Saturday, June 14, 2014

Teachers made a difference to me

Before I get into this at all, I will just note that 1) currently everything about teachers and teacher unions is so politicized and I am attempting to keep things positive and 2) comments are moderated so insulting comments, particularly about teacher unions or the alleged laziness of teachers, will not be published.  I've actually been on all sides of this issue, having been a very good student in a good public school, actually having been a mediocre teacher myself in a failing public school and currently having children in public school and dealing with the teachers going on strike (and making what I consider a major tactical blunder).  At any rate, I am using this post to remind myself how lucky I was to go to a good public school during a period of minimal and indeed perhaps no labor tensions.  While "the pie" had shrunk a bit from what the Boomers experienced (particularly when it came time for student grants and scholarships), it was a much more generous time in the United States.  My children face an era of constriction, and it will probably get worse from here on out.  It would be nice if people could get over their resentment of what the unions are asking for and recall what they had available to them when they were children.  The world has changed and gotten much harsher.  That said there are still good public schools and many caring teachers, but the worst public schools do seem a lot worse now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s...

I really did soak up knowledge like a sponge in those days and was equally interested in the sciences, particularly physics, as I was in the humanities.  One of my regrets is that, while I have kept up my skills in math (though not advanced mathematics), my natural feel for understanding physics has atrophied.  I'll have to brush up a lot when my children enter high school.

I was fortunate enough to be in the arts programs (no cuts in those days, although the parents did have to do a fair bit of fund raising).  I was in marching band and the pep band for basketball games (I tolerated both but it wasn't really my thing) and the concert band, which I enjoyed quite a bit.  I was occasionally added to the string orchestra, though this happened more in middle school than high school, if I am recalling correctly.  I was supposed to be in the pit band for a musical, but it was cancelled (perhaps the drama teacher had a nervous breakdown, I can't recall).  And I was in a jazz band for two years, even learning saxophone so I could play on more charts.  I was not a stand-out there (and certainly not in college where I learned how average I was!), but I had a good time.  I actually found a tape of one of our concerts.  Sadly, I don't think we ever recorded "The Stripper," which was one of our greatest hits (just imagine how much trouble the band teacher would have gotten in today!) but there is a decent version of Herbie Hancock's Chameleon.  In some ways, in addition to a greater appreciation for the arts, the best lesson was just mixing it up with other kids who weren't in the honors classes, for example.  (Although there was a very high correlation between honors students and the students in band -- probably because we had parents that pushed us to excel.)

While I would have to dig out the high school yearbooks (yes, I have them in a box somewhere) because I can't remember my English teachers' names, I do recall that I came to a great appreciation of literature through them.  Curiously enough, I skipped over 10th grade honors English, which focused on American lit. (and my next post will talk about books that I should have read had I been in that course) and went into the 11th grade honors English.  This was literature from Great Britain (and probably at least a bit from Ireland, since I'm sure we read Yeats).  A lot of it was poetry of course.  Our Shakespeare play for 11th grade was Midsummer's Night's Dream, and we actually acted out in class over a week or so.  (Romeo and Juliet was the 10th grade text.  I'm blanking on what was done in 12th grade, probably Hamlet, though we may also have read Macbeth.*)  I don't remember all the books we read, though I do remember Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd and Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  We might have tackled Pride and Prejudice or a similar Austen book.  I'm thinking that we didn't read any Bronte, though Wuthering Heights might have been an optional book on the reading list.  The 11th and 12th grade Honors teachers always made a point of taking the class to a Shakespeare production in the neighboring "big city" of Kalamazoo.  Sadly, my memory does fail me as to which it was, but almost certainly one of the comedies.  I do remember that I got a bit lost driving there (they didn't bus high school kids in those days!), and we entered in the middle of the first act.  Maybe this will pop up in a journal entry I wrote decades ago.  But the point was they had a bunch of motivated students and were able to inspire them to go even further.  (There was another class trip to see Julius Caesar in 1990 (with Brian Bedford!) but that was through University of Michigan.  While that was a cool trip, the early exposure in high school was more formative.  Still, university trips can be rewarding.  At UToronto, Prof. Linda Hutcheon organized a trip to the opera Carmen for us.)

It's not like I hadn't been exposed to literature through my parents or even on my own (by this point I was working at the library and had first pick over all the donations in the library book sale).  Still, one of the most rewarding classes I took in high school (in addition to world history) was taking the 12th grade English honors class (in 11th grade**).  This was world literature, though in practice I think it was European literature, though it is possible we read a few stories by Borges.  We read short stories by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and perhaps Kafka (I had been reading Kafka already).  I definitely remember reading Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, as I went into a funk for a while, thinking about how the truly great are brought down while the mediocre triumph.  (While this may indeed have been Turgenev's view, I now have a more jaded or at least nuanced view of those who consider themselves to be so special that they deserve special treatment.)  I read Crime and Punishment around this time, but I don't think for class.

I do wish I could recall more (and it is just possible that I hung onto these notebooks, in which case I'll come back around and fill in more details).  We may have read a short story or two by Flaubert, but we did not read Madame Bovary, since I came to that for the first time last year.  It certainly broadened my horizons.  What I remember best of all is during exam week, the teacher said that she was required to pass out final exams, but she was not required to mark them.  She passed out the exams, and then the class left them there, and we all went to an empty room (the band practice room, incidentally) and did a staged reading of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  How cool was that! That is the kind of teacher who inspires a life-long love of learning.  And I can only hope that most of you out there will (or did) have such a teacher.

* I'm definitely over-thinking this. I know I skipped R & J.  I know that we read Midsummer's Night's Dream, though maybe we actually did two Shakespeare plays a year in 11th and 12th grade honors (and we were reading this one because it was also the play the class was going to see?)  Now I am wondering if we read Macbeth in 11th grade and Hamlet (and King Lear?) in 12th grade honors?  Or Macbeth/Hamlet in 11th grade and Othello/Lear in 12th grade?  It all gets mixed up with the fact that I took a course on Shakespeare at U-Michigan (not with Ralph Williams though) where we covered essentially all the tragedies and a handful of comedies and history plays.  Anyway, I am over-thinking this, as it doesn't change the underlying point.

** I solved the problem of what to do as a senior (facing the problem of running out of classes) by jumping to university a year early.  While I had a pretty good run in high school, I really did come into my own in college, where I was the editor of a literary magazine, I joined a writers' group, I played a bit of indoor soccer with a team from my dorm, I helped build a homecoming float, I was in a play and even knew a couple of musicians in a band.  Just everything that one imagines that the "popular" kids are doing.  I pretty much grabbed every opportunity I could and have only a few regrets from those years, academically, personally or romantically.  I'll deal with the academic regret in the next post. 

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