Woodworking, Prep School

After a while, I began to feel that studying great art and accomplishment isn’t enough. Writing a thesis about art didn’t seem to be as fulfilling as trying to make the art. I had the special background with Karl together with the exceptionally academic nature of Reed, and then I stumbled onto William Morris, and things began to coalesce. One day I went to Lloyd Reynolds, the great calligrapher and teacher at Reed and showed him pictures of my wood work. I asked him what he thought I should do. He said, “You have a teacher who helped you make this? I think you ought to leave Reed immediately and go to him.” I finished out the year, my sophomore year, but after that meeting I was on my way. I wrote a zillion letters to European craft schools and universities where I could study woodwork, not realizing at that time that further work with Karl was a possibility, and eventually I was accepted at two—Carl Malmsten’s school in Stockholm and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. I was actually on my way there when I stopped in Pottstown to see Karl and stayed ten years. In the spring Alumni Bulletin of Hill School for 1972, I began an article about Karl in this way— . . . Born in a tiny self-sufficient village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, Karl Pacanovsky . . . was apprenticed in woodworking at eleven and a half years and took his first job at fourteen; as a journeyman he traveled through much of central Europe. Perhaps most influential were the years he spent building the monumental carved Gothic altars which were the expression of religious faith in his region. . . . Pacanovsky came to the United States in 1944. In twenty-eight years at the school he built a powerful foundation for the philosophy which we embody today. When he retired I merely took up where he left off. His influence still lives in this room. And he’s alive, too. I see him every week or two.

Soldiering, Army

When our truckload of recruits stopped in the small parking lot just outside the headquarters building of the Detached Enlisted Men’s List at Fort Eustis, Virginia, during World War II, I saw Sheffield nonchalantly resting his elbow on the laid-down tailgate of another army truck. To me he looked an exotic, swarthy skin, dimpled chin, and long sideburns, back in the days when most Regular Army sergeants wore their hair butch style. In his gray-green fatigues, he was a mustachioed Spanish don. I was frightened. Not my kind. For the last two weeks of my new life I had been sensing that I was square, and he was obviously all rounded and loose. We had to jump down from the truck. Calculating the distance to the ground, I wondered if with backpack and heavy duffle bag I would be able to land gracefully. I made it without stumbling, but the jolt to my spine unnerved me further. Sheffield didn’t line us up and call us to attention as I expected, but simply said, “O.K., you guys, follow me to the barracks.” He took us to the first building in the row and said, “I’ll be back in an hour to show you how to make your bunks. In the meantime, draw your blankets and sheets at the supply room.” In those first minutes at a permanent post, every act and word struck me in the face as the beginning of a series of actions that might end with my death in battle. At the time, I had no idea that Sheffield understood that most of us were feeling as awkward as we ever had in our lives. Not until months later did I realize that without clock or written schedule, Sheffield was timing our lives so we would learn at a pace we could handle. He had absented himself so we would have time to examine our digs, use the latrine, stretch out on our mattresses, and renew our courage. He was not a proper non-commissioned officer trying to break our spirit so that we would thoughtlessly obey all commands, including the one to advance under fire.

Teaching Teachers, Graduate School

I’ve been interested in story for a long time. I’m thinking basically of stories about the writers themselves. Telling them is a means of learning, a digestive kind of learning which is so often ignored in schools. It seems to me to be the field of operation of most of the arts. So I want my students to move toward an art-like selection of the elements of their personal experience. The more sharply the form resolves the content, so to speak, the more sharply is it a digestive process. I try to interest students in writing both autobiographical and fictional stories and to find their way between the two. When I was teaching children I discovered that story writing was central to them. They all loved stories at an early age and they liked to write them when they got over the hump, the difficulty, of shaping letters and words in writing. They get over that hump better, I find, by writing stories than by reading them. I think that’s most applicable at a very young age, but it still worked when I was teaching eleven-year-olds. Barbara Hardy—who’s the head of the English Department at Birkbeck College at the University of London—came down to talk to our teachers once at the London Association for the Teaching of English. She said that telling stories is not a way an artist has of manipulating an audience, but something that is transferred from life to art. She says that narrative is a primary act of mind. Her article, with those words as title, was printed in Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She wrote: . . . We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future. . . .

