Well, the bad thing first.
I have an awful confession to make. Even though I'm a Chicagoan, I like Boston/New York pizza better.
I know, how dare I. Sacrilege. If Chicago is identified by any food, it's hot dogs without ketchup, and deep dish pizza. And I like the paper-thin crust pizza of the east coast far better.
I buy slices. I eat them. I enjoy them. I fold them just like an east coast person would.
I mean, do we need that much cheese Chicago? I accuse you of a reductio ad absurdum--of taking a shred of the truth and manipulating it to absurdity.
Yes cheese tastes good. Yes it's even better melted. But it's good in small amounts: a little bit of cheddar on your chili, a slice with your sandwich, a bit mixed in with your omelet. But inches of it? Overkill.
So I apologize for my love of east coast pizza. But I made it up to Chicago yesterday.
I was in Arts in Education class, and we were talking about access to the arts in urban areas. One of the teaching fellows had worked in Chicago, so he was talking about the circumstances in south side neighborhoods. Then a few other students who had lived in Chicago piped up, and then a few more. Pretty soon anyone who had ever spent some time in the Windy City was chiming in with what they knew--Chicago this and Chicago that, Chicago lost funding, Chicago has strong community centers, Chicago has well-defined ethnic neighborhoods, on and on. So then a woman from Tennessee spoke up and joked (in her southern drawl), "Wait a minute, is everyone from Chicago?"
The whole room laughed. The Chicagoans had taken over. It was funny.
And as the laughter subsided, and a little space opened up for the next comment, I jumped in:
"Well, you're either from Chicago, or you wish you were."
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The First Poem: "Praise" (x)
You can find it here:
http://web.me.com/thelastpintaturtle/Poems/Praise.html
http://web.me.com/thelastpintaturtle/Poems/Praise.html
Working With My Priorities (x)
Do you know what the problem is with Harvard and Cambridge? There's too much you want to do. It's like a buffet, and you've stuffed yourself for a couple of hours, and you can't possibly eat another thing, but there still all that food sitting there.
Tonight for example there were three speakers I wanted to see giving talks AT THE SAME TIME. One was a poet, the other was talking about the future of energy, and the third was author Orhan Pamuk. And that was after I went to a lecture last night. How do you fit it all in?
You don't. You end up doing about 5% of all you want to do. Like Townes Van Zandt said, "Everything is not enough / Nothing's too much to bear, / Where you've been is good and gone / All you keep is the gettin' there."
And it's especially hard to fit it all in with the priorities I've set for myself. What are those priorities you ask? They're as follows:
1. Having fun.
2. Hitting on women
3. Working out
4. Classes
That's right, classes are #4. At Harvard mind you. I've been a workaholic for the past 15 years, so I'm long overdue for #1-#3. And I won't fail my classes. Maybe I won't get all A's, but I won't fail. And do you know what they call the person who finishes last in his class at Harvard? A Harvard graduate.
So I always pick socializing over homework. I'll go swimming in lieu of rereading an article. And I'll let a pretty girl keep me up until 1 am even if I have an early class the next day.
It's my money, it's my year, it's my plan.
Tonight for example there were three speakers I wanted to see giving talks AT THE SAME TIME. One was a poet, the other was talking about the future of energy, and the third was author Orhan Pamuk. And that was after I went to a lecture last night. How do you fit it all in?
You don't. You end up doing about 5% of all you want to do. Like Townes Van Zandt said, "Everything is not enough / Nothing's too much to bear, / Where you've been is good and gone / All you keep is the gettin' there."
And it's especially hard to fit it all in with the priorities I've set for myself. What are those priorities you ask? They're as follows:
1. Having fun.
2. Hitting on women
3. Working out
4. Classes
That's right, classes are #4. At Harvard mind you. I've been a workaholic for the past 15 years, so I'm long overdue for #1-#3. And I won't fail my classes. Maybe I won't get all A's, but I won't fail. And do you know what they call the person who finishes last in his class at Harvard? A Harvard graduate.
