A Life in School. What the Teacher Learned
Jane Tompkins
TEACHERS WHO TAUGHT ME
On the day before Thanksgiving vacation in my sophomore year of high school, our teacher, Mr. Bowler, didn’t ask us to do any geometry problems or to put our minds on school matters at all. He asked us to think about the meaning of Thanksgiving. No teacher had ever asked us to put aside our daily work before; that in itself was surprising. But more important, no teacher had ever asked us to think about something as if our doing so would make a difference. I felt we were being asked to put aside geometry because there was larger work to be done, and we were the ones to do it.
Mr. Bowler meant business, no doubt about that. He would never ask us to do a fake assignment – like write an essay on “What the American Flag Means to Me,” where it was understood you were supposed to gin up something on the spot and pretend you’d believed it all along. Besides, from the sound of his voice I knew when he asked us the question about Thanksgiving that he wanted to go deep, and to take us with him.
I knew this because from the first day of plane geometry when we sat in the classroom with our desks empty, it was clear something real was afoot. No books, no pieces of paper, nothing to be filled in or copied down. The clean slate of our desks reflected the blankness of the blackboard and the ready, open condition of our minds. We were being asked simply to think – a request that had never been made of us till then, in such an absolute, unmistakable form.
We sat there, and, step by step, day after day, in response to Mr. Bowler’s questions, we derived the proofs of plane geometry. We ourselves, starting with nothing, or with only the one postulate Mr. Bowler would write on the board, created the foundations of the subject matter we were there to study. No printed page clamped its narrow wisdom on our brains. We worked in the pure ether where only logic reigned, and by its strenuous process we were purified and reinvigorated. Much later in life, when I read the first line of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,” I felt I knew exactly what she meant.
Mr. Bowler had a deep voice, though he was not a large-bodied man, and when he spoke its timbre enriched and magnified his thought. His demeanor gave to the work we did a weight that schoolwork had not had before. He took us seriously, and he took plane geometry seriously, and consequently we felt that something hung on our deliberations. The derivation of those proofs, with no external aids or props, became one with my concept of noble action. For the work was elevating. As our minds stretched and played in response to his questions, Mr. Bowler showed us not only that we could do geometry, he showed us our mental strength. When someone answered a question in a way that pushed everything forward a giant step, we all admired the feat, for somehow, in that class, our thinking was a joint effort, and the virtuosity of one reflected the virtuosity of all.
From time to time, as on that Thanksgiving, Mr. Bowler would depart from our usual format and talk to us about something he called “knowledge and understanding.” When he said the words, in his deep-timbred voice, I knew that that was what I wanted and that there were untold reaches of mind, beyond plane geometry or the meaning of Thanksgiving, that knowledge and understanding would open to me.
When I ask myself what made Mr. Bowler such a good teacher, I remember something he told us one day. He told us that he had been trained to teach history, but that after he came to Ridgewood High they needed someone to teach geometry, so he had. Not being gifted in math, he’d had to work hard to understand it, so it was easier for him to explain it to others than if he’d understood it instantly himself. His lack of natural talent for the subject was our good fortune. But there was much more to Mr. Bowler’s class that made it distinctive. The closest I can come is to say it was something in the air – or something not in the air. Mr. Bowler’s classroom always felt fresh, as if the windows had been open a long time. There was no staleness or tension, no emotion or expectation emanating from him to sully the atmosphere. We walked in with no balance sheet appended to our names; and just as we produced the proof of the day out of nothing, so we ourselves came into being as if for the first time. This feeling of beginning afresh every day was immensely liberating; it was connected to our sense of creating something.
Now that I know what I know about the emotional fallout of teaching, how hard it is to keep one’s spirits up over the long haul, how virtually impossible it is not to let one’s feelings affect the conduct of a class, I am tempted to surmise that Mr. Bowler kept his inner life very well in order. When a teacher inhabits a given classroom all day long, day after day and year after year, a considerable portion of his or her personality seeps into the walls, becomes part of the furniture, and flickers in the light. It was cool and fresh in Mr. Bowler’s room at ten o’clock in the morning, and the air was mountain clear.
