My Heart and Hers Are the Same

I’ve written it before and I’ll write it again;  Evelyn is the rock of our family.  She is the steady one, the strong, remarkable woman who remembers what to do and when.  It is not the professional historian in the family who serves as the keeper of the family history, but Evelyn, who guards it carefully and zealously.  In our family, Evelyn is the keeper of Christmas and Easter traditions.  She and her three sisters—Rebecca and Marilyn and June—and her extended family maintain a close, loving relationship.

Wesley and Cammie Jo love and adore her, and so do I.  My claim to fame is that I know what she is thinking, even while she is thinking it;  she does not have to utter a word.

 My favorite Avett Brothers songs are “I and Love and You” and even though Evelyn and I were married in December, “January Wedding.”  In “January Wedding,” one of the brother’s sing:

“She’s talkin’ to me with her voice

Down so low I barely hear her

But I know what she’s sayin’

I understand because my heart and hers are the same.”

After we married in 1982, I often quoted the Robert Browning lines to Evelyn as I reveled in young love that I knew would mature and deepen through the passing years:  “Grow old along me!  The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.  Our times are in his hand, who saith, `A whole I planned, youth shows but half;  Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!”

I still believe the truth in those Browning lines, but while I do trust God, I have to admit that I am also sometimes afraid.  One thing that I was not afraid about was the recent hullabaloo about the world ending on May 21.

When a church member asked a wise minister whether he was a premillenialist or amillenialialist or a postmillenialist, the minister assured his inquisitor that he had read the book of Revelation and that he was a panmillenialist.  He said that the Lord would make sure that it would all pan out in the end.

As I have revealed to you before when I am fearful or anxious about other things, I turn  to my faith and to Evelyn and then to Wendell Berry.  Berry has surely written about his relationship with Tanya in his poem “They Sit Together on the Porch,” but he has also written unawares about my relationship with Evelyn in a few years.  We are not far away, after all, from an empty nest.

“They sit together on the porch, the dark

Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.

Their supper done with, they have washed and dried

The dishes—only two places now, two glasses,

Two knives, two forks, two spoons—small work for two.

She sits with her hands folded in her lap,

At rest.  He smokes his pipe.  They do not speak,

And when they speak at last it is to say

What each one knows the other knows.  They have

One mind between them, now, that finally

For all its knowing will not exactly know

Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding

Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.”

“One mind between them, now.”  “My heart and hers are the same.”

When it comes to a love so fine and deep, both Wendell Berry and the Avett Brothers have written a great truth.

Watching the Road Rush By

It seems that as I write this “Home and Away” column week by week I spend more time writing about home than away.

Perhaps that is how it should be, because I love home so much.  I love to travel, to be sure, and in a few weeks I will be going on a sure enough adventure for an American historian, a trip to Beijing and Xian, China with several other Murray State faculty and staff members.  This will be the trip of a lifetime for me;  I will visit places that I have only read about or taught about or seen on television.

 Of course, with email and texting and international cell phone packages, it is much easier now to keep in touch with loved ones back home, and to help my family who are unable to go with me this time to experience the things that I am experiencing, at least vicariously.

I have just returned from another trip to Lexington, two within a week—one, my very first meeting of the Kentucky Oral History Commission and another, an editorial board meeting of the University Press of Kentucky.  These trips to Lexington are not unfamiliar to me, and I am never surprised by the distance.  One of the charms of Murray, Kentucky is that it is centrally located—four hours from everywhere (except, of course, Nashville).  Usually, of course, I drive myself.

Rare are the times that I have been able to sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.  During such a trip, I read for a while, but then enjoy the luxury of peering out the window at a pleasant western Kentucky landscape.

In the passenger seat, one is immediately made aware of wider vistas.  You look down on the scene, not exactly a bird’s eye view, but maybe that of a Kentucky thoroughbred.

In the late spring, the redbuds and dogwoods would be all but spent, but everything would still be fresh and green.  Looking away to a tree-lined horizon, the trees floated by with varying speeds, depending on the distance from myself.  I found it interesting that the nearer my gaze, the faster things seemed to pass by.

And then, looking down directly to the road beneath my window, the pace quickened still, the gray asphalt and white road lines rushing by, weaving in and out at a frantic, dizzying pace.

