When I is not before E:
A New Face for Education
I remember Mr. Saneson, the way he
stood upright and sat rigid and the way he taught grammar loosely. His posture outweighed a pedagogy that had
long failed to inspire. I remember his
glasses—square bifocals that swallowed the top half of his face and kept his
features from spilling onto the floor in front of him. And I still wonder, when finally allowed the
comfort of family or friends or simple liquor, if he’d unwrap
those glasses and let pour a career’s worth of frustration, of shouting out
rules of subject/verb agreement, gerunds, sentence structure, and
spelling. I before E except after C.
I remember the way I sat separated from my friends because
of the laughter, and I’m embarrassed. I
remember how he told me I wasn’t half the student my brother was, and I’m
pissed. And I remember the way he closed
his door to the world at lunch and immediately after school, frightened and fed
up with the students of my generation, and I’m sorry. And I wonder what went wrong. I wonder if he still teaches.
Walking into Worland, Wyoming’s
single high school I am reminded of Mr. Saneson. It’s the row upon row of lockers that does
it. Maybe the
lunchroom with its chaos and energy.
Maybe the quiet library whose stacks challenge interest in the face of all that adolescent struggle. I never did like being in school, even now I
don’t, and maybe that’s what reminds me of Mr. Saneson.
Walking into Tim McGee’s
classroom the memory fades. Tables, not
desks, surround the room’s center. Music
plays. And where student art doesn’t
hang, the walls are peppered with 8 ˝ x 11 sheets of paper bearing the
thoughts, comments, and couplets of a thousand poets, priests, and
philosophers. Eliot
and Auden.
Mandela, Ghandi, Christ, and
Buddha.
He most honors my
style who learns under it to destroy the teacher –
Whitman. Funny thing, I think, for a
teacher to post for his students.
* * *
Tim McGee wants you to cheat. He wants you to fail and he wants you to
change the world. He wants you to leave
it better than you found it. Tim McGee,
an English teacher in small town, USA,
wants a lot of things. He wants to scale
Mt. Fuji
with the world’s 8th graders and televise
it via the Internet. He wants to
redefine today’s teacher to counter what he considers a near faithless
discipline. And he wants to know why the
kids on all continents shouldn’t hear what he alone has to say: about logic and
faith; truth and beauty; Shakespeare and Keats and Bruce Lee and Michael
Jordan. He wants us to be something we
are and something we are not, something encouraged and something evolutionary. Something more.
Tim McGee, an enigma of an educator in his hometown, carries
the degrees you want him to carry and teaches the texts you expect him to
teach. “I very much want to be perceived as the teacher who is playing by the
rules,” he says, as he crosses one leg over the other and locks his hands behind
his head. His jaw is speckled with
course yellow whiskers, round wire-rimmed glasses
center his blue eyes. I get the sense
that his looks are part of his charisma; maybe it’s the handkerchief tied
neatly around his neck or the blue canvas tennis shoes. He looks like he fell off the pages of J.Crew’s fall preview.
The bell rings.
Outside, the halls of Worland
High School are filled with
chirping. Lockers bang. A squeal of sneakers. I hear a student running, a teacher shouting,
and again I think of Mr. Saneson. A student strides into the room toting a duffel of books.
He’s all legs and pimples beneath a neatly parted head of hair. “Hey, McGee.”
“Hi, bro,” he answers with pure enthusiasm. He forgets about me. The squareness of
his jaw softens and his eyes are opened wide.
He leans forward in his chair, a hand planted on a knee, feet flat on
the ground and pigeon-toed. “What can I
do for you?” The student barely eyes
me.
The two talk briefly, not student to teacher but with the
ease of acquaintances. The kid is either
very confident or very at ease as he tells McGee of his intent to start the
soccer ministry they’ve talked about.
Shakespeare played out on the soccer pitch? Goals as gods? An iambic weave through a trochaic
defense. McGee’s face is round and pure,
his mouth agape.
“Soccer ministry?” I ask, after the
student leaves.
“What I’ve got to say is
fundamentally spiritual,” McGee says, leaning back into his chair and grabbing
hold of one knee with clasped hands.
