In mid-April, encountering Facebook Messenger's
red alert, he opened this:
"Hi, Coach! Hope you'll pardon my Holmesing in on you through Facebook. I recently learned from my niece Delaney, who knows LaTasha at Starbucks, that your peripatetic self still roams around Edmonds (comma here
or not? I say not--simple compound ((fun with oxymorons, just like we had back in your classes!)) noun clause direct objects with no interrupters, right?) and that your athletic self still plays senior softball. How wonderful! For the past
two years I've been volunteering two days a week at the Edmonds Historical Museum. Granted, I don't drink coffee, but still how could our paths not have crossed, because I always park on 4th between Dayton and Walnut and walk over to work. Or did
they metaphorically--or might that be virtually?--through LaTasha? Three degrees of separation? I live in the Seaview area with my partner (no comma here either, because the two nouns are in direct apposition with each other; they are one and the
same, and I love her) Jennifer. I graduated from Stanford with a degree in Library Science, took a job as an assistant librarian at Bothell High School, met Don Hamilton, an orthopedist, when I blew out my ACL playing pickup basketball, married him,
had two boys in quick succession, went back to work, divorced after the boys left for college (mutual consent--we both wanted someone else), retired six years ago. Coach, may I be so bold as to suggest we get together one of these days--an informal lunch,
maybe? I'd love to catch up with you."
They found an unoccupied bench along the path of gray brick pavers that wound south past the human-made dunes of green grass and the plantings of native bushes and grasses--blackberries and
cattails and wild rose hips and Northwest myrtle and fireweed--of Brackett's Landing Park, south of the ferry dock and just north of the totemically carved Friendship Tree, a gift from Hekinan, a sister city, its bas-relief firs and salmon and ladders and
Japanese characters splattered with white seagull droppings, and opened the takeout bags of fish and chips they had purchased at Spud on the east side of Railroad Avenue. Slender iron rods, painted the blue-green of verdigris, comprised the seat and
backrest of the bench which, he noted with pleasure just before sitting down, bore a commemorative plaque recently purchased by Patty Warfield in honor of her parents, who, the plaque revealed, liked to sit on a log at that spot near the Edmonds Sawmill and
watch the sun set during their courtship and where also, a generation later, the mill gone and the beach anyone's for the taking, the old man and his girl friend Solveig liked to park in his '49 Ford and stare at the sinking sun while swallowing nervously
and furtively stroking each other below the waist. A placid May Day, the light marine haze of late morning evaporating before their eyes, the air warming into, a glance at his watch told him, the low 60s, windshields on yachts winking into visibility.
The old man, in his Classics cap, gray hoodie, long-sleeved, zippered, forest-green polyester Pebble Beach golf shirt, black jeans, and new black and white Under Armour low-cut sneakers with flexible cloth uppers that yielded to his swollen, tingling, neuropathic
feet, contentedly inhaled odors of iodine, vinegar, and hot grease. Liz Ann, wearing a cardinal red ball cap embossed with a white S, light blue jeans and a white sweatshirt with a striking Japanese character silk-screened in black on the chest,
larger than life at six feet and probably 180 pounds, up 40 from her high school playing weight, kicked off her sandals and extended her long legs. "I see you're looking at my feet," she said. "I have two perfectly normal goddam feet and I don't
know why you're staring at them."
"Bless you," the old man said. "You remember."
She lifted her cap and shook out her long cornsilk hair, which on the basketball court she had worn in a pony tail and whipped in a defender's face when backing
her down in the post. Middle age had creased her forehead with two horizontal wrinkles and trenched a furrow between her blond eyebrows, but her eyes were still bright blue. "Of course I do. I was really intrigued by that story, although
it was decades before I realized why I identified with Seymour and bananafish. I remember so many things. I loved your classes, Coach. The Maplewood English Department offered a cornucopia of electives in those days, and in my four years
there I took all that you taught--Literary Classics, College Prep Comp, Humanities, Creative Writing, Growth of the Language, Semantics, Poetry. When I went to Stanford, I kept a jar of honey on my desk, like--I mean as!- you did in your classroom.
You'd invert it now and then so we could appreciate the golden bubble rising from the bottom to the top. Beauty in the mundane, like the red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. When we came into your room for class you
had us trained to look at the chalkboard, read a definition, and imitate a model while you took roll-- like 'Hyperbole--The use of exaggeration for rhetorical effect. He's so cheap that he puts grocery store discount coupons in the coffee shop tip jar.'
