The two years that Barbara and I lived at Palm Gardens were two of
the most memorable in my very happy life.
The fact that Barbara had her senior year ahead of her when we
moved in to that humble but perfect abode gave me one of several reasons to
stay connected to SMU for the two years that I taught at Pinkston. We would often avail ourselves of the free Friday
and Saturday movies shown in the SMU Student Union, typically excellent films offered
at an institution that had a thriving theater department and an audience that
appreciated excellence in cinema.
Memorable among the movies that we saw during that phase were two
Stanley Kubrick classics: 2001 Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange.
Dennis Weltman also continued as an on-campus presence: Upon graduation with his bachelor’s in
mathematics, he secured a teaching assistantship as he pursued his master’s in
the same field. Dennis would come over
frequently to sample my developing culinary artistry, items that included in
those days lasagna and fried chicken dinners and a nod to the gourmet with a dish
called Chicken Parisienne. That dish
could have been called simply Parisian Chicken, but we Texans are a classy
bunch.
Dennis would come over on many a Friday or Saturday, dine with us,
and linger for multiple games of Spades or Hearts and laugh after laugh. Sometimes we would go out to a commercial
theater to see some currently popular hit.
One memorable evening had us getting to a packed theater just in time
for Towering Inferno and having to
take seats in the first row, feeling that we were fighting those intense and ascending
flames along with Steve McQueen.
Barbara took excellent courses that academic year of 1973-1974. She had largely completed her math sequence for
the major and had space to take engaging electives: a course in criminology, another in the religion
of Islam, another in Eastern Religions, and courses in art history and the
history of contemporary music. Such
intellectual fare engendered many an animated evening discussion, as Barbara
shared ideas that she was mulling pertinent to her courses and I gave her the
latest scoop from Pinkston High.
…………………………………………………………….
Very seamlessly, without ever having to ponder how I intended to approach
the art of teaching, I went forth in the profession much in the mold of the
university professor. During summers of
1973 and 1974 I did a bevy of reading, memorably David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, on the Ivy
League big-thinkers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who got us into
so much deep dung in Vietnam; Toni
Morrison’s novel, Tar Baby; several Kurt Vonnegut novels, including Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle; and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novelistic rendering of
the life of the Buddha.
I also re-read--- at least twice--- the 900-page textbook that I retained from my
United States history survey course at Southern Methodist. I re-read the text during summer 1973 and
then I would re-read the relevant chapters before presenting material from the
succession of chronological periods in the American history course that I
taught at Pinkston; and I would proceed
similarly in my world history course, reviewing and re-reading texts and philosophical
tracts that I had first read in SMU’s vital Liberal Studies program or in Brad
Carter’s political theory courses.
I could tell that my students had not as a rule encountered this
level of teacher preparation:
They seemed to find hard to believe that I actually taught them and engaged them in conversation about the details of the slave trade; the plantation system of the Deep South; the seminal nature of the United States Constitution, in many ways the first coherent synthesis of the ideas of Montesquieu, Locke, and Rousseau now applied to practical governance, mostly by James Madison; the promise and the demise of Reconstruction; and the many amalgams of democratic and authoritarian ideas that abide in uncomfortable cognitive dissonance across the 19th and 20th centuries in both United States and world history.
They seemed to find hard to believe that I actually taught them and engaged them in conversation about the details of the slave trade; the plantation system of the Deep South; the seminal nature of the United States Constitution, in many ways the first coherent synthesis of the ideas of Montesquieu, Locke, and Rousseau now applied to practical governance, mostly by James Madison; the promise and the demise of Reconstruction; and the many amalgams of democratic and authoritarian ideas that abide in uncomfortable cognitive dissonance across the 19th and 20th centuries in both United States and world history.
Despite that early instruction from Michael Skates as to what I
might do with the essay I had assigned, and the pugilistic pounding my chin took from a non-oratorically
inclined Cicero, the reception I got from students at Pinkston now appears in
my personally reflective mirror as quite amazing, far too generous:
I look back on that time now and realize that from the moment I
stepped into those United States and world history classes I was most likely
among the top ten percent of teachers of such courses across the nation.
However ego-satisfying that might be, that is also a great
shame:
I wielded a mere bachelor’s degree in political science, with major
additional concentrations in history and psychology. I had so much yet to learn, degrees to pursue,
experiences to accumulate, books to read, research to conduct before I would get
even close to the knowledge level that I considered fully requisite to the
task.
The prematurely exalted level of effectiveness that I exhibited
even as I entered the classroom, therefore, conveys much about my own approach
to teaching
and
to the lack of preparation that most teachers bring to the most
important profession in these not very United States.
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