“What goes on here, in a word, it is
spirit. In a word, it’s
love, which is to say, trust. Kids today
are highly sophisticated, darkly skeptical—because it’s so easy to become
darkly skeptical today about the whole notion of confidence and truth and
compassion. So as I look at it, what
really I want to try and give to my students, if you will, I’m trying to give
them my life as a working model of what it means to be alive. What I really try to give is hope, and I
don’t so much give it as try to live it.”
Learning that McGee was born the son of a fundamentalist,
evangelical preacher in Southeast Asia, it’s a knee-jerk
reaction to dismiss comments regarding the spiritual nature of his teaching as
simply bedrock ecclesiastics. And as he
puts it, “biography can get in the way of the message.” It would also be easy to suggest that being
born in the east to traditions of the west, McGee’s adolescent defense would
have been a bucking of the overtly evangelical teachings of his father. That wouldn’t be fair either, according to
McGee. “I think the value laden positions I hold are universal values,
humanistic values and certainly non-western in many ways,” he says. “I would like to think they’re non-eastern as
well. I would like to think that they’re
human values.”
* * *
A few cars remain in the parking lot and a short, stocky man
walks out of Worland High
School’s front doors. File folders are wedged in his armpit. He’s smoking as soon as he’s outside the
school and wearing the clothes in your father’s wardrobe. I know he’s a teacher because he looks like
every other teacher I had when I was in school.
He eyes McGee, then me, and
nods as he climbs into his car. “I never
worried about the fact that I could offend people,” says McGee, answering a
question I didn’t ask. “Part of that was
because after three or four or five years, I was untouchable here. But I’m still open to the accusation, ‘well,
of course he has this kind of success, look where he teaches. He doesn’t have the minority population
problems, he doesn’t have the gang problems, he
doesn’t have the violence. There are no
socioeconomic problems.’ And it’s true, I can’t answer to any of that because I don’t teach in
South Central Los Angeles. I don’t walk
through metal-detectors everyday. I
don’t know, but I have a faith, I have a belief that my going into a classroom
like that would be, for me, like coming into the one here.”
A new silence meets us as the man drives away, one in which
a whistle’s echo on a faraway field feeds my memory of education, of my standard
march through learning, and my own brief stint as a teacher. I remember the insistence on teaching this
way as opposed to that, drilling students instead of sharing with them. And for the first time I can see how McGee
would be distrusted by a staff of teachers in the middle of middle class America—white
America—who
expect the day to begin and end the same way it did in 1973.
“I think I’m the most loved and the most misunderstood man
in this town,” McGee says, climbing into his own vehicle. “My goal was to stay in Worland long enough
that over time, people would just watch me and come to know me. And I’d be perceived as less a radical and
more an individual who has a certain approach to teaching. The people around me don’t consider me an
enigma, just a deeply integrative individual who works on a lot of
levels.”
But it’s the levels that get to people in places like Worland,
Wyoming.
Whether it’s provoking a student’s interest in
Siddhartha or Shakespeare, exposing them to Bach or the Bronté
sisters, or simple multiculturalism, traditional communities in traditional
settings buck change. Folk are
fond of the straight and narrow, the reliable, the
security that comes of predictability.
* * *
The next time I see McGee, he hands me a paper lathered in the
black ink of a copy machine. “I gave
that to my students today. It’s kind of
a response.” McGee is beaming with pride
at the intellectual coup he considers the daily course in his classroom: teaching
kids to think and feel as opposed to exacting recitation and a periodic pound
of flesh for failure.
The copied passage, torn from some anthology of hope and
faith, is titled “Light Out of Africa.” A giant O,
stretching from the last line of the paragraph to the first, is nonetheless
meant to be the first letter of the first word, our. O, a simple and strong architecture, gathering not just the
simplicity of a communion word, but the breadth of start and finish, first and
last, beginning and end. “Our deepest
fear is not that we are inadequate,” it reads, “[but] that
we are powerful beyond measure. As we
are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
“Can you think of any learning experience in your lifetime
that didn’t include some fear and some pain?” McGee asks.
