When I was a kid, little curly-haired redhead with glasses, all my teachers and relatives just assumed I’d be an English teacher someday. Didn’t I read all the time? Didn’t I get good grades in English? Wasn’t I obedient and rule-abiding? (Although my mother drew the line when she discovered that Miss Munson, the second grade teacher, had managed to convince me that washing out her soup saucepan in the janitor’s closet was a wonderful privilege. I can still vividly recall the smell of the mops, the drain, and the tomato soup. She even let me have her leftover soda crackers.)
What I had in mind was something more exotic, so I took a detour through the drama department, though somehow in college I got pressed back into “speech education.” I made my real break by getting my first teaching job on the Blackfeet reservation. And then jumping into a relationship with a cowboy sculptor twice my age. It was great! Nothing since has been so good.
The truth is that I didn’t consider myself much of an English teacher. I had a lot of theories but I hated grading papers and then somehow in the early Seventies a wall arose between teachers and students that prevented much of anything happening. It wasn’t just me. A whole culture changed and I didn’t like it. I tried again once in Heart Butte about 1990. Same wall. Plus the administration was corrupt bullies. I guess it’s culture-wide distrust of authorities.
The years with animal control were pretty good except that the way up was through either county administration or humane societies and I didn’t like either one. I’d been actually preparing for clinical psychology, but that was aiming towards administration, too. Or social work, which was less about empowerment than about control. Everything seemed to be about control and paperwork.
So I thought of the ministry. My Clinical Pastoral Education was one of the most perilous experiences of my life because of a marginally deranged supervisor. My internship was also a daunting affair due to a weird supervisor. The whole seminary experience was very mixed, with the exception of the courses from Richard G. Stern that I managed to smuggle in. There was sanity. Here was someone who knew what he was doing. Norman Maclean with Alzheimer’s made more sense than some of these people.
The truth was that I wanted to write. Maybe at first it was mixed with fantasies of “being a writer,” but really I just wanted to write. No one will pay you to do such a thing. No one will even publish what you write unless you are predictable and compliant.
The first years of ministry, circuit-riding around Montana to small fellowships, helped me to write. I repeated the same sermon four times, often incorporating comments from the earlier services. Faces tell you a whole lot more than blue pencils. This was how Thoreau learned to write -- not moping around in the woods, but telling live audiences about it afterwards. It wasn’t the careful use of commas, it was the energy and truth of the thoughts that powered the words.
In Saskatoon I began to enter the culture of writers, mostly through the happy sharing of Sharon Butala, much respected Canadian novelist who saved Wallace Stegner’s boyhood home in Eastend, Saskatchewan. She’s a “just do it” person.
Back in Portland but out of the ministry, I had a really awful job with the City of Portland, but often preached for another small UU fellowship that had broken off from Oregon City. Intelligent, anchored in ag and teaching jobs, funny and arty, they put me back on track for writing -- NOT the ministry.
The writing track itself had been laid by Richard Stern in the seminary years and then traced again by Peter Matthiessen in a short workshop in the Bitterroot Valley. Odd that both are Manhattanites by birth, even more odd that the two are totally different and followed radically different life plans. But I loved them and their writing and they were able to empower me with approval. I don’t take praise well from anyone I consider a lesser being, but these guys were Alpha Writers, major figures, “Silverbacks.”
There’s something more beyond that: a possible explanation for that wall between students and teachers. I think it is a lack of belief that the teacher has the best interests of the student at heart. Teachers are seen as forcing conformity, which on a reservation becomes a matter of assimilation, and erasing any dangerous initiative. Administrators think they have the same duty towards the teachers. That was even more true the one time I tried teaching off the reservation. I left the first week of November. The insecure female principal had stood across from the classroom door and glowered at me for a half-hour at a time. Her mantra was “on task.”
What happens now feels different from the way it was in the Fifties, when conformity was taken for granted and people were simply grateful for peace and order. Nowadays there is a lot of energy, almost insurgency. Students feel they can educate themselves about most things if only they can nail down the paperwork that will get them jobs, preferably high-paying. Who wants to read a textbook when you could get the real truth from a blog? Who wants to study statistics when you know it’s all damn lies anyway? Who wants a teacher to know anything about you when they’re liable to use it against you? What was only suspicion has become full-blown paranoia.
Neither Stern nor Matthiessen was an enforcer. Genuinely and truly, they wanted to know their students as human beings. Both were gentle, protective unless they thought you needed a good shaking up. (Matthiessen’s workover of Richard Manning became famous. Richard took it well.) They were NOT powerless. I hadn’t felt safety like that since the early days with Bob Scriver and, as it did earlier, the shelter allowed growth.
People ask me what teaching is really like. I tell them that on the worst days it’s hell, hard work, ditch digging. Then I tell them that on the best days it’s like flying, like when you were a little kid on a blissful summer day. It’s freedom, it’s unfolding, it’s transcendent. When a whole class is in sync and really “getting it,” the experience is (Victor Turner here) liminal, lifting everyone over a threshold into the world of play, dream, inspiration, and transformation. Everything is possible.
It can’t be done by intimidated teachers teaching to paychecks and federal testing.
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