ASU - Bad Teachers

While I think it is important to acknowledge the contributions of the good teachers I’ve had, I think it’s also valuable to note the contributions of the bad teachers. In middle school I had a history teacher who was going senile. He sent me to the vice-principal’s office for being late to class when it was actually someone else. (I ran into another senile professor at ASU. She was fine the previous year, according to K__, but a waste of my time when I took her class. I was able to transfer out.) Strangely, I ran into the worst instructor at ASU -- story to follow -- and she changed my life in ways she couldn’t have imagined. But first I want to say that all of my bad teachers were valuable because they forced me to question authority and evaluate everything myself -- which should be the goal of education. If I had had nothing but exemplary teachers would I be as good as I feel I am at questioning everything I’m told? Who knows.

English 101

Teaching English 101 isn’t a particularly demanding task at a university so it is given to instructors, not actual tenured professors. The instructor I had was a real character, for one thing she wasn’t terribly bright. She wasn’t interested in what you thought of the literature we studied, only in your repeating back to her her own interpretation of said literature. I usually disagreed with her and was reasonably outspoken about why. So she failed me.

Subsequently, I discovered a number of other people (including my mother’s boss’s brilliant daughter) who had also been failed by this woman. I considered failing her class to be a badge of honor. People she had failed were almost always people I wanted to know. There was also an interesting epilogue to this  story; years later I read in the paper that this instructor was terminated after being busted in Las Vegas for prostitution. I never did hear the details of that story but I wish I had.

The immediate consequence of my failing English 101 was that I now had to take English 102 (I think?) which was a sort of remedial version of 101. This class was taught by another instructor, a young woman I will call J2. She was very enthusiastic and open to actually thinking and discussing whatever we were reading. I ended up taking several classes from J2 and more from her friends and I also became friends with the group of people drawn to her like moths to a flame. Most of my oldest friends today have some connection to J2 or to the people I know because of her.

By this time I was quite good at photography and working in a darkroom. I got her interested in photography and her housemate (D__, still a friend of mine) came home one day to find his room was now also a darkroom.

J2’s classes were often more like seminars with several of the more articulate students (like me) contributing as much as she did (exaggeration). The “average” students were a bit confused but some of us were having fun. One of the people I met in these classes was K__ who is now a writer for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. She was both bright and precocious, being several years younger (she must have started college at 16 or younger). We would continue the discussions started in class outside under the trees. We both dreamed of being writers (which we have been after our own fashions) and in particular we longed to refuse the Pulitzer Prize in protest of their not giving that award to Thomas Pynchon for Gravity’s Rainbow. We both adored and hoped to emulate, Pynchon.

I wanted to write fiction fraught with appalling truth, to paraphrase a line from Little Women. The problem, as I finally realized after many years, was that I was neither a good storyteller nor was I privy to any appalling truths.