I had not watched the road rush by like this since childhood, when from a backseat window in our white Rambler station wagon, we journeyed from Texas to Oregon and then to Tennessee and eventually back to our Kentucky home.

Unencumbered in those days by seatbelts, I hugged the right rear door, and peeked past the jackets and suits hanging from a hook above the car window.  Even though the road rushed by beneath my window, back in those days, as a ten year old boy, it seemed like I had all the time in the world.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote, I had “all my road before me.”  Now, a generation later, my grown-up life has taken on a frantic and dizzying pace, much like the road rushing by beneath the car window.

While the road stretches out before Wesley and Cammie Jo, and for hundreds of recent Murray State University graduates, it seems that for Evelyn and me, at least, great chunks of road have already passed by.

On that long ago cross country trip, only when I lifted my gaze from the rushing road so near myself to the far horizon, only when my vision took in the big picture, the great wide scene, only then did the trees and fields slow down to a manageable pace.  Some of the trees almost appeared to move forward.

Despite the distance, only when I lifted my gaze could I really see.  And today, only when I lift my gaze away from myself, only then can I really see, and only then can I really live.

Graduates Leave Remarkable Thumbprints

Saturday is graduation day at Murray State University, the May commencement that marks both endings and beginnings.

Graduate Will Pitman, for example, a Murray native, is headed for Medical School at the University of Kentucky.  Will Cartwright, from Madisonville, is bound for Lexington as well, to the University of Kentucky School of Law, but first, he will spend his summer in Washington, D. C. with two internships, one in the United States Senate and the other in the United States House of Representatives.

After a proper celebration this weekend, other young men and women Murray State graduates will end their undergraduate careers to commence careers or graduate schools all over the United States and indeed the world.

Our high school daughter, Cammie Jo, just experienced another sort of celebration, her junior/senior prom.

This is, after all, a season for celebration, and in celebratory times such as these, deep insight sometimes is revealed.  Abraham Heschel, a Jewish rabbi, remarked that “true insight is a moment of perceiving a situation before it freezes into similarity with something else.”

The writer of one of my Sunday school lessons paraphrased the rabbi’s statement.  “Celebration,” he wrote, “is a moment of perceiving a situation before it freezes into similarity with every other experience in our past.”

Celebrations help break up the hum-drum tick-tock of our lives.  We set these times aside to remember the past, to revel in the present, and to anticipate what the future might hold.  In a sense, a celebration serves as a culmination of all that has gone before.  The prom represents the social event of the junior or senior year.

A graduation or commencement is the academic culmination of four years of homework, research papers, and examinations.

Dr. Harry Spalding, a Kentucky family doctor and at one time the mayor of Bardstown, was also a poet.

His collection of poetry, “Tales of a Kentucky Town,” includes a poem about the last days of the old Bardstown Preparatory School for Boys.

One of my former students, Jen McPherson, now a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, quoted from Spalding’s “The Last Prep Man” in her research report on Nelson County in my History of Kentucky class.  The poem gives a note of finality at the last commencement of that venerable institution:

“And now he was the very last

Of all that he’d then known;

The faces, the names, the glow

In friend’s eyes, the teachers past

The span of time, the truth they’d shown,

And the voices that echo, echo, and echo.”

Certainly a sense of finality as well as celebration pervades the pomp and circumstance of both proms and graduations.

And yet, there is at the same time an understanding that there is so much more to experience and to learn.  “You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands,” wrote John Updike.  “Take it up reverently,” he advised, “for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

So, to the graduates of Murray State University, take up the rest of your lives reverently.

You will encounter millions of other thumbprints as you proceed, but you will also leave your own mark, a thumbprint like no other.

Remembering My Mother’s Hands

I remember my mother, Cammie Mann Bolin, everyday, but especially as Mother’s Day approaches my memories intensify.

My mother, born in 1921 at the beginning of the “Roaring Twenties,” grew to adulthood in the years of the Great Depression, raised with my father two boys during the Cold War, lost and mourned a husband who died on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, and then lived out her days, first alone in the house where she had lived with my father, and then at Murray’s Glendale Place, two blocks from our home, before spending time at a nursing home and in the hospital before dying at the age of 85 on August 19, 2006.