So I always pick socializing over homework. I'll go swimming in lieu of rereading an article. And I'll let a pretty girl keep me up until 1 am even if I have an early class the next day.
It's my money, it's my year, it's my plan.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Artist and Teacher, Teacher and Artist (x)
My program is Arts in Education, populated by lots of artist and teachers, some more one than the other. So it makes sense that our first assignment would have us grapple with these two identities. Here's my essay:
I proudly identify myself as a teacher. But I never identify myself outwardly, and rarely inwardly, as an artist.
I remember the first time I felt like I was a teacher. I was a few weeks into my student teaching in Danville, Illinois, and I had just begun to run the classes on my own. I had my first taste of the complexity, agony, and thrill of being a teacher. That night my punk rock band was playing at a local club, and as we were setting up our equipment, I looked up our drummer with a big, silly grin on my face, and I said “Jason, I’m a teacher.” I love meeting a new group of people, because the conversation inevitably turns to what you do for a living, and I’ll get to say “I’m a high school English teacher.” My match.com username is EnglishTeacher33, half of my conversations start with “I taught this one student who . . .”, and my five-year-old niece draws pictures of me in a classroom.
Teaching is the only thing I’ve ever done with full, conscientious effort. I’ve taken some good stabs at being a guitar player, a boyfriend, a student, and a swimmer. But only with teaching did I ever give everything I have. I don’t know why and I don’t recall ever planning it that way, but I’ve overworked myself as an educator for the past 15 years. It’s my most obvious identification.
But I never call myself an artist. I sometimes worry I bluffed my way into the Arts in Education cohort. I love the arts, I teach them obsessively, I find them essential, and I think they’re woefully undervalued and underrepresented in public schools. But I feel like I rarely engage in my own artistic production. My classmates in the AIE program seem to be fully-fledged artists; they love their art, they practice it regularly, and they have long resumes and dense portfolios. I love all of their varied art forms, and that’s why the cohort is endlessly engaging. But I’m not sure I’m one of them.
Of course being a good teacher is truly an art; it takes skill, flexibility, nuance, and intuition. Standing in front of a class of 30 high school students, I often feel like the conductor of a grand symphony. I register individual moods and classroom vibes, I play student comments off of each other, I adjust the pace of the class, I interject or stay silent depending on what the moment dictates. Or maybe I’m like a jazz musician, who has no set notes to play, but simply builds and improvises on what the drums and bass lay down. I use my here-and-now reactions to both follow and shape what is in the air that day. If I stayed with rigidly fixed templates things would seem mechanistic and bloodless, and no one ever described John Coltrane as mechanistic and bloodless.
So I think my teaching makes me an artist, but not my writing. And why not? For some reason I think you’ve got to put in the time before you can claim something as your identity. During the school year I work far more than 60 hours a week, so how could I not identify myself as a teacher? Whatever is consuming my life is worthy of being my label. If I was a writer, wouldn’t I be doing it all day?
But that doesn’t make much sense. I have put in my time as a writer—I have a creative writing degree from Northwestern. How many countless pages did I craft and revise for that master’s? What about all the lyrics I’ve written? My summer poetry workshops? And since when does calling yourself an artist have a minimal time requirement? If I was only teaching part-time, I would still call myself a teacher. Why won’t I do the same as a writer?
I can think of other moments that tell me I’m an artist. I never wrote of my own volition until I lived in Tanzania when I was 33. Because that year was such an intense and transformative experience, I found myself heading to the local internet café to send long e-mails to my family. When I got home to the states my mother gave me two large three-ring binders filled with print-outs of every e-mail, which would later become the raw material of my master’s thesis. I always say that I accidentally discovered writing when I was in Tanzania. I had no plans to write that much, and no plans at all to become a writer or get a writing degree. But I had stumbled upon a craft that felt like it was meant for me. Why hadn’t I discovered it before? Do I blame my education? If writing was a magnificent, transcendent art form, why didn’t someone show me when I was younger? Would it have been that hard? What were my schools making me do with writing that steered me away from all of its glory? Shouldn’t schools make the potential love for a topic the first order of business?