Writing, Elementary School

I was born on October 28, 1942, in Washington, B.C., where we were living because my father was in the service. I don’t know exactly what he was doing there. We lived in Washington only six months. We moved a lot, New York, Virginia, Southern California, Nebraska—six months here, six months there. I remember Father studied at Cornell to become an entomologist, so Mother did secretarial work there. Dad was the first in his family to go to college. His father died when he was a teenager. A lot of pride revolved around his Ph.D. from Cornell University both before and after he got it. He finished school when I was in the first grade. I felt his pride in me when I gained academic and leadership recognition in college. I was not expected to do well in college. It was pleasing to surprise everyone, but most of all, my father. By the time I was in eighth grade I had been in eight schools. I remember being new all the time. I made a very poor adjustment at first up in New York. But for three years we lived in a tiny town in Virginia called Holland, where I went to second, third, and fourth grade. I was very shy. I remember the teachers. On the first day there a girl brought me an ice cream bar, and across the classroom sat an Indian boy. We eyed each other a lot. I felt an identity with him because I had been mistaken for an Indian myself. I even made a close friend, Elizabeth Ann Felton—I don’t remember whether she spelled Ann with or without an “e”—I think she became a minister. I remember going to her farm and loving her family. They seemed so stable. In Virginia I wrote a sentimental story. It was the first time a teacher paid attention to me. She told me she wanted me to read it at the PTA meeting. I was very shy, but I did it. As I began reading the paper aloud I got caught up in it and read it well.

Physics, High School

I don’t know. I guess I’ve always thought students learned science best in the lab. I try to start from the laboratory and go to the classroom, whenever possible. Let them do some observing, get a functional background to base their theories on. Then take it back to the classroom. That seems to work best for me. We have fifty-five-minute classes that meet five days a week, and my classroom and laboratory are in adjoining rooms, so I can take a group from class to lab or from lab to class. I can structure my teaching time to fit the lesson needs. I don’t think there was any one thing that made me believe in the laboratory approach. It was just the way I perceived physics. You explain the natural universe while you’re looking at it. The laboratory is a good place to see what’s going on. In many science courses the kids are supposed to read what to do in the lab manual, do it, and then be graded on the answer. I just talked to a man who in a geology class at a college in Ohio was handed a card with eight rock samples glued to it and was expected to identify them later in a test. He and the rest of the students never looked at the rocks in that area of Ohio in their natural setting and were never asked to think about the geology of the region they had been raised in. This fellow said that he had grown up on the Mississippi River in Illinois, and he had never known much about the place and power of that great river valley except what he had learned from a film called “The River” by Pare Lorentz that was shown in his American history course. In my course the kids walk in on the first day and some are interested and some couldn’t care less. I structure the course around two texts, the PSSC, which was produced by the Physical Science Study Committee for the National Science Foundation course back in 1960, and the texts produced for Project Physics developed by the Harvard Study Committee.

Writing, High School

While riding down the beach one day, my friend and I ran across some trails which led back into the dunes. That same night we went down the trails in a truck. Back in the dunes near the surf was a hill about 35 or 40 feet high. We drove up the trail and parked the truck. While getting out we noticed that the roar of the ocean was very loud and very clear. We went back to the truck and got a flashlight and started walking back towards the sound of the surf. My friend was carrying the flashlight and was about 10 or 12 feet to my left. As the light shone over the top of the hill, the other side seemed to disappear as if it were cut straight off. But before the thought crossed my mind, I fell—about 25 feet straight off the side of a dune! After making my landing I looked, and there, about a foot in front of me, lay the great Atlantic.—Richard Quidley Another testament to the water came in the form of a story by Terri Midgett. Its matter-of-fact voice reveals his closeness to the practice of rescuing, which has dominated the history of his family for generations. It was in the winter of ‘76. The Sound had had a layer of ice on it for at least a week. Now it was slowly beginning to melt. I went to the edge of the creek. As I walked on the ice my boots seemed to want to slip out from under me. I slowed down just enough to where I thought I wouldn’t fall, and about, that time, BAM! I’d slipped, falling hard on the ice, its wetness cold to my face. I stood up, my face numbed from the cold. Looking ahead, I saw three figures waving at me. It looked as though they needed help. I ran toward them, falling several times before reaching them. One of the boys had fallen through the ice. He was wet and cold and wanted to lie down, but I knew if he did, it would only be a matter of minutes before he’d die.

Mathematics and Computers, Private School

At the Park School the projects we do sometimes look a lot like science, and sometimes they don’t look so much like science, but just fun things to do. For example, kids in sixth grade are always writing secret things to one another. That’s a big deal, you may remember. I asked my students to study codes by finding out the frequencies of letters in the alphabet as they are used in English literature. We went to the library and each person got out a book that looked typical to him or her. And in pairs the kids began to count letters. They’d just open up the page and start in. They kept track of how many a’s, b’s, and c’s, and so on. Fine. I didn’t say how many they had to find. At the end of twenty minutes that collection of kids had counted up thousands and thousands of letters. From that data, using calculators, of course, they could figure out what fraction or percentage of the total each letter took up. E’s occurred 21 percent of the time and a’s 15 percent of the time, or whatever. They found that some letters were used much more frequently than others. Based on that, I gave them a coded message where all the a’s were transcribed into another letter, maybe n. I didn’t tell them what the mistermed letters were. I just gave them this coded message. So they counted up the letters in the coded message and found out that 21 or 22 percent of the time the letter q occurred, and so they said, “Oh I’ll bet that’s an e! Let’s put an e for q.” And that was the start. They began to filter out the letters that made sense. It was a treat for them to unlock the code. It was a simpleminded one, but it had its uses. From the teacher’s point of view it was a way to study percent, but from the child’s view it was using percent to unlock some codes.