I think.
In 1994, when McGee first recorded a lecture series for The
Teaching Company, an organization that produces video and audio courses across
the academic spectrum, one of his most resonant allegories took listeners
through the process of learning to ride a bike.
Simple. Basic. And somehow profound.
Central to the lecture—and his pedagogy—are the fear and pain of any
learning experience. You’re afraid
because you know you’re going to fall.
You know falling is going to hurt.
For McGee, that simple
knowledge is also an intense one. To
evolve, to learn, nothing is more essential than this understanding. “I deeply
respect a student’s right to fail,” he says.
“I think we work from the assumption that we want students not to fail. But it’s important in my pedagogy to give
students the opportunity to try something, to fail.” It’s that sincere respect that defines McGee
against his colleagues.
It’s that respect that
speaks to a student’s right to cheat. And
while cheating may circumvent the fixtures of the learning process—fear and
pain—it nonetheless presents an opportunity for McGee to lead students in the
direction of self-education. An opportunity to suggest that the next step may in fact be
failure, but a failure that establishes the possibility of lasting reward. And where Mr. Saneson
doled out punishments in the shape of detentions and tirades, McGee draws his
students closer, caring for them and not castigating them.
Me, I’m simple. So were the teachers that taught me, Saneson included. I
still consider my education a good one.
After all, we’ve asked ourselves since the inception of our democracy,
what should the purpose of education be?
What sort of citizen should we seek to create? And by and large, we’ve produced a democracy,
an American community, whose successes are numerous. But the very fact that we can count
them—whether in the form of commerce figures, production rates, or millionaire
twenty-somethings—is the proof some tout as education
gone awry.
America’s public schools, somewhere in the last century,
blurred the distinction between Emerson’s educated citizens and the industry
worker. Schools were themselves turned
to factories, an argument I’m only reiterating, and education’s success rate
became intricately tied to the number of productive individuals it spit out
along the assembly line of diploma and degree.
Gone the days of discourse and philosophy, welcome the
days of supply and demand.
* * *
But education isn’t just sums and letters. Not anymore.
Not for Tim McGee. Transcend and include. Move on, take the best of what was and
discard the rest. New thinking and new
teaching will have to introduce new learning as this democracy moves forward
into a new century. Students
more sophisticated than ever require it, as do parents, administrators, and
communities increasingly aware of the emerging alternatives. The pedagogy of my Mr. Saneson,
outdated certainly though not yet replaced, faces pressures from within and
without.
According to a 1999 study,
the National Center
for Education Statistics estimated the number of homeschooled
students somewhere in the neighborhood of 850,000. I’ve read recently that there may in fact be
as many as 2 million students currently homeschooled
in America. In addition, there are nearly 2,200 charter
schools operating in 32 states and serving nearly 500,000 students. That same NCES study also “suggests that
although homeschooling in the United
States may have primarily been a trend
within a homogeneous subgroup of white, middle-class, Christian families,
growth in homeschooling may be reaching a broader
range of American families and values.”
Parents choosing to homeschool their children
are doing so for a number of reasons: moral and religious as well as a
continued dissatisfaction with the programs and efforts of America’s
public schools. Guaranteed (or granted),
their children will not be the next generation sifting bottle tops or pumping
gas. And they will, as a rule, be more
prepared for significant questions of moral, ethical, and social concern.
* * *
Sitting at a café in San Francisco
a short while ago, considering the things McGee has been saying to his Wyoming
students for nearly 15 years, it struck me that the gist of his message was
hanging right in front of me. Tacked to
the wall around the café’s payphone, flyer upon flyer—yellow and red, some
white, some big and some small—all shout a consistent theme. “How you live your daily life defines your
Spirituality,” one says. Another, “bringing Peace to our homes, schools, and communities.” Zen masters, yoga instructors, gurus. Lectures, courses,
seminars. The public is invited to commune with the spirit in everyday reality.
It was this new Western—old
Eastern—wisdom that Tony Schwartz sought when he went looking around America
in the late eighties and early nineties.
