Good teachers change lives

So, the new crop of Teaching Fellows transcripts showed up in my mailbox yesterday morning, and I reviewed them and ate free bagels (which, maybe I should stop my bitching about the million meetings faculty are always having at Hunter, because, yum) and then went home, crabby and depressed, and tutored one of my students.

And felt better, because who wouldn't? Teaching is the best thing in the world.

The best thing except my husband, my son, and my parents, which is, of course, why I'm becoming a nurse.

But the fact that I'm not willing to make the sacrifices required to be a full-time teacher makes it more important for me to point out that all of my desire to teach (in or out of the classroom), and most of the other choices I have made, have been directly or indirectly influenced by a particular teacher I had in high school, Ms. Bryant.

I was lucky to have a lot of pretty terrific teachers once I went to high school -- smart people who generally treated me with respect even though I was different. (I'll point out that my brother, probably no more different than I was, but less desperate to be liked, did not have this experience, and should have; but then, we had very few of the same teachers.)

Ms. Bryant was the best, though. She was so good that she managed to get through to me even though, for much of the year I spent in her class, I was 1. seriously ill and 2. barely attending. She was the perfect teacher for me, from her summer reading assignments to her unwillingness to pull punches (her notes on my incoherent written response to "The Hunger Artist" precipitated my pulling it together enough to graduate high school and go on to college; she was also the person who got me to reconsider my excessive reliance on hyphens in analytical writing).

It's frustrating to be a creative person when you're in high school; a lot of people think they are "English people," when actually they are just inexact, people for whom precision is difficult or irrelevant and who, subsequently, can't get through science or math courses. My biggest criticism of the current education system is that its system for identifying academic progress does nothing to separate these people from people who actually use language well, or who can attend to it responsibly in a text or a poem or a journal article.

This, I think, is the root of a lot of the current political problems we're facing: people can decode, but they can't read. This is why people pull a single verse from the Bible or from the Constitution, ignore history, context, syntax, and every other tool designed for use in interpreting a text, and hold it up as a marker for their pet belief.

My experience is that often, contemporary readers honestly do not know how to differentiate between a close reading and a cursory reading of a text. Moreover, they're suspicious of critical reading; they claim that texts like the Bible and the Constitution should be self-evident. (Because texts inspired by the Infinite and translated across multiple languages, centuries, and cultures generally are transparent, right? Because readers who thought the Bible and the Constitution legitimized slavery were misguided, but we can't possibly be, correct?)

Whatever Sam Harris wants to tell you, for a long time, religious faith was a motivating factor for some pretty remarkable intellectual and creative work. People founded churches, produced treatises, and led revolutions in their efforts to seek out God. The current climate -- in which reactionary politics and unexamined faith join hands -- is what happens when the difference between decoding and reading is regarded as somehow indulgent, a "higher order concern", when you point out that the bar we've set for our students is so low that it's basically irrelevant and are met by claims that you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I'm not the smartest person in the world; I don't think I was even the smartest person in her class, if such a distinction means anything. But I was educated well while I was in it, and I left it better able to make sense of the world. Particularly since I had grown up in a fundamentalist religious environment, that education has been critical; it's allowed me to re-approach my God and my faith without having to try to force myself into beliefs that are not just contradictory, but incoherent.

This isn't to say I have all the answers, either; obviously I don't. But I do have a sense of what questions to ask when I'm approaching a public policy, a historical event, a Biblical passage.

Good teaching matters. I don't want this to turn into a diatribe about how our educational system is careening off course, how the kids who need teachers like Ms. Bryant "most" won't get them. I was a white kid in a rural school; I needed her badly enough. Policy trends being what they are, and those currently in control of them being who they are, I guess I should be happy if anyone gets a teacher like her at all.

I do want to thank her, to acknowledge how much of my life, of myself, I owe to her, and how to the degree that our current generation includes people willing to negotiate the limits of both modern "rationality" and pre-modern literalism in a post-modern world, it's because of teachers like her. Whatever I do with the remainder of my life, I hope I'm able to impact any one person -- student, patient, tutee, my own son -- as positively as she impacted me.