Letters to a Teacher

Sam Pickering

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555847210
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

Inspirational reflections on the art of teaching from the acclaimed essayist and teacher who inspired Dead Poets Society. Sam Pickering has been teaching for more than forty years. As a young English teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy in Tennessee, his musings on literature and his maverick pedagogy touched a student named Tommy Schulman, who later wrote the screenplay for Dead Poets Society. Pickering went on to teach at Dartmouth and the University of Connecticut, where he has been for twenty-five years. His acclaimed essays have established him as a nimble thinker with a unique way of enlightening us through the quotidian. Letters to a Teacher is a welcome reminder that teaching is a joy and an art. In ten letters addressed to teachers of all types, Pickering shares compelling, funny, always illuminating anecdotes from a lifetime in the classrooms of schools and universities. His observations touch on topics such as competition, curiosity, enthusiasm, and truth, and are leavened throughout with stories—whether from the family breakfast table, his revelatory nature walks, or his time teaching in Australia and Syria. More than a how-to guide, Letters to a Teacher is an invitation into the hearts and minds of an extraordinary educator and his students, and an irresistible call to reflection for the teacher who knows he or she must be compassionate, optimistic, respectful, firm, and above all, dynamic. "Perhaps the most poetic–even elegiac writing about education published in the past year." — Library Journal

Letter Eight: Pressure

DEAR TEACHER,
Having endured the slings and arrows of book reviewers for two decades, only rarely does unwarranted pestering bother me. My reaction to the girl’s complaining about her grade after the last class was unusual. What irritates, however, is students’ lack of style or planning. When I was in college, I rarely walked into a teacher’s office. When I did enter an office I was prepared for conversation, just as I was prepared for examinations at the end of a semester. Mr. Ballard, the old boy who taught me philosophy at Sewanee, had aged beyond being able to distinguish a C paper from an A paper. Although I was the best student in the class, he gave me B’s, a small matter but something that irked me. Early one morning before class I drank a stiff cup of coffee to get my brain percolating and went to his office. Declaring that one was going to major in philosophy pushed a grade up to B+. I began by saying I was going to major in philosophy, something I knew I would change as soon as the semester ended. To bump the big B into the little A required a smidgen more oil.

I wasn’t sure exactly what to do next, but my tongue was greased. “Oh, I am so pleased you want to major in philosophy,” Ballard said, beaming. “And by the way, what do you think of Aristotle?” Readiness was all. Inspiration sprang into words soft and creamy. “I like Aristotle just fine,” I answered, “but Socrates has changed my life. You know Leo Parini, don’t you?” Leo lived in my dormitory and was another temporary philosophy major. “Yes, indeed,” the man answered, “a most perceptive student. I see a great deal of him.” “Leo and I,” I continued, “are roommates. At the beginning of the semester we didn’t room together. We met in your course and became so interested in philosophy that we decided to room together in order to discuss your lectures. Every evening,” I continued as Ballard sat across from me, puffing and swelling like a muffin soaked in margarine, “every evening we choose some controversial topic and debate it according to the Socratic method. To you, sir, we owe all our intellectual growth. You and your teaching have changed our lives. For the first time in our lives we are capable of thought.”

“Oh, my, Pickering,” Ballard began, almost teary, “your words overwhelm me. They make me glad I am a teacher. Sometimes, you know, teaching can be lonely and dispiriting.” “Sir,” I answered, leaning forward and laying my hand like a butter knife on the old boy’s knee, “don’t be dispirited. When you get down in the dumps, think of Leo and me and the hundreds of other students for whom you have made a lasting difference.” “Bless you, Pickering, bless you,” the old man answered. In class later that morning, he repeated my tale, omitting, thank the Lord, Leo’s and my name. He said that in all his years of teaching no tribute had so touched him. At the end of the course I received an A. I never set foot in a philosophy class again and the next semester I became an English major. To get me to raise grades students have offered me all sorts of things, including cloth for suits, always with no success, but no one has ever offered me such a delightful story. If a student ever did serve up such a tale, I just might raise the grade.

Among the papers Amanda kept as memorabilia from her teaching days were notes from parents. Many explained why children had missed school. Kelly missed school on Tuesday, his mother said, because “he had bands put on his teeth Monday and his mouth was very sore.” Preston, another mother wrote, “has a cold and feels bad, so I let him stay at home yesterday. If you think he is too droopy to be at school today, just send him home. I think he probably spread all the germs Monday and might as well attend today, in case of learning something.” An auditorium of parents worried about grades. “Does Pamela concentrate in class when you are explaining how to do math?” a mother asked. “Apparently she’s not on or something. If she’s not listening maybe a firmer hand would help from you as from me. Her grades are terrible.” “Dear Mrs. Pickering,” another parent wrote. “I am grateful for Marcia’s Arithmetic grade. She was very pleased when she was able to stay with you after school, and it seems to do wonders for her. I hope that you will be able to help her more these next six weeks after school.”

