Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 298

February 17, 2016: AmericanStudying Non-favorites: Mad Men

[Each year for the last couple, I’ve followed up my Valentine’s series with a week AmericanStudying some things of which I’m not as big a fan. Please share your own non-favorites for a crowd-sourced airing of grievances this weekend!]On the historical and American flaws in the acclaimed TV drama.First, a disclosure: I haven’t yet watched the last two seasons (the 6th and the two-part 7th) of AMC’s drama Mad Men. It’s quite possible that some of the issues I’ll identify in this post were rectified in the course of those final seasons, and as always I’d welcome your thoughts on that question and on anything and everything else related to the show and this post in comments! I’ll also make clear that I watched the show’s first 5 seasons (not as they were aired, but on Netflix after the fact) because there’s a lot that I found both enjoyable and impressive about it: the performances (particularly Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, and the always great John Slattery); the nuanced themes of identity and community, work and family, love and loss; the recreations of a very specific milieu within the broader historical world of American society across the 1960s. This was indeed a unique and significant show, and thus one that both rewards viewing and yet at the same time demands the kinds of critical analysis that I hope this post will provide.For one thing, I wrote “recreations of a very specific milieu within the broader historical world” for a reason—although Mad Menhas often been described (as in the Time piece hyperlinked in that spot) as portraying the 60s in America overall, I would argue that it did so in an incredibly limited and narrow way. The show was set in New York City during the period of Civil Rights and Black Power, the Immigration Act of 1965, the Chicano Rights Movement, and so many more similar historical trends, and yet issues of race, ethnicity, and culture were nearly invisible from its fictional world (that article does indicate that African American characters became slightly more present in those final seasons, but still reads them largely critically). Even worse, Season 5 opened with a NYC racial protest and the firm’s subsequent advertising for an African American secretary, seemingly suggesting that the show was beginning to recognize and engage with these inescapable historical issues—only to fail to do anything else with that character or those histories and issues for the remainder of the season. I’m not suggesting that Mad Men would have had to make race or culture a central theme (shows can be about any number of subjects), but for a work set in NYC during the 60s to portray such a consistently white-washed setting and world represents at best an extremely limited historical perspective. (For the opposite argument about race and the show, see this article.)So Mad Men wasn’t about those historical themes and issues, for better or worse—but even if we focus on one of the show’s most central subjects, the complex, layered identity of its protagonist Don Draper, I’d say there’s a substantive critique to be made. Don was in many ways inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—like Fitzgerald’s character, Don grew up impoverished with a different name (Dick Whitman) and then, in one crucial moment, reinvented himself as a new man in order to chase the American Dreams of privilege, wealth, and beauty. (One key difference is that Don took the name and identity of an actual person, a Korean War officer who was killed because of him.) But there’s a world of difference between a short novel and a 7-season TV show, and it seems to me that Don Draper’s identity and arc quite simply did not have enough substance to merit all those hours of storytelling. It’s true that Jay Gatsby famously makes the case that we can repeat the past, but we didn’t have to read hundreds and hundreds of pages about him trying to do so again and again—while a good bit of the latter seasons of Mad Men featured Don making the same mistakes in pursuit of his elusive dreams. Perhaps that was part of the show’s thematic intent, but to this viewer it made the protagonist increasingly unlikable, and the show significantly less innovative and compelling.Next non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Pushback on this post, or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 16, 2016: AmericanStudying Non-favorites: Citizen Kane

