Teachers

I am not breaking any new ground here by saying teaching is a tough, thankless, low-paying job. Their value is huge, their compensation minimal. Yet, who has a greater long-term impact on young people- a caring teacher or a celebrity? Today I am going to share some thoughts on teachers who had a great influence on me.

I was fortunate. As a kid I went to private schools. My dad was a teacher, a good one, and the headmaster of the schools I attended. From Montessori through my senior year of high school we went to school together. My dad was my 8th grade algebra teacher and my physics teacher my junior year. I never got higher than an A-, and no, it wasn’t weird that he was my teacher or headmaster; I had no other frame of reference.

My 4th and 5th grade teachers, Mrs. And Mr. Hackworth were (and still are) married to each other. Mrs. Hackworth taught us poetry. Each weekend we would have to memorize I poem of her selection and be prepared to recite it aloud on Monday. It was hell, but I learned a lot. Honestly, I don’t remember much of what Mr. Hackworth taught us. I mostly remember him. He had a reputation as a tough, mean teacher, but to me he was just a good man. I really enjoyed 5th grade, despite not remembering much of what I learned.

As a freshman in high school I had a writing teacher called Bernice Hopkins. She also ran the school newspaper and encouraged me to write for it. My first assignment was to interview the school’s new soccer coach. I had no idea what to do so I basically transcribed my Q &A with him and that ran on the front page of the paper. My lack of style became my style. It was just what I did with the post about my friend Stephan and Veoh last week.

More important to my writing development was Dan Frank, a teacher I had as a sophomore in high school. He showed me structure- an introduction, a middle and a conclusion. So simple now, yet I guess I had to learn it some time. Today, Dan is the headmaster of the Francis Parker school here in Chicago, one of the top private schools in the city.

It’s often hard to find good teachers in college. So many academics are researchers first, teachers second. Despite this I had a handful. Alfred Appel I mentioned yesterday. (As I type this I can hear him in my ear lecturing about Lolita- he translated it and was a student of Nabokov’s). I was a teaching assistant for Irv Rein. He is a communications professor who studied a wide variety of topics ranging from celebrity to the rhetoric of supermarkets. In many ways he taught me how to be a college teacher. Like Appel, Irv showed me the performative nature of being a teacher. Both men could command your attention even when delivering dry material.

Anyone who has taken an Art History course at Northwestern knows about Hollis Clayson. She was and still is the best art history teacher I ever had. When I was a junior she was denied tenure and left school. Students were outraged, but years later she returned to N.U. I used to take my lunch and sit in the darkened lecture hall as she showed slides and spoke. She had a tremendous vocabulary, but then could turn on a dime and describe a Goya painting as “icky.”

Graduate school was full of great professors. David Tracy, my thesis advisor, had to cancel two meetings with me. One time he had to go to Rome to meet with the Pope. The other time he went to the White House to meet with the president. I was happy just to be in David’s presence. The funny thing is every time we met he wanted to talk about movies, while I wanted to talk about my thesis.

As a teacher I hope I live up to the standards set by the men and women mentioned above.

PeterH