They stride past, eyes hard, those girls, unseeing;
They looked for limits, and I gave them none.
The lines above I wrote years ago, upon reflecting on the sight of two former students of mine, ‘tough chicks’ dressed to kill, and heavily made up, in search, perhaps, of prey, who had both avoided eye contact with me as they passed in a school corridor the following year. The couplet was a mea culpa for my apparent inability to ‘connect’ with them the previous year. They were needy students beneath the bravado, but their need was for a firm hand rather than an open one, for life skills more than for writing fluency, let alone literary analysis. Reluctant to diminish their ‘self-esteem,’ to employ the now-discredited fetish of the time, I hesitated to employ the ‘tough love’ necessary, and rendered them a disservice. I had more success the next semester with a feisty girl from a military family who wanted to be a mortician. I still have the little ceramic bear she gave me at semester’s end, with its inscription “Thanks for helping me to do my best.”
Teachers must try to ‘connect’ with their students. They must direct and inspire, prescribe and evaluate, inform and correct, but to do this effectively, they must also listen, empathize, and reflect, putting themselves imaginatively in the student’s shoes. Being human, we empathize most with those most like ourselves. The most effective addiction counselors are frequently former addicts. My greatest successes were invariably with polite, studious, university-bound teenagers from families where reading had been encouraged from an early age, like mine, and who valued language and literature for its own sake, as I did. I had a soft spot for nerdy, bookish loners, as I had been one myself.
At eighteen years of age, many of them went on to university as I had done. It was there that I came to realize that most of the instructors in my undergraduate years, as well as those, lamentably, in the more rarified reaches of graduate school, could ‘connect’ in the hoped-for way only rarely. To some extent, this was due to circumstance: their classes were huge; the vast North American campus is not conducive to the cut and thrust of civilized debate, or to the comforting intimacy I had mistakenly or otherwise associated with the Oxbridge tutorials I had read about that I fondly imagined I would encounter at the modern suburban university I attended. In addition, unlike most my age then, I still lived at home, and did not develop, as they did, patterns of living and thinking radically different from those that saw me through high school, until later in life.
