I was asked to speak at the funeral of a revered English teacher at my alma mater in Mobile, Al. This is the text of my remarks.
I graduated from McGill-Toolen in 1980, and Jane Everest
taught me as a junior in American Studies English. Frankly, most of high school is a blur in my memory—a
collection of indistinct impressions and sentiments. It says something about
the impact that Jane had on my life that I remember her so vividly.
Many of you know that I am now a Catholic high school
principal and have been so for 24 years. I’ve interviewed and hired a lot of
high school teachers. In terms of the classroom, I look for two qualities:
First—a deep knowledge and dexterity with the
subject matter. A teacher can’t fake that, and smart kids, especially, will
dismiss a teacher as irrelevant if he or she doesn’t have the tools.
Second—a hard to define “with-it-ness”: a
presence, a person who is on the ball, but also a person with a certain
quirkiness that can keep kids’ attention. We forget that students spend all day
in desks in consecutive classes, and if the teacher doesn’t stand out or sport
some eccentricity, students slumber through his or her class.
Jane had both qualities, in abundance. In terms of the second, she was
wonderfully absent-minded, and even used it as her shtick to keep us amused and
interested. One afternoon, I remember that she was sitting in front of her desk
and talking with us, and started to fiddle with a stapler as she talked.
Suddenly she shrieked: “Agghh! I’ve stapled myself!” She came running over to
me in the front row. I looked at it. It wasn’t a nick—the staple was deeply
embedded in the palm of her hand. “Pull it out,” she said to me, “I can’t
watch.” I did so, somewhat horrified.
The reaction of the class went from deep concern (for about 5 seconds)
to secret hope that we might get an extra 15 minutes of free time while our
teacher sought first aid in the office. Didn’t happen—undeterred, Jane went
right on teaching!
In the late 1970’s, we didn’t have cell phones, so there was
no such thing as text-messaging, and therefore no problems with texting and
driving. But Jane was a fore-runner to that problem. After school one day, I
was driving somewhere and she was in the car ahead of me. She was reading a BOOK while she was
driving the car. That’s an enduring image I have of her: she always had a book
in her hand. As a student, I figured she was reading a book and was at the good
part, and oh, bother, she had to go home, so she just kept right on reading.
She had a peculiar wit. She asked her students to lead the
prayer before each class, and being unimaginative and ill-prepared, we often
defaulted back to the same prayer: “Lord, please help Friday get here quickly.”
After hearing this prayer for the tenth or so time, Jane looked at us and said
“I am concerned. You guys are simply praying your life away.” That comment
stuck with me, and I smile about it even now.
But Jane was also the real deal in the classroom—tough,
uncompromising, with high expectations. Having been one, having raised three,
and now principal of about 300 of them, I can say with authority that teenage
boys are know-it-alls. Mark Twain once wrote that when he was 16, his parents
were the stupidest people in all the world. When he turned 21, he was amazed at
how much they had learned in five years. So when my friends and I arrived that
first day in Jane’s English class, we had the attitude of “It’s ENGLISH. What
could we possibly learn here?”
Jane’s unequivocal answer: PLENTY. Really, her class was the first class that truly challenged
us. I don’t remember the grade on
my first essay—it was less than I was used to—but I do remember very clearly
this zinger she wrote at the top of my paper: “Faustin, you write beautifully,
but you have nothing to say. “ Appropriately enough, the first two years of
high school focused on the “How” of writing—the structure of the essay, the
grammar, the organization. But Jane wanted to know the “What.” What’s the
argument? Where’s the evidence? Did you make your case? And if we tried to hide
the fact we didn’t really understand a piece of literature in our writing, she
called us out. I have spoken to my
three sisters and brother, all of whom had Jane, and to my good friend Vincent
Ho, who left McGill, went to Harvard and became a doctor, and we all have the
same memory: Jane kicked our rears a bit, and because of that earned our
respect even as our writing greatly improved.
One of the great blessings of working in Catholic high
schools is that I meet some pretty incredible people, people who sacrifice a
life of glamour, or fame, or money in order to help kids. There’s a pernicious saying out there:
“People who can, do. People who can’t teach.” I can’t say strongly enough how
dead wrong that saying is. Good teachers can juggle ten things at once, they can
hold a room full of teenagers rapt with attention for an hour (if you think
that’s easy, you’ve haven’t tried it), they often must deal with the unhappy or
unruly student, or console or help re-direct the unhappy parent, monitor the
parking lot, create tests, grade papers, enter grades, respond to emails—and
the best teachers do all of these things with grace and even joy. People with
those skills could make a mint in other jobs if they wanted to.
The family
tells me that Jane taught high school for 28 years. By my estimation, then, she
taught well over 3,000 of us before she retired. When we die, what do we want people to say about us? I don’t
want people to say I was rich, or famous, or clever, or cool. I want people to
say I made a difference in other people’s lives.
Speaking on behalf of the 3,000 students I have the honor of
representing this morning, Jane Everest made a difference in our lives. And for
that, we are forever indebted, and forever proud to call her our teacher.
No comments:
Post a Comment