But Tanzania isn’t the only time that I felt like a real artist. When I was getting my degree at Northwestern, I recall working on a poem about Andrew Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. I babysat for my sister one evening, and after I put her daughter to bed, I sat at her computer and pleasurably agonized over the poem; I adjusted a comma here, rearranged a rhyme scheme there, wrapped myself up in the lines of the poem. I felt the rush of being in the moment of creation. I understood for the first time the meaning of “starving artist,” since I would have gladly given up food if I could feel that way all the time. Or maybe I wouldn’t starve, because making art felt like nourishment itself.
I recall another assignment from my master’s degree that made me feel like an artist. I was writing a science fiction piece about three white men in a high rise that perpetrated all of the evil in the world. It was my summer vacation and I wasn’t teaching, so I had time to luxuriate in the dialogue and scenes I was crafting. One morning I woke up with nothing on my schedule except to revise, and I was struck by my feeling of anticipation. It reminded me of Christmas mornings as a child, when I would wake up excited, because a new toy was waiting downstairs. Writing my science fiction story was playtime, an activity done for its sheer intrinsic joy. Which is something an artist would say.
So what is going on here? I have every reason to call myself an artist. I’ve put in the time, I’ve written a lot, and I’ve felt the artist’s rush. So why don’t I call myself an artist? What am I avoiding?
Maybe the answer is this simple: I don’t think I’m very good. Sure I hopped on stage to scream my lyrics with my punk band, but it’s easy to hide your insecurities behind walls distortion and eardrum-tearing volume. But to this day I’m still insecure about my writing. Recently I had my first poetry workshop class, which is mostly filled with brilliant undergraduate writers. I spent the entire three hours wondering anxiously whether I was good enough to be there. Why am I like this? Is it because Mr. Janke cut me from chorus in 5th grade since I couldn’t sing on tune? Is it because no one showed me I loved to write when I was young, and I didn’t have sufficient time to settle into the term “artist”? Is it from long-standing insecurities that only a qualified psychoanalyst could untangle? Well, whatever the reason, I don’t have a good reason to not call myself an artist. In fact, it shouldn’t have anything to do with how good I am; what’s more important is for me to get back that feeling that comes in the throes of creation. Since when do you have to be good at something to do it? I should take Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice and “follow my inclination rather than consult my ability.” That way I’d get to do what is fun all the time, accolades and criticisms be damned. Better yet, I should take my cue from Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When someone told him he couldn’t be the lead singer of a band since he can’t stay on tune, he responded, “Who made those rules?”
I proudly identify myself as a teacher. But I never identify myself outwardly, and rarely inwardly, as an artist.
I remember the first time I felt like I was a teacher. I was a few weeks into my student teaching in Danville, Illinois, and I had just begun to run the classes on my own. I had my first taste of the complexity, agony, and thrill of being a teacher. That night my punk rock band was playing at a local club, and as we were setting up our equipment, I looked up our drummer with a big, silly grin on my face, and I said “Jason, I’m a teacher.” I love meeting a new group of people, because the conversation inevitably turns to what you do for a living, and I’ll get to say “I’m a high school English teacher.” My match.com username is EnglishTeacher33, half of my conversations start with “I taught this one student who . . .”, and my five-year-old niece draws pictures of me in a classroom.
Teaching is the only thing I’ve ever done with full, conscientious effort. I’ve taken some good stabs at being a guitar player, a boyfriend, a student, and a swimmer. But only with teaching did I ever give everything I have. I don’t know why and I don’t recall ever planning it that way, but I’ve overworked myself as an educator for the past 15 years. It’s my most obvious identification.