In a fun way you covered so many things, depending on the subject matter of the class, different rhetorical devices like oxymoron, synecdoche, tmesis, litotes, anaphora, pathetic fallacy. Or different 'infelicities,' as you called them, comma splices,
dangling participles, split infinitives, pleonasms. You charmed us by playing with our names. When Toby raised his hand you'd say 'Toby or not Toby, what is the question?' You'd look at April and say 'Oh to be in English now that April's
here.' You called Joy 'a thing of beauty forever,' and whenever Sarah offered a comment you'd declare 'Thus spake Sarah Schuster.' I, of course, being partial to Shakespeare, was 'the Elizabethan'."
He looked toward the L-shaped fishing
pier to his left, anglers casting baited lines over the railing in long arcs.
"This is embarrassing to recall. It was an indirect way of expressing my affection for everybody. I mean, I couldn't just say 'I love you guys,' now, could I?
But I was also seeking to ingratiate myself for purposes of manipulating you. It was part of my classroom management. Bestowing a nickname--"
"An eke, or also, name, etymologically, you taught us."
"--is at least as much about controlling
as it is about endearing. I was just a kinder, gentler Donald Trump."
"But we loved being wooed that way!"
They extracted and set on the bench their drinks--a diet Coke for him, an unapologetic sugared one for her--and cardboard holders
of fish and chips, thimble-sized plastic containers of tartar sauce, and wads of napkins, spread the empty paper bags on their laps as placemats, and balanced the food on their quads.
"So, no ketchup on the fries?" the old man said. "Nor
I. I want that salty, greasy, crispy fry to mush up in my mouth unmasked by sugary citrus."
"Me, too," Liz Ann said. "I eat it plain with relish."
The old man raised a fry in salute. She smiled, her teeth like a sample from
an ear of white corn, except for the upper left canine, which had been smacked by an opponent's swinging elbow in a battle for a rebound--the officials made her leave the game to swab the blood from swelling lips--and ever after had leaned upon its premolar
neighbor. The increased fleshiness of her cheeks and the onset of jowls made her long nose less prominent than it had been in high school.
"The character on your sweatshirt--what's the translation?"
"'Freedom.'"
"Well, I'm glad you
felt free to hit me up on Facebook. It's such a pleasure to reconnect. Do you have a lot of Friends?
[Ooh, Wayne, at Pendant we would say that that (infelicitous juxtaposing of relative and demonstrative pronouns, you'll retaliate!) is a
pretty cheesy segue. I've noticed all along that transitions are your bête noire. Peevishly, you sometimes give up and take the corny way out. Solveig]
"Probably not in comparison with most people. Maybe
100."
"I'm about the same. None of my family members is alive any longer, but I have a Facebook connection with some former colleagues, students, players, softball teammates, childhood friends. Unlike you, I don't post much, but I do enjoy
being able to keep tabs on others without incurring any obligation to relate directly to them. Now and then I'll hit 'Like' at some cyclist's selfie taken in the midst of the Emerald City Bike Ride, or of some traveler's hilltop picture of tile roofs
in Croatia with the blue Adriatic below, just to show that I'm not dead yet and that I endorse their going and doing and adventuring and accomplishing. Once in a while I am moved to say 'Congratulations!' or 'Sorry to hear that' or 'Get well soon.'
And it's intriguing to note who among my Friends feels compelled to make religious or political comments. My former students run the gamut from agnostics to evangelicals and reactionaries to antifas. You, for example, make it quite clear that you
are a lesbian who abhors Donald Trump."
"Yes. Let the word go forth!"
They broke off pieces of fish and dabbed them in the tartar sauce, which the old man thought could use a bit of dill or fennel.
"Such a frabjous day in the
northwest wonderland," she said. Seagulls screeched and scavenged the beach as the tide receded. They swooped and flapped, soared and celebrated, their soprano squealings coming in epistropic units of three that the old man assumed
must have some grammatical or rhetorical significance. Three preschool girls in two-piece swim suits chattered and slalomed and twirled among the gulls in the sloppy sand at the water's edge, their lotus-positioned young mothers watching from blankets
spread back on the drier sand. "With their slithy toes are they gyring and gimbling in the waves? Should they beware the Jabberwock?"
[This one's a little better. Solveig]
"'Tisn't quite brillig, but yes, they should.
We all should, right? At least according to your interpretation."
"I know! We had so much fun with that poem. That day's anticipatory set activity was on portmanteaus, then you read 'Jabberwocky' aloud, which gave us a feel for the
tonal changes in the poem, and put us in small groups to explicate the text. After much discussion and digging in dictionaries, my group concluded that the poem exemplified the archetype of the quest and that the Jabberwock symbolized man's (as we said
in those days) foe: the kind of crazy talk, jibber-jabber, jubjubbing, turgid, burbling, whiffling, bantering, inaccurate, imprecise, obfuscating, fulminating, bullshitting nonsense to be found everywhere--in boroughs and groves, in homes and rathskellers.