My mother worked as a schoolteacher in Atlanta, Georgia;  Martin, Tennessee;  and Fulton and Dixon, Kentucky.  She also worked as an assistant pharmacist at Bolin’s Drugstore, as a homemaker, and then as a substitute teacher after my brother and I had grown up to honorable manhood (we hope), and married and had families of our own.

My mother worried constantly—a trait that I inherited—but through her worries she ministered consistently to those around her.

Her sweet smile could make your day.  She sent cards penned in her elegant hand, remembered others in her daily prayers, which more accurately would be described as her hourly prayers, for she followed the Biblical injunction to pray without ceasing, and she made sourdough bread which she always gave away.

Back in Webster County, Mama Bo’s meals were legendary, especially Sunday dinners, which she began to prepare the previous night and early the next morning before Sunday School and church, and then completed after church, somehow before everyone else had changed into more comfortable clothes.

I remember those meals and remember the hands that made them.  I remember my mother’s smile, but I also remember her hands.  Her hands were beautiful to me, not in the usual sense of long, slender fingers, but, ironically, in the fact that her right hand was severely crippled.  Most folks thought that my mother suffered from debilitating arthritis, the way the fingers on her right hand were shaped, but she actually suffered a gruesome injury that went a long way in forging her determined character.

As a 14-year-old girl, helping her father in his meat shop in the middle of the Depression, my mother inadvertently caught her hand in a meat grinder.  The doctors in that rural 1930s outpost did what they could do, and she went through several operations, but in the meantime, not to get behind in her school work, she immediately learned to write with her left hand.

And then, after her right hand had healed as much as it would heal, she re-learned to write with her now crippled right hand.  She graduated from Martin High School as the valedictorian of her class.

The re-learning process took such patience and fortitude that is hard to imagine, but the result was that one of my mother’s distinguishing characteristics was her beautiful, flowing penmanship, a characteristic always commented on by those who received her thoughtful letters, notes, and cards.

And those notes received by my brother’s family and by mine on every imaginable occasion—birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions—in her rounded cursive handwriting, with the letters made just so, continue to bless us as we find them in desk drawers and in file cabinets today.

I remember my mother’s smile, but I also remember my mother’s beautiful hands, hands that nurtured me and loved me right up to the night that she died as I stood by her side holding her hand—her right hand—in mine.

A Writer in Search of an Audience

As a teacher and an aspiring writer I think a great deal about audience.

Who will heed the words that I say and write?  Who will participate in the discussions I plan for my classrooms at the university or my Sunday school class at church?  Who will read the words of my weekly “Home and Away” newspaper column?  Who will read the books that I hope to write?

Even now as I make my schemes—that’s the way my old professor friend and mentor and I would put it as we sat hunkered down over a steaming cup of coffee in a corner of a cafeteria, relaxed but exhausted after a day of teaching;  not talking;  not having conversation;  we sat “making our schemes”—for whom do I plan and scheme?

Who after all is my audience, that particular, unique group of individuals sitting expectantly before me on a Tuesday afternoon or on a Sunday morning, waiting to see what they will have to endure or how they will spend the time during the class, and then how they will spend their time outside of class to prepare for discussions, presentations, quizzes, and examinations.  Even now, I am trying to anticipate my audience for tomorrow’s History class.

Even now, I am thinking of the audience that is my cherished Sunday school class at my church.

Already I have read and studied several commentaries for the lesson from the first chapter of the Old Testament book of Joshua.

But now I picture in my mind’s eye each class member.  I pray for them.  And I anticipate the insights they will bring to the lesson.

Even now I am thinking about the audience gathered before me as I stand behind a podium in that church classroom, before a group of ladies and gentleman whom I love beyond measure.

And even now I am thinking of the audience for this newspaper column.  I have particular readers in mind as I write these weekly columns.  My audience includes readers such as Dr. W. J. and Martha Pitman who will sometimes call to comment on a column that they have read.

When I hang up the phone I always know more than when Evelyn handed the phone to me. And when Dr. Pitman calls—his conversation sometimes interspersed with questions and asides to Mrs. Pitman nearby—when the Pitmans call, I always feel more alive, more in tune with the important things of life:  faith, family, and friends.

I also learn more about my vocation, centered around teaching and learning, reading and writing.

