ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Peter | Chuck | Marc
Date: December 2002
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Topic: "Were there any crucial events or people in the development of you as a teacher? Any heroes or bums?"

Chuck Sandy

After thirty years I can still feel it: the crack of a her ruler against my knuckles, the humiliation he put me through almost daily, the shame of her punishing me so publicly and so viciously for something I had not done. Mrs. Houth, Mr. LaDuke, Ms. Curtis: Whatever it is I was supposed to have learned in their classes is lost, and all that remains is the clear memory of the pain they inflicted.

“the bums in education, the villains in teachers' clothing, the evil administrators are the ones responsible for so much misery in life, yet we let them off the hook with counseling if they're lucky, with a transfer if we are not.”

That I now can look back on their behavior through the window of my readings in psychology does not lessen the damage they caused. Nor does it help to label them for what they were: sociopath, repressed pedophile, sadist. What helps is to remember that they propelled my escape from a small world.

As luck would have it, I had all three teachers within two years, and it was because of them that I discovered one could use books and the stories within them as storm-homes ­ places to escape to and find safety in while the emotional typhoons of the real school world swirled around me. In the fifth grade I took refuge from Mrs. Houth's cruelty by staying with Laura and her family in the Big Woods. In the sixth grade I escaped Mr. LaDuke's barely repressed longings and Ms. Curtis's sadism with long forays into Middle Earth along with Frodo and Sam.

I went from there to travel with the Freedom Riders down to the Old South where they battled the Klan and from there to stand beside Martin Luther King in Memphis. I joined Allen Ginsburg at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco as he howled against it all. I went down and out with George Orwell in London and Paris. I visited Los Alamos with Dr. Oppenheimer as he built The Bomb. I toured Hiroshima with John Hershey. Mr. LaDuke, Mrs., Houth, and Ms. Curtis helped me to understand the Heart of Darkness, The Catcher in The Rye, The Lord of the Flies.

It was not mere escapism, then, for within those journeys I discovered I could not only travel to where ever I wished, but could also learn on my own despite any effort to belittle or reduce me to less. This is no small lesson to learn, and though those three teachers are the clear villains of my educational life, I have to thank them for this somehow. Though they clearly wore the black hats of the enemy, they empowered me in much the same way any evil empowers us to rise up against it ­ and I did.

It was partly because of them that I became an educator. Though they are the bums here, the real villains, still they served this purpose, and still even now remain the black hats against which all others are measured. This allowed me to assign lesser black hats to those teachers too bored with their own life to inspire much in anyone, those professors so devoid of ideas they needed to lift them wholesale from their graduate students, those administrators either so interested in empire building and self-preservation or in maintaining the status-quo that they'd turn their back on people and ignore obvious problems.

You know who I mean, and so before moving on away from the dark side, lets thank those people for the semi-literates in society, for the increase in crime and alienation, for those who turned to drugs and gangs instead of books, for the darkness in so many hearts, for Columbine.

Those of you who know me well, know I am given to having extreme opinions and making blanket statements. This, however is not one of them: the bums in education, the villains in teachers' clothing, the evil administrators are the ones responsible for so much misery in life, yet we let them off the hook with counseling if they're lucky, with a transfer if we are not. In a fair world, they'd be made to pay.

In this world they're balanced by those in the white hats, by the true educators, by those teachers who make a difference, by the ones who have helped so many rise up to find an outlet for their anger, by the many teachers who give others by their example a way of being, a model for their life to follow.

After all these years I can still feel it: the pleasure of having her complete attention, the joy of having him treat me as an equal, the confidence and sense of purpose she gave me. Marilyn Bendena, Winston Fuller, Takeko Minami. Even now they are famous in my mind. She'd sit and listen to me ramble on about my ideas and my life as if she had nothing more important to do. He'd respond to my writing in a way that made me feel like a writer. She'd slap me on the back and tell me that I could do anything ­ even move to Japan to run a school -- in a way that made me believe it.

These three taught me that the best teachers are the same people in and out of class, that what education is really about is connection and soul-building, that a good teacher -- even encountered as late as university -- can turn a person's life around and cancel out the effects of even those who wore the blackest of hats. These three were my heroes and to them I owe my belief system, my ideas about education, my daily efforts to be as good a teacher as they were. They prepared the way for me to become who I am.

Who I became is a writer and an educator, and in my professional life I've encountered my share of heroes. I've learned more from Jack Richards than I have ever learned from anyone. Michael Rost continues to be a model worth following. Curtis Kelly and Marc Helgesen teach me again and again that teaching matters. My colleagues on the Humanities faculty at Chubu University show me almost daily what it means to believe in students. The teachers I encounter at Nagoya International school give me hope. These are the people I respect and attempt to emulate. They are the ones who give me the power to fight off the villains.

Mrs. Houth, Mr. LaDuke, and Ms. Curtis are all dead now, but I still see them still in classrooms around the world. Their lesser counterparts on the dark side turn up on faculties and in committee meetings quite regularly. I see those teachers with so many better things to do than teach frequently on school visits. I hear echoes of what their classrooms must be like at conferences when they ask the most unbelievable of questions: "What do I do with students who refuse to listen to me, how can I maintain control, why aren't they capable of real thought, is it the education system which makes them so servile and empty, am I so wrong to impose my values on students?"

Just the other day I had a conversation with a teacher who remarked that humanism is a luxury in classes like hers where discipline is the real issue. Just last night I received an email from an administrator who tried in vain to mask his distrust of teachers and students behind a veil of academic jargon, who came right out and said that "the whole problem is the failure of students to live up to expectations." Just the other day my father told me that the reason he never became a reader is because of a series of teachers who showed him in various ways that he was stupid. My father, who grew up to be a man who understands the inner workings of computer systems, said, "It should be a crime to make a kid feel that way."

Robert Coles writes in Moral Education that "students do not remember what we tell them. What they remember is how we make them feel." Often the only thing we worry about before going to class is what to teach and how to teach it. On days when I've had too little sleep or wake with a mood that darkens the color of my own hat, I too have to remind myself of the most important questions: How do I make my students feel? What are they going to remember about my class in 30 years?

Think about that. What color hat do you wear? Where will you fall when years from now one of your students creates their own list of heroes and villains? The effects of what you do today are long lasting. Damage cannot be undone. Think about that before you go to your next class. Think about it every day.

Panelists: Peter | Chuck | Marc

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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