The surprise I felt in Mr. Bowler’s course at the pure joy of thinking woke me again when my family moved from the Jersey suburbs to the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I went for my senior year to Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, where I was put in a class called Special English.
The move was no joke. Shorn of friends and familiar surroundings, up for evaluation again by everybody – classmates, teachers, neighbors – I had to find my way alone with nothing to go on but hope. The high school was stratified socially in a way that was new to me. On the bottom were the kids in the vocational-technical track who took typing and shop and wore their hair differently from the rest. Then there were the kids with nothing in particular to distinguish them – not looks, or brains, or personality, or ability at sports – who occupied a sort of gray limbo. Then came the popular kids and the school leaders, the football players, cheerleaders, presidents of the major student organizations, and the people who hung around them – well-dressed, attractive, outgoing kids who dated and set the social tone. They were at the top. Finally, a little off to one side, there was the intelligentsia, the people who ran the newspaper, edited the yearbook, got all As, and took Special English. In my other high school, there had been no such group; being a “brain” had meant being isolated and existing on the fringe. But here there was a niche for people like me. It was a godsend.
My mother had made sure when we first visited the school that I would be put in Special English, so I found myself in a class where all the students were not only smart in the conventional way but also cared about learning and wanted knowledge as much as I did. This was a piece of luck I couldn’t have hoped for. But there was more. There was the teacher.
It was Margaret Hay, the fact of her, as well as what she did, that made such a difference. The way her fine-boned features cut the air, as if she were on the prow of a ship moving fearlessly into the future. The way her voice, clear and piercing, resonated in our classroom, calling to whatever in us was high and aspiring. The way her words jolted us morally awake, demanding that we rise to the occasion. I had never seen this combination of powerful intellect, moral idealism, and strength of will in a person before. I wanted to win her approval, to come up to her standard, in every way.
For Mrs. Hay we did three hundred pages of outside reading a week, beyond what we did for class. She ordered the New York Times for us every day and got us into the habit of reading it. She gave us as the topic of our major paper “Freedom and Responsibility,” an assignment whose dimensions I have still not gotten over, anymore than I’ve gotten over my envy of Carolyn Goldberg, who wrote the perfect opening sentence: “Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.”
In 1956–57 Mrs. Hay had us put our desks in a circle so we could see each other (this never happened again throughout my formal schooling). Maybe because of the circle, maybe because of the energy and excitement of our discussions, maybe for other reasons, I remember the names and faces of most of the students in that class, the content of individual class discussions – should Antigone have been allowed to bury Polynices even though it was against the law? – and exactly how it felt to be there: excited, inspired, important.
When Mrs. Hay fired questions at us in her sharp, lovely voice, we had no choice but to answer. She aroused our moral outrage, dared us to think harder, challenged our comfortable assumptions. In her class we felt our strength individually and as a group because she pulled it out of us. We were like athletes whose feats were mental instead of physical, proud of our ourselves and of each other. A good part of the exhilaration came from our being a collection of the fat and the skinny, the too short and the too tall, the people with thick glasses and thin skins gathered at last in a place where not having the right clothes or the right body didn’t matter. It was what you said in discussion that counted, and beyond that, there was the shared sense that if you were in Special English you were special and deserved to be there whether you said anything or not.
I’ve had many teachers since whose example attracted and inspired me, but none so influential as Mrs. Hay. Small, thin, wiry, and self-contained – her hair was white, but she seemed young – Mrs. Hay had a commanding presence and a decisive manner. She knew her mind and would tell you what she thought frankly and judiciously if you asked her outright, and never with any sense that you had to agree. But once she had delivered an opinion, which was very seldom, we were loath to differ with her, for we respected her so much. On the one occasion when she offered me advice, I took it and went to Bryn Mawr College instead of Bennington. I’ve sometimes wondered what my life would have been like if I’d followed the artistic side of my nature rather than the intellectual, but it never occurred to me until this moment that Mrs. Hay might not have been right.
