After suffering the tragic, unexpected loss of English teacher Karl Savage on April 7, hundreds gathered at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Kensington, Md. on Saturday, April 10 for his funeral.


Among many speakers, English teacher Bill Griffiths, who was a good friend of Savage’s, gave a tear-jerking yet laugh-provoking speech. Below is a transcript of the words Griffiths spoke in remembrance, and celebration, of Savage’s life.

Karl Savage was the best teacher I ever saw. He was brilliant, kind, generous, alert, patient, playful, curious and respectful of everyone, most importantly of students. He made work seem like play more often than you could ever hope for, and when it finally boiled down to just the work itself, as it invariably does, he attached a value to it in such a way, that made you want to value it too. Look at the wall of notes to Karl in the hallway outside his room; hear what these notes say:

“Every time you came in, the room brightened.”

“I read every book in that class BC of Savage.”

“Savage’s Museum of Oddities will live on forever!”

“Say Hi to Shakespeare for me.”

Karl’s No.1 Law of Teaching was: “Inspire to Aspire.” And he’d do this by any means necessary.

As a teacher, this required an enormous amount of work on Karl’s part, yet you never saw him laboring with a frown. You never saw him act put upon. You never heard him speak rudely to anyone. You never felt like you were imposing. On the contrary, he always made it look easy. He always looked like he was enjoying himself. And if you had the good fortune to be in Karl’s company, you felt like he was enjoying you too. The Renaissance had a term for it: Sprezzatura – making the difficult look easy. This was Karl; he had a grace about him. And he had brilliance too, because for the amount of work we teachers know he did, to be as organized as he was, to be as ready as he always was every single day, he had to be working at such a very high level.

He might as well have been a surgeon because in terms of students he Saved Lives. As one kid said, “You changed my world completely. Your class was a haven for me.” Karl Savage protected these kids and shepherded them along until they took that next step.

Imagine how grateful this student was when she landed in Karl’s class and he took her under his wing: “I remember ninth grade, I was a month late to class because I didn’t have English, but you welcomed me so nice.”

Or how about this kid, who sounds a little rougher around the edges, but is just as vulnerable and beautiful inside, that he obviously came back to WJ to leave this note when he heard about Karl: “You helped me a lot to graduate. Thanks to you I’m free from high school. I’ll never forget you.”

Or the student who Karl empowered in one of his more fascinating ways. This student says, “You made me realize I wasn’t a kid, I was a mountain lion!”

Karl saved lives because he was able to reach students. “He got it.” He understood people. He “got” kids.

First of all he had great intuition and that allowed him to reach everyone. Smart, challenged, cocky, fearful, reclusive, impulsive, he had a way of speaking to kids – and adults – in that person’s own language. He never talked down to anyone.

Another reason he was able to reach kids was he never forgot what high school was like for him. And the students loved him for this. If you ever have the good fortune to visit Karl’s classroom while his stuff is still up, you will see amongst the drawings of his own children, on the wall right next to his desk, some student’s torn out last page of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and on it scrawled “Crucible sucks and I’m depressed.” This page hangs as a piece of Found Art for him, a constant reminder to try and meet kids in those places in themselves where they are most ready to learn.

To do this, each year, Karl would seemingly revise his whole curriculum, and then tweak it throughout the semester to better reach this group of kids, or that kid. He’d bring in News of the Weird stories for his ESOL kids to teach setting, character, story and plot. He’d bring in stories from The Onion. And these stories and articles spoke to the kids. Karl hypnotized them into interest.

He’d do the same thing with AP Lang kids. Each month, each week, each day, each class, something refreshingly new: Fun Fridays, sit where you want! A week of warm-ups showing “Awkward Family Photos.” The daily warm-up during a segment on Shakespeare with Shakespeare’s Insult of the Day: “Madame you are not worth the rude wind that blows in your face.”

And he organized all this and kept it together in that Savage brain of his. It was daunting and dizzying to the rest of us – not that he could do any one part of all this – but that he could do it all.

It reached a point with me personally, where I started to suspect that Savageland wasn’t a make-believe world of Karl’s and his students’ witty devising, but a very real parallel universe that he was able to slip into to get all this work done, while the rest of us bumped into ourselves all day. And somehow while he was in this parallel universe getting all this work done, his body, through some bizarre law of Savage Physics, was allowed to somehow sit quietly behind his desk during planning periods reading a book with great repose, or it was even permitted to pop over to Giant for some sushi and a Diet Coke. Doing the Savage Glide all the way over and all the way back.

But, in truth, I knew this was just my witty fantasy for Karl, devised on my part as a way of trying to understand how he was so good. He was so good no one ever even held it against him that he was so good. In fact he might be the only person in the world whom I never heard a single bad word uttered about. Ever.

