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.  


                 
 


  

    I received an unexpected email the other day.  It was a brief notice from Saint Mary’s College of California where I earned my bachelor’s degree announcing that a classmate of mine had died.  Mike was 60 or 61. 
I dug out my old yearbook to make sure I was remembering correctly,
hoping that I had two classmates with the same name.  His is a common Irish name, but no such luck.  It was a small school, about 1,200 students, and I was right; it was him.  
            
     This shouldn’t surprise me.  As an educator, I’ve had students die tragically in accidents or illness.  Family members have passed on; both my parents are dead. This past winter, one of my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University died unexpectedly over Christmas Break.  He was only 54 and in perfect health, but a stroke took him after a long flight to visit his mother.  
 
    So, hearing of Mike’s untimely passing wasn’t out of the realm of my
experience.

    I opened my yearbook and glanced at the senior portraits.  This was 1972, the height of the counter-cultural movement in California; thus, these portraits were informal.  Turns out I took two of them, a fact I had forgotten.  Both were casual snaps of two friends after a play performance. Saint Mary’s had an amphitheatre then; the play, The Birds by Aristophanes, was performed wearing masks the way it would have been in 414 BC when first produced. (If the times were counter-cultural, I hung with the counter-counter-cultural crowd.  I believe the term today would be “nerds,” but that’s another blog post.) 
 
    I glanced at old friends with whom I have not spoken in years.  Partly, this is because I moved away from California in 1978 and have not been back for any length of time since then.  And once my Mother died in 2004, even my trips to family out there have been less frequent.  In fact, since her passing, my family has met here in Marshall or in South Bend more regularly than out West. 

    But, excuses aside, I should have kept in better touch with old friends.

    This past week, we drove to Chicago and Indianapolis to visit Marianne’s
family.  Her uncle, Uncle Tom, a retired priest, suffers from advanced Parkinson’s.  (He is affectionately, “Father Uncle Tom” or “UT”to his nieces and nephews.)  Even with his tremors, his mind is sharp as ever. What
struck me during out visit was his knowledge of classmates from high school,
Notre Dame, and Indiana Law School that he remembers and keeps in touch
with.  It’s a talent I lack.

    Uncle Tom is able to do this in part because he was born and raised in
Indianapolis and except for four years at Notre Dame, two years stationed in
Japan with the US Army in the 50s, and his time in Rome at seminary, he has
lived his whole life there. On the other hand, I have packed up and re-rooted myself several times since I was 28, twice in Indiana, then Pennsylvania, and twenty-plus years ago, Minnesota.  I move, time moves along, old friends are forgotten.

    Glancing through the yearbook of 1972 the other night, I remembered every one of my classmates, even ones I did not know well at the time. 
Several had a band, a retro group that in the early 1970s played 50s
music, their act complete with leather jackets and slicked-back hair.  Instead of individual snaps of these guys, they did a band photo in their stage attire. 
They were pretty good as a mock-rock band and actually ended up performing long after graduation.  They made quite a name for themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area until a few years back.  One or two years
ago they were up for a reprise gig when one of the members (another classmate) died unexpectedly.

    I knew all these guys, but was never close to them, so the passing of one
of them didn’t hit me like Mike’s.

But it was the announcement of Mike’s death that led me to my long-unopened yearbook with grainy black and white photos.  When I came upon the photos of close friends, I had to ask questions for which I don’t know the answers.  One photo showed a recently-married couple.  In this day and age, you have to ask at least mentally, are they still together? A few classmates had become lawyers. Still at it?  I know from recent class notes on the
Saint Mary’s alumni homepage, that classmates who went into high school teaching right after graduation have been able to take early retirement through buy-out programs designed to retire higher-paid teachers.  What are their second careers?  Another classmate once lived in Canada.  Still there? 
 
    It seems like I should know a few of these things, but I don’t.

    The twists and turns of keeping in touch. And the odd ways that old
friends and acquaintances return to your life.

    Soon after we were married, Marianne took a Notre Dame summer class. 
The first day, she came home talking about her new classmates and
mentioned one by name, a Christian Brother out from California for a summer degree.

    “Not Brother Edmund?”  Could he be my Saint Mary’s classmate?

    The next class meeting, Marianne put the Saint Mary’s Alumni Directory at Brother Edmund’s seat.  When he came in, he glanced around the room.  Zarzana is not a common name but when first introduced to Marianne he had not put the two together.  He should have asked about a connection; it’s not a name like Murphy or Smith or Kelly. 
 
