Lambs to Lions

Who Am I?

My name is Mike Fassold.  I taught junior high for 26 years, high school for 4 years, and college for 6 years.  I retired in June of 2023 to coincide with the birth of my wife and I’s first grandchild.

As a teacher and a person, Mitch Albom’s book Tuesdays with Morrie was really important to me in my classroom and my life.  In my never-to-be-published book (I am too much of an introvert for that, but it was a personal challenger),

“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” Morrie Schwartz’s advice to Mitch Albom resonated to me.   The culture we live in told my 12 and 13 year olds that only the surface matters:  What do you look like?  What do you wear?  What do you have?  It results in our children feeling inadequate and unfulfilled because a person can never be perfect in appearance, never have enough clothes, and never have enough stuff.  I tried to build a completely different culture.  In my classroom anything just might happen.  It is also a place where faithfulness matters.  Where effort matters.  Where personal achievement is based on your own of expectation.  And understanding others matters. I worry today’s culture does not just impact students.  The constant negativity in our news has created factions of hatred and a worldview where only our feels and slights matter.  We substitute our opinions as fact; even when our opinions are formed from the manipulation of talking heads and 20 second videos on social media.

I once started the school year reading the following quote from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.   “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.  It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”  For my students this was our introduction to the first day.  Today, I worry about a world where our opinions are manipulated from social media and faux “news” channels.  I am hopeful that people will stop bumping and think for themselves.

I am content in retirement and have intentionally tried to stay out of the political world; but sometimes it is impossible when so many people ask for my thoughts.  I volunteer my time working with high schools in the We the People community.  My rule is that I will help anyone who asks.  My goal is to spread civic knowledge.  One of more rewarding endeavors has been to teach “We the People” style course for the adults in my community.  My favorite class was last September (2024) on Women’s History; the best part was that my girls and their friends took the class.

I still don’t watch much TV, but spend many hours a day reading and studying the goings on of the Supreme Court.  I still root for the teams of my youth; the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins.  I love to play Strat-o-Matic baseball and have a plethora of Red Sox teams (1946, 1967, 1972, 1975, 1983, 1986, 2004 and 2017).