On Teachers

There is much that has been said and written about teachers and teaching. And although much of it is complete rubbish, at least from my never modest point of view, it is certainly reasonable to argue that, despite the essential nature of the need to continue training our upcoming generations of citizens, there are still significant flaws of a systemic kind in the institution of School, which will ensure that folks will continue to hold forth, for the worse and, on the odd occasion, for the better, about teachers and teaching.

            No matter what anyone says, though, there are two things that remain absolutely bedrock true in my experience of the world: 1) Teachers are amazing people; and the village that raised me was populated by such as these; and 2) I was never a very good student, by everybody’s standards.

When I was growing up in the burbs of the US east coast, our next-door neighbors were the T… family, first generation immigrants from Greece who spoke English poorly, but who had a work ethic and a desire to succeed second to none. I remember that my parents left for work every morning around 6:30 or 7:00 am, so getting myself ready for school was typically given over to my own Self-motivation, which is even nowadays a somewhat dicey affair. It was predictable, then, that somewhere around the age of 10-11 a morning came where my own S-m (motivation of the self-starting sort) was not au rendezvous, and I decided in a moment of youthful existential enthusiasm that on that day I would not be going to school, which was about a 15-20 minute walk from the house. So, following an apparent (and certainly at that time unbeknownst to me) telephonic colloquium and collaboration between my stepmother and our neighbor, who was clearly ratting me out on the telephone behind my back, believe it or not, Mrs. T, the Greek immigrant neighbor with the poor English, came over to our house, came in the kitchen door, and threatened, in her version of English, to paddle me if I did not get my S-m into gear and hie my hinter hence (literally translated = get my butt on the road) to school! And then, in the face of my still struggling and clearly underwhelmed Self-motivation, she proceeded to provide the external power source for this wanna-be self-affirming 10 year-old—she grabbed me by the ear and marched me the entire way to school, by the ear, even sitting me down in my classroom chair!

            Now some folks might have some reservations about this manner of motivating young people to get their schooling, but I am still thankful to this simple immigrant lady, to Mrs. T, because she valued education enough to make us both get uncomfortably involved in mine that morning. She did not take any guff off of a snot-nosed 10 year-old throwing a temper tantrum. For my modestly educated immigrant neighbor it was education first, last, and always… tantrums, if tantrums there must be, come after school.

Our other neighbor, from across the street, was Mrs. B…, my English teacher in the 6^th grade. I remember to this day how her classroom was laid out – there was a blackboard to the front and to the side of the classroom, the opposite side was a bank of windows, and the cloakroom was at the back of the room. (The classroom geography is significant to this memory!). My desk was right at the front of the room, next to the teacher’s desk, so she could “keep an eye on me” (apparently I was a sometimes distracted kid…). Anyway… Mrs. B… was at the side board showing us how to diagram prepositional phrases (Really…!), and I obviously was not paying any attention whatsoever. In fact, I was actually looking, with my head resting on my hand (you know that ‘bored kid’ posture), in exactly the other direction, at two things: Inside there were Debbie’s 6^th grade legs; and framing those juvenile legs were the bank of windows, which were drawing me toward the Outside, where the bells of Freedom were busy ringing for the rest of the world. At some point during my grammar-hour musings, Mrs. B…, finally perceiving that I was (as usual) paying more attention to Debbie’s legs and beyond than to otherwise undoubtedly fascinating prepositional phrases and sentence diagrams, actually threw the rather compact grammar book at the back of my head from across the room. What really sticks in my mind, though, is that her aim was right on the money—she absolutely nailed me with that book on the first shot, then sent me off to stand in the cloak-room!

            I spent more time in Mrs. B…’s cloak-room (the old-school equivalent to modern time-out) than in her English classroom. Yet I have grown up to torture my own university students with disobliging reflections about dangling participles and split infinitives in their academic writing, and I know that several of my former students of ancient Greek have never fully recovered from being forced to diagram their sentences on the white board in Greek, in order to learn that Meaning derives from functions of language, which are not at all magical, but grammatical.

Several years after graduating high school I was very surprised to discover that one of my high school teachers, whom I had had for only one class—and that was a Typing class to boot (--how much interaction does a student actually have with the Typing teacher, after all?!), absolutely “got” me. He had written in my class evaluation that, while I was bright enough on the whole, in classes that did not interest me I would only do the barest minimum of work to get by with a passing grade. Somehow, magically, this one-time teacher of mine had seen the ‘pattern’ of student-me—that I only did well in classes that interested me. Frankly, that pattern has not changed a whit in all these years.

            My high school Typing teacher correctly (and very perceptively) saw that my pre-Nietzschean Will was at work in the process of my education; because although most of the classes in the curriculum I had to take were compulsory, I still refused to engage my full efforts in subjects that had no interest for me, compulsory or not. As I reconstruct through my adult eyes this teacher’s vision of younger-me, it seems that he must have seen a perfectly regulated hot or cold student – ‘A’s and ‘C’s… nothing in between. Judging myself by what I remember of my efforts and interests, I am of course interpreting my high school ‘B’s as simply ‘C’s gone wrong.

My high school PE teachers, who were also our athletic coaches, and most of whom were ex-US marine corps, really saved my hash in high school. I absolutely know this. I was not a punk or delinquent, nor a bad kid, just an unsupervised and therefore undirected source of vital energy. And my high school PE teachers took the initiative to direct that energy into sports—both in school and after school. But they also instilled in us the sense of an old-timey military code of honor… that we were to conduct ourselves well, honorably, because we had become role models for the younger ones. Not only were we scholar-athletes, but we were in training to become America’s future defenders… we were the next generation of the brave and the free. My high school PE teachers did not leave me the leisure, materially or morally, to go off and diffuse all my energy into ‘trouble’, which, as I look back, was actually quite a likely possibility.

These teachers of my memory were simply people; they had problems and private lives, just like everyone else. But these teaching-people were in our neighborhood, they were our neighbors, they were the guardian angels of our village who lived in our village; and, although most of them were not intimate friends of my family and never would become so, all of them watched over all of us. All of them were involved, day-by-day, every day, in the job of training up America’s next generations in the way they should go.