I had many other teachers whose example attracted and inspired me, or for whom I was simply grateful. Kind, gentle Mr. Reinhard in sixth grade, who was understanding when I wet my pants while giving a book report. Hazel Torrens, who taught world history in junior high. She wore her hair in an upsweep, but fine wisps were always escaping; everything about her was strong and soft. When she talked, we were gripped by her slightly throaty voice and deadpan delivery. In her class we staged a mock trial of Napoleon for treason against the French state.
My ninth-grade homeroom teacher, Miss Edmundson, who taught English and Spanish, and whose big nipples you could see in outline through the thin material of her dress, was good-natured and down-to-earth. She told us a story about making a fool of herself the first time she went to Mexico – she asked her landlord for sopa, meaning “soap.” When he protested and said he didn’t have any at that hour, and she insisted, it finally came out that in Spanish sopa means “soup.”
In college, Angelina Lograsso and Arthur Colby Sprague. In graduate school John Pope, Marie Borroff, Talbot Donaldson, Tom Greene, Richard Sewall, and Tilly Shaw. It wasn’t what they taught or even how they taught it, in a technical sense, that mattered. It was all the intangibles: tones of voice, figures of speech, emotional attitudes, physical stances and gestures. I see Signorina Lograsso seated at the desk in her tiny office where we held a tutorial in my senior year. She fumbles with a button on her navy blue rayon dress and smiles with pleasure at a thought she’s had about Dante. Her love bubbled up and spilled over.
Every time she said the name “Dante” in a course she taught on La Divina Commedia I felt the full force of her lifetime of devotion to the poet’s work.
The teachers who made the most difference to me were the ones who loved their subjects and didn’t hide it. Dr. Sprague, reenacting scenes from Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, taking now this part, now that, altering his voice (“Moor, she was chaste, she loved thee, cruel Moor”), showed me that you could love something with your body and your heart as well as your mind. When he did the scene from The Changeling, getting the timing just right as he switched from Beatrice-Joanna to De Flores – “You are the deed’s creature” – I shivered and wanted to hear it again. This kind of teaching inspired me because it reconfirmed my sense that literature really was about life, and it gave me permission to express my unbounded enthusiasm.
OTHER PEOPLE
Shortly after we moved, some neighborhood kids showed up on my doorstep, curious and eager to see what the new kid was like. When I opened the door I knew I was appearing for the first time on the stage of a new life. One of the kids wore the white canvas belt and diagonal shoulder strap of a safety patrol, dread staircase troll of my childhood. Nervous and at a loss, seeing it, I burst out “Those damn safety patrols!”
That was my social debut – in front of Walter Meyers, Jack Lewis, Bobby Jones, and Patsy Jones. Instead of showing how much I wanted to be liked by the kids in my new neighborhood, I said something completely inappropriate, a comment made up partly of old rage, and partly of a desire to show how worldly I was and how much on the side of those who hated authority.
By the time my parents moved from Manhattan to the suburbs, the days of my childhood terror in school were essentially over. Over in the most obvious ways, at any rate. After leaving P. S. 98, I no longer lived in terror of being publicly humiliated by teachers. The shape of fear had shifted: it was social ostracism that frightened me. Years later, my mother told me that while I was at P. S. 98 I’d been given a social maturity test, and the results showed that at age eight I had the social maturity of a twenty-four-year-old. So much for tests. The truth was, I was socially backward. All the energy I’d spent getting in good with teachers had left me with practically no sense of what it took to be liked by the other children. For a long time, I didn’t even know they were important; I experienced them as a kind of static, getting in the way of my relation to whoever happened to be in authority. Not until fifth grade did it dawn on me that, as far as my relations with my fellow students were concerned, being a good girl might not be such a good thing. And then I yearned to be caught doing something naughty. Nothing too bad (I had to stay in the good graces of the teacher, after all), but something risque enough to let the others know I was a regular kid.
