The most dramatic example I have yet seen of a teacher who failed to ‘connect’ with his students was an Englishman in Toronto’s Oakwood Collegiate who taught Grade Nine English history, a subject no longer on the curriculum. In a cut-glass upper-class accent and in an idiom which made no concession to his audience, he lectured to them from his notes from behind a lectern for the whole period, day after day. His students, my classmates, were in what was then called the ‘commercial’ stream (typing and woodworking being part of the course of study), and they sat listlessly still in serried rows before him, or dozed unnoticed at the back. There was no engagement with the class, never any discussion, and no questions were ever raised or answered. With that characteristic Canadian gift for stoical tolerance of the unbearable, they let what he said in at one ear and out at the other. The experience was an object lesson for me. I did not know then that this country had suffered far too many years of nannying by insufferable Liberal politicians like Mackenzie King, who communed with the spirit of his dead mother, and would later suffer from both Trudeaus, the arrogant one and his narcissistic son. I had then only recently arrived from England myself, and knew and loved the romance of English history. I cringed inwardly at the arid travesty that this make-believe history teacher had let it become. Perhaps it is some consolation that in today’s interactive classrooms he would not have got away with so insolent a degree of detachment.
I have been privileged to have known, or known of, several gifted English teachers who could ‘connect’ with me, and urge me on to greater application despite my own lack of self-confidence, among them Peter Athonas in England, Catherine Judge in South America, Patrick Daniel and Frank Tierney in Ottawa. The greatest example of them all I only knew by reputation, as alas, he never taught me: the scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis, Professor of English at Oxford and later at Cambridge, whose audience, in his books, his letters and his radio addresses, if not in his reportedly stimulating university tutorials, was the wider world beyond the ivory tower. A middle-aged bachelor, childless himself, he was even unpretentious enough to write self-deprecatory letters to eight-year-old fans of his Narnia books.
Teachers of English can never reach all of their students. Some will resist the kindest encouragement and well-meant overtures. Others are burdened with personal issues that schools cannot resolve. Many, even in university, are, perhaps mercifully, too young to have experienced first-hand the great traumas that are the subject of literature: loss and death, violence and mental cruelty, betrayal, reconciliation and redemption, the search for meaning and identity, the pangs of a troubled conscience, grace under pressure, as well, of course, as the love that binds, heals, and affirms. Nevertheless, the exercise of the imagination can make up for much of the life experience lacking at the time. Most students can be reached, inspired, even transformed by the sensitive teacher’s sincere desire to make what matters to her matter even more to them. That is a tall order. There are no shortcuts to that place, and every path there is different. But when the two solitudes of student and teacher reach that place of engagement together, the truth of E.M. Forster’s line in Howard’s End becomes gloriously apparent: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.’
