Those Who Can Do More, Teach

Jejak PandaKembali Bertemu Lagi Di Blog Ini, Silakan Membaca
bandar ceme 99When I was in graduate school at Humboldt State University, I used to read a comic strip in the San Francisco Examiner called Luann. It takes place in a junior/senior high school, and one recurring storyline in the strip involves funny banter that takes place in the faculty room. In one strip, a bespectacled male history teacher named Mr. Fogarty is talking with a guidance counselor named Miss Phelps, and he says, “I wish I could quit teaching and go write a novel.” Miss Phelps replies, “Ah, yes, the ‘frustrated teacher syndrome.’ The art teacher wants to be a great painter, the science teacher wants to do research ….” Mr. Fogarty interrupts Miss Phelps and says, “What’s Mrs. Thorpe want to do?” Miss Phelps replies, “Thorpe? What’s she teach?” Mr. Fogarty responds, “Sex Education.”

In the Prologue to Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s third memoir, McCourt writes, “In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second, ‘Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it was a wonder I could lift a pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.
So, what took you so long?
I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. … When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.”

Both the comic strip and Frank McCourt’s prologue address the aphorism we’re all familiar with: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. (Sometimes this is followed by, Those who can’t teach, administrate. I say this with all due respect for administrators—now that I am one). And certainly, while I am disinclined to give much credence to such a cliché, there is much truth to the old saying, though Frank McCourt’s observations put it into a more appropriate context. It’s not that teachers can’t, so much as that they can’t find the time or the energy. After all, we were good students once, who not only loved to read but also loved to write, and had at least some skill at the task. That interest and those skills didn’t just evaporate the day we first sat on the other side of the desk. What happened is that we began taking home 100 essays every few weeks and killing ourselves trying to get them read and graded with at least a modicum of helpful narrative response.

However, with all due respect to the recently deceased Frank McCourt, there are, in fact, many teachers who completely dispel this myth of the teacher who can’t, as well as who dispel the notion of the teacher who can’t find the time. There are those among us who toil with the hundreds of papers, who go home at night exhausted only to put in a couple more hours of grading, who go home weekends laden with bags of papers, projects, and quizzes to assess, who assign research papers to be due the Friday before a vacation so that we can spend our vacation grading, and yet who nonetheless still find the time for writing and scholarship.

This Thursday evening at UConn is the Aetna Awards Night, when we will be honoring writers who won contests sponsored and funded by the Aetna Chair of Writing. These include graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students taking UConn English, but it also includes Writing Project teachers who have completed this year’s Summer Institute and who have won awards for their poetry and prose. This year, the CWP Teacher-Consultant Writing Contest had over eighty submissions from almost thirty different teachers from all grade levels, kindergarten through college. We are publishing twenty-seven different pieces from twenty-three different teachers. Three are elementary school teachers, two are middle school teachers, fourteen are high school teachers, one is a graduate student at UConn, two are community college professors, and one is an adjunct professor. Five are former or current Teachers of the Year in their schools or districts. Three have published books of poetry. One has published a work of nonfiction. Five are currently writing novels. One received the PEN Discovery Award for Young Adult Literature in 2007. One had her fiction published in Best New American Voices 2006. One is a published playwright and poet. One is a Freedom Writer. One is a freelance journalist. One has published a half dozen scholarly articles within the last five years. And one received both a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in the last five years.

Looking over this impressive cast of teachers, I am made to think of a coffee mug given to me when I got my first job teaching high school English. It said, Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can Do More, Teach. That mug was lost years ago, but I’m thinking I should go online to see if I can order some to give out to my CWP colleagues. I’m gonna need a bunch.

* * *

I just began reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my son, our fourth Roald Dahl book. He loves it, as did I. I bumped into my friend Jon the other day, and he and I were trying to recall when we first read that book. For me, it was during the Blizzard of 1978, which occurred in early February. I would be nine that April. We lost power, and I spent two days reading the book by candlelight in my parents’ living room. A nice memory to have.