In A Man's Journey to Simple Abundance, edited by Michael Segell (Scribner: 2000), pp.245-254.

A TEACHER FOR ALL SEASONS

by Robert H. Bell

Teaching my first English class at Williams College in 1972, I began with Robert Frost's "Once by the Pacific." Gingerly I asked, "What is this poem about?" Ted smirked, tossed his blonde pony tail and said, "It's about pink elephants." I believed then that no matter how mistaken or impertinent a student's response, the teacher must take it seriously. I asked Ted, "What do you mean?"

"It's about pink elephants," repeated Ted. "A poem means whatever you want it to mean."

"I don't think so," I said. "When a pickpocket looks at a saint, he sees a pocket. That doesn't mean the saint is just a pocket."

The class uttered a collective "Whoa!" Ted cocked his head and went "Hmmm." An initiation for Ted, and an early lesson for the young professor: maybe not everything a student says is sacred, or even serious. Soon Ted and I were playing basketball together, still friendly combatants; his smart-alec skepticism became a positive element in our class discussions.

I loved being a young teacher. When I began teaching at age 26, I could hardly imagine anything more fun than discussing a Yeats poem or lecturing on Tom Jones. What I lacked in experience, dignity and wisdom I made up in energy and bravado. Usually my momentum carried me--even rescued me from a few crash-and-burn situations.

Two primary qualities of any teacher are dedicated love of the material and affectionate respect for the students. I genuinely liked my students and enjoyed their companionship. I ate meals with them at the house where I was Faculty Associate while debating politics and comparing favorite rock bands. I played intramural basketball and softball and, with fellow Bostonian students, lived and died with the Red Sox and the Celtics. Ray Cox and I were jubilant when the Celts beat Phoenix in triple over-time in 1974.

I played bit parts in two Williams theater productions: a solid debut as "The Wall" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a sublime moment as the priest in Twelfth Night. The priest has one speech of eight goofy lines, each of which in our production cued elaborate stage movement. Afraid I'd confuse the couplets, I wrote the first syllable of each line on my fingers. The director spotted them and chewed me out as though I were cheating on an exam. By the time I had my moment in the spotlight, perspiration had smudged the magic-marker clues--I didn't know fingers could sweat--but I did deliver eight lines in order.

The teaching life was rich with material, I found. In my thirties, I enjoyed a minor second career as a humorist, publishing pieces in magazines and broadcasting briefs on NPR stations. Much of my material was autobiographical, worked up in class. There were moments, candor compels me to confess, when "Introduction to Novel" became "The Bob Bell Show." Looking back, I realize my tendency to perform both energized and limited my early teaching. Still, I'd maintain that part of teaching, or one kind of good teaching, is performance: if you're dramatizing a character in Shakespeare or a humorous episode in Dickens, a little theatricality can't hurt. A vivid presence helps an English teacher bear witness to the power of glorious language and the value of critical inquiry. Students are a captive audience, and like most people they respond more willingly to personality than to complexity, more readily to autobiography than to abstraction. As a young man I overflowed with anecdotes and jokes. The trick is to put personal experience to educational use. Trouble was, even very smart Williams students seemed to remember my incidental one-liners or autobiographical anecdotes better than my meticulous analysis of Faulkner's characterization.

I may have had the fundamental skills of a teacher, but I needed to mature beyond boyish egocentricity. If my students were to develop, I had to develop with them. I was too focused on performance to imagine what students might need and use. Occasionally I would reflect on real-life subjects-- career or marriage. But I was self-conscious about seeming pompous or paternal and would hasten "home" to the text: "Well, that's enough of Life 101--let's look more closely at Cleopatra's next speech." I was wrong: Students wrote on course evaluations, "Give us more Life 101--we need it!"

While my priorities were academic and intellectual, and I never saw myself as a minister or counselor, as a first child I played the role of big brother instinctively. I was on a 10K run with Troy when he informed me he'd been accepted at medical school and shooting hoops with Randy when he told me he'd been turned down everywhere. After a class on Cleopatra's suicide, Priscilla confided that her father had killed himself. Teachers can only imagine the fears and horrors students bring with them: Marcia grieving for a beloved brother killed in a freak accident. Sometimes I could comfort, occasionally I could help.

As I grew older, I found more opportunities to offer support or guidance to students. A few years ago my senior honors student was a young woman of extraordinary benevolence--she cared for a homeless man, big sistered two local girls, tutored disadvantaged children, and hoped to teach in Africa. I suggested that she also apply to seminary. "Oh, I don't think I have the calling!" she replied. One afternoon instead of talking about biblical imagery in The Sound and the Fury we talked about her spiritual doubts and longings. I persuaded her to apply to Yale Divinity School, where she met and married a man with the same calling; when they finished, they took a parish together.

Not all encounters with students are sanguine. Once, playing basketball, I lined up against a student who murmured darkly, "Two years ago you made me read Middlemarch. Tonight you're gonna pay." Relations between teachers and students can magnify ordinary human confusion, stress, and miscommunication. Naturally students resist being evaluated and graded; a few resent the professor for his judgments. Some students (some teachers too) are troubled, disturbed, inordinately needy, fantasizing, or projecting. I've had students send me suggestive valentines. One graduate wanted me to intervene with her parents who were "plotting to send her to a mental asylum." It was evident she was on drugs, distraught, perhaps psychotic, but what could I do and why had she called me? Because in that large lecture class three years earlier she "knew I was talking directly" to her, that I "really understood" her. Well, I understood Faulkner and Austen, but not what to do in such a highly charged, potentially life-threatening situation.