[Each year for the last couple, I’ve followed up my Valentine’s series with a week AmericanStudying some things of which I’m not as big a fan. Please share your own non-favorites for a crowd-sourced airing of grievances this weekend!]On two very American problems with one of our most important films.Since its release in 1941, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has consistently been defined as one of the most innovative and significant American films; in recent decades it has almost always occupied one of the top spots in film critics’ and scholars’ lists of the best American films (or even best films period) of all time. There’s no doubt that Welles’ film pioneered a number of film techniques that quite simply changed the game when it came to filmmaking, on technical as well as story-telling levels, and I both defer to and (based on my limited knowledge) agree with my more informed FilmStudiers on those aspects of Kane. But at the same time, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation(1915) was also a pioneering and innovative film, and yet one that featured a deeply troubling set of themes and perspectives on which film scholars and historians can now agree. I’m not arguing that Kane is anywhere near as problematic as Birth (I know of few mainstream American films that are), but Welles’ film has at least a couple prominent—and telling—flaws nonetheless.For one thing, Citizen Kane represents one of the most overt cultural depictions of the Great Man theory of history I’ve ever encountered. It’s true that Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, a media tycoon modeled in large part on William Randolph Hearst, is far from an idealized hero, but that’s not what the “Great” in the Great Man theory implies—indeed, the theory suggests that both the strengths and weaknesses of these singular and influential historical figures have been the dominant forces in our communal stories. They’re “Great” in the sense of size and significance, and Kane embodies those qualities: his life at every stage, from the most inspiring to the most corrupt, exercises an over-sized influence on his society and world. The problem with that narrative isn’t just that it reinforces the egotism and delusions of grandeur of men like Hearst (and contemporary ones like, y’know, the Donald), but also and most importantly that it portrays American history as a battleground between a few towering figures, rather than the far messier, more democratic, and most of all more accurate concept of encounters and conflicts and connections between cultures and communities. Men like Hearst were part of that history to be sure, but as participants within it, as we all are.[SPOILER ALERT for Kane in this paragraph.] And then there’s that sled. I know that the film’s final revelation, that the great mystery of Kane’s dying word that drives the movie’s investigations into his life turns out to be just a nostalgic longing for a long-lost childhood toy, is likely meant to be ironic, and could be read as undercutting the narratives of Kane’s Greatness. But I have to admit that to my mind the Rosebud reveal undercuts the film itself at least as much. So someone on his death bed was thinking back to his life and longing for the simpler pleasures of childhood? A man who seemingly had everything was missing a symbol of what he had lost along the way? For one thing, Captain Obviousapproves. And for another, the answer to Kane’s mystery humanizes the character in only the most superficial ways—again, it’s an obvious and certainly universal way to imagine self-reflection and –definition, but it elides a deeper examination of the historical and social forces that have truly defined Kane’s life and identity, and that a different mystery plot (such as that at the center of John Sayles’ far superior film Lone Star, for example) could open up for viewers. Great but frustratingly limited—that defines both Charles Foster Kane and Orson Welles’ film about him.Next non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Pushback on this post, or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 15, 2016: AmericanStudying Non-favorites: To Kill a Mockingbird