Or, today, in the mythomaniacal tweets of Donald Trump. Because you were always on us about our diction, like--I mean such as--'disinterested' means having no stake in, not uninterested, and 'decimate' means killing one in 10, not destroying or killing
a large proportion of--and our sentence structure--comma splices, dangling modifiers, lack of parallel construction, circumlocutions--we decided that the hero was the adolescent you, and that the poem was a portrait of the English teacher as a young man wielding
his trusty verbal sword, his red pen, to dispatch misleading or infelicitous language."
They pulled in their feet as a puffing male jogger in shorts and tee shirt hurried by.
"Well, I tried. Forging in the smithy of my editor's role the
uncreated linguistic conscience of the human race. For a number of years I did graduate work at the U in the summer--seminars in Tragedy, Transcendentalism, Victorian Poetry, The Modern English Novel, but also courses in Rhetoric and Linguistics.
I was aware of the move from traditional, Latin-based grammatical analysis to structural linguistics and transformational grammar. The notion of grammar as an intuitively understood system of rules for generating sentences intrigued me and affected my
teaching of sentence rhetoric, but I stayed with the traditional approach and terminology when it came to a formal study of grammar in my classes. I was excited by the debate over Webster's Third International Dictionary, and in principle sided
with the descriptivists rather than the prescriptivists. I enjoyed browsing the Dictionary of American Slang, and now I always check the Urban Dictionary online for the word or phrase of the day. It's lively, creative stuff.
Let the dictionary tell us how language is used, not how it should be used. Couldn't agree more! But I was also very much a devotee of Henry Fowler and his Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I liked the notion of making
judicious linguistic selections based in part on logic, in part on esthetics. Whose logic and whose esthetics? Admittedly, those of editors and professors, mostly white and more than 50 per cent male, privileged to impose their preferences."
She shifted to sit side-saddle and looked directly at him for a moment. "But it was helpful to know that such preferences and considerations exist. Sure, there might be a little bit of Stockholm syndrome involved, some identifying with your
masters and keepers, some wish to be accepted by them, but I like knowing that for some people a thing can be only unique, not 'fairly unique,' or that it must center on, not 'around,' or that something is as good as or better than, not 'as
good or better than,' that something is one of the few, not 'one of the only,' that you push the edge of the envelope, not the envelope itself, that to beg the question is to assume the truth of a conclusion without providing logical support for it,
not to raise or invite a question."
"And I think, when you were heading off to college and career, such knowledge probably had some practical value, too. The college profs used to care; nowadays, I doubt it. My reluctance ever to split an
infinitive would not even register on most of them, let alone their students. Some of the stuff I taught would be regarded as nit-picking at best, discriminatory at worst. Times change, language changes. Words are memes. When their
'misuse' is copied frequently enough, in spite of the efforts of old gatekeeping epimemiologists and usageasters like me to stop their spread, when they go viral--a term that has itself gone viral and that I use here in a purely descriptive, non-pejorative
sense--they acquire new meanings, new uses. Thus 'incredible' now means 'fantastic' at least as often as it means 'unbelievable,' 'fantastic' means 'wonderful' much more often than it means 'fantasy-like,' 'wonderful' means 'terrific' way more often
than it means 'inspiring wonder,' and 'terrific' means 'incredible,' 'fantastic,' or 'wonderful' ninety-nine times as often as it means 'terror-making.' We're a more informal society than we once were. Our text messages and tweets are short
bursts of simplified spellings and emoticons. We value equality and tolerance, we disdain privilege and bias, so we are modifying our pronoun usage. We now use 'they' as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun to refer to a person whose gender isn't
known or to one who does not identify as male or female."
"You used to drill us on pronoun-antecedent agreement--for example, 'It's time for everyone to turn in his assignment.'"
"I did. And now 'It's time for everyone to turn
in his assignment' is regarded as inappropriate because it reflects not only patriarchal domination but gender insensitivity, since not everyone falls neatly into 'his' and 'her' categories. 'It's time for everyone to turn in his or
her assignment,' while not quite as patriarchal, nevertheless reflects gender insensitivity, and is cumbrous besides. Although it's like pouring poison into the porches of my aged ears, I concede that 'It's time for everyone to turn
in their assignment' solves those problems."
"So 'To each their own'?"
"Yes."
