Mr. Griffith was proud to serve for almost a decade as a public schoolteacher in various capacities, but mostly he taught ninth through twelfth graders such classes as Advanced Placement world history, world history, American history, “global studies”／geography, American government, and economics (including honors level versions of nearly all of those classes).

📖 As a member of Florida’s 2009 first-place High School Literacy Leadership Team of the year, B.F. Griffith fostered excellence in literacy education and contributed to the continuous improvement of students’ reading-comprehension and writing skills, encouraged enthusiasm for unassigned reading as well as abiding lifelong enjoyment of books, conducted and participated in faculty professional development sessions focused on teaching reading, and enhanced the overall literary rigor of the academic environment in which he taught.

♟️ Mr. Griffith also volunteered hundreds of hours of his time serving for seven years as Chess club coach as well as faculty-facilitator of an after-school Fine-Arts club, since the school where he taught lacked any formal visual-arts program (so the club was a great opportunity to teach interested students basic drawing＆painting fundamentals in addition to more advanced techniques of perspective, proportion, composition, blending, and shading). Comic book nerds, Anime enthusiasts, and aspiring young artists are extremely inspiring and rewarding people to mentor, and they tend to be some of the best and most promising minds of their generation! 🎨

At the risk of being a bit esoteric, 🤷
I’ll share some of my favorite quotes here:
drawn from a wide variety of sources
and in no particular sequence…

“Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but `tis not she;
Truth and Beauty buried be.”
－William Shakespeare
The Phoenix and the Turtle, lines 62⇢64

“What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time.”
－Prospero in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Act 1, Scene 2, Lines 49⇢50

玄之又玄
眾妙之門
“Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.”
－Laozi 老子 (Tao Te Ching 道德經)

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
－Andrew Marvell

“To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.”
－Oscar Wilde (A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated, 1894)

“Acts of injustice done
Between the setting and the rising sun
In history lie like bones, each one.”
－W.H. Auden

“The first lesson of history is the good of evil”
－Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wyrd bið ful aræd.
“Fate is inexorable.”

…Com on wanre niht scri∂an sceadugenga
“from out of the wan night slides the shadow walker”
－Beowulf

Ac her forÞ berað; fugelas singað, gylleð græghama.
“For here starts war, carrion birds sing, and gray wolves howl.”
－The Fight at Finnsburh

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
－No Coward Soul Is Mine, by Emily Brontë

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
－T.S. Eliot’s poem: “The Journey of the Magi”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
－The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
－Walt Whitman