But I never call myself an artist. I sometimes worry I bluffed my way into the Arts in Education cohort. I love the arts, I teach them obsessively, I find them essential, and I think they’re woefully undervalued and underrepresented in public schools. But I feel like I rarely engage in my own artistic production. My classmates in the AIE program seem to be fully-fledged artists; they love their art, they practice it regularly, and they have long resumes and dense portfolios. I love all of their varied art forms, and that’s why the cohort is endlessly engaging. But I’m not sure I’m one of them.
Of course being a good teacher is truly an art; it takes skill, flexibility, nuance, and intuition. Standing in front of a class of 30 high school students, I often feel like the conductor of a grand symphony. I register individual moods and classroom vibes, I play student comments off of each other, I adjust the pace of the class, I interject or stay silent depending on what the moment dictates. Or maybe I’m like a jazz musician, who has no set notes to play, but simply builds and improvises on what the drums and bass lay down. I use my here-and-now reactions to both follow and shape what is in the air that day. If I stayed with rigidly fixed templates things would seem mechanistic and bloodless, and no one ever described John Coltrane as mechanistic and bloodless.
So I think my teaching makes me an artist, but not my writing. And why not? For some reason I think you’ve got to put in the time before you can claim something as your identity. During the school year I work far more than 60 hours a week, so how could I not identify myself as a teacher? Whatever is consuming my life is worthy of being my label. If I was a writer, wouldn’t I be doing it all day?
But that doesn’t make much sense. I have put in my time as a writer—I have a creative writing degree from Northwestern. How many countless pages did I craft and revise for that master’s? What about all the lyrics I’ve written? My summer poetry workshops? And since when does calling yourself an artist have a minimal time requirement? If I was only teaching part-time, I would still call myself a teacher. Why won’t I do the same as a writer?
I can think of other moments that tell me I’m an artist. I never wrote of my own volition until I lived in Tanzania when I was 33. Because that year was such an intense and transformative experience, I found myself heading to the local internet café to send long e-mails to my family. When I got home to the states my mother gave me two large three-ring binders filled with print-outs of every e-mail, which would later become the raw material of my master’s thesis. I always say that I accidentally discovered writing when I was in Tanzania. I had no plans to write that much, and no plans at all to become a writer or get a writing degree. But I had stumbled upon a craft that felt like it was meant for me. Why hadn’t I discovered it before? Do I blame my education? If writing was a magnificent, transcendent art form, why didn’t someone show me when I was younger? Would it have been that hard? What were my schools making me do with writing that steered me away from all of its glory? Shouldn’t schools make the potential love for a topic the first order of business?
But Tanzania isn’t the only time that I felt like a real artist. When I was getting my degree at Northwestern, I recall working on a poem about Andrew Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. I babysat for my sister one evening, and after I put her daughter to bed, I sat at her computer and pleasurably agonized over the poem; I adjusted a comma here, rearranged a rhyme scheme there, wrapped myself up in the lines of the poem. I felt the rush of being in the moment of creation. I understood for the first time the meaning of “starving artist,” since I would have gladly given up food if I could feel that way all the time. Or maybe I wouldn’t starve, because making art felt like nourishment itself.
I recall another assignment from my master’s degree that made me feel like an artist. I was writing a science fiction piece about three white men in a high rise that perpetrated all of the evil in the world. It was my summer vacation and I wasn’t teaching, so I had time to luxuriate in the dialogue and scenes I was crafting. One morning I woke up with nothing on my schedule except to revise, and I was struck by my feeling of anticipation. It reminded me of Christmas mornings as a child, when I would wake up excited, because a new toy was waiting downstairs. Writing my science fiction story was playtime, an activity done for its sheer intrinsic joy. Which is something an artist would say.
So what is going on here? I have every reason to call myself an artist. I’ve put in the time, I’ve written a lot, and I’ve felt the artist’s rush. So why don’t I call myself an artist? What am I avoiding?
