Last Sunday Jeanne and I had guests over for dinner whom we had not seen in twenty-five years. Jess and Liz are former students of mine who graduated from Providence College in 1999; after a number of years in California they have recently moved back to southeastern New England. They brought their eight-year-old son Jack along, the first youngster who has been in our house for a while. Liz told me that I looked the same as when she had me in class in the late nineties, which is a falsehood that I am more than happy to believe. We had a great time, although it is slightly disconcerting to know that these forty-somethings had been my students as nineteen and twenty-year-olds.
That day was the tenth anniversary of Robin Williams’ death. Although many movie and entertainment stars have died during my lifetime, Williams’ passing was the only one that made me cry. Everyone present at dinner was a huge Robin Williams fan; Jess said that although his father had been an important role model and mentor, Robin Williams was the only person he had ever wanted to be. All of us mentioned our favorite Williams movies, including “The Fisher King,” “Good Morning Vietnam,” “Awakenings,” “Patch Adams,” and “Good Will Hunting,” for which he finally won his first and only Academy Award. And then there was my favorite.
The new semester begins in less than three weeks, so of course my thoughts are turning toward the classroom. The process of my transformation from scared-to-death graduate student to comfortable-in-my-skin professor was a long one with many landmarks along the way. One of the first was “Dead Poets Society,” not only my favorite Robin Williams movie but my favorite movie, period. It was released in 1989, the very year that I was thrown, as a completely inexperienced and totally frightened graduate student into my own classroom for the first time.
This movie was seminal for me, showed up at the right place at the right time in my life and continues to inspire my teaching energies. Dozens of scenes could illustrate; one will suffice. As the dynamic young teacher Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, gradually inspires his students to think for themselves, his young charges start taking their new-found freedom and running with it in unpredictable ways, as teenage young men are apt to do. One of these young men suggests at a school assembly that God wants girls to attend their all-boys school; the sheer outrageousness of the idea as well as the impromptu and disrespectful manner of his expressing it almost gets the student expelled.
The young man expects that Mr. Keating will admire his daring and creativity, but he soon finds out otherwise. “Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone . . . You being expelled from school is not daring, it’s stupid. You’ll miss some golden opportunities,” says Mr. Keating. “Like what?” “Like, if nothing else, the opportunity to attend my classes.”
I want my classes to be like that, I thought. I want to teach classes that will make students glad they came to my school. It’s one thing to see it in a movie, though; it’s another thing to find the path that might lead, over a career, in that direction.
Three years later, at a silent retreat during my first year of post-PhD teaching, I came across the work of Simone Weil, who in Waiting for God expressed the energy and passion at the heart of the learning process so well, it became and remains my “teaching philosophy.”
Contrary to the usual belief, [will power] has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
Early in my life I had been infected by the love of books and of ideas; at this early point in my career it was becoming clear that all my teaching really amounts to is the desire to pass this infection on to others. All I want to do is to help others find the joy in learning that has sustained me through times in my life when there seemed to be nothing else worthwhile except a book. Simone gave me the words to express what I’d intuited all along, that for me, teaching is a vocation, a sacrament, a holy thing.
Once several years I ago I walked into church having completely forgotten that I was scheduled as lector that day. Totally unprepared, I read from Isaiah that “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher . . . Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.” My best days are the ones when I don’t forget this.
P.S.: A quick “Dead Poets Society” story. During my early years at Providence College, twenty-five or so years ago, I happened to mention when lecturing in the large interdisciplinary program at the center of our core curriculum that my last name Morgan means “man of the sea” in Welsh. Before very long the guys in one of my seminar sections started calling me “O Captain, my Captain.” I’m still waiting for that to happen again.
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