One day it happened. This was before we’d moved. I was in the library at P. S. 98, sitting at a round table, talking and giggling with some other students (they were good students, like me, and by then I could giggle in school), when someone in authority, not our teacher, reprimanded us for making noise and sent us to the principal’s office. I was exhilarated. For the first time in my life I was being punished as if I was one of the rest. It was too good to be true. I half floated, half bounced down the hall on the balls of my feet. I knew I had nothing to fear because we were the good kids, the ones who got 100s on our tests. As soon as it was known who we were, everything would be cleared up. And it was. We got a sober but brief talking to from the principal (a distant figure named Mr. Rothman), and all was forgiven. But I hoped not forgotten. I wanted everyone to remember that Jane Parry had been sent to the principal’s office for talking.
Being caught doing something bad was comparatively easy; it was possible to create a situation that would earn a slight reproof. The part of the equation I couldn’t figure out had to do with being popular. By the time I got to junior high school I wanted to be like Penny Daly and Peg McGlashan, the popular girls, always at the center of a group who imitated them and laughed at everything they said. Penny was small and delicate, Peg large-boned and horsey, but they both had an unnameable quality that made me jealous. Their eyes and smiles flashed out from the circle of girls, as if to signal that their power was in full operation, but whenever I came close to see if I could get some, their attention lit on me only momentarily, then flitted away as if my homage was valueless to them.
The trouble was, I didn’t really like travelling in a pack, circling around the popular person, waiting to see if her popularity would rub off on me. I didn’t like hanging around the jukebox in Kavner’s drugstore listening to songs (“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”), talking about boys I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. It was boring and effortful, and I found myself wanting to go home and practice the piano – which normally I regarded as a burden.
I wasn’t equipped for this – whatever it was. I could understand studying, reading, or playing the piano, playing basketball or hockey or some indoor game, but the vague fluttering around giggles and secrets – with your clothes, meanwhile, being perfect – I didn’t get.
Besides, I resented the idea that getting along socially might mean work. Where people were concerned, I always thought things should come naturally. Friendships were for after school, when you could play and do what you wanted; they fell into the category of the spontaneous and unforced. What was the point of being around people if you had to strategize and calculate all the time, pretending things, holding back?
Finally I met some kids from across town who liked to play games and run around outside and get dirty. Indoors, we played duets on the piano, and card games, and games we made up. We joked and laughed a lot – and it didn’t matter if your crinolines weren’t the stiffest or if your hair had lost its set. It was a relief to be with girls I liked and had something in common with. My feet were on the ground when I was with them, and I felt normal and happy, as if things might be going to be all right.
In another way, though, I didn’t value this happiness. These girls – Lizzie King, Holly Pancoast, Corinne Szeglin – were not the most popular girls, the prettiest, the most in demand for dates, or the best dressed.
It was second-class citizenship to be their friend. They were fun, and they liked me, and I liked them. I forgot myself when I was with them. But I thought that in settling for them I had settled for less.
Something about my relationship to these girls, and to other people my age when I was growing up, foreshadowed the fact that I would be a teacher. Perhaps it was simply a matter of where my attention was focussed. As an only child I was always looking up, in a literal sense. Everyone I knew – that is, any parents – existed far above me; they were in control, and I modulated my behavior in relation to them. The give and take of equals, the feeling of being side by side, was something I enjoyed but counted less important than making an appearance on the stage for grown-ups. What they thought was what really mattered. Unconsciously I cast my lot with them.
So in school, naturally, teachers were the prime object of my attention. That was where the power lay, so you had to keep up with what they were doing. Besides, they had knowledge – something I coveted – though like their power they kept it mainly to themselves. Perhaps it was simply because I had focussed on them for so long that I learned to want to be like teachers. To be the one everybody looked at and had to obey, to be standing alone, up in front, performing while other people paid attention was the only thing I knew to aim for. When I attained this status, it took me a long time to realize its emptiness – unless you were already connected to yourself and to your audience by something we never learned about in school.
Still, it was here, in my concentration on teachers, that the love of school took root.
to be continued