...it's time to honor the past.
Twenty years ago today, I received my admission letter to Berkeley (and met my husband...it turned out to be a pretty pivotal day, huh?). I know a lot of you are about to send off your Statements of Intent to Register...so I thought I'd fill you in on some Cal history that may not show up in books.
This is an article about the most amazing professor I had at Cal, Alan Dundes. He taught for decades, I can't even imagine the thousands of students he influenced throughout his years at Cal. I took four classes with him, and he came very close to convincing me to give up my adolescent dream of becoming a high school English teacher to pursue a Ph.D in Folklore (the main reason I didn't was that the four Folklore programs in the US were at Bloomington, Texas, UCLA and Penn...none were places I wanted to live for the seven years it takes to earn a Ph.D).
Part of the reason I am so interested in taboo, and examining the twisted, humorous underpinnings of literature is because of Dundes' influence. So, when we have our borderline obscene discussions in class, you know who to thank...or blame.
Anyhow, I'd always hoped that some of my high school students would go to Cal and take classes with Dundes, but by the time I had kids who were old enough (and Berkeleyish enough) to go there, he was dead. My other favorite professor, Andrew Griffin, just died in March, of Alzheimers. The Cal you're about to enter is a very different place than the one I experienced. That's got its good side and bad side, I guess. It's like that line from Avenue Q:
If I were to go back to college, think what a loser I'd be,
I'd walk through the quad and think "Oh my god, those kids are so much younger than me."
Next year, when you come back to visit Wash at breaks, you'll see firsthand how that feels.
As you guys phase out of high school and into this next, dynamic period of your lives, please take some time to think back--all the way to pre-school and kindergarten--and honor the teachers, aides and other school-related folks who helped you get to this stage. They don't get enough credit for the foundations they built.
Plus, you're going to need to pull up those memories for your K-12 project in June.
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3 comments:
It's interesting that things that end up being so vital and important to someone's life can happen on the same day. (This is, of course, barring catastrophic events that coincide with death. THAT is just life sucking, and not amazing at all!) Serendipty, as Mrs. Selinger would say. And it's always saddening to hear of all these amazing, influential people are dying, but I guess that's been happening sincethe beginning of time, so what can you do? The plus side is that those who have learned under them continue their legacies by teaching us.
Steinbeck, actually, wrote a short piece on teachers and teaching, which I found particularly striking, though woefully not applicable to the direction I went/will go in my essay/presentation.
I have a terrible feeling this is going to end up looking a lot longer in a comment than it does in TextEdit, but who knows? Maybe someone will read it anyway.
--
...like captured firefliesJohn Steinbeck
--
My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked, "How much longer do I have to go to school?"
"About fifteen years," I said.
"Oh! Lord," he said despondently. "Do I have to?"
"I'm afraid so. It's terrible an I'm not going to try to tell you it isn't. But I can tell you this--if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing."
"Did you find one?"
"I found three," I said.
It is customary for adults to forget how had and dull and long school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredibly and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and math teacher in high school, my second a professor of creative writing at Stanford and my third was my friend and partner, Ed Ricketts.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist an that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
My three had these things in common--They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell--they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.
I shall speak only of my first teacher because in addition to the other things, she brought discovery.
She aroused us to shouting, bookwaving discussions. She had the noisiest class in school and she didn't even seem to know it. We could never stick to the subject, geometry or the chanted recitation of the memorized phyla. Our speculation ranged the world. She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.
She was fired and perhaps rightly so,for failing to teach the fundamentals. Such things must be learned. But she left a passion in us for the pure knowable world and me she inflamed with a curiosity which has never left me. I could not do simple arithmetic but through her I sensed that abstract mathematics was very much like music. When she was removed, a sadness came over us but the light did not go out. She left her signature on us,the literature of the teacher who writes on minds. I have had many teachers who told me soon-forgotten facts but only three who created in me a new thing, a new attitude and a new hunger. I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.
I can tell my son who looks forward with horror to fifteen years of drudgery that somewhere in the dusty dark a magic may happen that will light up the years... if he is very lucky.
That's a great piece. And I suspect, if that teacher taught a "soft" subject [like English, *cough*] she might've kept her job. Hard subjects aren't hard because they're DIFFICULT, they're hard because they're RIGID.
I'd like to point out, though, that a wonderful teacher still needs brilliant, attentive students to bounce off of. An responsive, disengaged group of students may not have elicited the same degree of passion from Steinbeck's teacher.
I just learned a few minutes ago (via googling) that Andy Griffin died. He was my favorite English Prof at Cal and we had kept in touch well after I'd graduated as well, but I hadn't heard from him in a while so am not only saddened not only by his death, but also shocked that it was due to an infirmity I associate with people much older than he was. Very sad, thank you for the tribute.
LSH
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