[Each year for the last couple, I’ve followed up my Valentine’s series with a week AmericanStudying some things of which I’m not as big a fan. Please share your own non-favorites for a crowd-sourced airing of grievances this weekend!]On what Harper Lee’s classic novel fails to do, and where it succeeds.In this We’re History piece on the controversies or criticisms surrounding two of the most prominent books published in 2015, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, I argued that many of the unhappy responses to Lee’s sequel/prequel were driven by the ways in which the new novel changed the character of Atticus Finch. After all, Atticus has been one of the most beloved characters in American literature since To Kill a Mockingbird’s original 1960 publication (and even more so since Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning portrayal in the 1962 film version), to the point where many parents have even in honor of the character. And Lee’s second novel didn’t just portray Atticus as having grown more conservative or racist with age, an all-too-common shift that would perhaps be easier for readers to accept—it also revealed that he had been affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations throughout his life, radically revising the original novel’s depiction of his racial and social positions.Or at least, that’s how the new Atticus and novel felt to many readers. I’ve long been troubled by the widely accepted narrative that To Kill a Mockingbirdis one of America’s best novels about race and racism—not only because there there are so many better ones that should be much more widely remembered and read, but also and more importantly because (as I also argue in that We’re History piece) Mockingbirdisn’t really about African American histories or identities at all. To be clear, Lee’s novel doesn’t necessarily pretend to be about those subjects—the book is first and foremost about narrator and protagonist Scout Finch’s maturation, and secondly about her relationship with her (in her young eyes) idealized and inspiring father; because her father is a white lawyer in a Jim Crow world where (as Lee erroneously depicts it) African Americans have no advocates from within their community, he ends up defending an African American man falsely accused of rape, but that’s a minor plotline within the frame of this secondary character. If readers have amplified that plotline into a defining American story of race and justice, something Lee’s novel quite simply is not, that’s ultimately more telling of the absence of fuller stories and histories of those issues from our collective memories.If we were able to stop viewing Lee’s novel as one of our central literary portrayals of race, it would open up other and to my mind more productive ways of reading Mockingbird. For example, the novel is particularly interesting as a depiction of a young girl struggling with narratives of gender and social expectations, linking Scout to characters like Frankie from Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1952) or Cassandra from Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862). And, for that matter, to an African/Caribbean American young female protagonist like Selina in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Issues of race, along with region and class and religion and sexuality and other factors, certainly impact each of those protagonists’ experiences and identities, which would allow for a more nuanced analysis of such themes than the celebratory anti-racist narrative that has developed around Lee’s novel. So as usual—as always, I hope—I’m not arguing for abandoning this non-favorite text, but rather for reconsidering it in ways that would be more accurate and more productive than the idealizing vision we’ve held for so long.Next non-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Pushback on this post, or other non-favorites you’d share?

