Teachers

For reasons that I honestly can’t seem to recall, this morning I found myself thinking of Bloomington, Indiana, the small town where I went to college, a place I haven’t been back to since graduating in 1995. Indiana University is big—no bigger than many of its Big Ten counterparts, but still really big for a kid who grew up in a town of 15,000 and could walk into the local grocery store and say, “Charge it to my dad’s account,” without having to tell them who her dad was, because they just knew.

I’ve since lived in places much bigger, but when I got to Bloomington, full of expectations for what my college years would be, it felt huge and fell short. There are myriad reasons for this. I don’t think I really knew, as a senior in high school, what I wanted in a college. And I went into it passively: I assumed it would teach me, but I didn’t realize I would have to work so hard to learn, and I hadn’t yet learned how to work hard.

I.U. is a good school, and Bloomington is a great town, but I had trouble finding my place in both. Again, myriad reasons. If I knew then what I know now, it would be different, and I might even love it there. But I didn’t, and I couldn’t, and so much of my time was spent counting down the years, months, weeks, and days until graduation.

So would I choose a different school if I had it to do over again? No. Because I met three teachers there who changed the way I look at the world.

One was Barry Kroll, whose Vietnam literature course (with texts like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) formed the basis for the political beliefs I hold today. We knew, throughout the semester, that Professor Kroll had served in Vietnam, and we all speculated things like, “Hey, do you think he ever killed anyone?” (What else would a bunch of 18-year-olds wonder about?) But when he stood up on the last day of class and put on a green military jacket, we cried, and I have tears in my eyes just thinking of it today. I didn’t think much about war before I took that class, and I haven’t seen war the same way since.

Another was James Madison, who taught American history, and who made it come alive for me in ways it never had before. I still have a clipping in my file cabinet of a letter he wrote to the editor of the Indiana Daily Student, in response to an article about rewriting history, in which he said, in part, “The past is up for grabs—always. It’s not static, it’s not dead, it’s not even past, as one pretty smart American once said. Rather than one and only one way of seeing it, we are free to see it as we see, struggling through reading, thinking, observing, and talking to understand in our own way. That we all will differ in what we see is what causes such confusion and what scares those who perhaps haven’t yet looked hard enough at the past.” Madison was it, you know?

The third was Scott Russell Sanders, who taught an English class called “A Sense of Place,” and who once, on a beautiful afternoon walked out of the classroom and asked us to join him, as he led us on a walk through Dunn’s Woods, silent all the way. Some of my classmates were whispering to each other, asking what the point was, whether this would be on a test, where we were going. I was first in line behind Sanders, and I was willing to follow him wherever he led me. And where he led me, where he led all of us, was to that sense of place that he cared so deeply about. I don’t think I fully grasped it when I was 18. But I think of him often, and I’ve come, over the years, to understand. (If you’re interested in reading an article by Sanders about Bloomington, and his devotion to and care for that place, click here.)

Can you imagine anyone who makes a greater impact on the world than a teacher?