Teacher who reached students pays a terrible price

We all had a teacher who got through.

Somehow, that teacher made high school more than a list of chores to be checked off, a tedious phase to pass through, a required doorway to the rest of your life.

Tom Hudson sounds like he was one of them.

He got through the peer pressure, the boredom and the fear that takes hold of so many high-school students, and expanded his classroom walls to include the open sea, mountain cliffs, deep green forests and his very own home.

It got him into trouble.

Two months ago, the Garfield High School biology teacher was put on leave while school officials investigated allegations related to his relationship with students.

On Tuesday, the man who had guided groups of teenagers into the great outdoors was found dead in an Everett motel room, an apparent suicide. He was 58.

A good teacher connects with students; gets them to think for themselves. His technique is questioned. Troubled by this, and perhaps other things, he takes his own life.

It is a story you can find in the library at Garfield: the death of Socrates.

The fifth-century philosopher was another teacher who caused his students to think in new ways, and was put through a trial for it.

Instead of changing his teaching style to suit the conventional fears of his detractors, Socrates took his own life by ingesting hemlock.

In Jacques-Louis David's painting "The Death of Socrates," the teacher is still speaking as he reaches for the poison; one of his finest and most devoted students, Plato, sits nearby, despondent.

There were a lot of Platos at Garfield the other day.

None of them was there in that Everett motel room the other night, but they were somber students who had followed Hudson into some of the best experiences of their lives.

Survival training. Scuba diving. Mountaineering. Ecology.

"He opened worlds for people," said Michela Steig, 18, after classes on Thursday.

"He didn't just teach it. He took you out and showed it to you."

In doing so - and like Socrates - Hudson walked a line with rule makers.

Sometime last fall, he apparently crossed it.

A parent expressed concern to school officials about Hudson's behavior with the kids. And that shook loose an avalanche of questions.

What about Hudson's sense of responsibility?

What about the time when he was the only adult to take a group of kids on a hike on Mount Olympus in 1998 - and then fell into a crevasse?

Hudson, who had climbed the spot above the Hoh River Valley 13 times before, was leading six trained students when he fell 30 feet.

The students went into action. They sent down a pulley. One student descended and dug Hudson out of the snow with an ice pick.

In less than a half-hour, they hauled Hudson out, recognized symptoms of hypothermia and found shelter.

"Had it not been for the students," Hudson told the school newspaper later, "I would have died."

That made some parents nervous. Others didn't like that students were welcome to call Hudson by his first name, and at home, and that he confided to teenagers that he sometimes became depressed.

It seemed too much for kids to handle.

But those kids - those young adults - insist it wasn't.

"His friends were his students, and that didn't have to be wrong," said Kaitlin Murdoch, 17, a senior who went on two of Hudson's trips.

After he was placed on leave, Hudson "stopped living," Murdoch said. "The students were his life, and that was taken away from him."

The school district's investigation will likely be abandoned now that Hudson is gone.

And so it may never be known if the allegations were true. Only that they likely played a part in killing a teacher best known for showing his students how to survive.

------------------------- Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday and Thursday in The Times. Her phone number is 206-464-2334. Her e-mail address is nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She owes a lot to Kovalevich and Canzanese.