In Praise of Great Teachers

   “And if I were a good teacher, who would know?”  
                Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

    It’s often easier to complain than praise. Even so, this essay is about the great profs I’ve known, the rare ones who have challenged me to become a better student and a better professor, those who have inspired me personally and professionally. It is offered as thanks to those in academe who keep it alive and thriving.

    Perhaps the best professor I have ever known is Dr. Charles Nelson from my days at Sacramento State University where I completed my MA in English.  SSU was my launching pad.  I did well in my MA work, well enough to voice aloud my desire to earn a PhD and teach at the college level. The MA gave me the ability to teach in the California two-year system with its good pay and multitude of opportunities since the state boasts of so many campuses from the Sierras to the Pacific.  
            
     But Charles stirred me on to the next level. I am forever indebted to him. (As an aside, one of my worst profs at the time urged me to stay at Lucky’s, a supermarket chain where I used to work.  “You’ll make more as a store manager than a high school teacher or a professor,” he explained.  Not exactly a Christa McAuliffe comment.)  
             
     Originally from Oklahoma, in his office Charles spoke with a relaxed twang of the Sooner State. He’d
drop a few Twain-like words, including that colloquial A-word ain’t when we spoke about my next project with him. For instance:  “I ain’t too sure Hamlet’s crazy.” Besides that ain’t, his crazy seemed stretched out by the addition of several letters: crraazzzy. But, get Professor Nelson in the classroom lecturing and he held his own intellectually, bar none, with never an ain’t or other grammatical slip.
              
     Any yet, he did something that few adults do when seriously talking about any subject.  He broke into laughter about the whole situation—genuine, often self-effacing, always playful, never cynical, pure fun-loving laughter at the absurdity of the situation.  (“What?  Killing your brother and marrying his widow for the crown of Denmark? You crraasssy?”)  More than once he pulled my academic career out of the recycle bin.  
             
     I was a bit of a lost puppy at the time.  I did a start-and-stop MA.  I started at Hayward State near Oakland, ran out of money, didn’t finish, and transferred to Sac State in my hometown.  I needed to regroup, then my father got very sick, and here I was stacking groceries all night at Lucky’s, trying to
finish my MA, searching for something professionally. Dr. Nelson helped me when I applied to the Catholic Diocesan system where I taught (sometimes full-, sometimes part-time) for the next four years.  Over the course of one grueling year,
he guided me through my final MA project while I was teaching and while my Father was growing sicker.
              
     To finally graduate, I wrote a series of essays in lieu of a single thesis.  It was probably more
challenging than a thesis since it had to be passed in pieces, and Charles was no slouch about scholarship.  I remember he wrote things like, “Why are you quoting all this outside material if you don’t use it in your essay?” I learned to temper my enthusiasm for long quotes that seemed more like
padding than serious research. It’s a story I still tell my students every time I teach composition. I want my writing students to have the same skills Dr. Nelson taught me.
             
     Two men pointed me toward Notre Dame, my Father (who was a “Subway Alum” always wanting one of his sons to attend ND) and Charles.  When I was accepted, I was also accepted at several other schools, but only ND offered me four years of teaching so I could teach part-time to pay my way through the program.  Dr. Nelson assured me that ND wasn’t just a football school. The rest is history.
             
     Years later at Notre Dame, in order to finish my dissertation, I worked closely with another gem of a professor, Dr. Donald Sniegowski. He made sure that my work was edited well, and he scrupulously went over every detail with me even under adverse circumstances. (This was actually the job of my thesis director, but Don did it instead; that tells you something right there.) One Saturday, we were to meet, but he called to cancel since he was going to
the hospital with phlebitis.  He had limped into the English office that morning to put his completed evaluation in my mailbox so that even though we weren’t meeting, I would have his notes about my next chapter.  
       
     Twenty-some years later, when our daughter asked her own professor to work on a paper dealing with African literature, her prof told her that she
needed to work with Professor Sniegowski, a noted specialist on that topic.  She called, made an appointment, and met with him.  When she entered his office, Don had a copy of my dissertation open and asked her if she was related to its author.  He hadn’t forgotten although the phlebitis had long since cleared up. 
           
     The first department chair I worked with was Dr. Ed Uehling at Valpo U near Chicago but located in Valparaiso, Indiana.  Good school. I faced a rocky year, but Ed helped me so much. He was a genuine man and a stabilizing influence on me. I had high school classroom know-how, a PhD in hand, administrative and university-level teaching experience, yet I was not getting any traction on the
job search.  Ed kept up the encouragement.  When I contemplated other academic careers or different professional tracks altogether (like being a tech-writer for an engineering firm in Michigan), Ed counseled me to stay with our profession.  I did, he worked with me, and I moved along to another campus in a tenure-track situation.

