Two Teachers

Catherine Madsen

(First published in Spirituality, Mythopoesis & Learning, ed. Peter Willis et al. [Mt. Gravatt, Australia: Post Pressed, 2009])

I have a generally jaundiced view of pedagogy; my best education has come from unassigned reading and profound private relationships. But two teachers in particular influenced what I look for in those, and in their honor I offer this.

Marianne Boko was my sixth-grade teacher in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1962-63. She was married to the high school band director; I think I remember hearing that in the ’50s she had been a bush pilot. Perhaps she was thirty or so, which seemed a great age to me at ten. She dressed simply, in tailored shirts and straight khaki skirts below the knee (a bit longer than 1962 fashion, and better looking, although she was manifestly not much interested in her looks). Her mouse-brown hair was bobbed and waved, and she had pale-blue eyes.

She knew what a sixth-grader was: we transformed the room into ancient Rome and a Halloween funhouse, grew mold in Petri dishes for the science fair, and sometimes made a lot of noise. She worked us hard; she taught us to outline, take fast dictation, report in a carrying voice on current events, and ingest a vast vocabulary list derived from Ruskin’s King of the Golden River. She introduced us to Roget’s Thesaurus. She had a plan for us to divide up The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to memorize, though I don’t remember any particular section as mine, so the plan might not have come off. I do remember never being bored.

In Detroit, where I had come from, there were two million people and a general sense of redundancy; in Fairbanks there were thirty thousand and a sense of excitement. In Detroit I had stood out only in spelling and math bees, and once when I had refused to be kissed by the gym teacher on my birthday; in Fairbanks I became a Girl Scout and a hall monitor because Mrs. Boko’s eyes were on me. One of her watchwords was ‘initiative’. She would use an obscure word, and pause, and wait for someone to get up and cross the room to the big dictionary. One winter afternoon she read us Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire,” which was riveting because frostbite was a genuine risk for us and death by freezing not entirely out of the question. She told us about the atomic bomb: enough to allow us to put two and two together, to understand that crouching under our desks in an air raid drill would be a futile form of protection.

Last year, on a whim, I googled her; I found out that she and her husband were early supporters and long-time staffers of a Baptist summer camp near Kodiak. She had never given a hint of her religion in class. Certainly in retrospect it was Christian, since we recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning along with the Pledge of Allegiance and a military anthem, but the brand of Christianity never showed. Those were the days when the Pledge of Allegiance was universal in American schools, and Christian prayers common and uncontested. The military anthems were unusual, but Alaska prickled with military presence during the Cold War years, and the anthems were rousing and fun. I argued with her once about the Pledge of Allegiance, and she seriously and patiently tried to get me to articulate my objection to it—to no avail; I had had very little religious education and did not have the concept of idolatry, so could get no farther than the pejorative ‘flaky,’ which I had picked up from my father’s conversation on other subjects. I suspect I wanted something that required more initiative than chiming in uncomprehendingly, clause by disjunct clause, “I pledge allegiance: to the flag: of the United States of America. And to the republic: for which it stands: one nation: under God: indivisible: with liberty and justice for all.” For children of ten who were not from military families, the link between initiative and patriotism was obscure.

It crossed my mind years later that she might have been trying to find out if my parents were Reds, but I don’t think so. I think she was completely disinterested, questioning me in order to make me think. And I never felt, with her, that thinking outranked feeling; in fact thinking required that feeling be awakened. At Christmas she played us a record of the Hallelujah Chorus, and I found it immensely stirring; I did not take it as a statement of religion, nor do I think she meant it as one in a limited sense. If she took “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” as a Christian proclamation and I took it as an expression in language of the severity of rock and snow and stars, we both understood it as a statement of fact, and I suspect she was content with that. I spent my years in Fairbanks running from evangelical classmates who wanted to save my soul; Mrs. Boko was not cast in that mold.

These days many Christian teachers in America are bitter about the supposed proscription in the public schools on teaching ‘values’. It strikes me that if you have values you will find a way of conveying them. Mrs. Boko would lean on her lectern, discoursing on some serious topic, one foot resting on the pedestal, and stare into space with her pale blue farseeing eyes, and say, “I know. I’ve been there.” That was her soul; she trusted children of ten and eleven with it, because they had souls too. I don’t remember what she talked about at those times; what I remember is the quiet surrounding her, the hush of our absolute attention. It was my first taste of honor from an adult other than my parents, and I am sensible of it still.

DeWard Johnson arrived at my high school, now back in Detroit, in my junior year. He was perhaps twenty-six, and had gone to high school with Motown star Smokey Robinson (whom he called, bemusedly, “William”). I had met Mr. Johnson, by his first name, two months before, in a summer-school choir for which he played the piano; he was all virtuosity and dash, and had helped me work up a guitar accompaniment for the finale of our concert. At the last minute the concert was cancelled, because angry people had set the city on fire. It was July of 1967.

