May 13, 2009
A Long Tribute to Recognize the California Day of the Teacher
Today is the “California Day of the Teacher.” About a decade ago I read “My Losing Season,” by Pat Conroy. The book is ostensibly an autobiography of the author’s senior basketball season at The Citadel College in South Carolina. But it is more about his years growing up with an abusive father who moved the family many times during Conroy’s formative years. Below is one of my favorite passages in any book. I am not sure I have read anything that describes more beautifully the thrill of learning and the power of a great teacher.
When the scholarly, charismatic Joseph Monte walking into 2A that first day, he radiated an owl-like authority and a passion for literature I’d never come across in a classroom. The way he talked about fiction must have been similar to the post-Pentecostal apostles spreading the word of God. He brought his love of books and words and fine writing to us every day of that year, and he thunderstruck me with the mesmerizing power of his teaching. He came into my life as a rose window onto the world of literature. He opened me up to the pleasures of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Faulkner, and dozens of others. The first book I read for Mr. Monte for extra credit was History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, the second was David Copperfield, and the third was The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Each time you finished a book you would have to find Mr. Monte to discuss the intricacies of that book with him. He gave off the aura of having read every book worth reading since Gutenberg invented the printing press.
“Read the great books, gentlemen,” Mr. Monte said one day. “Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.”
“How will we know the great ones?” Chris Warner asked behind me.
Mr. Monte shot Mr. Warner a look that was part bemusement and part contempt. “Ask me, Mr. Warner. Show a modicum of intelligence in these things.”
In November, Mr. Monte suggested I read The Sound and the Fury. I took the book home and began reading it with enormous anticipation because I could sense Mr. Monte’s reverence when he spoke about the pleasures of Faulkner, and he considered this his masterpiece. When I read the first ninety-two pages, I fretted, then despaired because it felt like I was reading the book underwater or weightless in outer space. I was not sure I understood a single line or had the slightest clue about where the book was tending or drifting. Shaken, I reread the same ninety-two pages that begin with the sentence of the curling flower spaces and ends with Benjy in Caddy’s arms. The second reading left me even more panic-stricken and perplexed.
When I approached Mr. Monte in the cafeteria, I told him I was not yet smart enough to read Faulkner, that I had not understood a single syllable of the first part. Mr. Monte took off his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief, smiled, then said, “Mr. Conroy, how familiar are you with the works of Shakespeare?”
“I read Twelfth Night last year,” I answered. “I read Julius Caesar in your class.”
“‘Do you know where Mr. Faulkner’s title came from, Mr. Conroy?”
“No, sir. I have no idea.”
“Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward,” Mr. Monte said. “Sometimes it makes you work and expand your mind. Mr. Faulkner has given you a clue in the title. Go to Act 5, Scene 4 of Macbeth. There you will find the key to your dilemma, if, Mr. Conroy, you’re the student I think you are.”
I rusted to the library and walked straight to the Shakespeare section and removed a copy of Macbeth from the shelf. Sitting down in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs I turned quickly to Act 5, Scene 4, where I read the words of Malcolm spoken to Monteith. Although I was lost in a play I had seldom heard of, the words of these unknown and fictional men rang true to me and I found them easy to understand. Then I came to the entrance of the sexton announcing to Macbeth that his queen was dead. When I read the words I did not know that the queen was his wife or that Lady Macbeth was an immemorial fictional creation. I did not know I was nearing the end of one of the great tragedies ever conceived. But I found the answer to Mr. Monte’s question in Macbeth’s heartbreaking response to the news of Lady Macbeth’s death. Word for word, I wrote that speech down in the spiral notebook Mr. Monte made us keep in his class. As I copied the last line of that speech, I felt like one of those forty-niners who pan for gold in rushing western streams for years, until they reach the summary and defining moment of their gambled-out lives and lift a pan from the ungenerous stream brimming with a king’s ransom of gold. I thought about the first section of The Sound and the Fury and I thought about Macbeth’s speech when he hears the news of his queen’s death. I put them together. I unlocked the mystery.
The next day I approached Mr. Monte again. His great reserve made it difficult to draw close to him, but I thought I carried the goods he wanted delivered.
“Do you have something for me, Mr. Conroy?” he asked.
“I think I do, Mr. Monte.” I opened my notebook.
“Do not waste a moment of my time, sir,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “If you have something, show it now. Out, out with it, Mr. Conroy. Why did I choose that phrase?”
“Macbeth say, ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ when he hears about the queen’s death.”
“What does he mean by that, Mr. Conroy?”
“How short life is, sir,” I said.
“What does that tell you about Mr. Faulkner’s book?”
“Nothing, sir. It’s later in the speech. When Macbeth says, ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound an fury, signifying nothing.’ That’s why I was confused, Mr. Monte. I was reading a tale told by the idiot, Benjy. It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy’s eyes . . . through an idiot’s eyes.”
Mr. Monte opened his grade book, which he carried with him everywhere, and he entered a notation beside my name. “A+, double credit, Mr. Conroy. This is a good moment in the life of your mind. It’s a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”
Goose bumps marched the length and breadth of my body and the back of my neck tingled as I knew for the first time that learning itself could carry the sting of diving inextinguishable pleasure. Joseph Monte could make the intellect look like the most lustrous and forbidden city of all. After my single year with Monte, I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean. Whenever I wrote an essay in that spiral notebook that he checked once a week, I tried to show off for Mr. Monte, distinguish myself from my classmates in a unique way. I took off on one boilerplate English assignment and wrote what I now realize was my first short story. When I turned the story in, I spent an uncomfortable weekend thinking that Mr. Monte would consider me pretentious or worse for not following the assignment literally. When he passed out the notebooks the following Monday, I turned to the story, breathless, and saw this notation: “More of this, Mr. Conroy. A+, double credit. For imagination.”
Monte rubbed my face in his theory of great teaching. It was oxygen, water, and fire to me. I could not get enough of it; I could not get enough of him. Before I left his class, he passed out a list of great books that he’d compiled. “I’ve put down one hundred novels it would behoove you to read before you go to college. The scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells among you will toss it in the trash before you leave today. But for those of you with a faint pilot light flickering in the stove, it might offer you a path to enlightenment.”
Before I left for college, I had marked all one hundred of those books off my list. Joseph Monte hit me like an ice storm, and I still think that great teacher was sent into my life by God who saw the directionless, blemished slide my life was taking in my disfigured household. The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share or impart, but I didn’t know how to ask. All I knew was, I was not the same boy who walked into Gonzaga that previous fall.
Thank you teachers, today and every day, for what you do for our students.
Sincerely,
Kevin
Kevin Skelly, Ph.D.
Superintendent
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