"But isn't there a grammatical-semantic incompatibility in that phrase? 'To each their own' grammatically solves the power and gender problems
but semantically implies that 'To each their own' and 'To each his own' are equally acceptable, when that isn't exactly what you mean."
"Good catch, Wittgenstein. The interanimation of words! A linguistic expression is often more complicated
than we at first assume. I won't give 'To each their own' my imprimatur just yet, but I am looking upon a liberal use of it--that is to say 'their'--favorably! And I hope that the next pronoun change in English will be the eradication
of 'whom'. I am far too often reading, even in the New York Times, utterances like 'Whom better than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to lead the nation into the future?' I cringe when people use 'whom' in the nominative position
in an attempt to sound learned or proper."
"So for 'whom' the bell tolls?"
"I hope so! For many years I devoted much of a class period to the 'who/whom' conundrum, but I now contend that 'who' should become everyone's default pronoun, filling
both nominative and objective roles, because figuring out when to use 'whom' is just too complicated for him or her or them."
"But not for I! I can still do it, Coach. Give me a chance!"
"Okay, try this." He set his half-empty
container of fish and chips beside him on the bench, took a pen from a pocket, and scribbled over the greasy Spud bag 'Who/whom shall I say is calling?'
She borrowed the pen to use as a pointer. "To determine whether to use 'who' or 'whom,' you
always told us to ask ourselves 'What's a nice pronoun like you doing in a clause or phrase like this?', figure out the grammatical function of the word, then decide which of its forms is appropriate. So: 'I' is the subject of the main clause, 'shall
say' is its complete transitive verb, 'who/whom is calling' is a noun clause serving as the complement, the direct object, of the main clause, within that noun clause 'who/whom' is the subject, thus 'who' is the correct form and the sentence should read
'Who shall I say is calling?'"
Flushing at her performance, she handed the pen and bag back to him.
"So I haven't lived in vain! You are able to range beyond your intuitive knowledge of the deep structure of English to demonstrate
an analytic knowledge of its surface structure. I have educated you, led you out of the shadowy cave of ignorance and into the light of day."
Liz Ann lifted her eyelids. "Don't mock the naming of parts! I love parsing! From pars
orationis, 'parts of speech,' right? The ultimate goal of education, in my opinion, should be the Delphic 'Know thyself,' but no knowledge, including that of grammatical analysis, is irrelevant to the achieving of that goal. Everything that
you learn should be incorporated into your understanding of yourself and of your relationship to the world and the universe."
The ferry Puyallup approached the dock, its horn, sounded a single time, resonating like a baritone sax. Its
idling engines hummed and gently churned foam as passengers streamed down the elevated walkway toward Railroad Avenue and cars and trucks clunk-clunked across the raised iron threshold and onto the pier.
"Liz Ann, I agree. I marvel at the very
existence of language, at its crowd-sourced emergence from the brains and mouths of our tree-hugging and cave-dwelling ancestors who somehow, over millennia, found ways to put sounds into patterns that majorities in clans or tribes came to accept as meaningful.
I've always loved to study grammar and to teach it. In one sense it's just fun, mental gymnastics, like a crossword puzzle, but it's also deeply satisfying to know that language has a structure that can be analyzed, that we can make conscious
this aspect of our unconscious, that its study can lead to insights about the nature of the mind and of learning. And it's certainly helpful to have terminology with which to talk about the linguistic usage of others--whether in literature or in routine
transactional communication--and to aid in your own employment of the medium. Grammar intertwines with rhetoric as you seek to establish a voice suitable to your persuasive purpose. Out of the black, willy-nilly, inchoate ideas and images, words
and phrases and clauses, pop into your conscious mind, and then, based on your knowledge of diction and sentence structure, you go to work revising them according to your rhetorical needs. So you decide to say 'they,' rather than 'his' or 'her,' in hopes
of persuading your audience that you are a 'woke' person, fair and decent, and to say 'The solution was unique' rather than 'fairly unique' for the sake of precision and economy, knowing that those who are aware of the difference will, shibbolethically, appreciate
your discernment, while others will not even notice it. And you decide to use, let's say, a periodic sentence because you think holding the main clause in abeyance will focus attention on what precedes it and create an intriguing suspense."
"I
remember those periodic sentences. And the loose! And the balanced! You gave us a lot of models to imitate! We'd write sentences for homework and then share our results in our discussion groups. What was that concept you talked
about--the generative rhetoric of the sentence?"
