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My nomination a couple of weeks ago for the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching required letters of support from past and present students. When I read the two letters that appeared in my packet, along with one by the administrator who organized the packet, I began to sob. I had no idea I was so wonderful, and I went straight out and bought a new hat.
A week later I was given a folder bulging with student letters that weren’t used directly in the packet, and after reading how inspirational, how life-affirming, how equitable I was, I began to sob again, into my new hat. Please, I wanted to beg the students. Don’t. It breaks my heart to have been heard by you and remembered. Stop, really.
Please!
Don’t.
Stop.
Please don’t stop.
One of them had taken a fiction-writing class with me and signed up for a second. I liked him from the start but told him I generally discourage repeats on the basis of aesthetic inbreeding. He persisted. He has…spirit. I had hopes for a while he would use that spirit toward a career in the arts, but he’s chosen the law instead. Never mind. A couple of lawyers from the state of Illinois turned out pretty well.
I laughed when I read in his letter, “I find that nearly every time I write now, a little, three-inch Oronte Churm appears on my shoulder [and even] at two in the morning, Little Churm whispers to me, ‘Distill…distill…distill….’”
Well, Little Churm talks sense, and let’s hope that before he dissolves in a fizz of effervescence he reveals all the test answers to the LSAT.
Other kinds of teachers, such as military drill sergeants, are very good at staying with you. Armies, after all, have had thousands of years to refine their pedagogy. Once in college when I was nearly asleep in my bunk, my left testicle said in a wall-rattling, basso profundo voice, “ YOU!” I started awake but there was nothing more, and I suspected that in my hypnagogic state I’d heard a former drill sergeant turned super-ego. The voice couldn’t have been that of an English professor. It didn't expound.
Schoolteachers have a different sort of authority, which comes from serving as witness both to subject and to students’ study of it. The best teachers I ever had (some of whom made their livings other ways) modeled how to be open to the world and were generous enough to show interest in my efforts to be so.
Sometimes it feels as if each of us is sunk in our own crystalline well. We think we know each other through the glass landscape until some small event reveals how impossibly distant we are in proximity, how another’s singing was actually keening. Any occasion that allows for real contact is invaluable. I sat across from a poet once at dinner and felt over the course of a short, intermittent conversation her enormous intelligence and consciousness focus on me. It’s a gift that almost makes the hard breaks of mortality bearable.
What happens for me on a good day in the classroom is like that too, and if some ghost of the exchange lingers for a student, I’m honored. A final lesson though, Carl: The connotations of Little Churm's size are not quite under control. Think bigger, please.
