What’s the Most Important Lesson You Learned from a Teacher?
Keith with a model of a DNA molecule. Photo by Steve Silberman.
Five mornings a week, Keith gets up before dawn, puts on one of his
geekiest bow ties (think Space Invaders, DNA helices, and daVinci’s Vitruvian Man),
and drives half an hour down the freeway to teach teenagers about the
wonders of science and the rigors of the scientific method at a local
high school.
It’s a demanding life with little downtime. Keith’s evenings and
weekends are often consumed by lesson planning and other school-related
activities, but he’s perpetually stressed out about whether he’s doing
enough for his kids. With his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from
Berkeley — one of the top five such programs in the country — he could
triple his schoolteacher’s salary by taking a job as a bench scientist
at DuPont or Exxon-Mobil, as many of his fellow Berkeley grads have
done.
But Keith has a passion for teaching. He lives for those moments when
he can help a student make sense of the world through science. (He’s
also my husband.)
People who make the career choices that Keith did don’t get a lot of
respect these days. In endless discussions of “the crisis in education,”
teachers are routinely described as burned out, bumbling,
underqualified, and unfit — particularly if they belong to a union. In
his new book Class Warfare, aspiring education reformer Steven
Brill calls school districts “the most lavishly funded and entrenched
bureaucracies in America… supported by an interest group — the teachers’
unions — which [have] money and playbooks every bit as effective in
thwarting the public interest as Big Oil, the NRA, or Big Tobacco.”
It’s as if we’ve collectively decided that anyone who devotes his
life to standing at the head of a classroom, when salaries are so low
and school budgets are being slashed, can’t be that smart after all — an
insidious legacy of the era when teaching was one of the few acceptable
occupations for women.
Conversely, teachers who are clearly effective are portrayed as
exceptional: self-sacrificing superheroes who single-handedly boost
their students’ scores on standardized tests with little regard for such
mundane concerns as a living wage, job security, health benefits, and
adequate class resources. Meanwhile, billionaire venture capitalists
like PayPal founder Peter Thiel advise young entrepreneurs to drop out
of college altogether as a “bad investment” and get down to the serious
business of raising capital in their teens — as if a wide-ranging
education was just another expendable item on a spreadsheet.
While reading this moving NPR story
about a neurosurgeon who phoned his high-school science teacher to
express his gratitude after performing a tricky operation, it struck me
how rarely we hear from accomplished people about the debt they owe to
their teachers. The words of a true teacher stay with us a long time,
offering wise counsel in a confusing world and a potent inoculation
against foolishness. Yet we rarely get to thank them explicitly. Perhaps
only in mid-life, we realize that the career path we chose was set, at
least in part, by the recognition, praise, or clarifying criticism of a
respected teacher when we were young.
Classroom photo by Black Vanilla.
In that spirit, I’ve asked some of the brightest folks I know in science and media to answer this simple question: What’s the most important lesson you learned from a teacher?
I’m delighted to report that a wide range of writers and thinkers
were eager to share their stories. Among those who pay tribute to their
most influential teachers here are two bestselling authors, Rebecca
Skloot and Deborah Blum; the brilliant culture critic Mark Dery;
award-winning science journalists David Dobbs, Amy Harmon, and Hillary
Rosner; cognitive psychologist Uta Frith, the pioneer of autism research
who translated Hans Asperger’s original paper; and several of the most
perceptive and prolific bloggers around, including Maggie Koerth-Baker
of BoingBoing, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, and Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science. It turns out that by asking people that simple question, you open floodgates of memory and understanding.
If you feel inspired after reading these marvelous, charming, and
occasionally terrifying tales from the classroom, please consider Googling up
a memorable teacher and sending them an email to tell them what you’re
up to now and express your appreciation. I guarantee that doing so will
improve your day and profoundly touch the heart of someone who helped
guide you into the world. Life is brief.
One of my favorite stories about a teacher’s enduring impact comes
from Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, the real-life model for
the hero of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, and
one of the first American students to study Zen in Japan. Snyder’s
teacher there was a tough old monk who delivered his lengthy discourses
on Buddhadharma in such a soft voice that his students strained to hear
them, struggling to stay awake on their meditation cushions.
