MY JOURNEY

I was not what you would call a model child or a model student. Not even close. I remember sitting upright, always upright, in my little chair at St. James Catholic School in New Jersey, and the nuns—although never using the word “dumb”—made it very clear that “Michael was different.” I went through school always hanging on to the bottom end of the bell curve. This, of course, made me very popular—by comparison to me, all the other students seemed so smart. As a child, I was suspected of swimming too long in the shallow end of the gene pool. At the time, an undiagnosed dyslexic condition led others to believe—and I allowed them to convince me—that I was dumb.

I had other interests: first sports, later girls. I got into high school because of sports, got through high school because of sports, got into college because of sports—and then the grade point average hit the fan. At the end of my freshman year, I had “earned” a 1.4 GPA. The paperwork for my expulsion from college was on the desk of the academic vice president, but the baseball coach intervened and saved me from being thrown out of school.

Then I turned it around. But why? How?

I dropped baseball and picked up books. I devoted myself with the same determination and discipline to academics as I had to baseball—and, you know what, it was fun. Mikey liked it!

There was some really good stuff in those books—some really bad stuff too, but it was fun poking holes in that. I was impressed with all of these really smart guys (we did not read books by or about women back then) tackling impossible problems, asking grand and complex questions, trying to make sense of a mixed-up, upside-down world. It was fun and it was challenging.

When I was young(er), however, I harbored no small amount of resentment—even hostility—toward my teachers and school. We always seemed to be headed in different directions. Teachers wanted to train me, stifle me, inhibit me, and impose order and control. Their motto seemed to be: “Stay within the lines, the lines are your friend!”

We did not get along very well. This was, I confess, as much my fault as theirs. They usually meant well. I often did not.

I found school confining, claustrophobic. I wanted out. I wanted to play ball, they wanted me to read about Dick and Jane. I wanted to run, they wanted me to sit. I wanted to explore, they wanted me to follow orders. I wanted to sing, they wanted me to be quiet. I wanted to fly, they wanted me grounded. They tried to teach me how to submit. (As a teacher, I do not think I would have wanted someone like me as a student—I could be somewhat difficult.)

Today, when I think about my attitude toward school, I am reminded of lines from a play, the author of which escapes my mind. In the play, a father makes a surprise entrance into the living room and finds his daughter and her boyfriend—just home from college—making out on the sofa. Upset, the father cries out: “Did you two sleep together?” to which the daughter replies, “Only during class lectures.”

With such animosity toward school, why did I become a teacher? Revenge? A psychotic need to punish students? Perhaps. In all seriousness, I do not have a good reason why I was drawn to teaching. There are, however, four things of which I am aware that seemed to have an impact on my decision. First, while in college, I read Neil Postman's book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Postman (Reference Postman1969) argued that teaching—when done properly—is a truly subversive activity. By subversive, he meant to challenge orthodoxy, to question established paradigms. “I can do that!” I said.

Second, I was profoundly influenced by a few great teachers who also were great people. Harold Winkler, Steve Dale, and others served as role models for what great teachers can be. They did more than merely talk at me in a classroom. They lived lives I admired, faced problems with courage and character, and tried to do the right thing. I began to see how one could live an honorable life in a world that seemed so often to conspire to make us into selfish, greedy creatures. Later, mentors including William Lammers, Bill Fitzgerald, James Loughran, and Thomas Cronin continued to move, teach, and inspire me.

Third—and this brings me to the title of this article—in college, I read a poem by Richard Brautigan (Reference Brautigan1974). It was a simple poem—perhaps it was not even a good poem in the academic sense—but one that spoke volumes to me. This short poem hit me like a brick:

I know I am a better teacher for having been a terrible student. So many teachers stole so many hours of my life, instilled in me not a love of learning but rather a fear of learning. I did not want to be like them: sour, boring, blindly conformist, dead. So, I became determined not to steal time from my students but instead to help liberate and empower them: to be for others what a few exceptional teachers were for me.