February 13-14, 2016: Teacher Tributes: My Fiancé

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I decided to share some of my blog’s early Tribute Posts on teachers I have loved. Leading up to this special weekend post on a very special teacher!]Because of her job (as a middle school social studies teacher in a strong school system—which is to say, as someone who works with probably the most technologically connected, obsessed, and savvy cohort of students in the world), my fiancé wouldn’t want me to discuss any identifying details in this space. (This will probably be the least-hyperlinked post I ever write!) So I’ll try to keep this general while still identifying five ways this very talented and dedicated teacher I love (in a slightly different way from my other subjects this week, natch) inspires me:1)      Her Innovations: She’s been teaching for over 15 years, but is the polar opposite of the teacher who brings the same yellowed lecture notes to class each day. Not only does she innovate from one year to the next, but I’ve seen her on numerous occasions figuring out a new way to present a topic, draw out her students, address an area that’s not quite working from one day to the next. And of course she’s having to do so across multiple sections of the same class that nonetheless have to engage different students (both individually and as communities) and thus might (read: do) require different innovations as well. 2)      Her Resiliency: We all have days or times or aspects of our jobs that present challenges or frustrations, knock us down a notch or five, throw us for a serious loop. But I’m here to say that middle school teaching in 2015 has many, many more such aspects than does college professing, or many other jobs I’ve been around. My fiancé has had more than her share (more than anybody’s share) of challenges added onto those. And all she does is come back better and more determined than ever, not because it’ll make the challenges go away but because she’s stronger than they’ll ever be. 3)      Her Compassion: I can’t begin to enumerate all the ways in which middle school students—as individuals, as peers, as family members, as citizens of communities—present challenges that go well beyond content and the classroom (although that too). No middle school teacher can ignore all those contexts, but I know for a fact that many choose to prioritize the content and the classroom, and to let students and families come to them for anything else. Fair enough, but my fiancé illustrates the power and potency of the opposite: of having concern and compassion for where her students are, in every sense, and for doing everything she can to meet and address each of them there (without losing any classroom rigor). 4)      Her Collegiality: This one’s simple to say but very hard to pull off: she cares about her colleagues and their success as much as she does her students and theirs. To quote Charles Dickens, may that be truly said of us, and all of us!5)      Her Passion: What those four, and so many other, elements add up to is someone who cares so deeply and fully, someone who brings the same passion to her job that she brings to the rest of her life (which is to say, as my sons would put it, a googolplex amount). That’d be damn inspiring in any person and profession—but in a teacher, it’s infinitely more so.Annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series starts Monday,BenPS. Teachers to whom you’d pay tribute? Other loves you’d share?

February 12, 2016: Teacher Tributes: Student Teachers

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I decided to share some of my blog’s early Tribute Posts on teachers I have loved. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very special teacher!]
Three things about which I have learned a great deal from classes and students I have taught at Fitchburg State:
1)      American Identities: In two of the classes I teach pretty regularly, Ethnic American Literature and Intro to American Studies, students complete a multi-generational family timeline and analytical family history as a main piece of individual work. I’ve now taught at least five sections of the former and at least seven of the latter, meaning I must have read more than 350 of these family projects. And every one has been incredibly valuable—hopefully for the students, but definitely for me, teaching me a great deal about the variety and breadth and challenges and power of American family and individual experiences and identities.
2)      American Artists: Since my second-half American literature survey comes right up to the present day (our last class reading is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake [2003]), for the last two classes I ask the students to bring in and briefly share a work by an artist (in any medium and genre) who has been influential in their life and perspective. I can’t tell you the number of writers and musicians, photographers and graffiti artists, and folks in every other imaginable artistic genre to whom I’ve been introduced through these presentations; but I can tell you that I learn as much about American art in those two days as I did in whole semesters of college.3)      America Itself: It’s not usually this clear-cut, of course, but I can trace with exact certainty the development of my second book. It started during an American Literature I class, as we were discussing Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and especially the complex middle section where she begins to join the social and economic communities of her Native captors; I linked the section to Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences, narrative, and hybrid identity, and an idea was born. There were lots of stages along the way from there to the book, and a great many of them were likewise directly situated in FSU spaces (as were, as that hyperlinked post illustrates, my third book’s stages as well!) and profoundly influenced by the voices and ideas of my colleagues and students.Special tribute post this weekend,BenPS. Teachers to whom you’d pay tribute? Other loves you’d share?

February 11, 2016: Teacher Tributes: Jeff Renye

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I decided to share some of my blog’s early Tribute Posts on teachers I have loved. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very special teacher!]On the great teacher with whom I shared my first office and teaching experience.
I don’t know if there’s an exact equivalent in any other advanced-degree-requiring profession, although I’m sure there are parallels: the first time a med student gets to deliver a baby on an OB rotation, for example. But then again, in that case there’s an actual doctor (or two) standing close by, ready to step in if things start to get out of hand, making the moment very explicitly instructional rather than professional. The same seems likely to be the case the first time a law student goes into a courtroom (as a summer intern, say), that he or she is doing so very clearly as a student still, learning from another professional who is likewise present, mimicking the responsibilities without quite taking them on yet. But the first time I stepped into a classroom as a teacher—at least in my graduate English program at Temple University, where we were the sole instructors of record for those first (and all other) classes, not teaching assistants for nor linked to anybody else—I was on my own, just me and those 22 first-semester first-year Writing I students.
I’m not trying to compare the stakes there to those involved in delivering (or even in participating in the delivery of) someone’s baby. But still, those 22 kids looking at me on that September 2001 afternoon were putting a key part of their first semester of college—and thus of much of the rest of their life—in my hands; and I was only about five years older than them, at the start of my second year of graduate school, with exactly zero classroom teaching experience of any kind behind me. The class used a standard syllabus for that first semester, and all of us who were teaching from it were part of a weekly teaching practicum; but neither of those things had much of anything to say about what we were to do on a daily basis, what would happen in that classroom for that hour, how I could possibly earn the respect that those 22 students were absolutely willing to give me—and more exactly my ability to teach them college writing—on faith. I’m sure I would have muddled my way through, and I like to think that I’d have gotten things figured out one way or another no matter what—but honestly, I don’t know how I could have survived those initial experiences if it weren’t for Anderson 1143.
1143 was my office, my first office no less, one floor up from the main English Department offices there at Temple. It didn’t have a window, much less a magic portal of knowledge about teaching. But it did have desks for myself and my friend and fellow first-time teacher Jeff Renye, and together there we aired our confusions and worries, listened to each other’s one-on-one conferences, tried to wrap our heads around discussion leading and assignments and grading, figured it out little by little, week by week, issue by issue, revelation by revelation. Jeff is likely to object, ‘cause he’s his own biggest critic when it comes to teaching (and much else)—and that’s probably part of the reason why he was such a perfect officemate, in this as in every other way, because he was never willing to settle for doing a mediocre job without trying to figure out how to do it better. But the great teachers aren’t just dedicated and committed (although they are those things for sure), they’re also innovative, they think outside of the boxes that they’re given (in a practicum, say), they figure out what’s going to work for themselves and their subjects and their students and they keep on figuring it out every class and every semester and every year. And they’re deeply communal, willing always to talk about all of that with their colleagues, to learn from each other as we struggle to get a bit better all the time. And all of that defines 1143 in that first year just about perfectly.I never got to watch Jeff teach, although I won’t settle for that past tense because I hope I’ll have the chance at some point. But I know for sure that I’ve talked to him more than anybody else about teaching, not only in that crucial first semester and year but in all the semesters and years since. We made it through that first semester, did right by those students, created our own syllabi and courses as we moved forward, made those classrooms our own. But, speaking for myself anyway, my classes have always also included the best teachers I’ve known and learned from, and so there’ll always be a lot of Anderson 1143 in every classroom of mine.Next amazing teacher tomorrow,BenPS. Teachers to whom you’d pay tribute? Other loves you’d share?