Grade pressure has increased in multiples since the 1960s. In fact many parents hurry children through childhood so that they will get a mind or a leg up on their companions. Summers are lost in intense study and “intenser” play. Children who can hardly run are thrown into soccer camp. Other children go to computer camp. Fifth-graders attend football camp. You will not be able to escape the ratcheting up of pressure and expectation. No matter your efforts to defuse competition, you will fail. In the twelve years my three children attended local schools, I went to only one parent-teacher conference, and that was when Francis began middle school. I canceled all the other conferences. In hopes of deflating pressure, I did not look at report cards on the days children brought them home. Eventually I read the cards because the children were proud of their marks and wanted to be praised. But as soon as Vicki and I glanced at the cards we buried them out of sight. Yet all my children have said I am the most intense, competitive person they have ever met. They have accused me of putting immense pressure on them to get good grades. “You may not have said anything, but that just made it worse. We knew what you wanted.” The statement smacks of the invisible-cat argument. One man points to a chair and says, “There is an invisible cat in that chair.” The other man answers, “The chair is empty. I don’t see a cat.” “That just proves my point,” the first man replies. “You don’t see the cat because it is invisible.”

No matter what they thought I did or did not do, the children felt under pressure to make high marks, most of the pressure inhaled from the air around them, coming from the tenor of a society that forever ranks and rates and does not let children relax and play enough because it defines them as lists of accomplishments. Paradoxically as grades have increased in importance, many high schools have abolished valedictorians and salutatorians and have substituted percentage groupings for rank. Although this may appear to be “dumbing down,” it is in fact “academic upping.” Schools have adopted the measures because increasing numbers of parents think grades increasingly significant and believe it better for college applications if their children appear in a top percentile rather than ranked tenth, twelfth, or twenty-second. Getting rid of the valedictorian and salutatorian penalizes only two students while enabling a group of students to share “top” honors.

In Australia the wonderful teacher who taught Eliza during the second half of our first year in Perth wrote a note to Eliza. Around the note she put seventeen stickers, among others, a pink horse, a yellow and blue butterfly, a blue whale, and two teddy bears sliding down a rainbow. On the card she wrote, “Remember, it’s okay not to be perfect all the time.” Unfortunately, we didn’t stay in Australia. At the beginning of her junior year, Eliza took the College Board Examinations. She made 760 in both math and English. She was upset, and shortly after she’d received the results I found her on the Internet booking the tests again. “I have to get 800s,” she said. “No, you don’t,” I said and broke the telephone connection. “Well,” she said, “I will have to make 800s on the SAT IIs.” “You don’t,” I said. “But I will,” she said. “The brothers did, and I have to also.”

Prepare yourself for the pressures parents, especially middle-class parents, will put upon you and their children. Boys who “broke” the honor code at MBA usually did so not to improve a grade so much as to satisfy a parent and thus make home more bearable. Fomenting competition and its accompanying pressure are also big money earners. Throughout elementary and high school, my children received flyers advertising summer programs, which would, if not guarantee them admission into top colleges, give them a handhold in the Ivy. Last year I gave a keynote talk at a one-day conference sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. The audience consisted of three hundred people: seventh- and eighth-graders and their parents.

In the 1950s book companies sold encyclopedias to lower-middle-class parents. Most of the parents had not attended college, and salesmen claimed the books would boost children to the heads of their classes, ultimately enabling them to enroll in college. Because of growing affluence, not encyclopedias, the children attended college. Now solidly middle class, those children themselves have become parents. To these people Johns Hopkins marketed programs for “Talented Youth,” appealing to a hope similar to that which book companies had made their pitch fifty years earlier. Instead of going to their alma maters, colleges down the road, parents now imagined their babies attending an Ivy League school or at least a distinguished state university. Nowadays the bait of flattering hope always hooks parents. At the conference several parents requested certificates that would testify to their children’s participation and which could be used in applications to college—five or six years later!

Parents often write me not because they care what I think, but in order to enlist me in putting pressure on a child’s teacher. In replies I avoid saying anything that could be used to criticize a child’s teacher. Late one winter a man wrote from Delaware, asking me to assess a poem written by his daughter, an eighth-grader. The girl had written the poem one morning during math class. Later that day she showed the poem to her English teacher. When the teacher did not praise the poem effusively, or so the father recounted, the girl was upset. “Please be as objective as you can and let her know what you think about her poem,” the father said, then added a sentence meant to undercut objectivity. “She needs your support at this time.” Entitled “Sad,” the poem began, “Sad tree. Sad house. / Spinning flowers in my life.” The remaining ten lines did not contribute much more to the poem.