    Small worlds do exist.

    On Saint Mary’s alumni webpage this past week, I found out Brother Edmund is now principal of a Christian Brothers high school in Berkeley, California.  I’m a department chair; he’s a principal; a classmate is gone. 
Time moves on.

    This all made me realize yet again how important it is to cherish each day and each friend.  I think this is one of life’s main messages, but daily routine can smother us so we forget it.  We need to relearn it.  And it takes a jolt to shove this message back into the forefront of our lives. 

    Take the sentence, “Life’s too short for. . .” and fill in the blank.  Life’s too short for bad coffee or cheap wine.  Life’s too short for putting up with this or that nonsense.  Life’s too short for wasting on an unfulfilling career. 
 
     For some, life is just all too short, period.

    When an obituary arrives out of the blue, making you realize how short life really can be, it’s time to remember and reconnect.

    I hope you make time this summer for just that: connecting and
reconnecting with family, with friends, and with your own past.

         Riding home from campus on my bike the other day, I passed by a house that is a residence for adults with developmental disabilities.  In social work parlance, it is a group home.  Two residents were each pushing lawn mowers down the street while a third talked to a neighbor.  These residents had a caretaker with them who was kindly walking along keeping the three on task.  This across-the-street neighbor was kidding the men, all in their late 40s or older, because he had seen them out at a local restaurant the other night.  He was needling them for all the BBQ ribs they ate. The good-natured chiding, the laughter, the warm feelings:  it may have been a work crew finishing a long week together or a bowling team after a tournament.  Guys having fun.  Guys sharing a laugh with one of the guys.
             
     I found the sight heartwarming.  
           
     I know one of the residents by name, Tom.  He is quite the Notre Dame Football fan, as I am.  I owned a few ND shirts I didn’t want anymore and made it a point of dropping them by his residence several years back.  He
still lights up when he sees me.  This was during the darker years of ND Football when the Faithful (Subway Alums or graduates alike) needed to rally to the cause.  Tom was right there.
           
     This particular residence has 4 or 5 adults.  It’s a stable group.  I think Tom’s lived there for about 15 years, a few of his housemates about the same. Every workday, a bus gathers them up, drives three blocks to a second group home and gathers another 4 or 5 adults, and off they all go, lunch boxes in hand, to productive work in a sheltered workshop or another business here in Marshall.
            
     As a homeowner, I appreciate these group homes because their lawns are
cut, their siding, windows, and roofs are in good shape.  I don’t want to cast aspersions at any other neighbors in these tough economic times, but the two nearby group homes look far better than several houses around here.  And at first glance you would never suspect these homes are in fact used for institutional purposes.   
         
     I know at SMSU every few weeks, yet a third group of adults with
disabilities comes up to collect recycling.  This particular group is not as high
functioning.  But their caretaker moves them along and they complete their task in a satisfactory manner.

    When we were first married, Marianne worked for an agency with the long-outdated name of “Council for the Retarded.”  In charge of this agency’s PR, Marianne’s first task was changing the name to Logan, because their buildings were on Logan Street in South Bend, Indiana, and their campus had become known as“Logan Center.”  
       
     Of course, “retarded” was the term of choice when this agency first started about thirty years before Marianne joined Logan.  Retarded was a polite euphemism that became the vogue in the 1950s.  At that time, the parents of the children this agency initially served were proud of the name, Council for the Retarded, because few agencies or groups were doing much for their special-needs children.  Back in the early 50s, the correct medical terms and psychological titles for children and adults with these disabilities were idiot, moron, and imbecile.  If I had a child which the state and the medical community labeled as “moron” or “imbecile,” I’d feel that “retarded”was a much softer, friendlier label. “Oh, my son’s not an idiot;
he’s just slow or retarded.”  
      
     How times have changed.  

     About the time Marianne worked at Logan, the last of the Indiana state
hospitals for such adults were being closed.  These institutions had shunted children and adults with disabilities out of plain view, often out of parents’
homes.  In the 80s, group homes like the two in our neighborhood were becoming more and more common.  Two social forces met and agreed on this:  the cost-cutters who never loved any state agency and the social activists who saw warehousing high-functioning adults as cruel.  Warehousing is also self-fulfilling.  It suggests that “these morons can’t do anything else,” so well-meaning bureaucrats set up a system where the developmentally disabled could not do anything else.  But when given the chance, oh, how
these young men and women shine.  We see it every day. 
          