Years later, Snyder ran into one of his fellow students from his days
in Kyoto, who was by then a senior monk himself. The monk told the
poet, “Remember those talks rōshi gave that no one could hear? I’m beginning to hear them now.”
Rebecca Skloot
Rebecca Skloot is the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and a writer for Popular Science magazine.
As people who’ve read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks know,
I first learned about Henrietta and her amazing HeLa cells in a basic
biology class when I was 16 years old. My teacher, Mr. Defler, wrote
Henrietta’s name on the chalk board and told us she was a black woman.
That was it, and class was over. I followed him to his office saying,
“Who was she? Did she have any kids? What do they think about those
cells?” He told me no one knew anything else about her. ”But if you’re
curious,” he told me, “go do some research, write up a little paper
about what you find and I’ll give you some extra credit.” At that point
I was planning to be a veterinarian — something I’d been determined to
do since I was a small child. I had no intention of becoming a writer. I
looked for information about Henrietta but didn’t find anything, so I
didn’t write that extra credit paper. But I never forgot about her — in
fact, I was a bit obsessed by her.
More than a decade later, while working my way through an
undergraduate degree in biology so I could apply for vet school, I took
my first creative writing class as an elective. (Amazingly, the school I
went to counted creative writing toward its required foreign language
requirement, so I signed up for creative writing thinking it would be
less work than the alternative… but that’s another story). At the start
of that class, the teacher gave us this writing prompt: ”Write for 15
minutes about something someone forgot.” I scribbled, “Henrietta Lacks”
at the top of my page and began writing an essay about how the whole
world seemed to have forgotten about Henrietta, but I was weirdly
obsessed with her. I fell in love with writing in that class but still
had no intention of becoming a professional writer. I had what I now
refer to as Veterinary Tunnel Vision.
Then one day, when I was getting ready to submit my applications for vet school, my writing teacher, the amazing John Calderazzo at Colorado State University, pulled me aside and said, Do you realize you’re a writer? And do you know there’s such a thing as a science writer? I didn’t. He told me he thought the world needed more people who understood science and could convey it to the public. You know, he said, you don’thave to go to vet school just because that’s what you always planned to do – you could get an MFA in writing instead. I
told him I’d never even heard of an MFA and had never for a moment
thought of giving up on my dream of becoming a vet. Then he said these
essential words: Letting go of a goal doesn’t mean you’ve failed, as
long as you have a new goal in its place. That’s not giving up, it’s
changing directions, which can be one of the best things you ever do in
life. The next day I started researching MFA programs in creative nonfiction writing. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 1988 when my biology teacher told me to see if I could find any
information about Henrietta, neither one of us could have imagined that
more than twenty years later, I’d publish a book about her having spent
most of my adult life looking to answer a question he inspired in that
classroom. Before my book came out, I tracked down that biology teacher,
now long retired, and sent him a note: “Dear Mr. Defler, here’s my
extra credit project. It’s 22 years late, but I have a good excuse: No
one knew anything about her.” He was shocked. I was just one of
thousands of students he’d taught in countless huge auditoriums, most of
us (myself included) looking disaffected and half asleep. He didn’t
remember that moment in class when he first told me about Henrietta,
but I did. Which is an amazing thing about classrooms: You never know
what random sentence from a teacher will change a student’s life.
Ferris Jabr
Ferris Jabr is a reporter for New Scientist.
Sometimes you can feel a hidden cog in your brain lurch into
motion—and sometimes you know exactly who got it going. I was sitting in
Carol Gontang’s biology class at Mountain View High School in
California. We were discussing Archaeopteryx. My teenage brain
got the gist of it: birds evolved from dinosaurs. But I couldn’t
visualize the process. I spouted my question as I raised my hand: “So
dinosaurs just, like, randomly started growing feathers?”
Mrs. Gontang’s eyes settled on me, then drifted toward the ceiling as
she touched her crown of poufy hair, all honey and lemon meringue. “A
feather is not so different from a scale,” she explained. “Remember,
they’re both made of keratin. It’s not hard to imagine a mutation that
would produce feathery scales.”