Maybe the answer is this simple: I don’t think I’m very good. Sure I hopped on stage to scream my lyrics with my punk band, but it’s easy to hide your insecurities behind walls distortion and eardrum-tearing volume. But to this day I’m still insecure about my writing. Recently I had my first poetry workshop class, which is mostly filled with brilliant undergraduate writers. I spent the entire three hours wondering anxiously whether I was good enough to be there. Why am I like this? Is it because Mr. Janke cut me from chorus in 5th grade since I couldn’t sing on tune? Is it because no one showed me I loved to write when I was young, and I didn’t have sufficient time to settle into the term “artist”? Is it from long-standing insecurities that only a qualified psychoanalyst could untangle? Well, whatever the reason, I don’t have a good reason to not call myself an artist. In fact, it shouldn’t have anything to do with how good I am; what’s more important is for me to get back that feeling that comes in the throes of creation. Since when do you have to be good at something to do it? I should take Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice and “follow my inclination rather than consult my ability.” That way I’d get to do what is fun all the time, accolades and criticisms be damned. Better yet, I should take my cue from Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When someone told him he couldn’t be the lead singer of a band since he can’t stay on tune, he responded, “Who made those rules?”
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
O.K., So I'm Not As Smart (x)
One of my four classes is a poetry workshop. I cross registered in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The class is kind of intimidating.
I feel pretty comfortable in the Graduate School of Education. Yeah, it's Harvard and all, but it's education. The only think I've really done with my life is teach. I've been on the front lines in one way or another for the last 15 years. The average amount of teaching experience for those in my master's is 4 years. I've taught longer in public high schools than any of my professors. They may be smart, they may have published books, but I still have the moxie to listen to what the say, and if I have to, respond (in my head) "nice theory Cambridge boy, but it wouldn't play out that way in the trenches."
But the Graduate School of Arts and Science is a different story. I'm not an academic, and I certainly never was Harvard material. I sort of backed in to the education program because of my wealth of experience, not my neurological makeup. So when you get out to the arts and sciences schools, you're amongst geniuses.
My poetry workshop is populated with undergraduates. And me. 15-20 years their senior. And they're all smarter than me. Sharp, articulate, their comments about poetry are the best I've ever heard. I'm outclassed. Think about it, you're some smart kid in high school, the very best in your class, and your writing/analyzing abilities are in another orbit. You won the genetic lottery on this one. Where would you go to school? Harvard.
So they're all already better than me. In fact, I originally didn't make the cut to get into the class. The only way in was to submit 5 poems, and then a cadre of professors read them all and select the best 15. Not me. Then at the last second someone dropped, so a spot opened up, and I was at the top of the waiting list. Which means, in the eyes of the professor, I am officially the worst poet in the class.
So I had to assert myself in some way, I had to get some kind of upper hand in some other arena. I started by wearing a t-shirt from the electrical worker's union (my cousin's). That way they would know I'd been in contact with the real world, with the workers, with the day to day grit and grime where reality happens. And then when we were going around the room introducing ourselves I emphasized my Chicago roots (they didn't need to know I grew up in a milquetoast white suburb), because all Chicagoans have a flinty toughness. As they went around the room, the undergrads would introduce themselves, and then say what dorm the lived in . . . because at Harvard you stay in your dorm "house" all four years. When I found this out I pounced. I said "What? You don't live in a house or an apartment at all? Not your junior and senior year? When I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois, when you were a junior you got a house with your friends, ran your own affairs, had parties, etc. It's an important part of your development." So I pulled rank, I let them know that they may still have their youth, and they undoubtedly have their brains and prestige, but I have hard-earned experience, and coolness. Boo ya.
