teachers

October 5, 2010

Learning From the Wrong Example: A Story of Five Teachers

Patricia Daley Martino and Peter Martino

For the most part I am grateful to my old teachers. By and large, they were an earnest and dedicated bunch.

Teachers like Patricia Daley Martino (pictured above with her husband Peter) were a treasure.

But I remember five with less kindly sentiments. Still, they did teach me something:

What not to do.

My very first high school science teacher laid down the law on the first day of class. And the “law” went something like this:

“I may make mistakes in marking your papers and grading your tests. You may be able to prove to me that I made those mistakes. It still won’t matter. I’m not going to change your scores or your grades no matter what you say.”

I can’t remember precisely what went through my mind when I heard this, but it was probably some version of “Is this guy nuts?”

What I learned from this man (whose son I knew in grade school, when he was already a juvenile delinquent in-training) was that power corrupts, and authority needs to wielded with a sense of justice, lest you become some sort of bully or dictator like my science teacher.

I also learned, in a practical way, that the famous quote from trial attorney Clarence Darrow is true: “There is no justice, in or out of court.”

But, I doubt that the teacher in question intended to instruct me in that particular lesson.

Still another high school science faculty member, a year or two later, took off a small number of points from a test paper because I didn’t put my home-room number on the page; or perhaps it was not in the right place, I don’t recall which. Since I was already “detail-oriented” he taught me nothing new about attention to small stuff. But, what I did learn was a lesson about nit-picking, something he was quite good at.

Going back to the primary grades, I observed a bad example displayed by two different teachers, one female, one male.

For reasons still unknown to me, both of these single adults, neither probably older than their early 30s, felt compelled to tell my class a bit about their dating lives. The man fancied himself a “Don Juan” type and indicated that he could easily have been married if only he wanted to. The woman, for her part, explained why it was that she was still single.

Who asked?

Should I have taken notes? What would they have said if someone queried, “Will we be tested on this?”

Even as a little kid, I thought to myself, “I’m not supposed to hear this.”

Finally, the teacher I had for music in the 8th grade told us all that she had been a famous opera singer, but for some reason had given up that career. Moreover, she offered that she had a stage name different from her current married name. What was it? She wouldn’t say. From time to time she would also rant about Harry Truman, who hadn’t been President for a number of years. She was, however, a heck of a good choral director.

Another case of kids being a captive audience. Too much information — the wrong information, I knew even then.

I suppose the moral of this story is that we learn equally from those who are good models and those who aren’t.

Teachers (and others) often don’t realize that the lesson they intend to teach is, in fact, not the one being taught.

June 16, 2010

The Price of Humility

Humility is generally thought to be a positive characteristic. Let’s consider this a little more carefully.

From the centuries-old teachings of the Catholic Church, one reads that there are “seven deadly sins:” wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Even without such a list, however, young people are often taught to be humble and not boastful.

They are instructed not to call too much attention to themselves, not to be full of themselves or too proud. Arrogance, excessive self-love (narcissism), hubris — all are viewed negatively and point to the notion that you are not as good as you think you are and therefore should not become “too big for your britches.” In effect, the message is, be modest and you will be fine.

But.

Yes, I know, there is always a but.

An example illustrates why I am a hesitant endorser of humility in all things. My seventh grade Chicago Public School home room teacher gave us an interesting assignment. In one of the marking periods (there were four per semester) each of us was to write down the grades that we believed we should receive for the term — what marks we felt we deserved. Up until that time I was something of a humility addict. Whether from home or elsewhere, I’d learned not to toot my own horn, not to draw attention to myself, and certainly not to overstate my accomplishments.

The strategy had worked pretty well up to that time. But, I did not see that it created the potential for trouble ahead.

I dutifully delivered the grades, having understated most, if not all of them. What difference did it make, I thought? The teacher would assign the bona-fide grades, of course, based on the work we had completed, our test scores, and so forth.

Some time later, we received our real marks. And, wouldn’t you know it, my instructor had given me exactly the evaluation I assigned to myself. Since I was enormously invested in my school performance, I was crushed. I seem to recall that each kid had a mini-conference with her up at her front desk. I don’t remember what she said to me, but the grades stood, at least until the next marking period, when she would not be influenced by any external opinions. Nevertheless, I’m sure that I was mad at myself for having understated my worth.

As miserable as she made me feel, this woman did me a great favor. In fact, there probably was no better way to deliver the message: don’t diminish yourself, don’t minimize your accomplishments, don’t be self-effacing. If you cannot be your own best advocate, why should you expect anyone else to advocate for you? While you needn’t trumpet your attainments to the farthest reaches of the earth, neither should you hide them under a rock.

There is a price to excess humility, just as there is a price to the extreme of any human characteristic, not just the seven deadly sins: too much confidence or too little, too much risk-taking or not enough, a naive excess of trust or a cynical absence of confidence and faith in others, and so forth.

My teacher is almost certainly deceased. But, if I could, I would thank her for her instruction in the price of a surfeit of humility.

Ironically enough, her name was Miss Price — my seventh grade teacher at Jamieson School.

—

The image above is Kandinsky’s Composition V.

May 9, 2010

Honoring Teachers: Speech to the Mather High School Class of 2010 on Behalf of the Zeolite Scholarship Fund

If you’ve ever traveled to the Near North Side of Chicago, you might have seen a peculiar street sign. The street name is spelled G-O-E-T-H-E. And most people in call it “Go-thee.”