     Logan ran about six group homes when Marianne worked there.  I remember filling in for the caretaker staff one night to make sure the six residents were fed dinner.  I hadn’t barbequed on their grill before, but I gave it my best shot.  Well, the men loved my burnt chicken.  Loved?  They devoured it.  

     A few of them were workers at a South Bend steel finishing works.  They did all the labor of the regular crew.  In fact, a study of their work productivity showed they actually out performed some of the longtime workers there.  These guys were on time each day.  They were scrupulous about their break time and lunch time.  They punched in and out accurately.  They didn’t sneak off to smoke on the company’s time.

    When Logan bought its seventh group home, however, the neighbors raised a stink.  All of Logan’s group homes had to meet stringent State of Indiana regulations. So many bedrooms so there was no overcrowding; so many bathrooms; and an adequate suite for the live-in caretaker. Logan did not want to saturate any one neighborhood, so for the seventh home, it went into a higher-end location. This upper-middle class neighborhood had families with good sized broods of children, thus the houses were larger, well suited for Logan’s needs.

    It was only here that Logan ruffled some feathers. However, at a public meeting, the confrontational neighbors were embarrassed to hear themselves essentially saying they didn’t want “those kind of people” as their neighbors, saying that “those kind of people” weren’t welcomed.  As these complaining
future neighbors heard themselves speaking out, they grew humiliated and humbled by their own heartlessness and mean-spirited attitudes.  
  
     But what good neighbors the group home residents turned out to be.  The group home residents cut their own lawn.  When the guys realized there were two widows on either side, those lawns were cut also.  And what guy can
resist a powerful snow blower?  Plus, South Bend is in the Great Lakes’ Snow Belt.  So, three driveways got cleaned up early every morning it snowed. Baked cookies soon replaced complaints as reluctant neighbors realized what great new neighbors they had.

    Marianne’s second task at Logan was getting the PR ready for the International Summer Special Olympics which were being held at the Notre Dame campus.  By the time the Games were held, my new teaching position across state had moved us away from South Bend and her job at Logan, but the experience has stuck with us.

    Special Olympics.  Group homes in residential neighborhoods.  The
clerk at a local supermarket here in Marshall helping me load my bags of
groceries in my car.  The visible and normal lives of our fellow citizens with special needs.  No longer labeled as morons, no longer warehoused out-of-sight, no longer shunned.  
 
     They’re carrying their lunchboxes, going to work, and every once in a while packing away the BBQ ribs like one of the guys.

Winter

“Now is the Winter of our Discontent. . .”

Shakespeare

                One has to be hardy to live through a Minnesota winter.  And this past winter tested even the hardiest of us.  This is especially true for the non-native Minnesotans, like myself, who ventured north for opportunity and not for the weather.  Since moving here in 1989, I have learned to count the seasons differently.  Here, there are five:  winter, spring, summer, autumn, winter. 

                My struggles with winters are compounded by the fact that I spent the first 28 years of my life living in Sacramento, California.  While not a beach-front Malibu, its winters were certainly much less challenging than Alberta Clippers and blizzards and white-out road conditions.  Winter or summer (which has its own weather challenges), I soon learned that in Minnesota, if you’re hitting the highway, check the weather.  Sudden violent storms (blizzards and tornado-producing thunderheads) lurk just over the horizon.  In the Southwest corner of my adopted state, the prairie affords no natural barriers to block the incessant wind.  Snow can fall horizontally in the howling wind here.  Rain can be blown under the shingles of your roof to find a way into your kitchen. 

                Although Sacramento is not, say, an island in the Mediterranean, it certainly stacks up pretty well against a Minnesota winter.  Tule fog was our greatest threat.  And to have such thick ground fog, there must be no wind.  And the air temp stays above 32˚.  We thought it was cold, but it really wasn’t. 

One of my favorite TV shows when I was a California boy was West Point, a weekly series that dramatized the heroism of military officers who graduated from that service academy.  Each episode usually began with the hero as a green cadet who always seemed to get into trouble.  Every week some officer always yelled at a troublesome plebe warning the callow youth he would never make it. 

                A common punishment for wayward cadets was to have them march back and forth across a large quad.  In true TV fashion, to show the passage of time, several scenes would be blended through the changing of the seasons.  The camera would focus on the errant cadet’s feet, and, by the magic of TV, the ground around those pacing feet would get rained on then snowed on.  What took a few moments to pace off gave the impression of passing weeks then months.  Rain to snow to melt-off just before the commercial.