I wonder if he may have missed Tim McGee. Listening to McGee, I know he hasn’t missed
Tony Schwartz or the thinkers, leaders, mystics, and teachers that he came
across during his spiritual pilgrimage.
What McGee’s got to say, though cloaked in the cardboard covers of
Tennyson, Eliot, and Dickens, is a message of integration, inclusiveness, and
peace. His is a life offered over and
again as new students come in and out of his classroom. What gets me is the literal nature of the
offering.
I think about this, and I’m gripped again by the
significance of that little O, the
story of cycles, birth and death and rebirth.
One of the men Schwartz didn’t miss on his quest was Ken Wilber, who after
his many years of exploration and explanation of consciousness—and
cultural—evolution posits that development in all its forms is governed by a
number of tenets. Among those tenets,
according to Wilber, is that “evolution is a process of transcend and include,
transcend and include.” Each successive
state of consciousness, morality, and culture—each successive state of all
systems whether governed by mind, body, or spirit—must incorporate the
blessings of the previous stage while presenting a new level to the depths that
define the system. To explain it simply,
and to paraphrase Wilber, organisms contain cells which contain molecules which
contain atoms. Wholes contain parts but
not vice versa. Put another way,
“letters to words to sentences to paragraphs.
The whole of one level becomes a part of the whole of the next.” And as Tennyson put it, “I am a part of all
that I have met.”
Understanding this, to some extent, I see now the
significance of Whitman’s words hanging inside McGee’s classroom: He most honors my style who
learns under it to destroy the teacher. At
some point, I couldn’t wait to be a teacher, to move on and stare back at the Sanesons among us and articulate the new age of education
and discovery. And who reading this
hasn’t thought what a wonderful parent they would make, building on the simple
goodness of their own forebears and discarding the distasteful business of that rock music is too loud and you’re going to pierce what? We’re critical, judgmental, hierarchical. What we
see and what we learn today has traditionally been what we’d unlearn tomorrow
by besting, transcending, or simply proving wrong. Records are made to be broken, so goes the
cliché. When I ask McGee about this he
beams. “Think about how often Aristotle
differed from Plato, his teacher,” he says with obvious satisfaction.
But do we want our teachers, our thinkers, our scientific or
biologic or spiritual principles offering themselves up to the altar of
self-sacrifice? Haven’t we been happy
with them supplying and supporting the answers to A plus B? Are we looking for
martyrs as we prepare the new world for the new age? Wouldn’t a little resistance be nice? We climb
mountains after all, because it’s more difficult than going down them. Because at the summit we are not ourselves,
we are something more, something higher.
We’re at something that was once out of reach. At what point do we brand ourselves defiant
for what we know and understand, and at what point do we open up to the
possibility that we still miss the mark, still beg the issue, still lack the
answer? I didn’t need to be reminded by
my teachers that my beginning would be their end. Spite had already told me so.
After all, I want to believe
that some of what I think and some of what I feel is
pure and original. I want to believe
that something inside me is beautiful, elemental and essential. That some of what I hold true, others will
hold true. I’m comfortable being a work
in progress. I’m not comfortable thinking
that I won’t be completed. I’m afraid of
the things I’ll learn about myself. I’m
afraid of the things I’ll learn about others.
I’m afraid because knowing a new truth, and disproving an old one, is going to hurt.
When I express this to McGee, he smiles.
His grin provides a frustrating comfort and his eyes suggest the irony
of the situation.
“By and large I’ve always been misunderstood,” says McGee,
sitting again inside his classroom, the morning sun dropping bricks of light on
the linoleum floor. “People
who didn’t know me, if they didn’t know what was going on, certainly distrusted
what was going on. I think it’s
difficult for them to recognize that what happens in here is something
important, that something more important than Shakespeare is happening.”
* * *
Jackson
Hole, Wyoming is typical of the
new paradise, the brave new world of naturalism, eco-feminism, and postmodern
Zen delight. Wyoming’s
answer to Aspen, a utopia built on
the brick of the plural dollar, where wealth has sought out the natural
environment in anticipation of an open-spaces
spirituality and an increasingly trendy epiphany. Where else but surrounded by the Beauty of the Tetons,
sacked comfortably in the Good of
your $6 million log cabin, can you expect to discover the Truth of this new millennium?