The eggshell cracked. A claw emerged, a beaky snout, a hint of
plumage. I could see it: something like a baby velociraptor, slick with
yolk, covered here and there in patches of fuzzy down. I had begun to
understand.
A classroom in India. Photo from the World Bank photo collection.
Amy Harmon
Amy Harmon is a correspondent for the New York Times.
The point of high school, so far as I could tell, was to prove how
much you knew. That was why you crammed for tests, tried to come up with
clever comments in class, stayed up late writing papers. You were
graded on it, of course. You were rewarded for it. Maybe you even
enjoyed it for its own sake, this accumulation of knowledge. I did. I
liked the sense of authority that came with being able to reel off the
real (economic!) causes of the Civil War, the workings of the digestive
system, Wordsworth’s recurring themes. And I liked the pats on the back I
got for being a Good Student from the teachers at my New York City
private school.
So it came as something of a shock, in the second semester of my
senior year, to encounter a pair of teachers who told us that
recognizing how little you knew was what really mattered in life. Their
names were Frank Moretti and Jack Salzman, and they co-taught a strange
blend of history and philosophy and literature. They backed up the claim
with Socrates and Salinger, and over the course of the term, with some
reluctance, my classmates and I began to grasp what they meant. It’s a
lesson I have had to re-learn again and again, in the dark moments of
writing, when I inevitably realize that what I really need to do is more
reporting. But I can’t imagine a better one for a journalist,
especially one like me, trying to write about science with no background
in the field. It’s humbling, after weeks or months of research, to say,
“I still don’t understand.” But it’s also liberating. And often at
those moments, I flash back to the glass-enclosed classroom, up the
stairs off the library, where I first considered not acting like such a
know-it-all.
Geoff Manaugh
Geoff Manaugh is the writer and editor of BLDGBLOG.
In the break between 7th and 8th grade, my mom hired my middle school
Latin teacher — an amateur poet in his free time — to give me writing
lessons during the summer months. The basic idea was that I would learn
to read and write poetry, something I was already trying my hand at, but
also that I would thus also stay out of trouble over the summer, as my
family had just fallen apart in a divorce and I was feeling more and
more betrayed and alienated by everyday life.
The resulting experience was both life-changing and extraordinary,
and I still think about it two decades later: my Latin teacher assigned
me both The Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn to read as
key texts over the summer, and we would meet up in the local state park,
walking around amidst deer, train tracks, and untended Pennsylvania
forests, discussing how to travel, how to document the allure of new
destinations, and how to turn notes, impressions, loose thoughts,
sketches, and other mental ephemera into poetry. We’d challenge each
other with new themes to turn into poems each week, sometimes even right
there on the spot, writing down lines in a rush within mere minutes,
and we’d always return to walking around that park, which, to this day,
makes me think of The Odyssey.
The next few years were often extraordinarily dark for me, and it was
poetry — the great valve of energy and release that poetry offered —
that got me through it all in one piece, a gift that can be traced
directly back to a Latin teacher, Dwight Peterson, in suburban
Pennsylvania, something I’ve never really thanked him for but will never
forget.
Maggie Koerth-Baker
Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She’s also the author of Before the Lights Go Out,
a book about how our electric system works today, why it got that way,
and how it will have to change to meet the needs of the 21st century. It
will be published in April 2012 by Wiley and Sons.
I had the same teacher for 4th and 5th grades, Shirley Johannsen. She
started teaching at State Street Elementary in Topeka, Kansas in 1963,
so by the time I got there in the late 1980s, this woman was already
educating the children of her first students. She taught both grades,
simultaneously, in the same classroom. And there were more than 20 of us
in each grade. Forty-plus students, one room, one well-loved Apple IIE,
and Ms. Johannsen.
That sounds like a recipe for a failing school, but Shirley Johannsen
was one of the best teachers I have ever had. There are two things this
woman did that completely changed my life.
First, Ms. Johannsen made me a writer. It was in her classroom that I
first made the connection between my obsessive love of reading, and the
fact that I could write books, too. And she encouraged me to write, not
just for school assignments, but for fun and for practice. She was the
first person who told me that writing was something I was good at. She
was my first editor.
