The Weekly Screed (#642)

Alice returns to Dairyland
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Earlier this month, I cajoled Alice out of New Jersey and back to Madison, where we celebrated her 50th anniversary as a teacher in the town where her career began. The occasion marked Alice’s reunion with several of the same students who had shuffled, slouching and suspicious, into a room on the lower B-wing of Robert M. LaFollette High School on her first day in front of a classroom, which was  overcrowded (there were 70 of us) with 14-year-olds.

As a new teacher whose Master’s Degree was barely dry, Alice got stuck with freshman Civics and a class or two of remedial English. Among her barely literate and openly hostile remedial students was a dead-end greaseball named Reeve.

Among the former students who came to Alice’s little reunion 50 years later, full of respect, affection and nostalgia, was Reeve.

After barely graduating in 1967, Reeve survived a grievous injury in Viet Nam and a long struggle with substance abuse. Somehow, by and by, he managed to steer away from the ugly fate that his peers and elders had, almost unanimously, forecast for him. Today, he’s a solid citizen and responsible husband, a hardworking member of America’s embattled middle-class. He’s got social and conversational skills that were never visible in the high-school version of Reeve. He’s humble, he’s amiable and he has a dynamite collection of tattoos. The strongest stuff he ingests nowadays is Pepsi.

Reeve didn’t explain why he needed to see Alice after all these years. He didn’t have to. We all knew why because we know Alice. She doesn’t give up on her kids. She sees the raggediest of them, like Reeve, as an exciting challenge. Alice leaned hard on Reeve, demanded that he finish every assignment on time, expected him to do it well and — to remind him — ambushed him in the halls. Although Reeve defied her expectations, she never betrayed a moment’s doubt either in his ability or in his worth. This was rare for Reeve, and he remembered.

Fifty years ago, Alice was an iron lady who scared those 70 freshmen out of our wits. But it wasn’t long before her heart showed through. By my junior year, I was one of a handful of students who periodically crashed Alice’s house on Friday nights after games, just to hang out with her and her husband. Alice recalled, ironically, that through all those home invasions, Keener, Dick, Schuster, Barry and I always called her “Mrs. Twombly,” but greeted her husband — a mere fellow student (working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin) — as “Bob.”

To us students, Alice conveyed an air of unquestionable authority without any pretense to superiority. She was — and remains — a literary snob, but she has always been able to forge a motherly bond with those “high-risk” kids who could barely read beyond Dick and Jane. She conveyed a sense of timelessness that’s common to all the best teachers I’ve ever known. Even in her seventies, there’s something twentyish about her. But in her twenties, when we had her at LaFollette, she was our living, constantly talking portal to an otherwise unfathomable past, a receptacle of history whose memory lent meaning to the immediate.

We who celebrated Alice this month knew she had given her life to teaching, to us and thousands who shuffled in our footsteps — slouching and suspicious — into her classrooms.

This poses another irony because, lately, the idea of any sentient adult surrendering his or her life to teaching — teaching America’s adolescent riffraff, edifying the insolent legions of the chronically ungrateful — has fallen out of vogue, especially along the cutting edge of what Tom Lehrer called “the ed biz.”

Today, the ideal teacher emulates Michelle Rhee, the ed biz’s latest superstar. Former education chancellor in D.C., Rhee began her teaching career with five weeks of training in a program called Teach for America. Then came a year as a gradeschool teacher, during which she famously covered her pupils’ mouths with masking tape to make them shut up. Next, Rhee added a summer-school session to her educational resumé. After two more years in the classroom, she quit — convinced that she knew enough, by then, to stand the educational Establishment on its ear. Today, Rhee bestrides the corporate school reform movement, among whose many bizarre convictions is the belief that someone like Alice who squanders her energy in the hopeless effort to save losers like Reeve, is a sucker.

Rhee and her financial angels maintain that a brand-new teacher every bit as brilliant as Alice can be patched together — classroom-ready and dirt-cheap — in a little under 40 days. Today, the prototype American (non-union, charter-school) teacher is a glorified “temp” who dabbles in the classroom for a couple of carefree pre-marital years, then moves seamlessly on to his or her “real” career, in some classy pursuit where there’s “real” money — like hedge funds.

The Times quoted one of these pedagogic toe-dippers, Tyler Dowdy, age 24, who’s eager, after two grueling years, to forsake teaching at a place called YES Prep West in Houston. He said, “I feel our generation is always moving onto the next thing, and always moving on to something Bigger and Better.”

Sadly for Alice and all the others who’ve wasted their lives in classrooms, there was never a “Bigger and Better” — just school. But every now and then, a former student suddenly accosts Alice, gazes into her eyes and gushes something like, “You changed my life. I owe you so much that I could never repay.”

Tyler Dowdy won’t be enduring that sort of shmaltz 50 years from now. Few among his handful of stepping-stone students will remember him. None will plan reunions, nor interrupt their lives to attend, nor recognize the price he paid or the love he gave without asking for any love in return. Nobody — not one — will ever seek him out, embrace him impulsively and say, “Thank you. For everything.”

Thank him? For what?