A Life in School. What the Teacher Learned (excerpts)

We start publishing extracts from Jane Tompkins’ book A Life in School.
Jane Tompkins is one of leading literary scholars, and in her book she looks back on her own life in the classroom, and discovers how much of what she learned there needs to be unlearned. Jane Tompkins’ memoir shows how her education shaped her in the mold of a high achiever who could read five languages but had little knowledge of herself. As she slowly awakens to the needs of her body, heart, and spirit, she discards the conventions of classroom teaching and learns what her students’ lives are like. A painful and exhilarating story of spiritual awakening, Tompkins’ book critiques American educational system while also paying tribute to it.

Jane Tompkins

PREFACE

At the age of forty-nine, having spent most of my conscious years inside the walls of academic institutions, I realized I no longer had much use for the things I’d learned in school. By this I don’t mean that what I had learned was worthless, but that the subjects I had studied and taught, and the way I had studied and taught them, were secondary to the real concerns of my life.
This realization followed upon a period of internal change, still going on, in which I gradually became aware that life was not as I had always taken it to be but something very different. How different was only just beginning to dawn. It became clear to me that I was not in my life to make a career for myself but to give something, though what, specifically, I didn’t yet know. I could tell that school was no longer the place for me. And even while I continued to draw a salary and teach classes in the university, I had, in some sense, graduated and was living in another world.
I look back on my life in school with an eye to understanding at least some of it: recording what it was like, for me, to be a teacher and a student. Though much of what I have to say is painful, my intent is not to repudiate that life but to examine it in a way that may be useful, especially to those who work within the present educational system. Because I am a product of that system, it would be ungrateful and even dishonest for me to turn my back on it. It made me what I am. Still, much of what I have to say is critical, for I am still smarting from wounds sustained long ago.
My chief concern is that our educational system does not focus on the inner lives of students or help them to acquire the self-understanding that is the basis for a satisfying life. Nor, by and large, does it provide the safe and nurturing environment that people need in order to grow. My teachers have not been of the usual kind – a dog, a course of massages, Alzheimer’s patients, homeless people, Buddhist meditation, a nondenominational, charismatic African-American church. The experiences that have meant the most to me have taken forms that are antithetical to what we mean when we refer to learning in an academic sense. Overcoming my resistance to these nonintellectual modes of knowing has been the work of my life in recent years. What was lacking in me – respect for the whole human organism, emotions, body, and spirit, as well as mind – is what is lacking in American education as well.
It may seem strange that there are so few references here to books on education theory, so little attempt to set my experience against the background of classroom practice as it’s described in the literature. For a long time I was at a loss to explain this myself. All I knew was, I had no desire to pick up a book on teaching – in fact, I had a positive aversion to doing so – and I couldn’t even muster the energy to feel guilty about it. Now I realize that this refusal to read about my subject was my subject. It came from a need to finally trust myself. It was to my own experience that I needed to turn for enlightenment. For it was the failure of my education to turn my attention to that experience, so that I might know myself and thus be able to rely on myself; it was this failure, which was ultimately my own, that I needed to come to terms with and, in writing this book, to compensate for.
In some areas of life, perhaps, it is possible to learn what one needs to know from reading about what other people have done. Perhaps teaching is one of them. But for me, very few books I have read on the subject approached it in a way that spoke to my condition. Indeed, there are only four: Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Parker Palmer’s To Know as We Are Known, Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Teacher, and Maria Montessori’s The Absorbent Mind. All share a vision of life that transcends the concerns of any particular educational system and shapes the author’s conception of what an education is. Freire’s book strikes a blow for political justice; Palmer’s holds up an image of true community; Ashton-Warner’s is dedicated to free self-expression; and Montessori’s to the growth of whole human beings. What they have in common is a commitment to the sacredness of life, and a fearlessness to speak on its behalf. What I take from them is courage to speak the truth about my experience and the hope that what I record here will render the experience of others more alive.
