A Personal Letter from an Inveterate Writing Teacher
by Robert Reichle
Life, I think, is a problem of energy management - seeking it out~ tapping it, transforming it
from crude into something that fuels us with little waste; deciding when and upon whom to
lavish it; and deciding from whom to accept it if it is offered.
The wise person knows two things especially about energy management: First, 'shifting our
attention from one thing to another depletes our strength more quickly than focusing our
attention does. As students, you all feel this. You must leap from' Freud" in psychology to "free
will" in philosophy; from "covalent bonds" in chemistry to "junk bonds' in business. To make
sense of all this you have guidance counselors who help you spend your energy teaching you
how to juggle your time. Beyond the university each of us is also a friend, an employee, a
dreamer, and, perhaps even a parent. If only we didn't have to weave all these roles together,
we think, we might get a focused grasp on one or two. We might never feel an energy crisis.
The second thing the wise person knows about energy management is that the greatest
potential source of energy is interaction among others. Thus, when we wrestle on battlefields
against our enemies armed to the teeth, or when we wrestle in beds with our lovers disarmed
to the bone, we are engaged in our greatest dramas ~ inevitable tragedies and comedies of
chaos resolving themselves, again, into equilibrium. In every such drama each player is part of a
system of shifting potential energy.
I had a vivid memory of the day when my high school physics teacher, Mr. Carl Abato, explained
the concept of potential energy to us. He placed a piece of chalk on his desk. The potential
energy of the chalk in this system, he said, is virtually zero. The chalk is at rest. But if we push
the chalk nearer the edge of the desk ~ as one might place a lit cigarette ~ the energy in this
system is increased the more it overhangs, the more it cannot resist (without the help of the
desk) the force of gravity. The potential energy becomes greater and greater until the chalk
teeters and falls from the desk ~ with a force equal that of gravity.
At the time this seemed a simple enough idea, and while I don't remember ever having to use it,
even during that physics class, I have reflected frequently on the metaphor feeling it was
momentous. The potential energy metaphor is powerful, in fact, beyond the boundary of
physics: since that time I have played with the notion when thinking of animate creatures ~ like
human beings ~ trying to dredge up something I sensed was implicit in Mr. Abato's explanation.
The idea is that all action implies vulnerability, all increases in potenti.al energy incite a change
of state ~ a fall if you will ~ but all action again reaches , eventually, a state of equilibrium,
always with more or less breakage, more or less chalk dust.
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Since that time I have become a teacher myself, and I have watched with interest the drama we
call "education," especially as it is played out it its familiar classroom form. I have seen myself
extend the potential energy metaphor even further as a result. I have used my physics lesson to
imagine this picture of the classroom: that students are really so many pieces of chalk, and
teachers are the forces drawing them ever closer to the edges of their desks. This simply means
that learning is and must be a little dangerous, that one must survive a change of state before
equilibrium is achieved again.
As I crossed the USC campus that bright morning, I fantasized in an almost maudlin way about
an episode from the old Twilight Zone television series. The episode starred Donald Plesance
as an aging professor of history at a small, prestigious mid-western college, who was, because
of forced retirement, due to give his final lectures, his final performances in the classroom. An
impeccable scholar, he saw himself nonetheless more as a teacher who, because of his
erudition, could move closer to his students rather than retreating from them into some ivory,
ivied tower. He was an historian who knew how to speak of the past so that his students could
be better primed for their futures.
Forced retirement was not totally unwarranted. The professor was getting a little senile: he
often lost his train of thought or messed the order of his lecture notes; he often misnamed
students he met every day, sometimes substituting names two generations into his teaching
past. Still, he was keen enough to know that the opportunity to continue what he loved to do
was slipping away.
Of course, be entertained ending it all- for living is not living without a livelihood; and the
present is nothing but a fleeting abstraction without knowledge of the past and an image of the
future. As you might expect, he thought of splattering his confused, spent, and wasted brains
about the room. For this is the necessarily melodramatic climax for someone whose job is and
always will be more theatrical art than information science.
