A character in a TV series that I was gorging on said to another person that he always believed that teaching was what you did when you could do nothing else. The man was speaking to a woman who had piqued his interest and the statement he made to her resonated with me. There was a time in my life when I was eager to teach, and I wanted to walk through a classroom of grade-schoolers.
With support and encouragement from my bride, I quit a company that I had served for 10 years and sat on my front lawn for a short period. I was not a graduate of a college or even of the art school I attended after high school, and I decided to go to Indiana University Southeast. I enrolled in a division of the school that admitted adult students without high school transcripts. Once I completed the required entry courses, I signed up for every course that involved art and English. After a couple of semesters, a counselor in the University division — the old people get in division — told me that I must declare a major, and suggested English. I promptly declared English as my major. I reveled in the study of English literature, in creative writing. Every book that I bought to satisfy my course requirements in English then, I still have on my bookshelves today. (Every book on math is gone.) At one point, Dr. Richard Brengle, one of my English professors, asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told him that I wanted to teach English, but I was uncertain of my qualifications to do so. He said something to me that foreshadowed a statement in a book that I am reading, now.
In his book, The Suspended Sentence: A Guide For Writers, Roscoe C. Born wrote of an incident that happened with him. When he was a university freshman, one of his instructors praised his work and told him, “It is enough to be able to use the language correctly; it does not matter that you cannot recite the rules and principles of grammar. They are like training wheels, to be discarded when they have done their job.” Which is essentially what Dr. Brengle told me. And I wanted to teach.
I did teach, but not English, or grammar, or literature. I taught young people at Shawnee Park in Louisville to draw, and beginning drawing to adult students attending night school at Thomas Carr Howe high school, and fashion illustration to students at Herron High School; I wrote and taught a photography lesson for high school journalism students in St. Louis, Missouri. I volunteered in the classrooms of my two good friends, both of whom were grade-school teachers, where my innate patience was put to a test that I passed. Of course, I had previously volunteered in my first bride’s classes too; she majored in Pre-Primary Education, and many of her classroom charts and graphics were crafted by her artist husband.
The proverb that states “Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach,” is an insult to the dedicated teachers who inculcated in me and others, a passion for the language and a desire to seek information about our world, to sate our curiosity, and to write about what we’ve found. I doubt that many of those who teach, do so because they can do nothing else. Teachers have a passion for their craft, a dedication toward the students they guide toward the portals of knowledge.
They teach because they want to, and they can.
cjon3acd@att.net