Second, Ms. Johannsen made me love science. In my memories, it’s like
I woke up one day, in her classroom, with a 9-volt battery and an
electric switch in my hand. Before her, science was dinosaurs and trips
to the museum with my parents. After, it was something to look forward
to every school year—new discoveries, surprising knowledge, a better
understanding of how the world around me worked.
Today, I’m a science journalist. I love my job. And I owe that to the teacher who saw my gifts and inspired my curiosity.
Classroom photo by IITA image library.
Maia Szalavitz
Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and a co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—And Endangered with Dr. Bruce Perry, and the author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids.
“Those who do not articulate their rights have none,” was the
statement that Mr. MacTamaney wrote on the blackboard on the first day
of school at Monroe-Woodbury High in New York state. That thought — and
the way he engaged my high school English class with humor and humanity —
had a profound influence on me.
My most important journalism can be summed up in that sentence. It
has involved attempting to help the voices of vulnerable people —
teenagers, drug users — be heard and to have their rights respected.
While that may not sound like traditional science journalism, it has
only been by understanding and presenting research data that I have been
able to uncover and fight specific injustices.
For example, if research showed that humiliation, abuse and attack
therapy cured addiction and helped troubled teens, my exposés of those
programs would not have made sense; if the science didn’t support the
idea that overdose prevention and needle exchange programs save lives, I
would not have continued to write op-eds explaining the data and the
need for such interventions.
I come from a family of teachers: my mother taught high school social
studies and my grandfather was a professor of business at Baruch
College. The power of a good teacher is to me, therefore, so obvious
that it’s actually hard to articulate. But I do think we need to speak
up for teachers and make sure their contributions to the careers and
success of every one of us are known — and they deserve to be respected
and better compensated.
The source of the spark that awakens a child’s mind is hard to
pinpoint, but the research is clear that early learning experiences have
great impact, for both good and ill. One kind word, a small bit of
encouragement can start a virtuous cycle that leads ultimately to the
expression of talent and success. We need to support our teachers so
they can illuminate all of us.
Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.
In the year that I started 8th grade, we moved from Louisiana to
Georgia. Terrible timing for any child in middle school and for me — a
shy girl whose major hobby was reading books, a full-fledged geek
wearing horn-rimmed glasses (yes, even then!) — completely traumatic. I
went to school, did my work, kept my head down. But here’s what changed
things. My 8th grade English teacher, Lois Player, liked the way I
wrote. And she was too smart to praise me in front of the class, too
savvy to further brand me as a full-fledged geek. She called me aside
and told me she thought I had talent and she bullied a rather reluctant
school administration into putting me into a brand new class, one in
which students created a newspaper for the school.
It was the first time I realized that writing could be community —
not a bad lesson at the age of 13. And the bigger lesson — that
kindness literally can shape a life — I learned that too. How can you
not admire a teacher who, besieged by hordes of adolescents, takes the
time to help a lost child? There are so many teachers today who do the
same and I know that from stories my sons tell me. But one more point
about Mrs. Player. She still lives in Athens, Georgia and last year I
went there to give a book talk. She was in the audience and she came up
after to tell me how proud she was. I felt lucky all over again.
Ed Yong
Ed Yong is an award-winning British science writer. His work has appeared in New Scientist, the Times, Wired, the Guardian, and Nature. He is the author of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
My science teacher, Keith Davies, used to teach me extra stuff in the
interstitial moments of class practicals. Though I was still in primary
school, I was learning secondary-level science because he never
blanched at the prospect of a precocious student asking lots of
questions. Mr. Davies taught me that curiosity would be rewarded with
knowledge. What better preparation for a scientific life could there be?
Math class. Photo by Stuart Pilbrow.
David Kroll
David Kroll is a pharmacology professor, aspiring writer, and science blogger at Take As Directed and Terra Sigillata.
As a gangly Polish kid in an Irish Catholic high school, I was a
perennial target for physical humiliation. Being good in school didn’t
help matters. But I had two science teachers whose kindness and support
stay with me 30 years later.
Thomas Hannan was a tall, handsome baseball coach who was also our
10th grade biology teacher. I good-naturedly taunted him by scoring a
100 on any test he could throw at us. After class one day, he offered to
formalize the challenge: every time I got a 100 thereafter, he would
buy a Pepsi and award it to me in class. If I didn’t, I owed him
a Pepsi. I thought this was madness. I didn’t need another reason to be
pushed around by the jocks. But as the baseball coach, Hannan’s
endorsement became an inoculation against the thrashings that typically
befell a smart kid. Good biology grades became an “in” thing.