One particularly dismal evening he is about to have dinner in his study. He sits at his desk,
impassively waiting for his housekeeper to serve his meal. One senses that the leather-bound
books lining his shelves, which at one time whet his appetite for ideas and richly fed him with
other minds, now pressed with a dull pain against our hero's fading brain. When his meal
arrives, he has no taste for food. For the body to be a good accomplice in cerebral homicide it
should not feel sated, it should not feel contented with the present, nourished for the future.
The future is our hero's enemy.
He pushes away his dinner, removes a revolver (a Civil War relic no doubt) from the drawer of
his desk and heads entranced into the evening snowfall late in the winter semester. He
wanders mindlessly to the monument of the college founder where he determines to kill
himself. But as he is about to pull the trigger the bells of the campus dome (quite
inappropriately) begin to chime...
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Dazed and unsteady, unsure of where he is, the professor is slowly seduced by the ringing
rhythms filling the darkened sky. The bells have always indicated the convening of lectures; so,
no less familiar to him now, they beckon him to his classroom. He enters and moves with habit
to his desk where he sits down heavily and buries his face in his hands. And here looms the
ethereal - and in this case ironic - boundary of the twilight zone: Our teacher, who is a teacher
no longer, is about to be educated himself, about to get the lesson of his life from none other
than some of his own former students.
There is a scuffing of feet and voices. Our hero lifts up his heavy head from his hands and
squints to face the classroom of ghostlike countenances, each vaguely familiar to him each
virtually alive. They look like students, so he feels the automatic impulse to teach them. A
search for his notes ends in vain. He attempts to speak extemporaneously but he can make no
sound· he rises and moves to the chalkboard, but he can make no marks.
Confused and exhausted he collapses again into his chair.
"Professor. Professor Kenner," sounds a young male voice. It is John Doe, a student who
graduated from the college in 1941 and then with a whole generation rushed dutifully,
enthusiastically off to war. The professor looks up and slow recognition erases the creases in his
face.
"John Doe. I that you, John? It's so good to see you."
John Doe has arrived in this classroom because of an act of bravery in the battle for
GuadalcanaI. He jumped on a hand grenade and saved a dozen fellow soldiers. He tells the
professor that by learning history he learned the necessity of social sacrifice and suffered little
ill saving his comrades.
The professor's face shows amazement and wonder.
Next there is Mary Smith, a perky, freckled redhead whose qualifications for this chimerical
classroom visit was dying at the hands of white racists in the South. Mary fought for black civil
rights before it was fashionable, and it cost her her life. She has returned to assure Professor
Kenner that the history that came to life in his lecture seemed a history of the fight for human
dignity. She felt a part of that history.
Finally among others, there is Jane Doe. Jane has preformed no publicly recognized act of
bravery. In fact, her life has been rather plain. Even her permit to tonight’s strange class is
nothing more remarkable than an inoperable brain tumor. But Jane has come perhaps with the
evening's most important message. She comes to say: "Professor Kenner, there is no reason for
despair. I have seen your future ~ they were my students."
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Here we cannot help but here Rod Serling's guiding narration: "What we've seen in Professor
Kenner's classroom this evening is a visit from a group whose lives were cut short, students who
have taken brief sabbaticals from death to educate a weary professor and bring him out of his
funk with tile most important lesson of his life: ‘As long as a teacher has students, he has a
livelihood; as long as his students become teachers, his future is secure.’ This is just one of the
important lessons from the Manual of Higher Education in the district called The Twilight
Zone.’”
It's Rod Serling sappy - all of it. I know. But I cry when I see it, and I'm sure I was misty-eyed just
thinking about it that first day at use while I approached my first group of freshmen.
*
*
*
It is not by accident that I say this Twilight Zone teacher was "educated," that his former
students 'brought him out or' his funk. For the word "educate" comes from the Latin, educare,
which means "to raise, to bring up," but is related to educere which means to lead out." We
carry around, most of us, the notion that education is the process of mastering some discipline,
skill or subject matter. Moreover, we think of this process in metaphors of "minds being filled
with knowledge." Looked at in this schoolish way education seems to be the original metaphor
turned inside-out, put on its head. Students “cram” their head with the facts or “absorb"
professors' lecturings; then they spill their brains on one of school's most striking institutional
moments ~ exams ~ all to get diplomas, those exit tickets which satisfy the student hunger to
put education behind them.
