Just as I was thinking about who I should dedicate The Puzzler’s Mansion to, the nation got into one of its periodic debates about teachers. They are either America’s heroes or parasites bankrupting the country through the pension system (and with summers off to boot). They are paid far too much or not nearly enough. Tenure protects good teachers or it’s an obstruction standing in the way of education reform. We need to let teachers have free reign in the classroom, or we need to adhere to a strict curriculum so that no child is left behind.
I find these conversations exhausting because you can cite specific examples to make just about any larger argument seem valid, and I wind up agreeing, at least momentarily, with everybody. The “rubber rooms” of New York City were an outrage, but I can also see the value in not allowing the hiring and firing of teachers be left solely in the hands of the administration, which is in turn beholden to the school board, which all too often is packed with, shall we say, political immoderates. I nod in agreement as one talking head or another mourns that we must now “teach to the test,” but I also see at least some value in standardized testing and trying to figure out if a school is, in general, doing well or doing poorly. Indeed, as homeschoolers, we even want to know that about ourselves, and that is why we’ve signed up our daughter to take a test a couple of weeks from now.
And that reminds me. We didn’t pull my daughter out of public school because of her teachers. Her teachers were fine. But the educational theory in play these days seems to be that the class can only advance as a group — and if some kids aren’t quite there yet, then we’re going to stop and help those kids catch up. And obviously that’s fine. But we recognized that our daughter could be progressing a lot faster, and that was never going to happen in the classroom setting. Our district has no gifted program for elementary school kids, or even a “slightly advanced” program. I assume our school district has neither the money nor the wherewithal to offer such a thing.
All of which is to say, asking what’s wrong with American education and talking only about the teachers is like saying, “What’s wrong this car?” and only examining the tires. There are other parts to this machine, too, you know.
Anyway. It was during one of these outbursts of public opinion that I decided to dedicate the third Winston book to “Teachers who make a difference.” Because somehow, no matter what the political climate and no matter how severely the budget has been slashed, we still have a great many good teachers out there. Yes, others are not so good, and most fall somewhere in between. That’s okay — that’s how it works in every profession. We’re never going to reach a point where all of our teachers are above average. The bad teachers can be survived and the average ones can be tolerated. The good teachers will make an impression on your child that will last long after the names of the bad and mediocre ones are forgotten.
In the dedication, I name three specific teachers who were particularly important to me: Claire Donahue, Robert Sarli, and Bill Scott.
Claire Donahue
I don’t think I was in high school for more than a week before I turned the library into my permanent refuge. I lived in that library. Any moment that I did not absolutely have to be somewhere else, I was in the library. The other students had to sit in homeroom; I raised my hand during roll call so that my presence could be registered, and then I left. To the library. I tolerated substitute teachers until they ran down and let us have the rest of the period free, and then I told them I needed to go to the library.
I recall that each day I had at least one period of “study hall.” I do not recall ever attending study hall. I went instead to the library. I imagine I worked it out with the study hall teacher early on, and then simply never returned.
The lunchroom? What lunchroom? I never stepped foot in that loud, unwelcoming place. I took my lunch down to the A/V room. Which was connected to the library.
Claire Donahue was the school librarian, and for those four years she was easily, far and away, the most important adult in my life outside of my parents. She was kind and warm, a den mother for a small group of us who needed a place to build up a small reserve of sanity before leaping back out to withstand the rest of the school day. It’s hard to imagine how I would have endured high school without the oasis she made available to us.
It was years before it dawned on me that she didn’t have to allow any of this — that a different teacher might have said, “This isn’t a clubhouse, you know. Where are you supposed to be right now?” It’s not possible to envision those words coming out of Ms. Donahue’s mouth. She knew that, for certain kids, a library is far, far greater than the sum of its books.
Robert Sarli
I am pretty sure that Mr. Sarli was my English teacher for two consecutive years. That must be the case, right? There’s no way we covered that much stuff in a single year. We read Shakespeare and the early Greeks. We read short stories, we read novels. We read classics, we read science-fiction, we read plays. We listened to the production of “Waiting For Godot” with Burt Lahr. We read poems, we read music lyrics. We wrote essays and papers and reports.
Mr. Sarli is, for me, the epitome of the good teacher. Nobody’s ever going to make a movie about him — he didn’t overcome ridiculous odds like Jaime Escalante or the Dangerous Minds woman. He was teaching a whole lotta white suburban kids. But he did it with a sharp wit, a genuine enjoyment of his subject, and most of all a boundless enthusiasm, like he couldn’t wait to explain the metaphors in Othello.
Years after I graduated, I went back to say hello to him, and in the course of chatting, I mentioned that I could not remember the name of a particular short story we had read in high school — not even in Mr. Sarli’s class, but in some other class. Well. He was up in a flash and brought me to the storage room adjoining his classroom, and we paged through anthology after anthology, looking for that story. I finally had to say, no, stop, it’s okay, I’m sure I’ll come across it again some day.
If every teacher approached his or her subject with this same knowledge and devotion, this would be a very different country indeed.
Bill Scott
There are days when the entire world changes, and for me, one of those days arrived when I spotted Games magazine on my algebra teacher’s desk.
I had been an avid reader of Games for a couple of years at that point, and had never seen a copy in the hands of another living soul. Discovering that Mr. Scott also enjoyed the magazine was like coming across a fellow member of a very small cult. We chatted about this puzzle or that puzzle — I still remember an anecdote he told me about trying to solve a particular Calculatrivia question — but that wasn’t enough for me. I started making puzzles for him to solve. Terrible, terrible puzzles. He took them and solved what he could. When a puzzle could not be solved, he told me so, and he encouraged me, though not without exasperation. The year spent in his class deepened my love of puzzles and helped set me on a path I would follow for, as far as I can see, the rest of my life.
Oh — he was a good teacher, too.