Fourth, my father. My father, who never graduated from the eighth grade—who had to leave school to go to work and raise his brothers and sisters—placed a great emphasis on education. Despite his lack of a formal education (cynics would say because of such a lack), my father was an extraordinarily educated man, a true gentleman. He achieved—with apparent ease and a naturalness quite extraordinary—a grace of mind and a mastery of intellect to which I still aspire. He was a truly educated man.

All of this leads me in a rather circuitous way to my thoughts on teaching. How can we develop in our students an appetite for education, a love for knowledge, a hunger for the “examined life”—a life of the mind, a life of reason, and a life of the heart?

Teaching is a challenge. That is why it is so much fun. To be a good teacher is a demanding, difficult, time-consuming task. It requires the combination of a wide range of skills. It demands much from us, but its rewards are many.

Being a good teacher does not come naturally. It requires a great investment of time and self. It requires work. One has to have self-awareness and other-awareness, professional skill and personal skill, insight and imagination, daring and humor, commitment and character.

This is good news and bad news. The good news is that there is no great mystery about what makes a good teacher. The bad news is that we do not know what makes a good teacher great. I suppose it is something transcendent, some form of magical connection between teacher and students.

Our primary questions as faculty members are: How can we help students to learn more effectively? What are the best ways to teach in the classroom, to teach outside of the classroom, to advise (on matters academic and otherwise), to promote intellectual curiosity and development, and to challenge students to become scholars and gentlepersons? I argue that the keys to answering these questions rest in the following characteristics.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN “EDUCATED PERSON”?

The art of teaching is not a mere job to be performed. Teaching is designed to enable. It strives to produce a person educated into a concept of a “coherent whole.” What is this coherent whole?

An educated person is able to think critically. He or she leads an examined life. The educated person displays a deep curiosity, develops a hierarchy of values, and thinks in degrees, not absolutes. The educated person is comfortable in the world of ideas; is familiar with the various methods for knowing truth; is familiar with other cultures, religions, and ways of knowing. The educated person knows the ways of science, the essence of beauty, the pursuit of truth. The educated person has pondered the important and perennial questions of humankind. He or she has read the great works of the world and is comfortable discussing the great ideas on which humans have reflected. The educated person thinks with the head and feels with the heart. The educated person is capable of loving deeply and committing wholly.

An educated person should be able to communicate with precision and force. He or she should have an informed acquaintance with the mathematical and experimental methods of the sciences; with the historical and quantitative techniques needed for investigating the workings and development of society; with some of the important scholarly, literary, and artistic achievements of the past; and with the major religious and philosophical conceptions of what it is to be human. An educated American cannot be provincial; he or she should know about other cultures, languages, and times; and have an understanding of and experience in thinking about moral and ethical problems. An educated person should have high aesthetic and moral standards, be able to reject shoddiness in all of its many forms, and defend those views effectively and rationally.

The educated person defends truth and justice, even when (especially when) it is unpopular to do so. The educated person knows that knowledge is deserving of sacrifice and that, if cultivated, it may grow into wisdom. He or she believes in the dignity of each person and honors human courage.

What I have outlined—if you have not already guessed—is an impossible dream. No teacher or student could possibly reach the heights outlined here—but that is our goal, our ideal, our windmill at which we can tilt.

If we ask our students to aim high, seek much, and take risks, we must be prepared to do so ourselves. Teaching is an exhausting, time-consuming, demanding, difficult vocation. It also is intensely satisfying, enriching, and rewarding. To see the spark light up in a student's eyes, to know we have made a difference, is richly rewarding. Much is expected of us but much is returned as well. In a phrase, we teach students to learn.

In considering an example of how an educated person might respond to a real-life problem, I was drawn to a response that Robert Kennedy gave to a question about the state of the nation in 1968. At a time when our prosperity was measured by the number of telephones and televisions per household, Kennedy (Reference Kennedy1968) said this about our gross national product: