I’ve been lucky over the years with the number of great teachers who helped educate me. Mr. Molyneux, my Ninth Grade English teacher, praised my writing and helped me get published in a student poetry anthology.
At Marquette University, Roger Mitchell conducted wonderful Creative Writing classes that helped students like me learn about the Writing Process. Michael McCanless, chain-smoking constantly, conducted a masterful class in Shakespeare that revealed many subtleties in the Bard’s work.
And my doctoral committee Chairman, Bob Daly, guided my fumbling attempts to write a dissertation into a book we both liked. In Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers (1981) Joseph Epstein collects 18 essays that reveal the admiration and influence great teachers had on their students.
Of all these great teachers, the two I wish I had classes with are Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. The essays on these two iconic professors praise their vast knowledge and the regard they held for their students. Did you have a Great Teacher? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
CONTRIBUTORS — vii
Introduction / Joseph Epstein — xi
Christian Gauss / Edmund Wilson — 1
Morris R. Cohen — fifty years later / Sidney Hook — 24
Alfred North Whitehead : Plato’s lost dialogue / Joseph Gerard Brennan — 47
Teggart of Berkeley / Robert Nisbet — 69
Nadia Boulanger / Suzanne R. Hoover — 88
F.O. Matthiessen / Kenneth S. Lynn — 103
Arthur O. Lovejoy / Lewis S. Feuer — 119
Yvor Winters of Stanford / Gerald Graff — 140
John William Miller / George P. Brockway — 155
Ruth Benedict / Victor Barnouw — 165
John Crowe Ransom / Anthony Hecht — 178
Hannah Arendt / Peter Stern & Jean Yarbrough — 189
The education of a scientist / Jeremy Bernstein — 212
I.A. Richards / Helen Vendler — 226
C.S. Lewis as a teacher / John Wain — 236
Leo Strauss : becoming naïve again / Werner J. Dannhauser — 252
I still shudder when I think of my high school teachers in Germany in the 50s – either they were real Nazis left over or what I call “Clerical Fascists” which mixed their extreme right wing tendencies with religious propaganda.
Only in the last two years(1960 – 1962) did we get young teachers which were ok, but nothing special.
My maths profs at university were a different kind – very good but not necessarily as teachers.
But we managed, we were a small group that helped each other.
Wolf, in the U.S. when I was growing up, teaching was a poor paying profession dominated by women. Most teachers would say they had a “Calling” to become an educator. Today, women have many more options and teaching has become more difficult given the current situation like online teaching.
In Germany at that time (until 1962) we had mainly male teachers but I would have preferred more females.
I can’t recall the name of a single teacher I ever had in High School or University. I just remember their eccentricities. A Chinese history teacher whose accent was so heavy no one in class could understand a word he said but if you asked him to repeat something he would get angry. A Shakespeare teacher who spent all his time ranting against student demonstrators against the Vietnam war. I don’t recall ever being either helped personally by a teacher or criticized.
Steve, sorry to hear that. At key times in my Life, a good teacher made all the difference.
Not until college did I have a really good teacher. And it was a class on the Vietnam War. Ninety students took this elective class with me–that’s how good the professor was. This was long after the war, probably in the late eighties. I liked him so much, we became close friends (along with Phil and his wife). So here’s to Mel Small, who knew how to breathe life into history. Not always easy. I am thankful to the Smalls for helping me make it through the last two years. So good teachers also make good friends. (Same for you, George!)
Patti, thank you for your kind words! The teachers I had in College and Grad School and the PhD. Program were a diverse group, but most of them really knew their field of study. I learned a lot from them. Isn’t it wonderful when you encounter someone like Mel Small!
Poor Jackie always seemed to get stuck with the losers. She had a teacher in college who told her that she reminded her of someone she hated! She actually went to the department to complain and got her grade improved. I’ve mentioned the notorious Richard Ellmann, biographer of Joyce and others, who was slumming at Hunter College one year, who she hated. She had a terrible Education teacher (pretty much turned her off teaching at the time), who just read from her notes every week. One week she lost her place and repeated the previous week’s lecture, word for word!
I, on the other hand, did have some very good teachers. A young English teacher in high school who encouraged me. A terrific chemistry teacher I loved as a junior, enough that I took a second year of chemistry because he was teaching it. Several good ones in college in drama (Prof. Kuner, first a general Drama class, later two classes in 20th C. British drama)) and various history classes. There were some turkeys too, which usually turned out to be classes Jackie and I took together! You can blame her. We had this guy Bernard (Bernie) Lander for Sociology. He used to make this girl (“Blondie, get me a corn muffin”) bring him a muffin, which he proceeded to eat and spray all over the front row. We had this older black woman, Elsie Lewis, for History of Black People in the US, who was (to be kind) past her sell-by date. She talked a lot about the Schomburg Center in Harlem, but had little else to contribute. When I spoke to a favorite professor (Prof. Miller, taught English History) about what other classes I was taking and mentioned Prof. Lewis, she said, “Oh, dear. That’s not working out, is it?” But I had terrific teachers for survey courses in Music (I remember we studied Alban Berg’s WOZZECK all semester, then went to see it performed only to discover it was in English when we had been studying the German original all year!) and Art History. We had to take two Phys Ed classes. Jackie had to take swimming, but they dropped that. (Hunter had a pool in the basement.) I took tennis and then softball, the latter of which entailed walking over to Central Park and playing a game on Friday afternoons! It was the easiest B ever.
Jeff, as you point out, having Good Teachers is a joy! But a Bad Teacher can be Hell on Earth. I’ve encountered a few Bad Teachers and suffered through the experience. In College, I was smart enough to Drop the Bad Professors and Add the Good Professors.
One more: Kenneth Sherrill was a young guy in the Political Science department 50 years ago. He is still around at the Graduate Center of CUNY, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus who is quoted frequently and occasionally seen on television. He was a District Leader and the first openly gay elected politician in New York in the ’70s.
Jeff, I’ve seen Kenneth Sherrill on TV a few times. Impressive guy!
These stories brought back memories:
Hope I haven’t told that story about going to church before – if so just ignore.
We went to the “Gymnasium” for 9 years (10 – 18 years of age) before going to univeristy – or doing military service.
I was lucky that I was a member of an “intellectual gang” of 4 male students, we discussed philosophy, especially Nietzsche and modern literature and … after school. Often we would walk with our friend Wolfgang who became a zoology prof halfway up from the valley to the village where he lived, about half an hour.
We did that too on Wednesday mornings, walking along the old city wall, when we were supposed to go to church – either catholic or protestant – you had to do this!
One day we were found out and ordered to go to the principal (a real catholic fascist) in the afternoon for detention maybe?
He was angry, probably knew it wouldn’t look good to punish his best pupils (I was the Primus …) and sent us home, probably didn’t want a discussion about religious freedom and choice in this state school.
Then we had more freedom – were around 15 years old.
But I still was angry especially after leaving school and going university when I heard from someone that he was supposed to offer his best pupil (me …) for a stipend by a well known foundation. He had done this the year before with his own son – but he was rejected so he didn’t do it any more.
I was lucky however. In my third year at university studying maths and physics I got the chance to join the foundation. Didn’t get too much money but several paid holidays abroad – the greatest wa a few weeks in summer in the famous English city of Canterbury, including visits to London and Brighton.
That made my love for anything English even stronger.
PS:
That principal was so ugly to his own children even that his younger son killed himself after a year at university when he realised he wasn’t up to what his father expected from him!
Horrible!
As long as he lived I wouldn’t go to class reunions …
Wolf, teachers have the power to influence students positively…and negatively.
I had a few good teachers in high school, but don’t recall their names, one for Freshman English, one for “World History”, and a Social Studies teach my Senior year. No one comes to mind from college, it was all big lecture halls and stuffed classrooms and it was the assignments I focused on.
Rick, other than my Freshman year where my English and History classes were in big lecture halls, the rest of my classes were smaller, usually about 30 students at the beginning of the semester and half that at the end.
I had a number of rather good or better teachers, in one way or another, and not a few idiots or loons, the latter mostly in elementary school in various New England states, but also one in graduate school who resented having to teach at all, even MS students. She manifested this resentment of her obligation by giving out 2 Bs, a C and about 10 Fs for her first exam. I got the C.
But in the same program, I also was in a seminar with Elyse Boulding, who also had her husband Kenneth in for one session. Thelma Lavine (author of, and host of the television series she put together at the same time, FROM SOCRATES TO SARTRE) and A. A. Attanasio taught grad courses I was able to take as an undergrad, the latter because Robert Onopa, who ran the writing program at the University of Hawaii, waived me in (I had taken his 300-level writing seminar as a frosh and IMMEDIATELY fell into a mutual dislike with Ian MacMillan, who was teaching the 400-level seminar the next semester…Onopa wondered if I might be interested in the 600-level course, where Attanasio had been a last-minute replacement for the aging, and I think ill, comedy writer Jack Douglas). A pity I can’t remember the names of a few of the encouraging or thoughtful teachers in grade/high school, though I can note Allen Palmer–a world-weary guy who did a creditable job teaching us every subject in 5th and 6th grade in our small Hazardville, CT, elementary school, save the arts classes that happened once a week with roving teachers , and PE (the PE teacher in 5th grade being one of my goons, who actually shoved me to the pavement once because I didn’t do a basketball drill to his satisfaction) and the Londonderry HS music and band teacher Andrew Soucy, who did become famous in that field–he for more than a decade running had his student marching band appear in the Rose Bowl parade, and he conducted the Boston Pops for a performance some years ago…David Something was the orchestra teacher in my last year in New Hampshire, and the first person to note that most of the jazz I seemed to like could be classed as Third Stream music…a term I hadn’t encountered till then.
Ha…my nearly lifelong inability to remember names–which was pretty bad in my youth if I exclusively heard a name, but I could retain names better if I read them–has led me to misspell Elise Boulding’s name. Another notable, a better lecturer than a worker with students, was visiting prof Alistair Reid, teaching a course in Borges, Neruda and Garcia Marquez. One of my classmates, during an office appointment to discuss her major paper for the course, couldn’t help but feel he was hoping sooner rather than later she would leave, so that he could eat the candy bar on his desk in solitude. (Hs translations of Borges being among the many better than the travesties Penguin has currently in print in English. I suspect our cat Ninja could do better than the Penguins.)
Lynn McCutcheon was a intro psychology prof I took a pair of courses from, but his avocational passion was rhythm and blues music and its cousins, and we shot the breeze about that for some length. His 1971 volume RHYTHM AND BLUES was one of the pioneer texts on the musical form.
Todd, it’s always good when you encounter a special teachers like Lynn McCutcheon.
Todd, I had some psycho gym teachers, too. One guy, who was head coach of the High School football team, couldn’t be bothered to teach classes. He would just throw out a bunch of balls and told us to play Dodgeball for the rest of the class. What a waste of time!
The Good: Dean Tietlebaum, high school history; Doyne Mraz, college drama; Bart DePalma, college art (brother of director Brian DePalma); Vivian Talley, fifth grade at Ocean View Elementary!
The Bad: Bill “Snake” Massari, high school Spanish; John “Chrome Dome” Grant, junior high English! Both assholes and sadists with no business being in the education system!
The Ugly: see The Bad! Maybe their hideous appearances made them ugly on the inside, too!
Bob, there’s a spectrum of teachers from Good to Bad. The trick is to avoid the Bad ones.