But if you’ve taken a little bit of German here at Mather, you know something that most Chicagoans don’t know. The correct pronunciation is “Gu(r)-tuh.” (The “r” is not pronounced).

But you still might not know who that is.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a writer, poet, philosopher, and scientist who was hugely famous by the time he died in 1832.

And here we are, and we can’t even say his name right.

I mention this, because we are here to honor some other people whose names you are even less likely to know, even if most of them might be a little bit easier to say. Just as Goethe was significant to cultured Germans of his time and after, these people were and are extraordinarily important to us.

They were our teachers here at Mather back in the 1960s. This year, we have decided to honor all of those teachers who made a difference in our lives — all those good men and women whose cleverness, dedication, and caring helped us along the way to becoming, we hope, educated people with the tools to make something of our lives.

It is fair to say that we would not be here today, able and willing to give scholarships to you, but for their influence.

And now my friend Barbara Orloff Litt will read you a short list of wonderful people who continue to live inside of us over 45 years since we last had regular contact with them. You will find no Chicago streets named after them, but they mean the world to us.

Thanks to all of them and thanks to you for listening to their names.

—

(The teachers so honored included Burl Covan, George Bayer, Abraham Fink, Jo Ann Rosow Greenblatt, Bob Kapolnek, Ralph Lewis, Patricia Daley Martino, Peter Miscinski, Kay Mulvey, William Paulick, Thomas Radzicki, Hy Speck, Nicholas Tasto, Rachel Topp, Eleanor Wollens, and Dawn McKee Wyman).


May 2, 2010

Lost and Forgotten Loves

Do you remember, perhaps wistfully, someone who has long been out of your life? The person might be a first love or a romantic interest who came along at a vulnerable moment. That individual provided something timely and touching, perhaps a feeling that you thought you would never have. Usually it was the possibility of love — the possibility of being loved and feeling loveable — something that hadn’t been experienced recently if at all; something that seemed hopelessly out of reach. And so, this person who opened the door to embracing that feeling — to a sense of being worthwhile and valuable — acquired a special value herself. She brought the “music” into your life and might continue to hold a special place in your heart.

Perhaps you felt that the lost love was too good for you — at least so you thought. The interest she had in you seemed a bit astonishing to you. And you were enormously grateful for her interest and the pleasure that she seemed to take in your company. If you were lucky, the relationship lasted long enough to change you for the better. And even though it ended with your heart breaking, you still carry inside of you a sense of gratitude and an enduring soft-spot for this person who you’ve likely not seen for many years.

There are ironies here, at least two I can think of. First, that your gratitude just might be a bit misplaced. You probably thought too little of yourself and too much of the object of your affection. Perhaps you placed her on a pedestal. You might have dismissed what you brought to the relationship: your good nature, your wit, your humor or kindness, or  your own physical attractiveness. And so, whatever affection or interest you experienced that felt to be more than you deserved, might in fact have been just what you were entitled to: you were better than you thought.

Another irony is that, as much as you might still think of this individual from time to time, it is entirely possible that she almost never thinks of you. You did not change her life, even if she changed yours. Your role was more peripheral, less important. To her, you are another relationship in a history of such contacts, not the one that made an enormous difference in her life, as she did in yours. It seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it? Yet that is the way life works.

But I think that the ultimate irony in these unequal pairings is that there is probably someone out there whose life you did alter, to whom you meant everything, and who you now hardly ever think about. In other words, the roles described at the start of this essay are reversed. And you may not even know (or remember) just how profound your impact was on that lover of the moment. For him or for her, that time together with you was much more special, decisive, and profound than it was for you.

It helps to see both sides of this. Both the over-valuing of another and the impact we make on people without really trying — just by showing up in their lives at the right moment and being ourselves. The most dramatic impact outside of a romantic relationship (and indeed one that has more influence) is surely that between a parent and a child, but bosses and friends can sometimes approach the importance of a romantic partner.

Therapists and teachers need to be mindful of this too, in their relationships with patients and students, respectively. Whether you help or you hurt another can be of enormous importance. And, if you’ve done your job especially well or especially poorly, you will probably be recalled long after the relationship has ended.

My high school friends and I take part in something called the Zeolite Scholarship Fund, about which a search of this blog’s archives will reveal more. One of the things we have done in addition to giving scholarships at our alma mater is to honor our old Mather High School teachers. We let them know how much they meant to us, at least those who made an important difference in our lives and are still living. Even decades later and long since they might have recalled any of our names, we remember them and their influence.

I suppose that the most appropriate metaphor for the way in which we unknowingly impact others negatively (and this can apply to teachers who were particularly poor or nasty) is one of walking down the street, being unaware and unconcerned (as we all are) of the very little creatures (bugs) that we might be treading upon. I know that this is an exaggerated comparison to the way that we are affected by others. But the point is that we are all pretty fragile, easily hurt by those who care less about us than we do about them.

Just something to be mindful of in any relationship, whichever end of it you are on. Like throwing a stone into a pool of water, the ripples can go on for a very long time.

Be nice.

gustav-klimt-the-kiss-c-1907-detail

A cropped version of the painting at the top of this page: The Kiss by Gustav Klimt