February 10, 2016: Teacher Tributes: It Takes a Village

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I decided to share some of my blog’s early Tribute Posts on teachers I have loved. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very special teacher!]
On five moments that helped get me here.
I’ve thought a lot over the first decade and a half of my career about just how communal any successful individual’s professional trajectory, his or her career path, really is. Since I’m about to make clear that I’m referring to myself, let me stress that by “successful” I simply mean somebody who has found a satisfying and productive and meaningful job, a way to do something that he loves and feels as if he can do for the rest of his life happily and well. I certainly feel that way about—and feel very lucky and blessed to have—my gig, and again have been thinking recently about just how many people and contributions and steps have contributed to my path here. And so, for today’s teaching tribute post, five such people and one specific, seemingly small but far from insignificant, moment in which each made such an impact for me:
1)      Mr. Hickerson and Bruce: My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Hickerson, runs a very close second to Mr. Heartwell as the most inspiring and impressive teacher of my pre-college years. The whole of that year with him was hugely meaningful for me, but if I had to highlight one moment, it’d be a couple classes when he had us bring in and analyze songs of our choosing. My choice was Bruce’s “The River,” then and now probably my favorite single song of Bruce’s, and the resulting discussion, and especially my attempt to articulate why I read the end of the song (and thus its whole arc and story and meaning) in the way that I did, was a transformative moment for me for sure.
2)      Ms. Perkins and Tutoring: In my senior year of high school, I was one of five students who were eligible for and chose to take a class in Multivariable Calculus. Because it was such a small cohort, our young and very enthusiastic and cool (in the best sense) teacher, Ms. Perkins, made the class very much about our individual identities and perspectives, including a creative assignment for which I made a Choose Your Own Adventure math book that I still remember very fondly. But by far the most meaningful feature was a unit in which each of us worked with one student from a more remedial math class to help him or her pass a standardized test that they needed in order to move to their next year’s class; I know I had tutored before in one context or another, but I remember those couple of weeks, and even particular choices of mine (that did work, that didn’t) and exchanges between us, much more fully and specifically. My tutoree passed, and I don’t think I had a prouder or happier moment in high school.
3)      Jay, John, and the Gauntlet: I’ll be the first to admit that I came into college in general, and into the History and Literature program there specifically (a program that usually started with sophomore year but that I had applied to begin as a freshman because I felt so damn ready for it), feeling like I knew what I was doing. Sure, I had things to learn, books to read, ideas to grapple with, but the skills? I was good to go. Well, my year of Hist and Lit Sophomore Tutorial, and specifically the incredibly challenging and rigorous and oh-so-necessary feedback I got from my two tutors, Jay Grossman and John McGreevy--now professors of American literature at Northwestern and history at Notre Dame, respectively—was exactly the corrective I needed. They fostered my ideas and interests and passion but made very clear how far I had to go as a thinker and reader and, especially, writer, and it’s difficult to overstate how much I’ve carried those lessons forward, both in my own work and as teaching models.
4)      Dr. Caserio and the Red Pen: And lest it seem as if the lessons ended there, or in college at all, I take you forward about six years, to a graduate class in Narratology and Fiction that I took in Spring 2002 with Temple’s then-department chair and resident taskmaster, Professor Robert Caserio. Caserio believed in and practiced the Socratic method, meaning that every class was a palm-sweating experience in being pushed and prodded and challenged and strengthened. But even more meaningful, for me, were his incredibly detailed and thoroughly rigorous comments on my papers—I couldn’t believe how much red ink I saw when I got the first paper back, and almost none of those comments comprised simply grammatical or stylistic responses; they were challenges to my ideas and to my prose, to words or sentences that weren’t clear or specific or sufficiently analytical, that needed more and better. They were also, and most importantly, an investment of time and energy and intelligence to which I couldn’t help but respond in kind.
5)      Dr. Crossley and a Chance: In the fall of 2004 I was teaching five sections of first-year writing as an adjunct at two local universities, Boston University (in the Writing Program there) and UMass Boston (in the English Department) while finishing my dissertation and going on the job market for the first time. My partner was working 100-hour weeks as a medical resident. And in mid-October our Boston apartment was broken into and my laptop (which included not-backed-up copies of my first dozen or so job letters and lots of other similarly difficult to replace or replicate materials) was one of the items stolen. All of which is just to say, by early November I was crazy busy and stretched thin and perhaps, to coin a phrase, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And then the UMass Boston English Department Chair, Professor Robert Crossley, asked me if I would be interested in teaching a literature class (a survey entitled Six American Writers) in the coming spring. I’ll probably never know what led him—as busy and stretched himself as any department chair always is—to think of me for it, but I do know that that spring course remains one of my best semesters ever, and that I can trace literally double-digit specific influences and effects of my work in that class on my continuing efforts as a teacher, scholar, and AmericanStudier.Each clause of that final sentence is really my point here. Who knows why opportunities come our way, and whether it’s ultimately anything other than luck that brings us to people and relationships and influences like these? Certainly we can and must take advantage of them once they’re there, be open to their inspirations and lessons and meanings, and carry them forward as fully and gratefully and successfully as we can. But it also seems to me that we—and I mean we as academics and scholars and teachers, but also we as Americans, we as humans—have to acknowledge just how significant a truth it is that, yes, it takes a village.Next amazing teacher tomorrow,BenPS. Teachers to whom you’d pay tribute? Other loves you’d share?