My chemistry and physics teacher, Neil Bender, was the opposite of
Hannan in physical appearance — disheveled, mismatched clothes — and had
a penchant for diverging into his other passion during class: movie
reviews. After our first submission of chemistry lab reports, he
commended us on our work but announced that one student’s work stood
head and shoulders above the rest. He refused to say who until all of
the cool kids badgered him for the student’s identity. As I sat in the
back at the lab bench for the other outcasts, I was shocked when he
revealed that I was the one with the propensity for chemistry.
I was not the only one singled out by either of these teachers. They
often did the same for others in their own thoughtful, personalized
ways. Mr. Hannan and Mr. Bender demonstrated that public recognition of
student performance and quiet understanding of high school
challenges can reach across the decades to inspire you as a teacher — to
pay forward the power of encouragement.
Mark Dery
Mark Dery is a cultural critic, freelance journalist, and the author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
In my mental pantheon of Professors Who Changed My Life, one looms
largest: an English teacher I encountered in my senior year in high
school, Mrs. C. (We’ll pseudonymize her for reasons of privacy.)
Loftily titled “Humanities,” her course for the few, the proud, the
college bound was thrillingly elite: anyone with the right GPA and an
interest in literature was welcome to submit an essay for consideration,
but few were chosen. The few who were chosen, me happily among
them, learned on Day One that our careers as self-satisfied bullshit
artists were over. Peering imperiously over her no-nonsense glasses,
smartly turned out in a gray twinset and skirt color-coordinated with
her salt-and-pepper hair, Mrs. C. regarded us with a flinty stare and
the mocking ghost of a smile. In that instant, we knew that she was well
familiar with our apple-polishing sycophancy, half-assed ”classroom
participation,” and slapdash, semicoherent papers, and knew them for the
laughable fraud they were.
From the moment we crossed the threshold of her classroom, she
informed, we would be treated as if we were in college. We would
read serious novels such as The Scarlet Letterand Moby Dick and, because Mrs. C. was a devout Jungian, philosophical investigations such as Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. We would participate in class — frequently, vigorously, and intelligently, arguing our interpretations of the week’s readings with specific evidence mined from the text. Those who wanted to excel were advised to buy Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols,
a skeleton key to the collective unconscious. (I promptly rushed out
and bought a copy; it sits on my shelf to this day, a
beloved artifact of that pre-Derridean world when a symbol had a fixed,
finite number of meanings.)
San Diego, in the 1970s, was a dreamy limbo of Navy retirees and
Goldwater Republicans and bible-belt troglodytes and stoners and surfers
and Malibu Barbies, reflexively hostile to intellectualism. In Mrs. C’s
mirrorworld, intellectuals were celebrated and sharp-elbowed debate was
the only sport that mattered. She threw wide the doors of adolescent
minds whose previous idea of deep thought had been M.C. Escher
posters and Yes lyrics, exposing us to the mysteries of symbolism
and subtext.
Of course, only one reading of the text was permissible —
hers — and my later encounters with Barthes and his postmodern
progeny would make Mrs. C.’s by-the-numbers Jungianism look autocratic
and antiquated. Even so, the endorphin buzz of hitting the
interpretive bull’s-eye, making Mrs. C.’s eyes light up with that
you-got-it! glow of approval, struck sparks in my teenage mind. My year
with Mrs. C. inspired a major in English, a career in cultural
criticism, and a lifetime habit of overthinking everything, a gift that keeps on giving.
Sarah Fallon
Sarah Fallon is a story editor at Wired magazine.
I took AP Chemistry my senior year in high school. It was a small
class, just me and three other women, and it was taught by a guy named
Garcia Stone. We suspected that Garcia was not his real name, and the
rumor around school was that he had been a chemist for the Hells Angels
before he started teaching high school. On the weekends, he ran a
motorcycle repair shop.