     As a department chair myself now, I often think about how Dr. Uehling would do things.  His calm and thoughtful demeanor managed many a situation (a mess I created or other issues). Well-respected, Ed helped on many levels at Valpo campus-wide.  I wouldn’t be here if not for him.  Even now, I wish at times that my hot Italian temper could be as cool and controlled under fire as Ed’s.
              
     The saddest story to relate in this blog is about Dr. Bob Alexander.  He was nearing the end of his exemplary career at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where I taught for two years after Valpo. This campus and I were not a fit.  We should have been: small, Catholic liberal arts college so like my alma mater from California, my own PhD from ND where the priests of King’s were trained, and the list goes on. But, it never worked out between us. It went from bad to worse.
               
     Bob was an inspiration, however.  He was the professor who used to enter the classroom each day a few minutes late on purpose.  His explanation:  if on time, you looked cowed by the administration; if too late, you seemed to disrespect the students.  His trick was to come in consistently a few minutes late to show his students he was his own boss.  Having taught high school, I never broke with that routine of being “ahead of the bell,” but I loved Bob for his
wise, idiosyncratic attitude.
           
     His heart gave out while he was fighting severe influenza our last winter in Pennsylvania.  He was within a year or so of retirement.  It was the saddest blow since he had been such an advocate of mine at a time when my life at King’s had grown so deplorable. His wife, Gracie, told me later that Bob’s one regret was that he had never written while teaching.  I remember that every time I write now; Bob didn’t write and it haunted his widow and cast a shadow over his fine career.  

    Every career is filled with mentors and colleagues who rise up at precisely the needed moment. We all
could fill pages with anecdotes of colleagues or teachers who inspired us, helped us, kicked us out of our complacency, encouraged us at just the right
moment.
           
     It’s not about their published books or their impressive resumes, although many of these scholars are widely published.  It’s about their humanity in the face of so many obstacles in academe today, their humanity and their love of teaching which they shared with me and so many others. They cared about their students, embraced our profession as a vocation not an occupation, and did their best.
          
     At this time of Thanksgiving past and Christmas ahead, holidays steeped in gratefulness, it’s important to remember all those inspiring men and women from our past.  Colleagues and mentors like these point our way to the future.  


                 
 


  

            Coming Late to Being Sicilian

    “You’re Sicilian? Have any relatives in the Mafia?”

    That question kept me from admitting to anyone until I was well into my 30s that half my Italian heritage is Sicilian.  (For the record, the other half is from Potenza in the Basilicata Provence where the boot of Italy forms the foot’s arch.  It’s not on the coast, but up in the mountains.  But that’s an
essay for a different blog.)

    Sicily itself sits off the “Toe of Italy” separated from the main peninsula by only a few miles of channel.  It’s so close that Italian engineers are planning either a railroad tunnel (aka, a Chunnel) or a long suspension bridge between the European
mainland that ends at that Italian toe and the port of Messina on Sicily.  Once it opens, I’m on that train.  

    The two history books of Sicily I own both start with the association of the Three-Cornered Island and the mining of obsidian going back to prehistoric
times.  This jet-black stone created by volcanic activity can be chipped and sharpened into cutting blades or polished as art objects. This natural glass is treasured for its inherent simplicity and beauty. 
Sicily is an island of volcanoes, on the island itself, and on smaller islands of its coast.  Obsidian is easy to find there.

    Obsidian:  hard and curved as volcanic glass often
is.  Beautiful when shined to a glossy night-black finish. Not a refined beautiful object as is Belleck porcelain or Waterford or Italian crystal.  And also, knowing how to break it into shards, obsidian can be sharpened enough to use as a scalpel blade; this ancient cutting edge is still in use as such today.

     What’s so ironic and puzzling about being Sicilian is that this island set in the middle of the  Mediterranean Sea is a treasure of history that gets overlooked or belittled even today.  No one should feel any shame for being part of this culture. The Greeks colonized the island long before Rome began to flourish. Siracusae, (Syracuse today), is one of the birthplaces of modern mathematics.  Archimedes, perhaps one of the greatest scientific and logical minds of the Ancient World, not only worked out intricate, axiomatic theorems, but also started other intellectuals and engineers thinking about hydrodynamics, fulcrums and levers, and the
heavens.