In September he was the high school’s new choir director. He succeeded an older lady of excruciatingly genteel tastes under whose tutelage we had squirmed. I have since understood, from her name and other evidence, that she was from an aristocratic black family that had painstakingly bred itself to pass for white; that gives me more sympathy for her, but the mincing repression of “The Lass with the Delicate Air” and the inanity of the high-school nostalgia ballad “Magic Moments” were a terrible waste of adolescent energy. Mr. Johnson was quite black, with an exuberant Afro haircut; he wore bright paisley shirts, bright plaid pants, and sometimes a string of beads. (During rehearsal one of the basses, who were always acting up, commented disparagingly on the beads; he tossed back, “Your beads don’t hang right.”) His musical tastes were electrifying. In his first semester he whipped out Buxtehude’s Das neugebohrne Kindelein, which we performed with harpsichord; next spring we did Lili Boulanger’s Psaume 24, with trumpets, and Bach’s Cantata 50. Nobody—not the parents, not the teachers—knew we could sing like that. We didn’t know we could sing like that.

He could play our middle-aged lady accompanist under the table, but he didn’t; he deferred to her, gave her the occasional hint, and kept his virtuosity for his Sunday job as a church organist. He was a high Anglican, given to crossing himself at moments of irony, but in the sense that a real musician’s real religion is music, he handed down its commandments. First among them was that rehearsal transgresses the bounds of decorum. Reverence might be integral to the mood of a piece, but in rehearsal all bets were off; he was the one who started calling Britten’s Te Deum the Tedium. The intensity of rehearsal, the necessity of reading a written score and doing it justice, brings out the silliness in people: laughter counterbalances the frustration of singing a piece over and over until you get it right, whereupon you go back and sing it over and over again to work on dynamics. We called him Mr. J., and would have died for him: not in a swooning pubescent crush of the kind I had once had on the drama teacher—we were working too hard for that—but in alert gratitude for being given real work.

He founded an after-school group of madrigal singers, which I joined; we danced the pavane in costume at the concerts (nobody else could have gotten teenage boys into Renaissance tights) and sang Belle qui tiens ma vie in terrible accents. One evening he took us—there were seven or eight in the group—to a suburban campus for a lecture on early music, and on the way back, in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Grosse Pointe, we had our finest hour. Grosse Pointe, immediately adjacent to the East Side, was then insistently white; racially mixed groups of young people went there only with trepidation. The restaurant was busy, but it took an inordinately long time even for a waitress to bring us water. When she did, one of the glasses slid on the table on its own condensation, and she said, “Oh my, there must be spooks in here.” Having been carefully brought up, I didn’t know that ‘spook’ was a racial insult—one can’t be completely certain the waitress knew it—but everyone black in the group knew it and took it as deliberate, and the temperature dropped. And continued to drop as we waited, and waited, for the waitress to come back and take our order. Eventually Mr. J. decided to show the crowded room what we were made of, blew a note on his pitch pipe, whispered “The Little White Hen,” and we burst into well-trained song. Having shown ourselves conversant with high culture, we were immediately waited on, and went back to the city exhilarated and vindicated.

And the link between all this and the question of spirituality and pedagogy? The Grosse Pointe experience at least illustrates that the resonant human voice breaks down social barriers, however temporarily; it gets at something more vital than deeply entrenched racial and class tensions. But more than that, there was the daily experience of rehearsals: music is cooperative, mutual. We were necessary to the work. Through our voices the will of the great composers was done at that time and place. It never had to be said; the rowdy bass section could go on being rowdy, we could sing religious music without any test of belief, we could create the hush of awe and the crash of glory with no violation of adolescent reticence. And we could go on to the successes and frustrations of our various racial and ethnic and class demographics with that experience behind us: whatever became of us later, we had brought sound into being then.

There were other teachers—not many—whom I appreciated, but none who so powerfully offered me a world worth belonging to. They knew the essential thing about the relationship between spirituality and teaching, which is not how to talk about it but how to create it. Too much self-consciousness about such a thing can make you earnest and interfering, whereupon you set off the students’ crap detectors and all is lost. In my second term of college I sat through the first session of a writing course with a maternal, soft-voiced woman who wanted us to trust her and write her our innermost thoughts; I switched to another section faster than you could say Esalen. Trust has to be earned: as a teacher you have to prove yourself strong enough to handle a student’s innermost thoughts, and you can’t care whether you get them. And if you are strong enough, you may never get them directly; you may be providing ways for them to emerge obliquely, without compromising the students’ dignity or promoting dependency. The spiritual is not just unconditional acceptance, though it is that; it also transmits the universe’s unconditional demand that we make something of ourselves that will be acceptable in its sight.

We can get there only sometimes, and we have to be good to each other in the meantime; we have to encourage and strengthen each other for the next try. Mrs. Boko and Mr. Johnson showed me how to do it: watch constantly for what you want to be worthy of, and accept no substitutes.