On the first day of class, Garcia asked us if we wanted him to teach
to the AP test so we all got 4s and 5s — or if we just wanted to learn
fun stuff and do cool experiments. We said screw the test, let’s just do
a fun year. And that’s what we did. I did a project on esters (take an
acid and an alcohol, mix them up, and the result is usually something
smelly) that left my car reeking of old bananas for months. We made
thermite (used in WWI bombs) and nitrogen triiodide (a contact
explosive). We asked him to let us make fireworks. (He said no.) We
asked about making LSD too. (He said that the ingredients required to
make it safely were too closely monitored by the government.) It was
wonderful. And we all got 4s and 5s on the test.
Class photo, Aomori, Japan, 1950s. Photo by Richard Masoner.
Tim DeChant
Tim DeChant is the author of Per Square Mile.
Within weeks of beginning my freshman year in high school, Mrs.
Wondergem, my English teacher, assigned a five paragraph essay on Lord of the Flies.
I worked diligently on the paper. I turned it in on time. And I
received a C-. I was devastated. I was a good student, and the low grade
felt like a slap of cold water in the face. But all hope wasn’t lost —
since the entire class had done so poorly, Mrs. Wondergem said she would
give us the chance to revise the paper. Relieved, I worked hard,
running edits past my mother. My grade improved, but more importantly,
my writing improved — however incrementally — because I had revised.
In retrospect, the bad-grade-followed-by-chance-for-redemption bit
feels a tad canned. From the start, Mrs. Wondergem had probably planned
the whole thing as a sort of lesson. “You’re in the big leagues now,”
she seemed to be implying, and, “Your first draft may not be good
enough, but you can always revise.” That bad grade wasn’t just an
introduction to the hard knocks of high school, it was an early lesson
in persistence.
I can’t say that at that moment I decided to be a writer — I was too
annoyed with having received the initial bad grade — but it was a
pivotal moment in my academic career. I didn’t love writing that year,
or necessarily the next. It took years to learn to embrace the process,
and years more before I decided to become a writer. But I got there
eventually. Mrs. Wondergem was the first editor of many, but she was
pitch perfect in that role — demanding and vexing yet ultimately
forgiving and encouraging.
A few weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail from Mrs. Wondergem.
She had recently spoken to my parents, who told her I was now a writer.
She was thrilled.
Nicola Twilley
Nicola Twilley is the writer and editor of Edible Geography.
My favorite teacher story involves my Phys. Ed. instructor telling
me, aged 14, that, if I only believed in myself, I could do a
somersault. It ends with four of my front teeth hanging out of my mouth
by their roots. But perhaps that’s not what you’re looking for.
My school teachers were extremely competent and not particularly
inspiring, and my poor undergraduate professors had to deal with the
fact that I wasn’t really interested in doing any more academic work
after the treadmill intensity of my A-levels. The real eye-opening
happened late in the day, during my post-graduate studies at the
University of Chicago, in a course called “Art and Medicine” taught by
Barbara Maria Stafford.
Call me slow, but it was the first time that I’d been introduced to
the incredibly fertile, idea-rich, and under-explored territory created
by crossing disciplines. I ended up writing about wedding dresses
adorned with sequins of foil-wrapped contraceptive pills, silver-coated
Valium charms on bracelets, the placebo effect, the boundaries between
surface and interior, and all sorts of other things that, although
expressed in somewhat pretentious art-history academese, were incredibly
exciting, at least to me. I’ve since made the space where food meets
everything else my intellectual home, and I don’t know how much longer
it would have taken me to find it (if ever) without Barbara Stafford’s
inspiring introduction to the delights of cross-disciplinary
exploration.
Hillary Rosner
Hillary Rosner has written about science and the environment for The New York Times, Popular Science, High Country News, Mother Jones, Audubon, and many other publications.
My senior year of high school, a young teacher named Mr. Willey
offered a postmodern literature seminar. I’d always loved reading, but
to be freed from the stuffy confines of the canon was incredible. We
read Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Gloria Naylor, Walker
Percy — and in writing assignments we mimicked each author’s style. The
books we read felt so relevant, in a way that nothing before
had, that it really solidified my desire to become a writer. To be 17 in
the late 1980s and reading White Noise… It was so powerful,
like listening to a transformative record. Mr. Willey made me aware, in a
way I hadn’t been before, how many different ways there were to use
language to tell a story or convey a message.