Students may be smitten with their professors, and vice versa. The young, in a high state of alert and ardent aspiration, caught up in that sensual music, can be disconcertingly attractive. The teacher must recognize the proper boundaries--not always an easy thing to do. When I was in my late thirties, I taught a beautiful, gifted but tortured young woman who monopolized discussions in class, as though she were taking an individual tutorial with me. After one class, when I gently urged her to leave more space for her less confident classmates, she burst into bitter tears. Later she dropped out of school and wrote me long, intimate letters. I liked and admired her enormously, found her fascinating--worried about her.

When she was preparing to return to college, she asked me to select her courses and register for her. She approached me while I was conversing with several colleagues--the first time I had seen her in over a year. I said, "great to see you--come by my office soon!" The next morning I received an angry, pathetic letter: How could I be so callous? How could I treat her that way? Anybody reading the letter, stuck in my faculty mail slot without an envelope, would have assumed that I was intimate with an undergraduate. Now I was alarmed that I was too close to her but frightened that withdrawal could do real harm: She had been talking regularly about suicide. What is the role of a teacher who cares for a student in trouble?

I've learned that teaching requires both firm boundaries and fluid connections, intellectual authority and personal contact. Education is communication. (Teach: an active verb, requires a subject and an object.) But higher education is not personal therapy. It can be dangerous for a teacher to be an intimate confidante. As I've grown older, I've learned that a professor can demonstrate the opposite possibility, the value of less intimacy and subjectivity. College students don't necessarily need a professorial pal or a drinking companion, but they may well value an older counselor, someone definitely not Dad but interested, concerned, willing to listen and advise.

After thirty years of teaching, I've discovered so many more things I need to say about King Lear or Tom Jones that I have less time for contemporary allusions and amusing digressions. I've deliberately subordinated myself more rigorously to my authors. I once heard a world-renowned musicologist lecture on Handel. Applauded enthusiastically, the lecturer held up a recording and pointed emphatically to the image of Handel. That's now my ideal of teacherly advocacy: the object of veneration is not the lecturer but the work of art. Blessedly, getting older, I care less, or at least not nearly so much, about appearing cool, funny, or attractive; teaching Tristram Shandy or Song of Solomon, I’ll be the Geek of the Week. He who abaseth himself exalteth the Lord.

The passage of time has necessarily altered my relationships with students. While we no longer like the same music, wear similar clothes (what 20-year-old wears "relaxed fit"?), speak a common idiom, I've gained both greater authority and richer connections with students. A teacher needs to be able to hear himself as well as students. At a certain point in this life's odyssey--around the time one starts using phrases like "at a certain point in this life's odyssey"--students stopped calling me by my first name. By the time I was forty I was gray-haired and unmistakably professorial. When I invited my senior thesis student to call me by my first name, she continued to address me as Professor Bell. I repeated my invitation. The next week she wrote me an abashed confession: "Dear Professor Bell--I'm sorry, I can't call you by your first name. You just don't seem like a 'Bob' to me." Today, if I am ever tempted to "be a Bob," I have two teenage daughters to make remind me I'm not. On the other hand (no English teacher is single-handed), next June I'll be performing again as priest--for real, conducting a marriage ceremony for my student Sarah's wedding.

Significant moments in education, I've learned, may be conspicuously un-dramatic. Last year, when I was teaching Richard Wilbur's poem "The Writer," I asked my first-year students what was appealing about the speaker's attitude toward his daughter. Anne Dwyer said softly, "his respect for her." Respectfulness also characterizes the teacher's attitude toward the material and the students. Simone Weil says, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." I want to demonstrate the efficacy and pleasure of generous attention to literature, to encourage disciplined, imaginative responses to language, and to give pure, sustained attention to the student's reading and writing. The hardest part, where I really earn the big bucks, is grading students' essays--lots of them; it's grueling but gratifying, for it verifies the importance of critical thinking. If an eighteen-year-old is to take very seriously words and ideas, she must perceive that the teacher, her reader, is responding thoughtfully to every idea she has--and to the words she uses to express it.

Education should be challenging, demanding, even painful. Learning is disorienting, frightening, and overwhelming. This makes teaching seem awfully somber. It's not. For me teaching is anything but dutiful: it's joyful. I have boundless fun talking about Henry the Fourth or Eudora Welty. I've never had to contrive enthusiasm. And demonstrating it is almost a sacrament--one of the English teacher's means of bearing witness to the value of literature. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek for "filled with the gods." A word invented by James Joyce, "joyicity," identifies the author himself with pleasure. I experience joyicity quoting poetry, watching plays, analyzing texts, reveling in felicities of language. I want to convey the fun of reading, thinking, dramatizing, revising, correcting, speculating. I enjoy it every bit as much now as I did in 1972, when I would finish one class and immediately begin day-dreaming about the next. Next month I turn fifty-four, and I will enter another classroom, meet twenty-five eager English majors, and distribute three passages, the opening lines of Chaucer's "General Prologue," Milton's Paradise Lost, and Eliot's The Waste Land. For me it is like another visit to Narnia, except that grown-ups can return, perhaps less intoxicated, histrionic, and humorous but more productive, happier and wiser.

Like an athlete, a teacher must adapt, refine his craft, compensate for attributes that diminish or disappear. My boyhood hero, Ted Williams, wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived. If he wasn't, he came damn close, second only to Babe Ruth. But without a doubt Ted Williams was the greatest old hitter in baseball history. Batting .388 in 1957 was even more amazing than hitting .406 in 1941. I would love to become one of Williams College's great old teachers. It's something to shoot for.