What I would like to see emerge in this country is a more holistic way of conceiving education – by which I mean a way of teaching and learning that is not just task-oriented but always looking over its shoulder at everything that is going on around. Such a method would never fail to take into account that students and teachers have bodies that are mortal, hearts that can be broken, spirits that need to be fed. It would be interested in experience as much as in book knowledge, and its responsibility would be the growth of whole human beings, in harmony with the planet and with one another.
The Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer published an article a few years back reporting on a solution to the drug problem. An educator named Dr. George Busiel of Nichols Middle School in Evanston, Illinois, had started a program for children called Operation Snowflake. He said: “I think what happens to a lot of kids is that they never really learn how to handle their stress, their anger. In addition to drug education, that is what we are trying to do, to give them some skills to handle the things that are coming up in their lives.”
“To give them some skills to handle the things that are coming up in their lives” is as helpful a statement as I can imagine of the purpose of an education. It is both practical and revolutionary: practical in that instead of ignoring the strong emotions that create problems for the student, it admits them and offers help; revolutionary in that school, more often than not, has been the place that causes stress and anger in people’s lives, instead of relieving them. A few days ago the same newspaper reported that two teenage girls in Gary, North Carolina, had committed suicide, leaving a note that apologized for bad grades and disobedience. Would an education designed to help students understand their inner turmoil have prevented this catastrophe?
I’m speaking here of an attitude toward learning that accepts the importance of the inner life. An approach to teaching that acknowledges the humanness of both teachers and students. I remember, when I try to recall, hardly any instances in which my teachers told us something about their own lives. The only instance that stands out was in third grade, when Mrs. Higgins, my favorite teacher, told us, for reasons I shall never know, that that morning her son, John, had brought her a glass of orange juice while she was in the shower. It had something to do with her having a cold. The feeling that accompanied this tiny anecdote was abundantly clear: proud pleasure. Mrs. Higgins was boasting and enjoying her boast, and I enjoyed it almost as much as she did. I saw the steamy bathroom, felt the heat and moisture in the air, saw the orange of the glass of orange juice held out toward the shower stall by the hand of the mysterious John (in my mind a tall youth with brown hair). And behind the clouded glass door was the naked body of Mrs. Higgins, enjoying itself.
What I remember thinking at the time had nothing to do with Freudian relationships. Rather, I was amazed and pleased to learn that Mrs. Higgins had a family life just as I did. I pictured her bathroom being very much like my own, her apartment another version of ours.
And her relationship to John – that was what was so interesting. I knew she had told us this little story to show us that her son cared for her, that she was loved within the bosom of her family, that she, Mrs. Higgins, despite her cold, was the luckiest person in the whole world.
I dwell on this incident because it symbolizes something that was missing from education as I knew it: the reality of private life. Taking showers, having a naked body, drinking orange juice, being a member of a family, needing to know that you are loved, needing to tell about it. It was the sense of life itself that was missing, of sensory and emotional experience not divided up into “subjects” – hygiene, psychology, nutrition, family relations – but embedded in a narrative, part of a lived history, a history I could relate to my history and the histories of the people around me, how we felt, what we really thought about, what it was like for us to be alive and going through the world.
The story about the son and the shower and the orange juice let me know that Mrs. Higgins was a human being like me, and at the same time that it made me envious (how loved she was!), it gave me hope. What the hope was founded on I can’t quite say – a feeling of commonality, perhaps, a knowledge that Mrs. Higgins had needs and that her needs and mine might not be all that different.
School as I knew it taught social studies for the making of good citizens; it taught arithmetic so that we could learn how to make change, hold jobs involving computation, and pay taxes. It taught reading, writing, and spelling. But it never turned our gaze toward ourselves or each other. It never suggested that we might reach out to one another. Death was never mentioned. There was a song that accompanied a skipping game we learned in kindergarten:
How do you do, my partner
How do you do today?
We will dance in a circle.
I will show you the way.
This song brought me and my classmates face to face; it talked about how we were going to treat each other, and about how we really were. But it’s a memory that has no equivalent in all my years of school.
A holistic approach to education would recognize that a person must learn how to be with other people, how to love, how to take criticism, how to grieve, how to have fun, as well as how to add and subtract, multiply and divide. It would not leave out of account that people are begotten, born, and die. It would address the need for purpose and for connectedness to ourselves and one another; it would not leave us alone to wander the world armed with plenty of knowledge but lacking the skills to handle the things that are coming up in our lives.
