Christmas gift idea for teacher

As a teacher - and like every other teacher - I stand at the intersection of many more vectors, variables, forces, emotions, ideals, aspirations, and accidents than I can even track, much less control. The moment of space and time I stand in now is only the forward crest of a wave that has been gradually shaped by a great many particular drops of experience, whose formative effects I was not vividly aware of at the time they happened.

Once I start thinking about it, however, I realize how different I am from the greener-than-grass, 27-year-old University of Chicago graduate student who, without five seconds' worth of teaching experience, suddenly found himself standing at 8 a.m. in front of a class of freshman writing students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee - students who expected me to know something not only about reading and writing but about how to teach reading and writing.

It was a terrifying moment. Without even knowing how, I remember opening my mouth and beginning that mysterious projection of self, that ever-incomplete exploration of ideas, and that always uncertain social invitation to students - all very big-ticket items - that we somehow squeeze behind this small but significant word: "teaching."

As I look back on my teaching career, I am struck less by what I have (perhaps, perhaps not) learned about teaching problems or teaching principles than by the memory of student faces and student stories. My mind's eye brings to me students' faces like shadows from the dark; my mind's ear brings to me students' stories like voices from another world. I do not possess complete stories for all the students I have known. Constraints of time, inclination, and reticence have often blocked the stories, and with regard to some students, I possess only tantalizing but often sad and sometimes terrifying fragments.

One of the faces belongs to a young woman (my wife's student, really, whom I got to know), the daughter of Russian immigrants, who wrote poetry of such raw emotional intensity and pain that reading it was like having acid thrown in your eyes. Another is that of a sweet and naive young woman who wanted to talk over her decision to concede to her boyfriend's importunities for a sexual relationship. I still receive an annual Christmas letter from her and she is still married to the original "boy friend."

Another face is that of a young woman who wept through my dramatic account of the murder in Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit because, as she told me later, her brother had murdered their mother and father. (In my stunned surprise and shock, all I could think of at first was how Charles Lamb's sister had done the same thing to their mother.)

Another face belongs to a young man who needed a B in my freshman composition class in order to maintain the draft deferment that was keeping him out of the Vietnam War. Another belongs to an older student, a man close to my own age, who took one literature course from me, dropped his history major, switched to English, and today is a professional colleague. Another belongs to a young man whose name was the first I ever called out while taking attendance from a computer roster, who escaped from an unhappy home by coming to live with me and my wife after graduation, and who remains today one of my closest friends and the husband of one of my colleagues.

Another belongs to a young woman who came to me for help when what had started out in her life as a sexual adventure turned into promiscuity and eventually into sexual prostitution. Another is the angry face of the young Native American man from northern Wisconsin who, when I was only one three-piece suit and three weeks of time into my teaching career, stopped me cold in the middle of my scintillating account of comma splices (a topic ordered up by the common syllabus enforced on all teachers of the course) in order to offer me the frontal challenge, "Gregory, do you know what the shit you're talking about?"

Well, I did know - about comma splices, that is - and I even had a pretty good idea why comma splices seemed pretty irrelevant in the life of a young man in Lee Thundercloud's position in American society, but Mr. Thundercloud and I never came to an understanding about either comma splices or my knowledge of things more relevant to him, for he left the class and never returned. But other students stayed, and one whose story has meant the most to me over the years is, curiously, a student whose face I saw only once. The relationship between me and Sister Mary Thecla is my favorite teaching story.

I first came into contact with Sister Mary while I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago. My wife, who is now a successful children's book author, supported the two of us at the time - supplemented only marginally by my fellowships - by teaching in the suburban public schools. (One year when we were both on fellowships, we lived for an entire nine months on $1,800, including paying rent, buying our food, running a car, and purchasing a dog and a sewing machine. I suppose it's still the case that poverty doesn't mean the same thing to graduate students that it means to most other people. But that's a graduate school story, not a teaching story.)

I worked at high-paying, blue-collar, industrial jobs in the Chicago area during the summers - Youngstown Steel, Erie Lackawana Railroad, Rock Island Railroad, assorted construction jobs. During the school year, I taught school, which really meant only grading tests and essays, at the American Correspondence School (ACS), the world's largest correspondence school for high school students, located in Hyde Park right next to the University of Chicago.

Grading the essays and test papers of faceless high school students from around the world was not an ideal introduction to teaching. There was no eye contact, no body language, no questions and answers, no colleagues to consult, no talk in the hall, no consultations in the teacher's office. But I did write in the margins of my students' tests, and when they gave evidence of keen perception or good writing or intellectual aspiration, I tried to encourage their lonely dedication and isolated perseverance.

By far the most perceptive, eager, and thoughtful student I had was a young woman recently arrived in this country from Ireland - a nun, Sister Mary Thecla, assigned to a convent in White Springs, New York. Sister Mary was thrilled to be taking the high school survey course in American literature, and I was thrilled to have her as a student. She was fresh, intelligent, enthusiastic - nay, breathless - and I wrote notes of praise, encouragement, and literary and writing instruction in the margins of each of her tests and essays. On the last of her papers for the course, I attached a letter encouraging her to think about going to college and assuring her that she would certainly do well if she could only find a way to go.

I heard nothing from Sister Mary for several weeks and did not expect to hear from her again at all. But finally I did hear, and in the unexpected form of a personal letter. The day my own letter to her had arrived, attached to her final exam, Sister Mary's mother superior had been inspecting the White Springs convent, and, somehow, Sister Mary found the courage not only to show mother superior my letter but to ask if she could - on the basis of my recommendation-be given permission to attend college. The mother superior said yes, and Sister Mary was writing to let me know that, wonder of wonders, she would be attending Loyola College in Chicago at the beginning of the fall term.

Since I left Chicago for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee a little before Sister Mary arrived, I never met her, but we did correspond - not frequently, but often enough to let me know that she was loving her work and doing well. As Sister Mary was approaching the end of her college career, however, I received a call from her one day: could she and a friend come by my house in Milwaukee next Sunday afternoon for an hour or so?

At the appointed time Sister Mary arrived, a smiling young woman with Ireland in her face. She said that she did not want to finish her college years without thanking me in person for writing the letter that had made all the difference in her life. She also said that she had a gift for me, at which point she pulled a beautiful, hand-cut, 1880s Waterford crystal bowl from her bag and presented it to me. The last time she had visited her parents in Dublin she had brought this bowl - a family heirloom - back with her. She had carried it in her lap to make sure that nothing happened to it while it crossed the Atlantic. Now she wanted me to have it as a remembrance of her affection and gratitude in return for my instruction and encouragement. In an hour she was gone.