It was 1987. President Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down a wall. That same year, I sat in Mr. Silva’s advanced English class on the first day of my junior year at a new high school. He tore down something too, just smaller. And only mine.

Silva walked through the door, a stack of papers and a few books in his left hand, wearing tan slacks with sharp creases, a sky-blue shirt open to a Saint Christopher medal, and his hair permed into a Bob Ross halo. Tan leather boat shoes, popular for the year of the yuppie, and no socks. “Settle down, class,” he said, smiling and shutting the door behind him.

“Before we begin, let me say where you are sitting is where you’ll stay the entire semester, no changing seats.” A collective groan spread through the twenty students. “Unless you make me move you,” he said, smiling. He wrote DETENTION on the chalkboard in block letters, then erased it. “How about this: let’s agree we won’t need this,” he said, pointing at the board where detention was written.

That’s how our class started, and Mr. Silva called on Heather Lamberti first, recognizing her name long before she raised her hand, answering her question before she asked. “No homework. Unless you don’t finish your assignment during our class period.” Jason Livermore, the kid no one bothered, sat in the back, defining the word verbatim correctly for Mr. Silva, all without looking up from his Levi’s jean jacket, covered in band patches like Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Poison, and Dokken. Silva snatched a Tootsie Pop off his desk and hucked it to Jason, who caught it without looking up.

Silva walked up to the chalkboard and started drawing, first a line, then a circle, then another line and so on until it ran the length of the chalkboard.

“Can anyone tell me what this is?”

Nobody raised their hand.

“This,” he said, pointing at the board, “is a Portuguese Divider.” He said it like it explained everything. “You see, everyone in Portugal travels by boat. These,” he pointed at the circles, “are the boats. These lines,” he pointed at the lines, “divide them. You will use one of these in your composition books, marking each of your sections.” He winked at Heather. “You will probably need three.”

It was a joke, a lie, and a lesson all in the same breath. We were teenagers, and none of us knew which part was which. I think that was the lesson. He wasn’t teaching us the difference between a semicolon and a comma that day. He was teaching us that a teacher could walk into a room, learn our names before we gave them, guess our questions before we asked them, and make a drawing of nothing into a tool we’d actually use—because Mr. Silva decided, on day one, to pay attention to twenty GenXers who weren’t expecting it.

We moved three weeks later to the northernmost point of Idaho, so I don’t remember most of what Mr. Silva taught me about writing. But I do remember that Portuguese Divider. I remember being caught off guard by a grown-up who was paying attention to me.

Reagan asked for the Berlin Wall to come down in 1987. Mr. Silva took another one down without asking—mine. The one that made me think no adult was paying attention to me.