This is the story of how I came to view school in a radically different way. I did not set out to change my views; experience changed them for me. Some alterations in the way I taught led to greater self-consciousness about what I was doing in the classroom. This prompted me to look back into my own past as a student, to relive the school days of my childhood. As I experimented more boldly in my teaching, and delved further into the past, my inner life began to be transformed. Remembering the past was not, as I had originally thought, just an attempt to see how I had been molded as a teacher by the teachers who had molded me; it was an exploratory mission into the depths of my formation as a person, and it put me in touch for the first time with the founding experiences of my life. It helped me to discover what kind of person I had become as a result of those early school experiences, and even more, who I had been before they worked their will on me.
As memories of those old days of tribulation came back to me piecemeal, and in flashes, they put me through pains I had long forgotten. I felt and saw myself again, a child terrified that the teacher wouldn’t call on her when she had to go to the Girls Room, obsessed with not making mistakes, full of the physical symptoms of distress – stomachaches, headaches, bedwetting – hating school, and not understanding why I should have to go there.
Only slowly, as the memories have ripened, have I begun to see their meanings, often so simple that I find it hard to admit their truth: such as that my school was not a healthy place for children; such as that school, although it taught me to succeed in its own terms, also stunted and misshaped me for life. The memories revealed that I had always believed school was a good place, and for a long time while writing this memoir I clung to that belief. After all, as a college professor, the fundamental Tightness of school was the ground on which I’d based my existence. School was my life; it was the world. It simply never occurred to me that it might not be good at bottom.
But finally it did occur to me. The early memories woke me up to who I was – a terrified performer – and to what school had been about – obeying rules. And I gained a new perspective on the fear I felt later on as an adult experimenting in my own classroom.
I realized that the meaning of the experiments would be much clearer if set against the background of my formation as a professional literary scholar. So the middle part of the book tells how I became a professor; working hard in college and harder in graduate school – a tale of success shadowed by ignorance. By the time I’d begun to teach, I had read Dante in the original, and Virgil and Ariosto and Tasso. I knew Old English and Middle English, could read German and French, and had studied the classics of English and American literature. But my first published article, on Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a story about a man whose ignorance of himself catches up with him in the end, set off an alarm. I knew this story had something important to say to me, but what? what? I couldn’t tell. I was too busy, too worried about my career, and too unsure of myself to look deeply into this problem. I forged ahead. It was only much later – after many years of trying to be a good teacher and to climb the professional ladder – that I began to wake up to the rest of my life.
The last part of the book charts my struggle to make teaching a less fearful activity, the university a less intimidating place, and myself a less career-driven person. It begins with discontent with my teaching practice and an attempt to do something about it, moves to accounts of more radical experimentation during which I lost the investment I had once had in making sure students knew what I knew and what I thought, and eventually passes into existential territory where all the moorings come loose. Finally, through trying to realize my dreams of how a classroom might be, I discovered that school was not some benign and more or less permanent feature of the way life is organized but the enemy of what I wanted to learn and teach.
My experiments in teaching did not turn out to exist solely for the reasons I had given for them. I thought it was for my students’ benefit that I was conducting these trials by liberation, for I saw how straitjacketed they were by the need to please and to perform for people in authority. But it wasn’t only for them that I took these risks. By throwing out the window all the usual standards and structures, I was also trying to free myself from the authoritarian training that had fettered me, rebelling at all that had been done to me in the way of mind-numbing and spirit-breaking discipline. I needed to let go of the conventions that normally bind classroom behavior until I could get back to a place where there were no standard forms any longer, a time and space before school began.
In the end, my classroom experiments and the memories of P.S. 98 led me to a glimpse of the person I had been before I went to school. The search led to the parts of my self that school had sidelined or suppressed: emotion, imagination, spirituality, respect for the body’s needs. I had loved the life of intellectual striving, of scholarly inquiry, challenge, and debate, but I had learned, as Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon, a play I read for English class my senior year of high school, that to be guided by reason alone is sailing without ballast. I wanted to become whole. Yet more important even than the discovery of any particular part of my psyche was the recognition that there is no final source of knowledge or authority outside the self.