Later, when he read a draft of my college admissions essay, I was
crushed when he said it was trite and needed work. Writing had always
come easily to me, and I’d learned to get by with minimal effort. Mr.
Willey taught me that having a natural aptitude for something means you
have to work even harder at it — because otherwise what’s the point?
Bonnie Bassler
Bonnie Bassler is an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Princeton Professor of Molecular Biology.
From my postdoctoral advisor, Michael Silverman, I learned that
science is an adventure and the only limitation is one’s imagination.
Classroom, Gambia. Photo by H2O Alchemist.
Joe Kloc
Joe Kloc is a freelance writer and illustrator who lives in San Francisco.
My last semester of college, I took a class on Paradise Lost
in which the professor defined Milton’s notion of grace as “the ability
to change.” Raised in Catholic school, I was surprised I had never
heard this — or any — concrete definition of the word. I didn’t think
much of the lesson at the time, because I had long ago taken up the
habit of dismissing any word born of religion.
But then some weeks later, the professor brought up Milton’s grace
again, this time to explain how he had gotten sober after decades of
drinking. As I watched this old man stand before a class of 25 cynical
kids and use his own alcoholism to make an appeal for grace and dignity
in our lives, it occurred to me that whether it was from god or family
or friends — I won’t do him the disservice of speculating which — he had
indeed been given grace. I could no longer dismiss this word; there was
no other to replace it.
I left that class with the understanding that words — their
religious, historical or scientific baggage aside — are ultimately human
inventions, created to articulate our experiences. In dismissing words
too quickly, we run the risk of losing the language that affords us the
ability to comprehend ourselves. I came to see why “Amazing Grace” is
still a song worth singing through a secular life.
Uta Frith
Uta Frith is a developmental psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.
I had many excellent teachers, but today my memory spotlight landed
on one distinct if distant image: Frl. Dr. Lunkenheimer, teacher of the
Sexta, about 40 eleven-year-olds in their first year of high school.
Picture provincial Germany in 1952; picture a suit-clad woman, prim and
spinsterish, with hair that looked as if it couldn’t wait to turn grey,
drawn back into a plain knot, perhaps still in her thirties. She taught
us how to write essays, and how to parse sentences, and she knew her
stuff. After all, she had a PhD. My parents told me it would be more
respectful to address her as Frau Doktor Lunkenheimer, and not Fräulein.
Interestingly, in this they anticipated modern usage, where the
Fräulein has been thoroughly replaced by Frau. Frau Dr L. belonged
definitely to the strict and distant type of teacher rather than the
popular and chummy type. I liked her a lot and always looked forward to
her lessons. Once she deeply hurt my feelings in front of the whole
class and from this stemmed also perhaps her greatest gift to me.
As every pupil of a Gymnasium knows you have to learn poems. I knew
many of them by heart already because my mother was a great fan of
poetry. Almost every Sunday she would read poetry to me and my sister
from her favourite volumes. In lessons with Frau Dr. L. we read and
discussed a famous poem, by Goethe, entitled “Johanna Sebus.” The
subtitle tells all: “In memory of the virtuous and beautiful
seventeen-year-old girl from the village of Brienen who on 13th
January 1809, during the freezing of the Rhine and great collapse of
the dam at Cleve, died while bringing help.” Thus, a real life story was
the subject of this very dramatic ballad, which starts with the
foreboding and onomatopoeic lines, imprinted in the brain of legions of
German schoolchildren:
Der Damm zerreißt, das Feld erbraus’t,
die Fluten spülen, die Fläche saus’t.
“Ich trage dich, Mutter, durch die Flut;
noch reicht sie nicht hoch, ich wate gut.”
(You can find a translation here.)
The story of the heroic girl is told by Goethe in tightly condensed
form: she saves first her mother, carrying her on her back, then goes
back to save a woman and her children (who also asked her to save a
goat), but she fails. The heart wrench of the poem is that all want to
be saved by her but nobody is there to save the heroine.