[Uh-oh, a little more Velveeta here. Solveig]
"Yes. In the early '70s Noam Chomsky's notion of the grammatical principle of embedding or recursion and Francis Christensen's notion
of sentence form itself as the generator of ideas inspired me to teach elements of style in a way that, I hoped, would help each student develop his or her or their own. Style is the person themself, I might say in a bit of Buffonery! I have always
been averse to the plain style advocated by Strunk and White in their popular little manual. I am attracted to distinctive styles--the hardness of Patrick White, the softness of Malcolm Lowry. I love textural richness, density, variety--in part,
I admit, as an acrobatic verbal selfie, sheer unapologetic narcissism, a demonstration of the writer's ethos that may prove appealing but runs the risk of appalling, like a behind-the-back pass or a reverse layup when neither is necessary, but primarily as
a way to provide rhythm and texture, the jazz-like riffing of subordinate clauses and phrases after, before, or in the midst of the main clause adding to or qualifying meaning. Christensen argued for what he called the cumulative sentence (essentially
what traditional rhetoric called a loose sentence), a main clause followed by any number of subordinate clauses and phrases, each one shifting down to a lower level of specificity, detailing the detail that preceded it, providing examples, implications, qualifications--codicils,
you might say. The form itself is liberating. It generates ideas by stimulating your powers of observation and analysis. You examine your subject with more alertness as you seek to add layers of meaning. With enough practice, you internalize
the structure, you rewire your brain, as we say (probably all too often; that's definitely a meme that's gone viral) these days. And, of course, the principle applies to the practice of periodic and balanced sentences as well."
Out in the middle
of the Salish Sea, pleasure boats bobbed on the wakes of a black jumbo freighter heading south to Seattle and a white, many-windowed cruise ship, The Argosy, riding high and sassy as it glided toward the Inside Passage to Alaska. Liz Ann's phone
text-pinged inside her jeans pocket. She ignored it.
"Well, it was certainly fun. The guys in my group came up with some pretty hilarious stuff. Parodies of you, for example. One of the non-obscene ones that I remember is 'Wayne
raised both eyebrows halfway to his receding hairline, like Fosbury at the top of his flop, his eyes widening in horror, as if he'd just heard someone start a sentence with 'Hopefully' instead of 'I hope'.' I know that there was carry-over to my writing
in college, and I've forever maintained a love of word-play, but I think that above all your stuff led to my becoming a better reader, helping me to work my way through the syntactic mazes of Proust and Shakespeare."
"It pleases me to hear that.
In my undergraduate days I was heavily influenced by the New Criticism of Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, and others, and I used to devour The Saturday Review of Literature along with my tuna fish sandwiches at lunchtime in the UW library. In
my teaching I cared little about the history of literature--trends, cycles, developments, biographies of writers--but very much about textual interpretation, close reading. "Just give me the text," one of my profs used to say, and I was in full agreement.
That kind of analytical skill, teasing out the meaning of metaphors, digging for the relevance of allusions, detecting and appreciating intended ambiguities, disambiguating unintended ones, is valuable in understanding Proust and Shakespeare but also the Bible,
the Constitution and other legal documents, and even the dense, dull language we're asked to wade through these days before we adopt apps on our electronic devices. And surely, in these Trumpian times, it can help us distinguish among
real news, fake news, and real fake news, make us more discerning, less gullible."
To the north the alto whistle of a freight train screamed its warning, and soon they heard its wheels clicking over the joints of the tracks behind them. The iron
rods of the bench had for some minutes been biting his back and butt. He stood for a few seconds, rotated his shoulders, wiggled his hips, then sat again.
"And this concern with the interanimation of words affected the way I taught prose style.
Certainly the approach has its critics--the anti-formalists, the anti-behavioralists, those against the part-to-whole method. They find such exercises a-creative, a-rhetorical, artificial, stultifying, and particularly inapplicable to expository writing,
where the emphasis they say should be on organization and logic and clarity. But I think that imitating a form can stimulate creativity. In basketball for example, we used to drill on dribbling to a two-foot jump stop and then making a front pivot
or a reverse pivot to get off a shot. We'd do it several times without a ball, getting the footwork, the rhythm and the balance, then with a ball, then against a passive defender, and finally against an aggressive defender, each time with the requirement
that the player make a front or reverse pivot to free herself for a shot."
"I know. And it worked. The step-through move became a major part of my offense."
"Right. You incorporated it into your game. You learned the skill
through formal instruction and guided practice and then, in scrimmages and games, began to see-feel-sense--some combination of perception and intuition--where it could be employed for what we might call rhetorical effect, a telling, freeing move that enabled
you to score or to assist someone else to score with a pass."