School, by definition, conditions us to believe that there are others who know better than we do; it encourages and often forces us to give up our own judgment in favor of the judgment of those in authority. School, by its existence, militates against the very thing that education is for – the development of the individual. This paradox is at its heart. And so, sooner or later, everyone has to leave school, if not literally, then in a spiritual sense. “There is no way set up for us,” the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said. “Moment after moment we have to find our own way. Some idea of perfection, or some perfect way which is set up by someone else, is not the true way for us.” One must decide to let experience speak.

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

My first days in the classroom at Connecticut College, I couldn’t believe my luck. There I was in front of the class, holding forth, gesticulating, writing on the blackboard, walking around, sometimes sitting on a desk, and they, the students in their rows before me, were listening! It gave me a rush of power I could feel in the veins of my arms, a flash of exhilaration. So this was what it was all about! At the same time, I was so anxious about doing it right that I couldn’t make the fifty-minute drive from Middletown to New London without having to go to the bathroom. It was all country roads with no place to stop, so there would be an excruciating ten minutes of bouncing up and down in my car at the end, the climax being a dash from the parking lot to the ladies room in the English department building. My nervousness was partly innate, and partly the result of my sense of being onstage when I was teaching. I was “appearing” twice a day, three days a week, for fourteen weeks. Practically all the lines were mine and – the hardest part – I had to write them all myself. Who wouldn’t be nervous?
My toughest course as a beginning teacher was a survey of English literature from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens. I’d never taken a survey course and had no notion of how to teach one. My training in close reading was some help, but in a survey course you couldn’t remain at that level of detail and expect students to stay with you. I needed to know history; I needed biographical information on the authors; I needed overarching ideas to pull the material together – everything that had been forbidden at Yale. The bottom line was I didn’t have enough to say. I was always afraid I’d run out of material before the hour was up and have to stand there facing the students, my mouth opening and closing but emitting no sound.
I developed a habit of holding back on my important points, stretching out the lesser ideas and making them last until I could see I’d have enough material to get me through to the end of the period. Sometimes the main points would get lost or squeezed into the last few minutes when the students were already collecting their things, anxious about being late for the next class and no longer paying attention.
About a third of the way through the course, I figured out how to provide an overview of several periods that had an idea behind it – my idea – and I worked hard to make the presentation cogent and forceful. After class, a smart student with an edge in her voice came up and said that she and her friends would like to hear more lectures like that, with the clear implication that there had been too few. I cringed. I wanted to give more lectures like that, but my lack of experience and preparation made it impossible, at least on a regular basis.
This was one of the few painful moments I remember from my first two years of teaching. Challenged by newness and the desire to succeed, I was charged with hope, energy, and excitement. I don’t know what I was like as a teacher, and I don’t know what happened in my classes – the intensity of being in the spotlight produced a kind of amnesia – but the feeling was like being a horse with the bit in its teeth. I ran and ran, leaping ditches and fences, getting mud splashed, stumbling occasionally, but always regaining my stride, plunging ahead, unconscious of everything except the perilousness of the task and my own expenditure of effort.
I must have been learning something. By the end of the second year, my students sat in a circle. A friend who had her office next to a room where I held one of my classes said she heard the sound of laughter through the wall. The room was sun filled; I was teaching poetry, drama, and fiction to freshmen. An innocent myself, I had put together a sequence of readings called Poems of Seduction that I thought quite daring. On some days at least, the class was lively and eventful, owing largely to the participation of three students.