That afternoon I wrote the girl. “Your father sent me a copy of your poem ‘Sad.’ You have a nice lyric sense, and the piece is soft and gentle,” I began. “But I will tell you what I tell students at the university. You have made a beginning, but you must push on.” I urged the girl to read poetry and suggested several collections. “Writing,” I said, “does not come easily. My friends who publish poetry sometimes revise their poems thirty or forty times. Poetry results more from work—hard, slogging work—than from inspiration.” Lastly, I wished the girl good luck and then described something silly I did on the athletic rather than the poetic field when I was her age. Because the letter did not undercut his daughter’s English teacher, the father was disappointed and wrote me back angrily. He said I would not recognize a good poem if I saw one, giving the lie to his plea for objectivity. He and his daughter agreed that I was no longer the teacher depicted in Dead Poets Society. “You have lost the ability to inspire.” I marveled at the letter then tossed it into the recycle can. Parents will say dreadful things to you. Do not let them burrow under the skin and get into your bloodstream. If you have to respond, go into your office alone, shut the door, and quote Tennessee Williams, preferably a terse, ripe phrase, something like “Screw you” or “Kiss my ass.” Afterward open your door, chuckle, step into the hall, and smile like the sunrise.

A Few Platitudes

One Friday in Australia Eliza and I went to the local library. Tacked to a board was a flyer advertising a lecture entitled, “How to Prevent Aging.” “There is only one sure way to prevent aging,” I said to the librarian. “What’s that?” she said, stamping books and not paying much attention to my statement. “Death,” I barked. “What?” she said, looking up and pushing away from her desk. “Death,” I repeated, stepping closer. “Death is the only certain cure for aging. Only fools will attend the lecture.” “Daddy,” Eliza said later, “you frightened that nice woman.” “Good,” I said, “truth disturbs.”

Of course I should have kept my mouth shut. Your success may depend as much upon what you don’t say as what you do say. Fictions thrive everywhere but they do especially well in school environments. “Take the humbug out of life,” Josh Billings, the nineteenth-century humorist, said, “and you won’t have much left to do business with.” No matter what their occupations, people talk and write conventionally, relying upon words and phrases that they haven’t analyzed critically. If you persist in throwing them to the intellectual mat, you will soon be thought a crank. Still, to keep your mind sharp, you must ponder phrases commonly bandied about in educational discussions. Of course common phrases function as intellectual shorthand. The problem is that they distort and shortchange thought. Tacked to a bulletin board in the classroom in which I taught this fall was a poster. Printed on the poster in big black letters was the command TEACH THE WHOLE CHILD. Beneath the imperative someone, resembling me, at least intellectually, had written, “except the private parts.”

The phrase “role model” seems to be as popular among educators as the Comedy Central channel is among teenagers. Only the unexamined life is exemplary. No life can stand scrutiny and interpretation, this last usually bent by biographers in order to startle and thus sell books. In part “role model” is just an example gone uptown and dressed in fancy duds. Yet it is different, raising the image, say, of a toy train, each part smaller than the original, as children are smaller than adults, but still in scale. Implied in the celebration of role model is the assertion that if children copy adults meticulously they can, if not become those adults, then at least succeed to the same degree. The implication, of course, is a lie. Moreover, the concept itself is probably a fiction and, like so many fictions, one imposed paternalistically by the well meaning upon the poor and deprived, of whose actual lives the good intentioned usually know little. I have never met a student who modeled her life on that of another person. By all means describe good examples, but do not assume that example will change behavior.

Bad example or the “unrole model” can terrify and often changes people quicker than good example. Moreover copying good example does not necessarily bring happy results. In “His Little Hatchet,” Petroleum V. Nasby, the nineteenth-century American wit, described the results of mimicking good example. “I commenced being good at a very early age and built myself up on the best models,” Nasby wrote. “I was yet an infant when I read the affecting story of the hacking down of the cherry tree by George Washington, and his manly statement to his father that he could not tell a lie. I read the story and it filled me with a desire to surpass him. I was not going to let any such a boy as George Washington, even if he did afterwards get to be President, excel me in the moralities.” Nasby then proceeded to chop down his father’s most valuable cherry tree. After felling the tree, he went Washington one better and dug up the roots, “so that by no means could the variety be preserved.” Nasby eagerly anticipated confessing and being “wept over and forgiven” because of his “extreme truthfulness.” The plan failed. “I was very much like George Washington, but the trouble was that my father didn’t resemble George Washington’s father.” On being asked, “Did you chop down the cherry tree?” Nasby responded, “Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.” Nasby then struck “the proper attitude for the old gentleman to shed tears on me.” Alas, his father said that “he had rather I told a thousand lies than to have cut down that particular tree, and he whipped me until I was in an exasperated rawness.”

