[For this year’s
annual post-Charlottesville-trip series, I wanted to share tributes to various
folks who were important influences during my Cville years. Leading up to a
special weekend post on a peer of mine who’s aiming to become a Cville
influence in 2019!]
[NB. This post
is a repeat, and I have indeed been able to share it with Mr. Heartwell and see
him in recent years!]
On the
challenging and vital art of getting through.
I like to say that I gave some
thought to teaching high school English before settling on grad school and
college teaching, and that’s not untrue, but the bottom line—and I’ve always
known it at some level—is that I knew I couldn’t get through a career teaching
at the high school level. In my admittedly individual and limited experiences
(in public schools, which are the only ones I can speak to), many of those
English teachers who had made it to retirement age in that demanding and
under-appreciated and –paid profession did so by shutting down in significant
ways, by dulling their love of the subject or their desire to connect with
their students on a day to day basis or similar core aspects of what we do.
I’ll never forget my junior year American lit teacher, for example, who,
realizing that we didn’t have time to read Melville’s Billy Budd as planned, told us we would watch the movie instead—and
then, when we ran out of time for even that, just spent five minutes telling us
the entire plot and ended by saying, “That’ll do.” The really passionate and
committed and innovative English teachers, on the other hand, the ones who
clearly couldn’t do their job without staying in the room every day and in
every way, seemed to burn out very young and leave the profession.
As I saw it then and as I have
heard from friends and grad students who teach in the public schools up here,
there are plenty of practical and administrative reasons for that
trend—requirements from the school system and the state (and now standardized
testing and outside agencies), the difficulties and dangers of assigning works
that might be controversial or anger parents or fall outside of certain
boundaries, the need to do things like grammar and vocabulary in ways that
might have nothing to do with one’s own pedagogical ideas and goals, and many
others—, but if I had to identify one overarching factor, it’d be the
difficulty of getting through to the students themselves. If and when I
complain about trying to get my students to read or be interested in what we’re
doing, I try to remember how much more difficult it would be with 15 year olds,
kids who aren’t paying to be there and didn’t in any sense choose to be and
have everything going on that 15 year olds do and often think it’s nerdy and
horrible to show any interest in a class text or topic and etc. And when
thinking about that doesn’t make me feel any more inspired, I remember that
getting through to those kids—to any class—is difficult but not impossible,
remember a soft-spoken man with a Southern accent and an abiding love for
Faulkner and singer-songwriters and the Black Mountain poets, remember maybe
the most pitch-perfect, Robin Williams-movie-like name of any teacher I’ve ever
had: Mr. Heartwell.
I had Proal Heartwell for
two classes—AP English and Advanced Composition—in my senior year of high
school, a time when you’d think, when I thought, that my love for reading and
writing was already pretty fully developed (I had, after all, signed up for AP
English and Advanced Composition). But Mr. Heartwell proved us both wrong, on
an almost daily basis, and in more ways than I can possibly detail here. The
first thing in the morning journal free writes set to music that each of us got
to bring in and share with our classmates; the unit on close reading song
lyrics of our choice (as a sneaky way to get us analyzing poetry) that I have
shamelessly cribbed for my
own Writing I syllabus; the dense and difficult texts (from As I Lay Dying to multiple Shakespeare
plays to, yeah, the Black Mountain Poets) that he found ways to get us to open
up for ourselves, to feel as if we were making them alive and new; the cassette
tape with more than an hour of feedback that he gave each of us for our short
stories; the poetry reading he organized for us and emceed at a downtown book
store. I don’t think I remember with any real specificity or vividness any one
assignment or unit from any other high school class—most of my high school
memories are of that time I should have asked her to dance, that humiliating
day at lunch, and, y’know, that other 15-year old kind of stuff—but I remember
all of those from Mr. Heartwell’s classes, and many more besides. Would I have
majored in History and Literature in college, written a thesis on historical
fiction and American culture, gone to grad school for a PhD in English, published
my first article on Faulkner, if I didn’t take those classes with Mr.
Heartwell? Maybe. But I’m not sure I would have gotten through senior year and
high school without him, and I know I wouldn’t be the teacher and reader and
writer and person I am.
I don’t think I ever quite told
Mr. Heartwell any of this—no final scene with all of us standing on our desks
in this movie, at least in part because luckily no one forced Mr. Heartwell
out; he did leave at a later point to found an
innovative middle school for girls, inspired I believe by his own daughter.
But I have to believe that he already knows how much he was getting through to
us, how much he got through the obstacles and requirements and got right to the
core of what makes teaching and literature and reading and writing alive and
vibrant, meaningful and valuable. Next Cville influence tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Influential
people you’d highlight?
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