These teachers knew and loved what they taught, and they communicated that to their students.
One thing school friends do when they get together after a long time is reminisce about their teachers. They groan about the teacher who made choral music or seventh-grade gym a misery, and they remember their favorite teachers, the ones who had a lasting influence on their lives. Undoubtedly these favorite teachers are as different as the former students who are recalling them, but I think that they often share an important quality - a passionate devotion to the subject they taught.
A couple of years ago, I picked up an excellent book about teachers and teaching that illustrates this point. A Special Relationship: Our Teachers and How We Learned (Pushcart Press, 1991) presents comments from a number of famous people about their teachers. The editor, John Board, didn't call these people up and question them -- many of the people he wanted to "interview," like Helen Keller, John Muir, and Louis Sullivan, were no longer alive. Besides, he wanted to see what, if anything, these people had to say about the teachers who were important to them when they were not on the spot. So he combed through their memoirs and came up with some remarkable tributes to teachers. In almost every case, these favorite teachers were in love with their subject, and, because attaining great knowledge and the skill to deploy it requires discipline, they also demanded hard work of their students.
Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins says that his plans to become an engineer "melted in a new lust for books and writing" when he met Miss Mary E. Copley, his eighth-grade teacher:
Whitman once said that he was simmering, simmering, simmering until Emerson brought him to the boil, and that is precisely what Miss Copley did for me. The high school had an excellent library, and I read everything I could lay my hands on: Chaucer, Homer, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Robert Burns, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Tennyson ... .! also read Souls of Black Folk. I knew by heart the basic axiom of Du Bois.
Mark Van Doren, a writer, teacher, and scholar, talks about the powerful influence of a principal who covered a class about Shakespeare's Macbeth when Van Doren' s regular teacher was sick:
In forty minutes he created a world -- perhaps the world -- and I was never to forget it. This was powerful teaching; it assumed maturity in us who listened; it spoke to that maturity; and insofar as such as thing can be done to a boy of thirteen, it made me a reading man.
And novelist MacKinlay Kantor describes the effect of Miss Grace Bidlack's eighth-grade course in American history:
The America she gave her boys was a heritage of sweat, bullets, tattered flags, war-whoops, red footprints in the snow. To children who previously had found stimulation in [boys' adventure books], she suddenly discovered the thrill and significance of our national past. We galloped with Nathaniel Bacon. We snaked through the swamps with King Philip .... We paced the chilly streets of Philadelphia with Robert Morris, ringing doorbells, demanding money for the ragged Continental Congress ....
I am by no means tricked into falsehood along with the sentimental recollection. I have not lost touch with my youth. I see others of Miss Bidlack's boys every now and then, and we always talk of her.
There is no question what made these teachers stand out in the memories of their former students. They knew and loved what they taught and communicated that. It is too bad, then, that there is a prejudice against content among many members of our educational establishment. Prospective teachers are often indoctrinated with the idea that they should "teach the student, not the subject." This means focusing on the process of learning - on "problem solving," "higher-order thinking skills," and "critical thinking," rather than American history or Macbeth or W.E.B. Du Bois. The terms may sound impressive, but without content, students don't have anything to think about - or, probably, any interest in thinking. Subject matter, as the great teachers in John Board's book knew, is the life's breath of learning.
As a part of reforming our education system, we need to think about what we consider important in a teacher. Of course, good teachers are skilled in techniques of what we now call classroom management. They are sensitive to who their students are and know what kinds of approaches will help the youngsters learn. But these things are worth very little unless a teacher knows and loves the subject. So our reforms must reestablish and preeminence of subject matter by setting standards that focus on content and curricula and assessments attached to these standards. When this happens, content will assume its correct place in the preparation of young teachers. And then teachers like Grace Bidlack and Mary E. Copley -- teachers who are in love with their subject -- will once more be the models to which everyone in the profession aspires.