"And that was true also of all the other drills we did--the head fakes, ball fakes, step-backs, bounce passes, overhead passes, baseball passes, crossover dribbles, spin dribbles, behind-the-back
dribbles, bank shots, hook shots, all types of layups. You used to talk about Funktionslust--the love of exercising skills that we're good at. It's like they became extensions or expansions of ourselves. In time we just flowed into
them, or they just flowed out of us, in response to a need."
" Yes. And, similarly, writing exercises can enhance perception and, given enough repetition, lead to fluidity. Even punctuation exercises play a role here. Being required
to write sentences employing a colon or a pair of dashes forces you to see that what goes after the colon or between the dashes must in some way augment or add specificity to what precedes the colon or surrounds the dashes. Sentences requiring a semi-colon
make you balance or contrast independent clauses. Imitations can lead to an expanded, more versatile style--a grammar of moves generating a rhetoric of motifs--which you can adapt to any occasion. On the other hand, I also believe that at
times students learn better if they work together to discover and develop ideas, Googling the teacher only occasionally for assistance."
"That's why you often put us in groups."
"Right. And usually it paid off, as it did in the analysis
of 'Jabberwocky.' But not always."
"Sometimes you never know," she said with a smile.
"I always know I like that, though.'' He returned her smile.
"Were you thinking of 'Invictus'?"
"Exactly. When
I asked you to rank in order of artistic quality 'Invictus,' 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal,' 'God's Grandeur,' 'The Emperor of Ice Cream,' 'Stopping by Woods,' and 'Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God,' I was mostly concerned about what standards
you came up with and how you applied them to your evaluation of the poems, not the actual ranking itself. Based on the Romantic assumption that the young are all classicists--"
"Ahem."
"--and the Platonic assumption that at least some learning
is remembering--summoning innate ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful--I expected you to focus on unity, structure, rhythm, diction, precision, freshness, richness, subtlety, surprise. I expected views to vary, with one exception: 'Invictus'
had to be last."
"And we all rated it first!"
"Indeed you did. You were not troubled that Henley bludgeons the reader with the vague, the general. He offers no fresh imagery, no specific detail, no indication of why he should be in
pain, what menaces he faces in this life or the next, no reason for us to believe that he is the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. Now, Henley himself in fact suffered from tuberculosis and had a leg amputated as a consequence. Details
about dealing with that, familiar words used unfamiliarly, idiosyncratically, could have resulted in a good poem."
"But you must admit it had unity, structure, and rhythm. And most important of all, even though it wasn't subtly expressed, it had
a rousing theme. We were high school kids, Coach! We were used to competing in various sports against other schools, with the pep band playing the theme from 'Rocky' during timeouts to inspire us. As a coach, in tight situations, you weren't
so subtle yourself: 'Suck it up!' 'Bust a gut!' 'Dominate!'"
"I know. Under pressure, my imagination failed."
"But the trite, the expected, was what we needed. The one time you said something different--'Why don't you
break your backs, girls?'--we got totally confused and a little offended and almost lost the game. How did we know, until you told us in the locker room afterwards, that you were alluding to Stubb's motivating words to his oarsmen when chasing whales
in Moby Dick? Anyway, we could all see that the other poems were more intricate, and we liked them, but the one that most spoke to us was 'Invictus.' We longed to believe that we were masters and captains, and we warmed to
meaning that was blatant, not latent. So maybe the young are not entirely classicists. Or maybe they need to have their memories jogged a little bit by a teacher who prompts them to delve deeper--which is what you did when you asked
us to discuss our criteria and justify our rankings. Once you got over your initial disappointment, you turned it into a good lesson. You didn't convince us to change our minds, but you got us to think, you discomfited us, you planted a seed.
It was definitely a factor in the gradual evolution of my own esthetic standards."
"Nice of you to say so. Like a coach helping her team regroup after a disappointing performance, you turn defeat into moral victory! In any case, education
in America has long been such a fraught issue. Since at least the early '50s, when I started reading stuff I found on the coffee tables of my parents and their friends--Look, Life, Colliers, The Reader's Digest--articles
on education, sex, and food have been the staples of popular magazines. Most will agree that education is of the utmost importance, but not since the days of the one-room schoolhouse and the McGuffey Reader have we had anything but short-lived
consensus on purpose or process. We bounce back and forth from John Dewey to Robert Maynard Hutchings, from Jean Piaget to Rudolf Flesch, from Maria Montessori to Alan Bloom and Benjamin Bloomberg. We see, we saw, we gee, we haw, we pitch, we yaw.