Bobbi Stewart used to come to class in riding boots; when I ran into her in Philadelphia a few years later, she was going to vet school. She had short curly hair, a dusting of freckles across her nose, and a sweet laconic frankness; in discussions I could count on her to cut to the chase. Diana Diamond had intense brown eyes and long curly blonde hair. In a low, vibrant voice that compelled you to listen, she made complex, sensitive remarks whose end I could never predict from their beginning. I felt honored when she decided to speak. She told me once that her father was a professor, and for years afterward whenever I heard of an academician named Diamond I wondered if it was her father. The liveliest person in the class was a girl named Lynn Sher, whose bouncy ponytail, strong chin, and snapping bright eyes I was always glad to see. Lynn’s enthusiasm and intelligence carried the course day after day; she laughed a lot and was always willing to speak when I asked a question. One day a few years ago, I turned on the television and there was Lynn, working as a reporter for ABC. Her hair was different, her expression had changed, but the brightness, the competence, the good nature were still the same.
I didn’t always appreciate my students.
There was a girl named Diane in another class, perhaps the most eager student I ever had. Diane had a preppy accent and a preppy look: blonde hair worn conservatively turned under, big teeth, smooth tan skin, rounded features and huge blue green eyes wide open to the world. She beamed at me, talked effervescently in class, came up afterward to ask questions, and poured her energy out unstintingly. I found so much responsiveness embarrassing. If she liked my course that much, how good could she be?
My behavior toward students embarrasses me when I think about it today. I often took students who liked me for granted, and longed for the admiration of those who were indifferent. Sometimes I even resented the ones who liked me if they weren’t the smartest in the class, for if they weren’t smart, then maybe I wasn’t either. And smart was the most important thing to be. I cared for my students, but still and all, unconsciously I made them serve as my reflection. In return for the hard work I put into my classes, I wanted them to love me, to love the material I taught, and to talk about it in a sophisticated way so that I would look good by extension.
Almost all my effort as a teacher went into finding things to say about the texts I’d assigned, since, as far as I knew, good teaching consisted of having brilliant ideas about the subject matter. This was the model I had been given, and it was what I tried to live up to. Year after year I strove to achieve that ideal of brilliance, and year after year I waited for a student to tell me that I had. When it finally did happen, after some fifteen years of teaching, I dismissed the accolade because it came from the wrong person – a middle-aged woman who was taking my course in American literature, the mother of a former student. She told me my lectures were like diamonds, taped every one I delivered, and gave me copies of the tapes; she invited me to a party at her house and offered me the use of her cottage on the Jersey Shore. It was more than I could handle. Though I was going through a divorce at the time and needed it desperately, I didn’t know what to do with so much love.
The failure to meet appreciation with gratitude stemmed from the sense that I didn’t deserve praise, wasn’t really good enough. My other shortcomings came from a simple lack of expertise. When I look back on it now, I’m amazed that my fellow Ph.D.’s and I were let loose in the classroom with virtually no preparation for what we would encounter in a human sense. If nothing else, I wish I had been warned about what an ego-battering enterprise teaching can be. Teaching, by its very nature, exposes the self to myriad forms of criticism and rejection, as well as to emulation and flattery and love. Day after day, teachers are up there, on display; no matter how good they are, it’s impossible not to get shot down. If only I’d known, if only someone I respected had talked to me honestly about teaching, I might have been saved from a lot of pain.
In one of those early classes, there was a student who had been laying for me all semester. I was aware of her hostility but had been holding my own; if the material was hard for me, it was even harder for the students, and I had just enough margin to get by. One day when the course was almost over we were doing Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I loved this poem and I loved Stevens, though I had trouble understanding him. I’d worked out an interpretation that almost accounted for the beautiful last lines of the poem that begin, “Oh! blessed rage for order, pale Ramon.” Almost, but not quite. I hoped no one would notice. I offered my reading, which involved two “steps” or “levels,” and I thought I was home free, when a hand went up. It was the hostile student, who was smart and knowledgeable about modern poetry. “Don’t you think there’s a third level here?” she asked, in a cool, smirking tone, and went on to demonstrate that I had left out a crucial third step: it was just the piece I’d known was missing but couldn’t grasp myself.
Having managed to conceal my ignorance all semester, I had finally been shown up for the struggling novice I was. The student had played her trump card at the final moment, leaving me no time to repair my image. In the competition for who was smartest, I’d lost the last round. That was how I took it, at any rate. No other interpretation was open to me then.

to be continued