Aerospace Engineering, University

Actually, the project got started before I got involved. The history is something like this—after it began the Space Shuttle program, NASA began to sell payload space for various flights. One experimenter might spend a million dollars on a flight. NASA felt they wouldn’t sell all the space for major experiments and so decided to offer the leftover space to individuals, to universities, to people in industries who might want to try to do something useful in space but didn’t have that kind of money. So they came up with the Getaway Special Program. We found we could spend $5,000 and get two-and-a-half cubic feet of space and 100 pounds, or $10,000 and get five cubic feet and 200 pounds. The Aerospace Engineering Department chose the cheaper and agreed to pay the money out of department funds. Later, the Pullman Company gave us that sum for a second Getaway Special payload. That’s only part of the cost, of course. The expenses of designing and making the apparatus are additional. I was one of the original group that participated in the first consideration of the project in 1977, but wasn’t the teacher of the class. Professor Leslie Jones taught a course based on our upper-air research using rockets and balloons, which became the Getaway Special Project in 1979. At that time, unbeknownst to the rest of us, he had become ill with leukemia, and he needed the help of Professor Harm Buning in order to help him finish the semester. Soon after that Leslie Jones died. In 1981, I took over the course in the winter semester. I’m working out of a tradition established by Professor Buning, but I think I’ve gone a little bit further. One of the first things I did was to go to a symposium on Getaway Special programs at the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. The Academy is very much interested in having students build some of these things. In presentations the students talked about what they were doing, which was essentially what we’re doing now in our course.

Social Studies, High School

I began teaching at McClymonds High School in Oakland, California, in 1968. McClymonds is the only regular high school in west Oakland, historically one of the poorest areas in all of Oakland. Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and China lived in the area before blacks moved in during World War II. During my fifteen years there I’ve taught about ten whites, ten Asians, and ten Latinos. The rest have all been blacks, and I’m white. We’ve never had any racial disturbances at Mack. Even during the worst days of the late sixties and early seventies, the students were peaceful. The school’s ethnic homogeneity and relative small size, 750 to 1,000 students, have kept things relatively placid. According to district records, about 70 percent of the students’ families are on some sort of welfare. In 1979 one of the English teachers at McClymonds came back in the fall with high praise for the Bay Area Writing Project. She never described what went on, but would always coo and say that BAWP was “marvelous.” That year I attended a workshop conducted by Mary K. Healy, one of the associate directors of BAWP for the California Council for the Social Studies. Her presentation was indeed marvelous, and I signed up for the BAWP summer session at Berkeley that year. I’ve been a BAWPer ever since. Later the entire social science department at Mack participated. I regard this as a sign of the department’s recognition of the need to teach more writing. Our school administration vigorously supports our efforts to introduce more writing into our courses. When I began teaching at Mack I had high hopes that all my students would become scholars entering four-year institutions so that they could become leaders in the struggle for black liberation. Then I found that some of my students didn't know where the Pacific Ocean was in relation to Oakland. One boy in a college prep class in U.S. history answered a question on the causes of the Civil War by writing, “Slavery it bad. I don't like it. It cause the war.” This was his answer on an hour-long test.

Literature, College

I always thought that students do best when they’re responding to the best possible material. I used to try “socially relevant” literature, and they got all messed up in confusions of social identity and in defining what was relevant for them. I figured they could read Euripides and Shakespeare because those writers took up universal experiences— life and death, the relationships between parents and children, love, and the war between the sexes.the sexes. That comment still didn’t explain to me how he could gain the sympathy of people so unlike him and bring them to reading and understanding such difficult works as Greek and Elizabethan tragedies. I asked him to attempt to explain this apparent miracle. I think I could relate to people to whom school seemed a foreign place because I had had so much difficulty there myself. As a student I was always late, and confused. I barely made a C average in high school and college, and later I flunked out of graduate school. My father was a mailman who loved to read ancient history—the classic Greeks and Egyptians. I grew up liking science. I was going to beat the Russians to the moon. I spent a year in engineering school and got a summer job in a radio-manufacturing plant. The people there showed me you didn’t have to put on professional airs to be a good person. Then I spent two years studying physics before finishing a degree in literature. I taught science and math in junior high school and eventually finished course work in English for a doctorate. But when I came to writing a dissertation on the texts of Shakespeare’s King Lear, I found I had a block on writing. At first I’d sit down at my typewriter alone at 9 A.M., and at 9:20 I’d be sweating, too nervous to go on any further. My wife quit a job, went back to school so she had more hours to be at home with me. After a month or so, I could write for two hours. Then later I could write through a twelve-hour day.