Jackson Hole is a place where tycoon parents can
seek to instill a new world view, a new spiritually-economic order, in the
minds of their Land Rover driving teens.
In Jackson’s
schools I am not reminded of Mr. Saneson. The gloss on the space and furniture, the
technology draped from the commons and the lack of linoleum tell me I’m in a
place where energy and creativity are channeled to excellence. I think this is the point—marketing for
public education. If excellence isn’t
the end result, I’ve been well duped. I
half expect to see students filing two-by-two, decked in Patagonia
uniforms and spouting Latin conjugations as they entertain their Ivy League
recruiters.
I am relieved to some extent
when I find myself packed into a room with eleven “at risk” 6th
graders and McGee. The relief however,
is a painful reminder of a more painful reality: education is about rough
spots, not gloss and glitter. And as is
unfortunately typical in today’s public education environment, the rough spots
have been reduced to oft-diagnosed learning disorders. And those students then find themselves
packaged and parsed and left to the discretion of programs with names like
“Focus on Success” and “The Future is Now.” It’s a frustrating irony: the expectation
that teachers and administrators would be most excited by students who think
outside the box is quickly usurped by the reality that the quality herd is one well-managed. Black sheep aren’t pretty and they do nothing
for the wheels and cogs in the machinery of contemporary education.
No, these eleven students
aren’t Jackson’s cherished image of
the Good. And more than just their dress
suggests their parents aren’t choosing between Land Rover’s forest green and
midnight blue for the sweet sixteen birthday party. Another painful reality: poverty doesn’t
access a level playing field, especially education’s. And while riches don’t mean smarts, I risk
little in suggesting they give your kid one hell of an advantage.
McGee isn’t a miracle worker. Even before I’d asked the question and before
we’d sat down with this group, he’d said as much. What can one teacher hope to do in 30 minutes
with any group of kids he’s never seen?
Regardless, this is why I’m here.
McGee is pure energy, pure concern, pure
respect. Earlier in the morning he’d
sucked in the whole of Jackson’s
eighth grade in somewhere over an hour.
Whether those eighth graders or any of these sixth graders will walk
away from today’s experiences with a lasting understanding of their individual
greatness is a question that can’t be answered.
But I believe the stories that faces tell, and some of those faces spoke
of understanding, courage, and new vigor.
And some of these faces shine with the sense that this man with this
blond hair, sharp chin, soft eyes and squeaking voice is talking to them as
gods and angels.
Back inside my motel room I cannot shake the images of this
morning. I also cannot shed the
knowledge that whatever words I may choose and whatever way I may tell this
story, there is a fundamental failure that will govern its completion. I can only tell of Tim McGee in a
two-dimensional way. While I can gather
the gist of his effort and the marrow of his message, I cannot capture the
complexities and subtleties that define him, that make him the teacher he is,
that make him the person we all need. I
cannot spell the image of a man who speaks perfectly to the chaos of
spirituality and learning, and regardless garners little respect among
colleagues. After all, he makes their
jobs more difficult.
The evening air that has swallowed Jackson
is crisp, the sky steel gray. The Tetons are peppered with snow, their rock edges straining
heavenward. The smell of pine and wood
smoke lingers and there are few sounds.
Driving to the public library McGee is also quiet. He seems drained. After working with the middle school in the
morning, it was Jackson’s few homeschooled students and its Christian
Academy in the afternoon. Tonight, parents and
teachers and tomorrow, the high school.
All of his lectures have been more or less extemporaneous; all of them
delivered with consistent energy, no beats skipped and no minced words.
I want to ask him if he gets discouraged, if he ever
questions the sincerity of his words, his actions, his
energy. I myself am discouraged and
tired. Does he know I can’t draw the
complete picture and present the perfect image?
I can write down what he says but I cannot write the passion and
inflection that defines his delivery and conveys his overwhelming compassion.