But “to educate" really means to pull something out of our students; rather than IN-ducing
them we need to E-duce them. And we hide this mistaken technique of
pushing-instead-of-pulling behind a professional name called "teaching" which more often than
not IN-structs without EX-tracting anything valuable out of anybody.
It should be clear by now that I do not trust the institutional warp of education.
However, I should say it's not exactly clear what teachers are, indeed, supposed to educe from
their students. Maybe the Twilight Zone gives us some guidance. Professor Kenner's students
might have been filled with history after all, but their actions clearly went beyond the actions of
mere diplomates – “those who have received diplomas and are thereby certified as specialists."
His students were more than mere specialists, for they connected the study of human history to
human dignity, to social sacrifice, and to the futures of other, not just to their own professions.
The discipline of history did not make them educated; it made them informed. But Professor
Kenner communicated history in its richness s as human drama, and this is what pulled his
students out of themselves to play on stages a various as World War II, Birmingham, Alabama,
and Thomas Jefferson High School in Yourtown, USA. Professor Kenner accomplished
something that many instructors do not: he brought the "person" out of the individual student
and the proof that he performed this educement is that a few real persons came back to him to
return the favor.
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Perhaps this idea of education is hard for you to understand. Especially in a writing class . Good.
I hope it s a little disconcerting, a little frustrating. But I've been guided by the idea all semester.
I've been bobbing and weaving, first left, then right, all in the interest of avoiding the answers
the formulas, and the rules - all those things students' stomachs seem best adapted to digest.
So, instead of giving answers and delineating formulas and rules, I've been trying to draw good
questions and strategic decisions out of you - be they malformed because of your ingenuous
habitual need to please the teacher or be they exquisitely wrought in a golden moment of
insight and grace. I've been trying to get you to think, and as we all know, one of the equations
of the new millennium is: "Writing is thinking.”
One thing is certain: the activities of the writing class especially - the thinking and rethinking of
ideas, the expression of experience in the revision of language - are the exact activities which
best bring the "person” out of the student. And because these activities best bring us out, one
could say that the activities of literacy, of writing and reading, constitute education; the
disciplines, the subject matters of math and psychology and history and philosophy and
sociology and biology do not. This means an educated person must be more than a receptacle
of facts; must be more than a consummate methodologist; certainly must be more than a
professional specialist. The educated individual must be the one who knows how to use facts,
how to use methods, how to use ideas and language to bring the 'person ' out of himself and
out of others. The educated person uses language, especially, to give guts and hair to
experience so that it may live in public and be identified a human.
It is her in passing that I must disagree with those commentators on writing who emphasize the
inner Self in the composing act. I do not believe, as they do, that we write finally to discover our
selves through profound moments on indwelling reflection. Of course, anything, we write must
tell us something of what's inside us, but writing cannot be just an inner search for the
individual. It is also an activity which makes a product, and products are public, even when we
write only to ourselves as in a diary. The Self-searchers concentrate too much on the often
isolated and isolating atmosphere of composing. (Actually, I'm sitting quite alone right now as a
matter of fact, wallowing in my own weak mind. But I'm wallowing for the purpose of making
an artifact, a manifest of myself, to be sure, but not just of myself. It's a manifest of humanity
as well).
Plumbing one's own depths may be amusing, frightening, saddening or joyful, or even
disappointingly boring ~ but I do I not understand why we tend to see these personal
revelations as amounting to much by themselves. If we don't see these as human revelations,
indications of things at least as important as the individual who made them, then I think we
have failed at becoming educated. In effect, it is the "search-for-Self” psychology of the 60's
and 70's which has forced us inside our own little heads to look for enlightenment ... and we
can't get out!
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Consider what follows as an illustration of what I have just said. When I read E. B. White or
Friedrich Nietzsche or Annie Dillard or Thomas Mann or Flannery O'Connor (to name my
favorites ), my impulse is to converse with the person behind the text, with the human and
humane voice I hear behind the characters, the plots, the insights the individual styles.
