Actually teaching

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True story.

My friend Patton Hollow and I were quietly reading student essays in our graduate student office.

Suddenly Patton said, “I can’t do this any more.”

“What?”

“Assigning my students to write autobiographical essays. It’s just too much, too often.”

“What happened this time?”

One student, he said, dutifully following the assignment, had written about a defining moment in a personal relationship. With her father. One night when she was about 10, she woke up to shouting downstairs. This was not unusual, and she stayed in bed. Soon it got quiet, and after a few minutes her bedroom door opened.

In the doorway stood her father, crying. She could not make out or did not remember what he was saying. In his hands he held a shotgun.

He told her to get out of bed. Terrified, she did. He walked toward her, raising the gun. Then he knelt in front of her, held the gun out, and told her to take it. She did. She was only 10. He took the barrel of the gun in his hand and put it to his forehead. He was sobbing. He told her to pull the trigger. He was not fit to live, he said. He had to die so he would cause no more pain. She had to put him away, he said.

She did not know what to do. She was only 10.

“She wrote this in an essay?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure it’s true?”

“It’s definitely true,” Patton said. “She was in here yesterday crying.”

“What happened?”

“She didn’t pull the trigger. But last winter her father killed himself.”

I didn’t ask how. There was a more immediate problem. A teaching problem. “What did you say to her?”

“I can’t even remember.”

“What are you going to do?”

He did not know. He only knew that he could not let it go. I suggested he ask one of the professors for advice.

This in itself was tricky, because which professor could be trusted to understand the situation? Some of them, with stunted moral sensitivities, could be ruled out immediately. Others would be dependably indifferent.

Eventually Patton got what was probably the most humane advice: Keep the discussion focused on the piece of writing; emphasize to her that she is trying to convey her pain to other readers, not just simply reliving it herself, and get her to talk about what she wants the readers to feel and understand from her story.

How to do this was another matter entirely, and depended on Patton’s skill, not as a lecturer or paper-grader, but as a human being. Luckily for the student, as a human being Patton Hollow was an exemplary specimen, and the student-teacher interaction came out on the upside of progress. How the student fared afterward, we never knew.

Teaching is not a process of injecting facts into brains. It’s a matter of getting people, first, to remember facts, and second, to understand them. Strong emotions – and thoughts and moral beliefs – color everyone’s understanding. To teach well, you have to see into each person as best you can, and try to wend a way among the facts, understandings, beliefs and emotions that are already there. In other words, you have to make contact. This is as true in science and math as it is in English and history.

Now imagine you are a high school teacher in central Maine. You are responsible for teaching – actually teaching (see previous paragraph) – girls who you’ve noticed have neat, parallel scab lines on their forearms. Hulking boys with wild, frightened looks in their eyes most days. Kids who go to the back corner of your room and put their heads down on desks they can barely fit their adult bodies into. Others who have noticeable talents for memory, calculus, music, language, field hockey, truck transmissions, profit margins. Still others who have no noticeable interest in anything. How do you get their attention? How do you get any of them just to read 10 pages in the textbook this weekend?

And why does that kid put her head down on the desk every day? Is it me? Or is it something that goes on in her house involving shotguns?

Then one afternoon, she appears in your classroom doorway after school. She wants to make contact. But you have to send her away because you are required to attend a meeting in which an administrator is going to summarize a book she is assigning all teachers to read about dealing with troubled students.

If you think teaching – actually teaching – is a cushy job, think again.

Dana Wilde has been an English professor, a U.S. Fulbright scholar, and an NEH fellow, and now works as a copy desk editor and columnist for the BDN. His e-mail address is dwilde@bangordailynews.net.