                My reaction to those feet pacing in snow was always the same.  How could anyone live in snow, I would ask?  At the time, I wanted to attend West Point; I was young and impressionable.  But live where it snowed?  Not for me, that icy life.

                Life kept me in California until I was 28.  After college, I worked on my MA in English literature and taught high school for four years all in and around Sacramento.  But, I was ambitious, anxious to move on to teaching at the university level and willing to put my feet in the waters of what lay beyond my hometown so long as it was along the West Coast.

                I applied to ten PhD schools:  five in California, two others on the West Coast, and a few token ones well beyond Utah just in case.  The tokens didn’t matter.  I was going to Cal or UCLA or at least UC Davis, a campus twenty minutes from home. 

Soon, the rejections piled up.  Berkeley, no!  UCLA, no!  Davis, no!  Those token places out East and in the Midwest increasingly grew more and more likely.  Harsh reality forced me to hatch a new plan:  cross the Sierras in an inverse move of those pioneers of the Gold Rush, snatch up my PhD in record time, and return to teach in California.  I just presumed I would come back to Sacramento State, where I earned my MA, and where I felt I belonged.  I couldn’t imagine living or teaching anywhere else.

                The last winter I taught high school in Sacramento, I lived with my parents because my father was seriously ill.  We didn’t know it, but he had less than two years to live.  That winter was also the worst winter in South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame.  WNDU, an NBC affiliate, was then located on the campus.  When the famous blizzard of 1978 socked Notre Dame, it made national news with live shots of snow piled up to second-story dorm windows and a campus blanketed to stillness.

                Notre Dame was one of the campuses that hadn’t yet rejected me.  And thanks to a WNDU feed, my father and I watched nightly for a week in January 1978 as a three-foot layer of snow and lamppost-high drifts closed the Notre Dame campus for the first time in a century.

                This was not sunny California.

                After the storm but while the campus was still closed, my dad and I sat safe and warm in front of our TV and watched students file into the ND basketball arena for a game.  ND insisted the game go on, so on it went even if the visiting team had to struggle to reach the campus.  True to form, the Irish student body came out of their snow-bound dorms and flowed towards the arena, their heads barely visible along the snow-cleared path.  A trench had been carved out for them just for this game.  It was like watching a white-shrouded World War I trench system without barbed wire.  The famous Golden Dome stood majestic but snow-covered, no longer gold.

                “How can anyone live in that?” I demanded, disdaining every thought of a snowy winter, especially with snow piled higher than your head.

                “You’re going to go to Notre Dame,” my dad replied, a man of few words.  He was a Notre Dame Subway Alum.  None of his four sons had attended ND.  His not-so-secret ambition in life:  have one of us earn an ND degree.

                A few weeks later, I got my acceptance letter from the Golden Dome, with a promise of four years of teaching to pay my way through.  It was a graduate teaching position, the best way to finance further education.  I may have been an idealistic English teacher, but I knew my four years of high school experience amounted to something.  Notre Dame agreed.  Besides graduate seminars and exams and a dissertation, I graded stacks and stacks of freshmen papers over the next several years, but the exchange was well worth it.

                Rather quickly, I even grew to appreciate harsh Midwest winters.  During my third year there, I went cross-country skiing with a young woman originally from Chicago who had winter down pat.  She was a graduate of Notre Dame; her senior year was that blizzard winter I had watched with my father.  I may have seen her on her way to that game.  Who knows?  Out skiing, I wore so many layers, I could hardly move.  After repeated falls, I split my pants down the backside seam.  She married me anyway.

                I don’t think of Minnesota winters in quite the same way as I did while living in California.  They are prolonged (and this past one especially so with snow even at the end of April), but they can be endured.  Once here, I bought a snow blower then up-scaled it to a larger model.  Now, I hire two strapping fellows to clear my long driveway.  I own parkas and overcoats, multiple scarves, several pairs of boots, sets of gloves.  Beyond all that, I’ve made tremendous friends who make trying situations bearable.  Their native (and non-native) good humor about winters of Ice Age proportions reminds me that those frozen months are as much a prolonged season as a state of mind.  Their warm hearts make life flourish here all year, every year.

And yet, when I teach the Percy Shelly poem “Ode to the West Wind” which ends:  “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I still remind my students that Shelley was living in sunny Italy when he wrote that, not Minnesota.