The Principal Is Not Your Pal

  

Did you have a favorite teacher, either as a kid or an adult, that had a major influence on you as a writer?

Abandon all ye hope for one teacher like Mr. Keating here, because I contain multitudes of experiences in the hallowed halls of institutional terror.

I am the sum of a Catholic education, so Sister Mary Stigmata provided the standard for my “formative years.” Sisters of Infinite Cruelty and Finite Compassion. There was the nun who had to jump to hit my friend George’s hand because he was left-handed and she was so short. I don’t remember her name, but I’m certain it was masculine. Then there was the principal who loved to say that the principal was your pal. She would float into classrooms unannounced with report cards. You were called up and stood in front of her while she reviewed your progress. There were never compliments because ego fed Pride.

I dreaded school, and I especially disliked math. I was the shortest kid in class, so I had to sit in front. My impaired hearing exacerbated that status. Line formation: shortest to tallest. Butt of jokes. Picked last in gym class. The classroom was also my introduction to societal inequities, injustices, and favoritism. Our classes were divided into A and B; the former were bright and the latter dim. And don’t assume you maintained an A-game year to year.

And no, I don’t have a Napoleon Complex, but society is cruel to the vertically challenged hominid. Before you send me copies of The Handmaid’s Tale, I will tell you firsthand, as one of seven boys outnumbered four to one, that it was not Utopia. Us boys were all terrorized by a gaggle of girls who fancied themselves Pinky Tuscadero and the Pinkettes. Yeah, that allusion dates me.

Everything changed during sixth grade, which, for those doing the math, was circa 1978–79. Mrs. B entered our lives. She was innovative. She set aside ten minutes every day when we could write whatever we wanted. It was never graded. For Christmas, she taught us how to sing “Silent Night” in German. It’s a song that remains emotional for me because of her and my grandmother. Four-plus decades later, I still can’t get past the line Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh! without a tear.

Every. Damn. Time.

I disliked school but loved learning.

The problem was that the subjects did not interest me. I loved Art and Reading. The latter consisted of reading paragraphs around a table, waiting for corrections on pronunciation. There was no analysis. The closest I came to that was the monthly book report, and I was the weirdo who read way above his pay grade. I was the kid caught reading “weird” books from the library. Ibáñez and Quiroga. It was fine to read the Hardy Boys or Homer abridged, but you got suspicious looks when you presented Conrad, Orwell, and Twain to your peers. My covers were hand-drawn.

One teacher noticed and lent me her copies of Christie. Over two years, I read all of Christie. So I guess this future Criminal Mind and You owe her.

I attended a prestigious all-boys school run by the Benedictine Order. A different experience. The school would later be mired in scandal, and I was acutely aware of malfeasance during my time there. Those experiences hardened my distrust of organizations and authority. I write about the atherosclerosis of power structures in all my novels.

But there were profound and positive moments, too. What we learn is not always what’s in the classroom. Sometimes it’s in the throwaway breadcrumbs that reveal perspective, character, and integrity.

I had a Latin teacher who was rigorous and demanding. He also taught history, and Armistice Day was sacred to him. He described watching a beloved uncle slowly die from the effects of mustard gas in World War I. Thanks to him, I can still decline nouns and conjugate verbs in Latin. Most students thought he was Paul Hunham from The Holdovers, except in a black robe. He’d send us home for vacation expecting twenty translations upon our return. We didn’t just have to learn the damn vocabulary. We had to provide five cognates per word.

Ah, the sweet gateway to the Romance languages and the language of science. Volvere: to roll, to turn becomes revolver and revolution. Mitto, mittere: to send became admit, emit, omit, permit, and transmit. Suddenly words had histories. They had relatives.

The lesson was associative thinking: seeing connections and then learning to make them.

He taught me another lesson. Use your critical thinking here. The school had a policy that if you had an A average, you could forego the final exam. I had the grade, but he told me I had to take the exam. I was furious. I took it, and he made me wait while he graded it. I scored a 99.

He told me the policy should be for his poor students. They needed the pardon, not me.

You decide the lesson.

I had two lay teachers, both women, for Literature. They lectured the tried-and-tired interpretations but dared the class to form our own. It didn’t matter what we argued so long as we could back it up. Their classes were ones I looked forward to because they deepened my love of reading, and I began to see literature as a continuous and timeless conversation.

I did not have that experience at university. There was the prof as Moses: Thou shalt not have any other interpretation but mine.

One haunting lesson from my senior year bears upon today’s landscape. We were reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and we were discussing epiphany when one of those teachers conveyed her own epiphanic moment. She had been a graduate student at Columbia, studying the poetry of William Blake in 1968.

I was born in 1968.

She said it was the one year she thought the world would end: the nihilism and despair, the assassinations, the unrelenting violence at home and abroad.

I look outside.

I’m not sure what the tribe has learned since then. But I know I could have conformed. I could have weaponized learning for monetary success without the guardrails of ethics or principles.

The principal is not your pal.

I didn’t. I became someone else, and I think I am the better person because of them.

For that, the endless lesson is gratitude.