Regardless of the difference in timbre, these humane voices make me want to engage in
dialogue, to sit with them in their book-lined studies, beside the fire, to trade our fictions and
our histories. And when writing instead of reading, no matter how geographically or mentally
isolated I feel, my impulse is not to find myself, but to find myself in conversation with
someone else. If you've ever been locked in real conversation, you know what I mean. We want
so badly to know about our talk-partners, and we struggle to form the best questions we can
ask them - questions which will earn responses mixed with sincerity, vulnerability and courage,
responses which will always speak a little bit of life and death whether the topic is Dostoevski
or Disneyland. And at the same time, we wait. We pray for the life and death questions to be
asked of us so that we may - in blessed desperation - let the other know who we are, let our
persons out of ourselves, act like we're educated.
It is with blessed desperation that I converse with you tonight through this document. Because I
am about to leave a place where I have been a student and a teacher for about seventeen years,
there are things which must be said - and said now because the time is dramatic.
First I am desperate because I have witnessed an institution of higher education start to place
more and more emphasis on institution than education. It has at least begun to confuse the
two. To use the jargon of this essay: it is investing its energy more and more on the installation
of knowledge into its students' heads instead of on the distillation of something valuable from
its students through knowledge. Students are not so much being rendered into persons as they
are being rent into specialist individuals. I know this only by dealing with all of you. Grades and
diplomas motivate most of you more than knowledge does; the dream of a good job gives you
stamina more than social commitment does. While I sympathize with you because cultural
forces have helped to make you this way, I cannot help but worry about whether or not enough
of you see the problem yourselves. The institution is passing its values along to you, petrifying
them in you. I'm troubled: what kind of teachers will you be?
Next I feel desperate because as the university becomes more institutional in character it
alienates its faculty and students from each other. It used to be that administrations
administered the wills of the faculties; that the faculties made choices and designed curricula
based on interactions with each other and their students. But in the new university students
are not so much learners as they are tuition payers who help to keep the business of education
alive. A real student is truly difficult to replace; a tuition payer is not - at least not in a
democracy perversely committed to letting anything that breathes into a school. Because
students are more and more functioning as tuition-payers, faculties have become fingers of an
administrative have that must gently massage and please its current and prospective
customers.
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To please prospective students is precisely not to educate them. There should be risk in
becoming educated. The upshot of all this is that the real students, the risk-takers who seek to
be educated, actually become trespassers in the very places they thought would be home.
Finally I am desperate simply because I must move on. I must now plunge off a desk from which
I have been pushed by irresistible forces. This will take most of the energy I have on reserve
right now. Yet, as I sit in front of you this evening for the last time lucky enough to recognize
you here and now before you come back on unlikely sabbaticals from death, I realize that once
again I have been educated this semester too. Here is what you have brought out of me:
We must recognize the limits of individuality. No longer can we assume that our lives' goals are
to discover the core of ourselves. I know this might sound odd to people immersed in a culture
hyperactive with individualism. I've learned in being a teacher, however, that my life has been
strangely dedicated to tomorrow - and not necessarily my own tomorrow. It has been
dedicated to knowledge - not in a scholarly and hoarding way, but in a Socratic mid-wifing way.
Our best teachers, I believe, recognize that the world will go on without them when they die. Or,
maybe better: persons who recognize that the world will survive their deaths are those best
suited to teach others. In any case, the world that does survive will be better or worse
depending on how many students have been educated in to persons. Unfortunately, this is hard
to measure: unlike the architect who can point to a solid edifice, or even the murderer who can
silently relish the fact that he has left a writhing, bleeding victim, the teacher usually has no
clear artifact to point to in order to gauge the success (or failure) of his efforts and, therefore,
his value - unless, of course his students can bring out themselves as persons and educate
others to do the same.
What I am implying is that we should all be teachers at least some of the time, and we should
perceive that this is not an endeavor of merely personal satisfaction. We should become deft at
brining others out of themselves, and that any scruple of individual satisfaction must be
weighed against the responsibility we have to them. not to ourselves.
Biologically we are genetic individuals; theologically we are unique souls; psychologically we are
autonomous selves. But culturally we are persons, and I believe that moments of teaching,
whether they occur within or without the walls of the classroom, are the most important
moments for such preciously constituted creatures.
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