As we do with religious doctrine and practice, we disperse into squabbling factions whenever we discuss objectives, curriculum, and pedagogy because they so grow out of our own slant on the meaning of life and the nature of personhood. So we say that
the purpose of education is to liberalize, to open eyes, to free the mind, to teach critical and creative thinking, to transform the culture, to develop a lifelong love of learning, or we say it's to teach the three R's, to prepare for the world of work, to
sort out according to ability, to develop specific vocational skills, to transmit the culture, to pass on the core values of democracy and capitalism, such as patriotism, discipline, work-ethic, competitiveness. We say that the curriculum should grow
out of the needs and interests of the student, or that there is a certain body of knowledge and skills that must comprise it. We say that the student is a discoverer who learns by doing, or that he/she/they is a vessel to be filled. We say that
the student should learn to read through the Whole Language method, looking and saying, or through an intensive study of phonics, sounding out words. We say that the student best learns history or science or mathematics by acting like a historian (examining
primary sources), a scientist (collecting data, forming and testing hypotheses), or a mathematician (drawing principles--theorems, for example--from the study of a specific problem) or that the student should be told, via lecture, textbook, or film, the facts
of history, the laws of science, and the principles of mathematics. We say that the teacher is a guide or that the teacher is an authority."
"And I followed all this cycling and recycling of philosophies and methods with my boys from kindergarten
through high school, and of course in my career, beginning as an assistant and eventually becoming head librarian, providing resources and support for all of the various programs and practices, from the days of the card catalogue, The Reader's Guide,
microfiche, cassette tapes and overhead projectors to the arrival of desk-top computers, cell phones, and iPads. I always loved learning and wanted to be involved in education, but I knew that teaching was not for me. I didn't have the presence
for it. Being a librarian felt just right. I could work with kids without having to be their daily model. And I could control a microcosm holding within its 5,000 square feet a fair sampling of the world's knowledge, wisdom, and artistic
expression. Its sea-foam green walls, industrial-gray padless carpet, and metal stacks were my home away from home, my baby. Such a rich and satisfying Gestalt: the entire universe put in order by Dewey Decimals and Google. And I was the
guide to the galaxy, assisting with a myriad of approaches adopted and abandoned, sometimes re-adopted and re-abandoned. Programmed learning, cooperative learning, mastery learning. Basic academic competencies, the 3 Rs. Business letters
and the five-paragraph essay took priority for a while, then journaling and exploring writing as a process. Speed-reading, using your finger as a pacer, à la Evelyn Wood, one year, free reading the next. At Bothell, at the end of
every second-period class, students and teachers--even the librarian and her student-assistant staff--would remain in the room for an additional 20 minutes and read whatever they liked: comic books, magazines, newspapers, novels, self-help books, anything
except assigned texts. I remember there was a lot of blushing and giggling when my girls passed around an underlined copy of The Sensuous Woman, giving apparently no thought to the demeaning nature of its basic premise--though I must confess
I found the presentation of tongue exercises useful in my relationships with both Don and Jennifer! For a while we had homogenous classes, then grouping into basic, regular, and honors. Then along came the Advanced Placement Program and International
Baccalaureate. There was a concern over learning styles--visual, auditory, kinesthetic. We went through phases of more homework and less homework. We evaluated students against each other according to state or federal norms on standardized
tests, and against themselves based on things like personal portfolios. At the elementary level we developed Individualized Educational Programs for the physically and intellectually challenged and special programs for the gifted. And of course
there was No Child Left Behind and, just as I was on the verge of retiring, here came Common Core and STEM and crazes for charter schools and home schooling."
"Yes, in education we must admit that we have a richness of embarrassments. But do you
know where I come down in all this?"
"Squarely in the middle?"
"Exactly! Somewhere between Miss Dove and John Keating. Early in my career I read Rousseau's Emile and A.S. Neill's Summerhill and John Holt's
How Children Fail and How Children Learn and was warmed by their Romantic belief that the curriculum should grow out of the felt-needs of the students, but whenever I stepped back into the classroom it seemed to me that there was not world
enough and time. Waiting for intrinsic motivation to kick in too often results in failure to launch. Extrinsic motivation--competition, grades, praise, fear of failure--is a necessary counterbalance. I think we need to synthesize the thesis
of the student as vessel with its antithesis of the student as discoverer. Reading is far more than decoding letters and sounds, but skill in decoding with facility and accuracy is prerequisite to being able to move from text to subtext, for achieving
levels of interpretation, for grasping symbolism, metaphor, irony, ambiguity, and paradox, for being able to read or write anything beyond the plain style. I'm all for a heavy dose of phonics for beginning readers."
"I'm grateful that my sons
got that at Seaview Elementary in the '80s."
"And reading and writing surely require more than a rich vocabulary, but I'm convinced that a study of Latin and Greek roots and affixes, if pushed to the point of application, can improve one's reading and
writing both."
