by Daniel Rigney (open.salon.com/blog/danagram)
A favorite book in our house is Loren Pope’s Colleges That Change Lives, an acknowledged classic among college guidebooks. Pope identifies a handful of small, smart liberal arts colleges around the United States which, while not as well known as some other schools, have earned reputations as places where good students receive the challenge and collegial community they need to thrive both intellectually and personally.
Pope’s book reminds me that I, and most of us, have encountered people in our lives, beyond our own families and friends, who have left valuable but invisible impressions on who we’ve become and are still becoming. I am calling these people Teachers in the widest sense. Teachers who change lives.
If books can have acknowledgements, then why can’t blogs? I would like here and now to acknowledge a small group of people – and I could have made a much longer list – who have been my Teachers through the years. Some of these may no longer be alive, and others still alive may never know this list exists. But in every case their names will be written in the book of life as people who will always have lived, and who have made impressions for which I am grateful.
My hunch is that each of us keeps an unpublished and sometimes unconscious list like this in the recesses of our minds, and that the list grows and changes with time.
A Teacher list is not a ranking. Teachers may be on your list for many different and incomparable reasons. My own list below is more or less chronological.
Most of my Teachers have been small-t teachers, whether on high school or university faculties. One named below is a church minister from my youth, and two are psychologists who helped members of our family through difficult times -- and we all have them. I am not including my old friends and colleagues through the years in this list. As we say in Texas, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.
Thank you, then, to …
Herbert Sprouls, who first made me aware of the power and beauty of metaphors
Anne Griffin, English teacher and lit mag editor, who helped me learn to write
Judy Allen, another English teacher, who set the bar high with brassy intelligence and wit
Tom Hall, a geometry teacher who was way nerdy before nerdy was way cool
Ambrose Gordon, English professor, gentleman scholar in a remarkable program called Plan II (Plan to? Plan to what?)
Dale McLemore, my first sociology professor, who gave us the classics of the discipline from day one
Gideon Sjoberg, citizen-intellectual and creative social theorist
Sharon McMahon, who understands teenagers better than I did, or do
Nancy Baker-Brown, from whom I learned that Pandora’s music box contains mostly good things
Stephen Klineberg, whose Owl’s eye view of the history and sociology of Houston was the best newcomer’s gift I could have asked for
Nancy Geyer, novelist and playwright, whose creative writing course led me to start this blog in February. Hope to see you again next fall in your scriptwriting course.
And thank you, finally, to Loren Pope, for Colleges That Change Lives, and to colleges, both literal and metaphorical, that change lives everywhere, and every day.
Life is, after all, a Continuing Studies program.
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