Unlike role model, example is real. “My family was poor. My parents didn’t read, and there were few books in the house when I was growing up,” a friend told me. “I liked reading and checked books out of the school library, but I didn’t think about teaching until the sixth grade. The man who taught the sixth grade held books delicately and turned pages carefully. He told the class that books mattered, and he read us stories and poetry. One day while listening to him read and watching him turn pages, I thought, ‘This is what I am going to do. I’m going to teach.’”

You should be your students’ best example. Show them that you enjoy teaching and that what you teach matters. Little things will contribute to your success as an example. For instance, how students address you matters. You are not Emma or Raymond. You are a teacher. You are Miss Johnson, Mrs. Ratcliffe, Ms. Catlin, Mr. Griffin, and Coach Garthright. Titles preserve and elevate. Certainly formality can inhibit and imprison. Yet in classrooms, which inevitably spiral toward chaos, they help preserve order. They serve as drags on untoward recklessness. They help define you as someone important, a person worth listening to and obeying.

Another phrase that has been used past the threadbare stage is “learning experience.” The phrase offers false consolation and is symptomatic of people’s fierce determination to be positive and optimistic and thus frees them from scrutinizing living. Generally people undergo something dreadful. On recovering they say, “While it was going on, it was terrible. But the ordeal was a learning experience. I’m a better person for it. Now that it is over, I am thankful for the experience.” Not long ago Hoben Donkin met Floyd Templeton outside Read’s drugstore in Carthage. “Floyd,” Hoben said, “I haven’t seen you for the longest time. How’ve you been?” “Not so well,” Floyd answered. “Last summer I disturbed a bear eating blackberries.” “Oh, my Lord,” Hoben said. “What happened?” “The bear chased me,” Floyd said. “Although I ran as fast as I could, he caught me, and before I had a chance to introduce myself, he killed me and ate me.” “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Hoben said. “I’m so sorry.” “Well, thank you,” Floyd answered. “It wasn’t pleasant, but I learned a lot from the experience, and if I weren’t dead, I could put it to good use.” “I bet you could. You’re just the man for it. Nobody could do better. I’m really sorry you died,” Hoben said somberly. “Thanks for that, too,” Floyd said. “I appreciate your sympathy and concern.”

Dream and unwarranted expectation flourish in a mobile society. Although many Americans are born in peonage, they are not legally bound to it. Only imagination limits what Americans think they or, in the case of schools, their children can accomplish. When the shell of expectation shatters and people’s hopes for themselves prove rotten, they still can imagine their children breaking free from hard circumstances and soaring fully fledged over the impossible. Most Americans see life as linear and upward, a progress in which people, particularly children, stride toward secular achievement, growing by overcoming challenges. In this vision education is the handmaiden of success. When a child reaches a barrier, education extends a hand. The classroom would be different if Americans saw life as circular. Then perhaps education would not stress mastery as much as appreciation, accomplishment more than joy.

Some years ago a student interviewed me for an assignment. What aspects of my life, she asked, had changed during the past five years. I explained that little had changed. Unlike earlier hunks of time during which children were born and parents died, when dreams and ambition fermented, recent years had stretched flat, calm, and happy. “The only change that the past five years has brought to my life,” I said, “is the wonderful absence of change.” In the platitudinous view of life as a continuing progress, stasis is failure. My answer disturbed the student. “I’m supposed to talk about change and challenge,” she said. “I’ll have to interview someone else.” Teachers know that yearly grade reports that show progress from, say, 72 to 76 or 82 to 88 satisfy parents and administrators.

No matter how good they are, school systems are pressured to “improve,” or if not really improve then adopt changes that give the illusion of improvement and, in another wearying phrase, of “adapting to changing times.” By all means try different methods. Work and try to better your teaching, but be aware that in education life can be circular; today’s startling improvement may be a reworking of something done twenty years ago, then dropped and forgotten. Still, dry bones may live just because they appear unfamiliar. Nothing, though, as I keep pointing out, is simple. Although dry bones may invigorate classes, they may also kill, especially when politicians package them as a return to the basics, usually as an excuse to cut education budgets, “frills,” they invariably say. The truth is that many teachers teach only the basics. Not only can their schools not afford frills but their students are ill prepared for anything other than basics. Alas, these are just the students who might benefit greatly from frills, inessentials that break the sad tenor of their lives. Instead of serving these students an impoverished low-calorie diet of basics, schools might better serve community by dishing out frills, high culture that might startle and awaken.

No one escapes generalities studded with words like challenge and growth. Educators are particularly susceptible to them because such platitudes justify their existence. If people stopped believing or paying lip service to the idea that education shaped adults, schools and universities would close and the economy would collapse. Because my son Francis did well on the PSATs, a sort of preliminary college entrance examination taken by juniors in high school, a foundation invited him to apply for a summer fellowship, six weeks spent at Kenyon or Cornell discussing identity. Applicants were instructed to write short essays, the topics the stuff of the ...