At this point in the poem a strange anomaly occurs: Goethe refers to
the heroine as “Susie,” (“schoen Sus-chen”): Susie who still stands
straight and good; Susie who stands like a star; Susie whose image
floats above the flood.
Why on earth does Goethe call her Susie and not by her real name,
Johanna? Somebody in the class asked this obvious question, and Frau
Dr. L. said “I really don’t know.” I raised an eager hand indicating
that I knew why: “Goethe didn’t like the name Johanna and he rather
liked the name Susie.” Frau Dr. L. looked at me in surprise: “How do you
know this?” “My mother told me,” I replied proudly. Inevitably, Frau
Dr. L. dismissed this explanation with scorn, telling the whole class
that this information could certainly not be trusted. I was shocked and
mortified. Surely, my poetry-obsessed mother would not make up this
story. Not to trust her word was simply unprecedented, and yet in this
lesson I started to think. It occurred to me that you must always have
precise sources for what you believe to be true — and be able to quote
them at the right moment. The word of a trusted authority, even the
greatest authority, is subject to scrutiny. The reverberating memory of
the shock that I felt at the time made me think that this was a crucial
lesson for me. Remarkably, much later in life I found this lesson to be
encapsulated in the motto of the Royal Society, Nulla in verbis, which means, roughly, “Don’t believe in the words of authority.”
I still thank Frau Dr. L. for having so subtly started my conversion
from childish believer to adolescent doubter. Ironically, Goethe’s
ballad praises a young girl’s love for her mother. Yet, my story is
about finding out that mothers are not infallible. And there is yet
another twist. I still believe that my mother had a credible source for
Goethe’s reasons for the name change. Searching the web today, I found
mention of two possible reasons: First, Goethe did not know the name of
the girl when hearing the story which inspired him to write the ballad;
his information was clearly scanty as he had the age wrong with Johanna
Sebus being only 16 at the time and not 17. The second possible reason
is that he disliked the real name of the heroine – my mother’s
explanation! Here is at last a proper source.
The letter of a young painter, Luise Seidler (1986-1866) is cited.
She wrote in June 1809, a month after Goethe wrote the poem, that he
replaced the real name of Johanna because it had too much pathos because
of its connection with the Maid of Orleans.
Classroom, Kenya, 2010. Photo by Nikki McLeod.
David Dobbs
David Dobbs writes on culture and science for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Neuron Culture, and other places. He’s working on his fifth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion.
I started studying the violin in my 30s, working with a warm, intense teacher named Malone. After 5 years he put Bach’s D minor partita in front of me. “We’ll start with the Allemande,”
he said. He put the music on the stand and talked me through the first
movement, pencilling in bowings and fingerings, occasionally
demonstrating how to get through some rhythmic puzzle, and sent me home.
I practiced hard all week and came in ready to play about half the
first page.
He stopped me on the second note. “Please put down the violin,” he said. I did.
“You’re skipping through that first D. I know it’s just a fucking
little sixteenth note, but you have to play the whole thing. I don’t
even mean the time. You’re actually giving it enough time. But you’re
playing over it instead of through it. You have to play right through the center of it. It’s a leading note, but it’s not just a step into the room. It is the room, and you have to put us there. Play it. Play through every single note in the piece.”
I started to reach for the violin. He held up a hand.
“Wait,” he said. “This is Bach. And Bach, more than any other music,
and these pieces, more than any other Bach, is music complete. This
doesn’t just mean it’s beautiful. This means you can play this music all
your life, even just this Allemande, and no matter what you do, it will
expose you. It will expose everything you are and everything you’re
not. It will expose everything you can do and everything you can’t. It
will expose everything you’ve mastered and everything you’re scared of.
And I don’t mean just about the violin. I mean about everything. It’ll
show all that today and it’ll show all that when you play it again in 10
years. And people who know music, who’ve seen you play it both times,
they will see you play it and know who you were and who you’ve become.
“There is nothing you can do about this. Or actually there is only one thing you can do about it. And that’s to play the fucking music. To not play scared, even if you’re terrified. To not rush. To not short anything. Inhabit this thing. Play it full.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slow, and gave me the tiniest hint
of a smile. “Okay,” he said, and nodded at my violin. “Play.”
Source: PLoS Blogs
No comments:
Post a Comment