Educating Myself While Teaching

Here's a confession: When I began teaching in 1966 at age 21, I didn't know a lot.

Here's another confession: When I finished teaching in the spring of 2011, I still didn't know a lot.

Oh, sure, I knew more than I'd known in 1966, but considering all there is to know in the world, I still didn't know a lot. And still don’t.

But this is what I did, right from the beginning. I looked on teaching as an opportunity to educate my students, sure, but also to educate myself.

In bed at night that first year in my tiny, practically bare apartment in Twinsburg, Ohio, I made myself read an hour each night of U. S. history (I was teaching it to my seventh graders), an hour of important fiction (for I was teaching English, as well). I can remember only one book I read that year, a book about the framing of our Constitution: Miracle at Philadelphia, 1966, by Catherine Drinker Bowen. I think it was in that book that I learned that B. Franklin was opposed to the bald eagle as our national bird; he preferred the wild turkey.

I kept up the reading habit for many years--and it's only accelerated in recent (retired, fairly immobile) times.

But it wasn't just reading. In the summers Joyce and I drove all over the country to see (and photograph) literary sites: authors' homes (and graves), places that were settings for novels. Sometimes one of us would get completely obsessed. Joyce and I drove to see about every place that has anything to do with John Brown, from Missouri to upstate New York; I got so impassioned about Jack London and The Call of the Wild that I went to the Yukon twice, hiked the Chilkoot Trail (prominent in the novella), read all his other books--wrote a couple of my own.

Other obsessions: Anne Frank (went to the Netherlands, saw the place where she hid; went to Germany to see the camp where she died, Bergen-Belsen), Edgar Poe (saw the remaining places where he lived, saw his grave), Mary Shelley (traveled all over England, Wales, Switzerland, Italy in search of the places where she'd been--and places relevant to Frankenstein's creature), etc.

I also tried to read the complete works of the writers I was teaching, including Shakespeare, and Joyce and I saw live productions of every play he wrote. Both of us have been to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the Bard sites there.

I maintain that habit today: If I read something I really like by a writer (Elizabeth Strout, Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, Richard Ford. Maggie O’Farrell, et al.), well, I then proceed to read every other damn thing that writer published.

This continues with mysteries (which I love): Robert B. Parker, Michael B. Connelly, Elmore Leonard, and (recently) Val McDermid—and many others.

And on and on.

I had tremendous fun doing all of this, and I like to think that my students benefitted, as well.

I know that when I was a student, I profited more from teachers who actually practiced what they preached--and who loved doing so—not those who stuck to the same old sagging lesson plan year after year.

Now, unable to do much more (cursed bodies!), I still read several hours a day--reading books I should have read years ago (the complete Leatherstocking Tales, the works of Anthony Trollope, for example), reading book by writers I've always meant to read (In Search of Lost Time, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers and its sequel, Twenty Years After), reading new writers--at least new to me.

Doing this helps me continue to feel alive--at least above the shoulders.

And it's incredibly touching, too, when friends (Facebook and otherwise) and former students follow a recommendation and dive into the book(s), too—nothing like flailing together through the surging streams.

I feel I remain a teacher--unpaid in money, paid in gratitude--precious to me, life-sustaining for me.