     I find it funny that even today Archimedes is listed as a “Greek” even though he was born in Syracuse and lived there most of his life. As a member of the New World, I am American (of Italian heritage, obviously) but I can hardly say I’m an Italian in such a way to suggest I was born in Rome.  So, why call a Sicilian of Syracuse “a Greek”? It’s all part of the bad rap Sicily continuously gets. I believe it stems from the modern bias against Sicily; the Ancients would never have considered Archimedes a Greek.

     Like any subject, you scratch the surface and you find a wealth of information. In 2005, my three brothers and I traveled to Potenza then flew from
Naples to Palermo, rented a car, and drove to Piana degli Albanesi where my father’s parents lived until they immigrated to the US in 1913. (He was born in Sacramento in 1914, an American of Sicilian ancestry.) As its name suggests, Piana degli Albanesi is itself a village of immigrants who fled Albania in the 1480s because the Muslim Turks were pushing into the Balkans after the fall of Constantinople.  

    Isn’t history a wonder?  The Balkans still can’t get along and, even as recently as the Fall of the Iron Curtain, Albanians have been loading up rusty steamers and chugging for Sicily as a refugees.  

     In her book, Sicily:  Three Thousands Years of Human History, Sandra Benjamin states that the Albresh, (the name for these Sicilians and Italians of Albanian ancestry), have lost their language and
customs. Her research conclusion is a bit premature. During the late Fifteen-Century migration, Albanian Christians settled in 300 villages in Southern Italy and Sicily. (Coincidentally, Potenza was one of the Italian villages although my Mother’s ancestry has none of this Albanian heritage.) Over time in most of these villages, the Albresh have lost their Albanian heritage. As is typical of immigrants, over time most are indistinguishable from their neighbors.  

     Not so in Piana degli Albanesi.  Here, the Albresh
language is still spoken by my relatives.  It is the language of my father and my grandparents, so I learned. My distant Sicilian cousins are teaching their daughter Albresh to keep their heritage alive. She was about 6 or 7 in 2005 when I met her; she spoke formal Italian (the Tuscan dialect), the Sicilian dialect of Italian, plus Albresh from her family, and the basics of English she was learning in school. I am sure before she finishes high school, she’ll know French, as well. And anyone speaking Sicilian/Italian can pick up Spanish with little difficulty. Piana also has an Albanian seminary, started during the Cold War when Albanian Communists banned the Church. 
Young Albanian men can get along with Sicilian Albresh pretty well, even though my linguist cousin informs me that today’s Albresh is more like Medieval Albanian than modern Albanian.

     So, Sicily has this layer of Albanians who came in 1488.  Think of the other layers:  Greeks,
Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Muslims, Normans, the Spanish, the French, and the Germans (to be ousted by American and British forces in 1943) to provide an incomplete list. 

     The Normans seized contol in 1166, one hundred years after conquering England. The Normans knew a good island to conquer when they saw it.  They united Southern Italy with Sicily to form the Kingdom of Two Sicilies or sometimes, the Kingdom of Naples. From the 1500s or so, Sicily became the
football of Europe, something to kick around the royal households. Shakespeare makes this point in his History Plays where one of the reasons to reject a marriage proposal between the English throne and a French royal is that she’s only bringing the Sicilian crown in her dowry. The Bourbons had Sicily. Then Spain had it.  (They treated the Sicilians miserably, by the way.  Under Spanish rule, a Sicilian peasant
could not get a passport to leave the island; these peasants were virtual slaves in their own fields for 200 years.)

     I am grateful for the Normans for one particular aspect. As rulers of this island, they recognized its rich and varied history. In the 1200s, the Norman King, Roger II, ordered all the “antiquity” in his kingdom be saved. On Roger’s authority, Segesta was saved, at the time, a seventeen-centuries-old
temple.

     The Greek-style temple at Segesta is the only one in the whole Mediterranean that has all four of its column walls still standing. That means its original walls have now been standing for over 2500 years.  All other such temples are partially in ruins. This would include Roman Era temples as well. Look all you want, at the Parthenon, at the ruins in Agrigento with its Valle dei Templi, throughout all the far-flung reaches of the Greek, Alexandrian and Roman empires. Not another temple stands in its original glory like Segesta unless restored by modern archeologists.  

     This impressive and massive temple itself never seems to have had a roof.  This puzzles modern archeologists except those who believe it never intended to have a roof so that different religions could use the same space.  Local, pre-Greek Sicilians worshiped to the sky without needing a
roof. (The mild Sicilian weather cooperates.)  It’s a rare religious community today that shares its worship space without acrimony, but on polyglot
Sicily it happened 2500 years ago.