And, in truth, I realized whenever I did drop in to see him in his classroom, he couldn’t really be in some parallel universe, because he was so clearly right in front of me real as real could be: warm, present, patient, kind, funny, generous. Whatever you needed, he had. And if he didn’t have it to hand to you directly, he’d e-mail it to you in such a timely manner that you knew he had moved something he was doing to the side to take care of you.

There are so many stories about Karl to be told:

Ask the members of the Facial Hair Styling Club who will happily tell you about the time he showed up and delivered a 45-minute speech about…facial hair styling…to a room full of kids who weren’t even shaving!

And of course there’s the story of Karl’s “Seize Back the Day” Campaign and his attempt to reclaim Leap Day for self and family. But you can see that on YouTube.

But there is one story I would be remiss not to tell, and it is a story that once again shows what a great teacher Karl was: it is the story of how the first Samurai Haiku Poetry Shootout started. The very ones that he and Jon Bos carried on this very semester.

Within our first year of teaching together, Karl and I – we were just a couple doors away from each other back then – both realized we loved Haiku. I was teaching creative writing, and had just bought this great book called North American Haiku, and I was showing him, and he was genuinely entranced with it. Several days later, one of the best teaching and learning moments ever known to man was devised: The Samurai Haiku Shootout. This got shortened to Haiku Shootouts and what they involved were secret attacks on each other’s classrooms. I don’t remember who attacked who first, but this is what would happen: You’d be teaching and you’d hear a quiet knock on your classroom door, and when you’d open it, an entire class of 28 to 30 kids would flow in, circling the walls of your room until they surrounded you; some would be grinning ear to ear, some moved like lost bubbles being swept along in the flood. And then Karl and I would meet in the center of the room and bow and say “hai” or something like that, that we’d seen in Shogun – Karl was probably saying something in real Japanese – and then in short order Karl and I, and more importantly three kids who volunteered or got volunteered from each of our classes, would go to the board, someone would call out a word, usually a noun, and we’d have a time-keeper call out “go!” and in 2 minutes, everyone at the various chalk boards had to write a 17 syllable traditional Haiku in that 2-minute time frame. And each contestant – it felt more like combatant – would be judged by the loudest cheering, which although it had the feel of the Roman Coliseum at this point, almost always awarded the victory to the deserving writer. As if when you treat people with respect, such as students, they respond in kind by doing the right thing. And the topics that got called out were wild: laundry, lantern, quasar, condominium. This seeming waste of curriculum time was miraculous for the kids. Sometimes during the school year, at the end of a particular unit, as we’d pause to catch our breath, a kid would yell out, “Let’s attack Savage.” And the unwritten rules were: if a kid said this and you could steal 20 minutes, you would attack, but the even more definitive rule was if you were attacked – unless you were actually in the middle of a test – you had to accept the challenge. Sometimes our class would plan an attack for the following day and everyone would show up dressed in black.

Again, I can’t tell you how much the kids loved this. For one, it shows teachers having fun, and competing. Kids love to see teachers competing because when teachers compete, then one of them has to lose! For many of the kids it instilled a love of language – of poetry – that hours of lecturing might never do. One kid Karl had, who was somewhat reclusive, and learning how to socialize with other kids, totally came out of his shell due to these Haiku Shootouts. This kid immediately wanted to become the Haiku King of the Universe. He was so small then, and he had this flaming red hair and he’d get so intense. Every Haiku Battle he fought he wanted to write the best Haiku of anyone, and he always willed himself to victory. He’d stare through the class until they clapped loudest for him. I had him the following year and he wanted to attack Karl as madly as he wanted to attack me the year before. He was loyal to Haiku more than he was to us. By the end of WJ he was thriving in theater productions; he is thriving today in college. He checks in with us when he’s home on break.

Karl somehow knew to tap this kid in this way. And Karl tapped into others with these Haiku Wars. One of my favorite notes on Karl’s wall reads:

Master of Haiku
Your Apprentices Now
Write to Honor You.

Once, a student of mine, a talented writer, described grief, better than she knew. She described it as the inability to give love to someone who is lost to you. Whether your love is refused by the person it is intended for, or whether that person dies and cannot – within the bounds of our human existence – be there to receive it. And return it.

There is much grief being felt here today. He was such a great man in all of our lives, and even greater husband and father. Our hearts go out to you Julie, and Jeremiah, and Lucy, and to you Ella.

We don’t know why we have lost Karl at so young an age, but we will always know one thing about him: He was Beautiful.

Let the students have the last word:

You spoke, we listened
Respect for you is Eternal.