February 9, 2016: Teacher Tributes: Proal Heartwell

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I decided to share some of my blog’s early Tribute Posts on teachers I have loved. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very special teacher!]On the challenging and vital art of getting through.
I like to say that I gave some thought to teaching high school English before settling on grad school and college teaching, and that’s not untrue, but the bottom line—and I’ve always known it at some level—is that I couldn’t get through a career teaching at the high school level. In my admittedly individual and limited experiences (in public schools, which are the only ones I can speak to), many of those English teachers who had made it to retirement age in that demanding and under-appreciated and –paid profession did so by shutting down in significant ways, by dulling their love of the subject or their desire to connect with their students on a day to day basis or similar core aspects of what we do. I’ll never forget my junior year American lit teacher, for example, who, realizing that we didn’t have time to read Melville’s Billy Budd as planned, told us we would watch the movie instead—and then, when we ran out of time for even that, just spent five minutes telling us the entire plot and ended by saying, “That’ll do.” The really passionate and committed and innovative English teachers, on the other hand, the ones who clearly couldn’t do their job without staying in the room every day and in every way, seemed to burn out very young and leave the profession.
As I saw it then and as I have heard from friends and grad students who teach in the public schools up here, there are plenty of practical and administrative reasons for that trend—requirements from the school system and the state (and now standardized testing and outside agencies), the difficulties and dangers of assigning works that might be controversial or anger parents or fall outside of certain boundaries, the need to do things like grammar and vocabulary in ways that might have nothing to do with one’s own pedagogical ideas and goals, and many others—, but if I had to identify one overarching factor, it’d be the difficulty of getting through to the students themselves. If and when I complain about trying to get my students to read or be interested in what we’re doing, I try to remember how much more difficult it would be with 15 year olds, kids who aren’t paying to be there and didn’t in any sense choose to be and have everything going on that 15 year olds do and think it’s nerdy and horrible to show any interest in a class text or topic and etc. And when thinking about that doesn’t make me feel any more inspired, I remember that getting through to those kids—to any class—is difficult but not impossible, remember a soft-spoken man with a Southern accent and an abiding love for Faulkner and singer-songwriters and the Black Mountain poets, remember maybe the most pitch-perfect, Robin Williams-movie-like name of any teacher I’ve ever had: Mr. Heartwell.
I had Proal Heartwell for two classes—AP English and Advanced Composition—in my senior year of high school, a time when you’d think, when I thought, that my love for reading and writing was already pretty fully developed (I had, after all, signed up for AP English and Advanced Composition). But Mr. Heartwell proved us both wrong, on an almost daily basis, and in more ways than I can possibly detail here. The first thing in the morning journal free writes set to music that each of us got to bring in and share with our classmates; the unit on close reading song lyrics of our choice (as a sneaky way to get us analyzing poetry) that I have shamelessly cribbed for my own Writing I syllabus; the dense and difficult texts (from As I Lay Dying to multiple Shakespeare plays to, yeah, the Black Mountain Poets) that he found ways to get us to open up for ourselves, to feel as if we were making them alive and new; the cassette tape with more than an hour of feedback that he gave each of us for our short stories; the poetry reading he organized for us and emceed at a downtown book store. I don’t think I remember with any real specificity or vividness any one assignment or unit from any other high school class—most of my high school memories are of that time I should have asked her to dance, that humiliating day at lunch, and, y’know, that other 15 year-old kind of stuff—but I remember all of those from Mr. Heartwell’s classes, and many more besides. Would I have majored in History and Literature in college, written a thesis on historical fiction and American culture, gone to grad school for a PhD in English, published my first article on Faulkner, if I didn’t take those classes with Mr. Heartwell? Maybe. But I’m not sure I would have gotten through senior year and high school without him, and I know I wouldn’t be the teacher and reader and writer I am.
I don’t think I ever quite told Mr. Heartwell any of this—no final scene with all of us standing on our desks in this movie, at least in part because luckily no one forced Mr. Heartwell out; he did leave at a later point to found an innovative middle school for girls, inspired I believe by his own daughter. But I have to believe that he already knows how much he was getting through to us, how much he got through the obstacles and requirements and got right to the core of what makes teaching and literature and reading and writing alive and vibrant, meaningful and valuable. Next amazing teacher tomorrow,BenPS. Teachers to whom you’d pay tribute? Other loves you’d share?