     And the surviving remnants of the village of Segesta itself, set higher up the rugged hill from the temple, has the ruins of another pagan, pre-Christian temple which then became a Christian Church, then a Mosque, and then finally a monk’s hermitage once the Moors were driven from the island. 

     I consider Segesta one of the holiest spots I’ve ever visited. Humans have found it so for close to thirty centuries. Can’t beat a track record like that.

    So, Sicily is not the darkest island of Europe, not the festering pool of Mafia that too many TV-addicted
Americans have come to believe.

     Monreale Cathedral (a Norman edifice with magnificent Christian mosaics), Segesta, Agrigento with its Valle dei Templi (which the Greek poet Pindar once called “the fairest city inhabited by
mortals”), Villa del Casale, (with the grandest and best-preserved examples of Roman mosaics), Mount Etna (Europe’s largest and most active volcano):  all places I need to visit. It will be a homecoming for me, a return to that rich culture as “multi-ethnic” as any modern country. Rugged and tempestuous, historic and lavish, meditative and boisterous, quiet along its golden beaches but thunderous at the peak of Etna.

    And at its core, a bedrock of obsidian. Hard as
glass, and when necessary, sharp as any forged blade. Traits that have stood me well.  

That's me in 2005 with Segesta Temple in the background.  Note the best take of me, but there it is.  (Shirt bought in Potenza, Italy.)

                            Dogs . . . and Cats (if I must)

    Let me be frank. I love dogs but am highly allergic to cats.  This puts me in an untenable position when trying to discuss either mammal fairly. Around a cat, my nose runs, my eyes itch and tear up, my voice gets hoarse.  I found this out the summer before I started high school.
         
     Those years were in the Dark Ages.  They may have been in the 60s, but “The Sixties” hadn’t officially hit yet.  I left a Catholic grammar school where there were at least girls in the room but where none of the “boy-girl thing” was condoned. During that summer, I didn’t know that a classmate, Alice, liked me.  But in my innocent and not-yet-grown-up boyhood, I liked another classmate, Margaret, who never liked me in that way.  This was awkward because Margaret and Alice were close friends.  
 
     These were two of the smartest and most sophisticated young women in our class.  Margaret had short, blond, school-girl hair, now longer and stylish in preparation for high school.  She was beginning to show her curves.  Slender Alice had long straight brown hair and stood taller than her friend. 
The pair had lost all girlish gawkiness and moved like women, not kids.  I was the self-conscious, scrawny boy who wore braces and who had very low, presentient standardized test scores that absolutely ruled out me ever going to college.
      
     One sultry afternoon, Margaret invited me over to sit on her shady patio
and imagine what high school would be like.  I had no illusions of my angelic blond sweeping me off my feet in an outburst of unrestrained emotion, but jumped at the chance.  I knew that at best ours was to remain a totally Catholic-guilt scripted, early-teenage scene of friendship as depicted in those stilted movies set in the English countryside with a dog nearby and no suggestion of even holding hands. 
 
    Alice was there, the only other guest. Here was my chance to behold the deity I adored, Margaret, and befriend her acolyte, Alice.  
 
     While Margaret fussed about making iced tea and opening potato chips, lithe Alice sat thigh-to-thigh right next to gangly me on a swinging bench meant for three.  We were both in Bermuda shorts; our legs even touched. 
Hers were shaved.  This position left no room for a phonebook between us. 
Girls in her class had been sanctimoniously instructed by stone-faced
Sister Mary Joseph, our former principal, to always keep a Yellow-Pages distance between themselves and boys sitting by them to avoid any near occasion of Mortal Sin.  
 
     Margaret owned a large tomcat, Merlin, whose black and white coat reminded me of our nuns.  Inexplicably, this feline took a liking to sweaty me.  He curled up on my lap and began purring.  Reaching over to pet him, Alice told me animal lovers made for caring friends, a fact she confidently knew.  

    Casting his dark and mysterious spell, Merlin immediately made me wheeze.  Soon defeated as if by Sister Principal herself, I rode my bike home hardly able to see, my first murky sortie into adulthood ended with swollen eyes brought on byallergic reactions not emotional rigidity or spiritual remorse.  
 
     They moved on to McClatchy, the public co-ed high school.  I went to Bishop Armstrong High School which at that time had no girls but, fortunately for me, no cats either.  Only in my senior year did I have a class that included young women.  Six of them, in uniforms, came over from Bishop Manogue, the all-girls’ high school.  My physics teacher, a Christian Brother
dressed like a Medieval monk, needed special permission from Rome to teach them because they were non-male.
  
     Although I was never supposed to do very well in my studies, I did okay
in high school and eventually I enrolled in an all-men’s college.
        