And that, basically, is what the Robin Williams character says to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. You end up thinking a lot about that movie when you go here. In that scene Robin Williams concedes that Matt Damon has an unmatched brain, but he hasn't yet lived. And there's no substitute for that. In fact, I want to read it again. It will make me feel better about myself. It's a little embarrassing to like something that Ben Affleck had a part in, but Matt Damon is still cool isn't he? Anyway, here it is:
I feel pretty comfortable in the Graduate School of Education. Yeah, it's Harvard and all, but it's education. The only think I've really done with my life is teach. I've been on the front lines in one way or another for the last 15 years. The average amount of teaching experience for those in my master's is 4 years. I've taught longer in public high schools than any of my professors. They may be smart, they may have published books, but I still have the moxie to listen to what the say, and if I have to, respond (in my head) "nice theory Cambridge boy, but it wouldn't play out that way in the trenches."
But the Graduate School of Arts and Science is a different story. I'm not an academic, and I certainly never was Harvard material. I sort of backed in to the education program because of my wealth of experience, not my neurological makeup. So when you get out to the arts and sciences schools, you're amongst geniuses.
My poetry workshop is populated with undergraduates. And me. 15-20 years their senior. And they're all smarter than me. Sharp, articulate, their comments about poetry are the best I've ever heard. I'm outclassed. Think about it, you're some smart kid in high school, the very best in your class, and your writing/analyzing abilities are in another orbit. You won the genetic lottery on this one. Where would you go to school? Harvard.
So they're all already better than me. In fact, I originally didn't make the cut to get into the class. The only way in was to submit 5 poems, and then a cadre of professors read them all and select the best 15. Not me. Then at the last second someone dropped, so a spot opened up, and I was at the top of the waiting list. Which means, in the eyes of the professor, I am officially the worst poet in the class.
So I had to assert myself in some way, I had to get some kind of upper hand in some other arena. I started by wearing a t-shirt from the electrical worker's union (my cousin's). That way they would know I'd been in contact with the real world, with the workers, with the day to day grit and grime where reality happens. And then when we were going around the room introducing ourselves I emphasized my Chicago roots (they didn't need to know I grew up in a milquetoast white suburb), because all Chicagoans have a flinty toughness. As they went around the room, the undergrads would introduce themselves, and then say what dorm the lived in . . . because at Harvard you stay in your dorm "house" all four years. When I found this out I pounced. I said "What? You don't live in a house or an apartment at all? Not your junior and senior year? When I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois, when you were a junior you got a house with your friends, ran your own affairs, had parties, etc. It's an important part of your development." So I pulled rank, I let them know that they may still have their youth, and they undoubtedly have their brains and prestige, but I have hard-earned experience, and coolness. Boo ya.
And that, basically, is what the Robin Williams character says to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. You end up thinking a lot about that movie when you go here. In that scene Robin Williams concedes that Matt Damon has an unmatched brain, but he hasn't yet lived. And there's no substitute for that. In fact, I want to read it again. It will make me feel better about myself. It's a little embarrassing to like something that Ben Affleck had a part in, but Matt Damon is still cool isn't he? Anyway, here it is:
"So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written . . . Michelangelo? You know a lot about him I bet. Life's work, criticisms, political aspirations. But you couldn't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. And if I asked you about women I'm sure you could give me a syllabus of your personal favorites, and maybe you've been laid a few times too. But you couldn't tell me how it feels to wake up next to a woman and be truly happy. If I asked you about war you could refer me to a bevy of fictional and non-fictional material, but you've never been in one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him draw his last breath, looking to you for help. And if I asked you about love I'd get a sonnet, but you've never looked at a woman and been truly vulnerable. Known that someone could kill you with a look. That someone could rescue you from grief. That God had put an angel on Earth just for you. And you wouldn't know how it felt to be her angel. To have the love be there for her forever. Through anything, through cancer. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand and not leaving because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term 'visiting hours' didn't apply to you. And you wouldn't know about real loss, because that only occurs when you lose something you love more than yourself, and you've never dared to love anything that much. I look at you and I don't see an intelligent confident man, I don't see a peer, and I don't see my equal. I see a boy."
