health, issues, troubled kids, and just as in the case of Mitch Albom, how to have empathy for the lost of society who are struggling.
Looking back, as I explained to my mom, I said, We watched all these movies and documentaries about Morrie Schwartz and a selfish journalist who had taken a class with him in college to care for him as he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and his body was failing to where he needed caretakers, and we watched a 60 Minutes report on soldiers with PTSD after war, and I look back on this kid I was now since she is in Hospice care and I am saying, “That kid was Mitch Albom, that kid was the soldiers, that defined me!”
A troubled, out-of-control kid with no remorse who now got a calling to be a Catholic deacon and serve others.
Unlike the state testing signed by the bill “No Child Left Behind,” Mrs. von Buchler genuinely never “left” a “child behind.”
Now, four years later, I am one step away from graduating from Indiana University this Fall, I am on the verge of finding a job, and I am one more step away from helping a new generation in my sister also graduate and go off to college, but for Mrs. von Buchler, she is now in Hospice care fighting for her life.
When I heard this I felt crushed. She made an impact on me and I didn’t know it, I pray for her and her family on what could be either be her last year on Earth or a sudden miracle.
If Mrs. von Buchler passed away, it would be a massive loss to the English teaching community not just to the Bloomington South community, but also to the world of teaching. She was also more than an English teacher, she taught the Academic Super Bowl club and a few reading clubs at South.
Her presence could be missed, but I also believe in a miracle.
Mrs. von Buchler was not an “asshole” of a teacher, she filled a “hole” gapping “hole in my life that I never thought I needed.
Thank you Mrs. von Buchler and I pray for you and your family.