February 8, 2016: Teacher Tributes: Alan Heimert

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I decided to share some of my blog’s early Tribute Posts on teachers I have loved. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very special teacher!]On staying in the room.
There were ten of us in the room when the first class began, a typical size for an upper-level English-department seminar. We were all juniors and seniors, all English or History or (like me) History and Literature majors, and I’m sure that we were all expecting it to be a challenging semester—the class was focused entirely on the Puritans, the books were plentiful and weighty in every sense, and the professor was one of our nation’s most esteemed authorities on the topic and a notoriously demanding scholar and teacher to boot. But I don’t think any of us were ready for what went down on that first day. There were no introductions, no “Tell us your name and House and one interesting thing about you,” no going over the syllabus; the professor and his graduate assistant came into the room and handed out a 50-page photocopied reading, the prof said that we would have about forty-five minutes to read it and then we’d have an in-depth discussion, and then they left again. And did I mention that the reading was in that old-style font, the one where all the f’s look like s’s? There were six of us in the room by the time the prof and assistant came back, and then it got really tough.
Professor Alan Heimert was a few months shy of 70 that spring, in the fifth decade of what by any conceivable measure was a monumentally successful and influential career. Few works on the Puritans, the colonial or Revolutionary eras, or religion in American identity and life have made as significant an impact as did Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution (1966); his co-edited collections The Great Awakening (1967) and The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (1985) remain the gold standard for teaching about and understanding their topics. He taught the Harvard English Department’s gateway course, English 70, for over thirty years, introducing untold thousands of undergraduates to the rigors and rewards of literary scholarship. He served as the Master of Eliot House for that same period, the thirty-three years between 1968 and 1991, one of the longest tenures of any Master, and in that time influenced the college experiences and lifelong successes of tens of thousands of other undergraduates. The History and Literature program bore and still bears his stamp in innumerable ways. All of which is to say that by late January of 1998, when I sat in that seminar room struggling over a Puritan primary text and awaiting his return, Professor Heimert could have been forgiven if he committed slightly less than 100% of his energies or attention to the six of us who stayed in the room.
But once Professor Heimert returned, for that remaining hour and a bit and for two hours every week thereafter, he stayed in the room with us as well, entirely and wholeheartedly. It’s impossible for me to describe the combination of emotions that I felt every week in the few minutes before he entered the room, knowing as I now did how immediately the rigorous questions and challenges and discussion would begin and how fully they would occupy my world for those next two hours. I was definitely intimidated; I’m not the type to stay quiet for two hours (a fact that I’m sure shocks absolutely none of you), but I knew that everything that came out of my mouth in there had been well-thought-out and grounded in the texts and ready to be pushed and prodded and revised and reshaped and honed into something a lot smarter than it had been. I was also excited; I could feel my understanding and analyses, not only of the specific materials and ideas but also and more meaningfully as a reader and thinker and talker and writer (I haven’t even talked about the weekly journals and the amount of red ink that they’d contain when we got them back), developing and deepening over the course of the semester, so that when I walked into the hour-long oral exam in May (an hour equaled in rigor in my college experience only by my senior thesis defense), I felt worthy to sit in that room with Professor Heimert and talk with him about some of the most important American texts and figures and ideas.
Professor Heimert passed away in November of that year, making me one of the last students to have the great fortune to take a class from him. My teaching style is about as distinct from Professor Heimert’s as you can get; my first classes feature introductions and a chance for every student to tell us a bit about who he or she is and some main highlights of the syllabus and semester and a very informal and non-threatening bit of writing. But I learned from him a lot more than just the intricacies of “saved by faith alone” and declension and the Halfway Covenant; I learned what it really means to stay in the room, to be for that time each week as fully a part of my classes’ communities as I can be. Next amazing teacher tomorrow,BenPS. Teachers to whom you’d pay tribute? Other loves you’d share?

February 6-7, 2016: AmericanStudying Super Bowl L

[For each of the last few years, I’ve used Super Bowl week to AmericanStudy some football and/or sports topics. This week, I’ve focused on five football debates I haven’t already covered in those series, leading up to this special post two complementary Super Bowl L storylines!]Consider this a Guest Post of ours, because when it comes to Super Bowl L and its two most prominent and polarizing figures, I couldn’t possibly AmericanStudy them any better than did two scholars on the great Sport in American History blog:Andrew McGregor on “Peyton Manning: The NFL’s Great White Hope”;And Kate Aguilar on “The Man in the Mirror: Black Culture, White Privilege, and Supermen in the Age of Cam Newton.”Before you settle down for the spectacle, the commercials, the Coldplay, and oh yeah the football, I urge you to read those two great examples of SportsStudying.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?