"The word-attack skills! When we'd come upon an unfamiliar word in a poem, you'd jump up in a karate stance and say 'Hah! Hah!' while making chopping motions with your right arm, and we'd know to break the word down into root
and affix. 'Cornucopia'--'cornu,' horn, 'copia,' of plenty. "Legerdemain'--'leger,' light, 'demain,' of hand. And, of course, my favorite, 'education'--'e,' out, and 'duct,' to lead. To lead out of ignorance is still the best,
most comprehensive meaning of the word. I believe we go to school to become as free of ignorance--of the world and of the universe, of ourselves and of others--as possible. Education liberates. The aim is to become, in the Emersonian sense,
Man (or, better, Person) Thinking. Thinking critically about oneself and everything else."
"I so agree. Even the vocabulary lists I used to test you on in College Prep Comp had merit, I thought, because I required you to select from them
five words to include in your weekly essays. It sounds so artificial and sterile, so inorganic, but it works. You found a way to use them, and the words became your own. There is a place for rote learning, for memorizing. One mark of
the educated person is being able to remember and regurgitate stuff. The greater your knowledge of roots and etymologies, the greater your appreciation of the interrelations between words. The more material you have at your disposal, the greater
your potential for critical and creative thinking. And through the process, no matter the subject or the method--a formal lecture, a technical demonstration analyzed and presented step by step, with question and response or other active involvement on
the learner's part, or in free-flowing group discussion--underlying all, imbuing all, like the background beat provided for jazz soloists, is the informal imprinting, on the student's psyche, of the teacher as meme, modeling, as you say, Person Thinking.
Given all of our embarrassments, our gullibility, our susceptibility to the next short-lived placebo or Hawthorne effect, all of our approaches and programs that do not survive, are we getting anywhere? I actually think so. We inch our way along.
We've crawled out of the sea, we've evolved lungs to replace our gills. Although we're still squirming forward by wiggling our tails and fins, we do know more about how to teach. Our pedagogy, our methodology, our knowledge of the principles of
learning, have improved. Give me a learner long enough on motivation, and a place to stand, and I can mold the world! But mold it to what? This is where we run into conflict, and probably always will and probably always should. Pendulum
swings seem to me both inevitable and healthy. When it comes to philosophy and curriculum, we will always need to correct our corrections."
"Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it must be about 12:30, and I have to work a shift at the Museum
at 1:00." She checked her phone. "Yep, 12:33."
[Et tu, Liz Ann? Solveig]
[Just imitating my mentor! Liz Ann]
"Coach, this has been such fun, and I feel that there's much that we haven't touched on.
Like basketball. And lesbianism! We should do this again."
"I'd love to. But let's change the venue. How about a beer just across the tracks at 190 Sunset?"
[This is what you resort to to (I know, I know) thicken the plot?
Solveig]
"Great. I love their courtyard!"
The old man collected their trash and put it in his Spud bag. He walked her back to her silver mini-Cooper in the Spud parking lot. His Santa Fe sat next to it, his gym bag on the passenger
seat. He would lift weights and shoot baskets at HSAC before heading home.
"Little car for a big girl," she laughed. "It's so dexterous that whenever I'm in traffic I feel as if I'm back on the court making quick moves."
They hugged.
A bit of breeze wafted a few strands of her lemon-scented hair into his face.
As she opened her door she said, "Hey, Coach, I fear we are in danger of losing the subjunctive mode. Is it on its last legs, as it were?" She grinned.
He
smiled. "No doubt."
[Wayne, I appreciate your thoughts on educational philosophy, curriculum, and methodology. I share some of them. You obviously did some excellent work as a teacher, and I'm happy to learn that many of your students
responded positively to you. But this dialogue is just a bit too Socratically smug for me. Like Socrates' pupils by his side in the agora, Liz Ann is too agreeable, too eager to accept this sorites here and that enthymeme there.
I half expected her to step up onto that verdigris bench and intone 'Oh, Captain, my Captain!' Surely many of your students did not enjoy your exercises in sentence rhetoric, surely many did not become close readers and original stylists. Dave]
[Right on, Dave! I refused to join the cult of Wayne. It wasn't fun, it was boring. I hated being part of those smug little groups. That's why I smashed one of those vertical windows that open like a door and broke into his classroom
one night and poured beer over his desk and wrote 'FUCK YOU WAYNE!' on the chalkboard. So now you know who did it, Wayne. Maloney]
[That was you, Lonnie? The window was boarded up for days, and the damn carpet smelled like beer for
a week. Not appreciated! Liz Ann]