     My first year, I ended up with a puppy living in my dorm room, which
didn’t work since such creatures live to eat, sleep, eliminate, and whimper when ignored.  This was my older brother’s pup, but his RA was onto him and threatened to have him thrown off campus for keeping a dog.  Here I was, a lowly freshman, coerced into taking care of this dog as though it was suddenly okay for new students to house a yapping pet while upper-classmen
couldn’t.  Furious, I gave in to this forced-on-me, fraternal burden. But, in one week, I totally had it.  Fortunately, my brother was engaged and his future father-in-law agreed to take that canine off my hands.   
          
     It’s a tangled web, my relationship with cats and dogs.
  
     Here in Marshall, a friend, Cathy, often hosted us for dinner.  Several colleagues would sit around eating, telling stories, joking, when without warning Cathy would shout at the top of her lungs, “GET OFF THERE!” at her cat behind me tiptoeing on the spread of food.  She was a tall, robust woman and could be indescribably loud.  Her cat ignored her.  

    Cats are vertical, I’ve been told, with an attachment deficit.
      
     When Cathy went on sabbatical, friends agreed to take care of this cat for a year in their home. But, when she came back, the cat wouldn’t stay with her; it wandered back to that cat-sitters’ house, an independent feline to the
end.
        
     Dogs are loyal. They usually figure out who is the leader and follow that leader faithfully.  Man’s best friend after all.
          
     For five summers, I helped run a summer camp while I was teaching high
school.  The camp’s year-round caretaker, called by his initials, T. V., got a month off once 100 screaming campers descended on the place.  T. V. had an old black mongrel dog, Luke, which followed him everywhere.  Luke was no longer in his prime, but he was gentle with the kids, easy to care for, and always at my heels once the caretaker took off.
   
     Luke didn’t bark or fuss.  He was smart enough not to put his nose into porcupines which says something because we had other camp dogs, purebred St. Bernards, that never learned to avoid those smarting quills. (Saint Bernards are not a bright breed.  Those lunkhead dogs kept doing the same
thing over and over and expecting things to change. Vet bills for quill removal proved this.) 
          
     Luke followed me everywhere around camp.  If I needed to leave in the jeep, he moved off to the shade and waited until I returned, sleeping not far from where I parked.

    One hot morning, I walked across camp with Luke shadowing me.  After ten minutes in the nurse’s cabin, I came out to find Luke there on the nurse’s porch as always, but stone dead.  Dead!  Not even my dog.  Dead!  With a fly-covered trickle of blood near his breathless snout.  But steadfast!  He had followed me to the very end even though for eleven months each year he had plenty of time to shuffle off his mortal coil on the caretaker’s watch, not mine.

    The stupidest dog I ever owned was a yellow-Lab mix named Sugar.  She hated men, me in particular.  She was way too much dog for a housedog, and way too independent to live anywhere near a man used to having dogs obey him, accustomed to having his canines die at his feet.   

    Sugar ended up in Pig Heaven.  Unable to keep her, I gave her to a friend who owns a swine breeding farm.  Sugar was content to live out in the barn, eat all the hog carcasses she could dig up, and occasionally run with a pack of wild dogs.  But she lived long, died fat, and never bothered me again.
         
     The smartest dog I ever owned was really my mother’s kinetic and strong
Airedale.  I wanted to call him Brutus, but she wanted him to be Magoo. He became Brutus Magoo, but she couldn’t keep him after I went off to
graduate school.  Hyper Brutus ended up at my summer camp, living the good life until he was hit by a car.  He limped back to camp to die, but not
while I was there.

    The luckiest dog was Mollie, rescued from the local pound.  She was the oddest-shaped creature ever to walk this earth:  a sort of black Lab with stubby legs, a thick neck, a stubborn disposition, but as gentle as can be. 
Abandoned as a pup, she became a garbage gut; she’d gobble without
chewing any roadkill or dead bird she found.  Sit anywhere near her and she’d fling herself onto your lap.  She weighed 55 pounds, so if she caught you off guard, you were in for a surprise.
        
     But Maya takes the cake.  She is our Lab/Bassett mix with short non-Lab legs, long Bassett ears, and sad Bassett eyes. When excited, she barks like her Lab self then bays like her Bassett self then stops to ponder the whole confused process.  But she’s a keeper.  If a bit spoiled, that’s my fault for hiding dog treats in my office which she begs for whenever I sit down to write.  Maya was originally our daughter’s dog, but remained with us after she went off to college.  Now, several years later, there is no way Maya’s moving out to live with her “owner,”possession being 9/10th of the law. 

    And Maya’s not a cat.