So Are They Really That Smart at Harvard? (x)
When you get to Harvard, you expect people to be smart. Really smart. Especially the professors. So are they?
Not really. They're pretty much like the professors I've known at the University of Illinois and Northwestern. Some good, some not so good, some engaging, some boring, some that love teaching, some that seem to be doing it out of obligation. They drink coffee, they're not always that good at running a class discussion, they write comments on your paper in pencil.
Most of my professors are in the Graduate School of Education. But Mr. Harber was smarter than all of them.
Who is Mr. Harber? My first year of teaching was at Paxton-Buckley-Loda High School back in 1994. It was a rural town in central Illinois where the parking lots were filled with pick-up trucks and the stands were filled with Carhartts. Mr. Harber was the librarian across the hall from my classroom. If I believed in God, I would say God placed him there to help me through my first year. He had taught for 15 years before becoming the librarian, and he was articulate, open minded, thoughtful, sharp as a tack, had an answer for all things educational, and sported a beard that extended down past his collar. What would have taken me 10 years to learn as a teacher, I did in only 2 thanks to him. Even here at Harvard, 14 years later, I still hear myself repeating something he had said to me way back in the mid-nineties.
He was the smartest man I had ever met. He is smarter than any professor I have met here. Not that folks aren't smart around here, they're just not Mr. Harber.
What does this mean? The smartest man and smartest educational scholar I ever met is librarian in a small rural town in central Illinois without publicity and a modest salary. The professors at Harvard are big names--leaders in the field, published authors, on the radio, the young ones are "rising stars" and the veterans are "esteemed author-educators". But why? Why do they get all the press clippings? Why are they assumed to be the best in the business? What did they do to get that title? Do they deserve it? How egregious is the salary difference between a Harvard professor and a rural Illinois teacher? Should we bring Mr. Harber to Harvard? Would he want to come? Would he even be Mr. Harber then? Do the Harvard professors know that they can be matched and surpassed by modest educators like him? Does that ever make them nervous?
Not really. They're pretty much like the professors I've known at the University of Illinois and Northwestern. Some good, some not so good, some engaging, some boring, some that love teaching, some that seem to be doing it out of obligation. They drink coffee, they're not always that good at running a class discussion, they write comments on your paper in pencil.
Most of my professors are in the Graduate School of Education. But Mr. Harber was smarter than all of them.
Who is Mr. Harber? My first year of teaching was at Paxton-Buckley-Loda High School back in 1994. It was a rural town in central Illinois where the parking lots were filled with pick-up trucks and the stands were filled with Carhartts. Mr. Harber was the librarian across the hall from my classroom. If I believed in God, I would say God placed him there to help me through my first year. He had taught for 15 years before becoming the librarian, and he was articulate, open minded, thoughtful, sharp as a tack, had an answer for all things educational, and sported a beard that extended down past his collar. What would have taken me 10 years to learn as a teacher, I did in only 2 thanks to him. Even here at Harvard, 14 years later, I still hear myself repeating something he had said to me way back in the mid-nineties.
He was the smartest man I had ever met. He is smarter than any professor I have met here. Not that folks aren't smart around here, they're just not Mr. Harber.
What does this mean? The smartest man and smartest educational scholar I ever met is librarian in a small rural town in central Illinois without publicity and a modest salary. The professors at Harvard are big names--leaders in the field, published authors, on the radio, the young ones are "rising stars" and the veterans are "esteemed author-educators". But why? Why do they get all the press clippings? Why are they assumed to be the best in the business? What did they do to get that title? Do they deserve it? How egregious is the salary difference between a Harvard professor and a rural Illinois teacher? Should we bring Mr. Harber to Harvard? Would he want to come? Would he even be Mr. Harber then? Do the Harvard professors know that they can be matched and surpassed by modest educators like him? Does that ever make them nervous?
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