A dozen or so parents—maybe a teacher among them—have
gathered in one of the library’s classrooms.
Most are women and most are well dressed. I watch their faces during the lecture, watch
the women smile and nod in affirmation, watch the men
leaned back into their chairs with stone faces that tell maybe of
disappointment, maybe of frustration, maybe of their children that don’t listen
or don’t try or don’t care.
“What’s the bloody point of doing years and years and years
of preparatory work,” McGee says, pacing before the empty seats in the first
row, “if at the moment—the death of your
child, the death of a parent, the inconvenience of things not working out the
way one expects them to—you can’t maintain spiritual equipoise. What’s the bloody point of the spiritual
practice? Spiritual disciplines are only
of value if they actually work in spiritually painful moments.”
“How is this going to get my kid into Harvard?” one face
says.
And then it hits me, he’s talking to me. Like he’s been talking to me since we met,
since I first heard him lecture, since I first saw him stare into the eyes of a
student and communicate the courage and energy that he’s made it a goal to
give. And now the faces in the crowd say
it too. “He’s talking to me.” So much more important than where that guy’s
kid goes to college, or what I would write, or what we all would do, is who we
would be. Much more important than what
grades our kids and our students collect and where on the totem they stand, is
who they are and how they think and for what they care.
“Everything I do in a classroom is who I am,” he says
later. “There’s a huge correlation
between what I try to do in a classroom, and what I try to share with my own
kids. That in the end, your ultimate
goal is to leave the world a better place than you found it. And the great challenge, I think, is to
discover in your youth, ways you think you might be able to do that. I want to present to students a model of the
honest, contemplative life, and see where it goes, see how it’s played out.”
I understand.
* * *
I am alone now, the stretches of Nevada
below me and Jackson Hole behind. At 35,000 feet the comfort of time and space
become abstract. We cross time zones and
borders and are set down with an ease that belies the journey. In two hours I will have traversed the
emptiness between Wyoming and California
and some short time after that my home and my life will themselves belie the
ease of a journey. One in which the
knowledge of who I am found itself vaulted by the understanding of who I must
be. A journey still underway
in which the fear of knowing one truth is tantamount to the pain of learning
another.
I long for something simple.
I long to sit inside my apartment, be swallowed in music and light and
guarded from the change that marks each minute’s passage. I want to forget what I’ve learned in the past
few weeks. Strangely, I want to talk to
Mr. Saneson. I
want him to explain that learning is a one-time thing, you either plug in or
you don’t. You have only one
chance. And strangely, I don’t think he
will. I think even Mr. Saneson would acknowledge that learning is a gift, a rock
you can’t break, a river you can’t cross, a depth with no end. And so now I am anxious. Anxious about learning and failing, stepping
back when the way is forward. I am
nervous and scared. Like that pimply kid
I once was. Like that student and
teacher I became. Like the writer I’m
trying to be.
Like most of my friends who are writers and artists, I save
rejection letters. Originally
a reminder—regard each success with relative satisfaction, knowing full
well the weight of the failures before it—they made it possible to plot a
course from where I am to where I was.
Only now do I realize they point painfully in the direction of where I will
be. And this too is frightening. Our parts continue to make the whole.
San Francisco Bay
is in sight. Over its blue-green and
silted waters we send bridges, barges and ferries. We move the earth. Alcatraz, quiet in the
Bay’s waters, is also a reminder of where we have been. We travel there to tour its passageways and
cellblocks. We remark that we are
masters of time not just in aircraft or automobile—moving ourselves beyond
scope in a whir of sick efficiency—but tamers of the hour by taking time from
those who’ve not used it justly. The
irony, I think, is rich. Time eventually
wins out. Alcatraz
reminds us of that also. I think a lot
of things now that I’ve listened to McGee.
I think that even as we talked about time and fate, effort and energy
and the effects of understanding, we talked as much about the simple education
of one writer coming to grips with his insecurities, his doubts and
frustrations, and his fear of “what is past, or passing, or to come.”
©2003 Adam Sopko