So even now as I write these lines I am thinking about readers such as W. J. and Martha Pitman, who sometime this week will pick up the newspaper, sacrificing a few minutes to read some obscure and sometimes otiose column, written by a friend who loves them and their families beyond measure.

Even now I am thinking about my newspaper audience, those faithful readers taking the time to read the ramblings of a fellow Kentuckian whose values sometimes mirror their own—faith, family, and friends, teaching and learning, reading and writing.

I know one thing to be true.  At the university, in my Sunday school class at church, and in the readers of my “Home and Away” column, I have a great audience.

Now if I could only do them justice.

Remembering MSU ‘March Madness’ 2011

Now that April is here, perhaps it is safe to reminisce on the Madness of March some of us witnessed on our television screens (while others traveled to Newark or Tucson or Houston or wherever) to participate in the drama and spectacle of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

The fact that our Racers did not make the tournament after winning the OVC regular season championship certainly diminished the excitement around here, but two of my alma maters made the field.

The University of Kentucky, where I completed two graduate degrees and which I follow both as a fan and as a subject of academic interest overcame six SEC road losses in the regular season to win the SEC Tournament in Atlanta and then four games in the NCAA Tournament—against Princeton, West Virginia, number one seeded Ohio State, and then North Carolina—to make the Final Four before succumbing to the eventual champion Connecticut Huskies by 1 point (56-55).

Now, for Kentucky, the drama continues to unfold:  Who will stay?  Who will enter the NBA draft?  Players have until April 24, I think, to decide.  From what I’ve seen from high school all-star games, however, with Davis, Gilchrist, Wiltjer, and Teague—it sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?—the Wildcats will be loaded for another year.

My undergraduate alma mater, Belmont University, had the best season in the school’s history since ascending to NCAA Division I status.  When I played there in the mid-1970s, Belmont competed in the small college NAIA.

This year, Belmont went 19-1 in the NCAA’s Atlantic Sun Conference (losing only to our arch-rival Lipscomb University in the “Battle of the Boulevard”) and went 30-5 overall, winning the A-Sun Conference Tournament in Macon, Georgia, and then, as a 13th seed losing to 4th-seeded Wisconsin,72-58, in Tucson in the NCAA Tournament’s first round.

The game proved to be an inglorious end to a storybook season for the small Nashville school.  I say “small Nashville school,” but the Belmont University of today, with almost 6,000 students, is five times the size of the Belmont College from which I graduated in 1978.  Then, only 1,400 or so undergraduates scurried across that tiny gem of a campus, located not far from the downtown of the Music City, just at the end of Music Row.  Today, the institution’s storied Music Business program continues to thrive, but represents only one of many other top-notch undergraduate and graduate programs.

Now there is a new Pharmacy School and ground has been broken for a Belmont School of Law.  The university has expanded in both enrollment and real estate.

I flourished at Belmont in Nashville and at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.  In fact, I look back on those years with fondness and appreciation, and I cannot go back to either city without visiting the campuses, however changed they might be.

Despite the tournament losses to Connecticut for the Wildcats and to Wisconsin for the Bruins, the games of last month brought back a flood of memories of bygone days, when a small-town western Kentucky boy played basketball, not against Ohio State and North Carolina and Connecticut and Wisconsin, but against Lambuth and Bethel and Lipscomb and Tusculum and Fisk.

I miss those days, to be sure, but at least I can continue to live out the dream of college basketball, albeit vicariously now, by watching Murray State and Belmont and Kentucky.  But, oh, to be young again.

I will write more next week about my Belmont experience, and then in two weeks I will delve into my graduate school years in Lexington.

As for now, let me just say that I am proud of the institutions with which I am associated.  I love them all, whether they are located in Nashville, Lexington, or Murray.

Anguished English and Writing Bloopers

Kids say the darnedest things.  And, sometimes, students write the darnedest things.  An essay response is required on every examination that I give in my History classes at Murray State.

Students often produce well-reasoned, well-organized, and well-crafted essays within a fixed block of time, one hour and fifteen minutes for a Tuesday/Thursday class.  This is no small achievement.

From time to time, however, the pressure of the clock and a lack of preparation cause students to state ideas with less clarity.  Sometimes, faulty sentence structure, poor word choice, and fuzzy thinking (all problems for which I have been guilty) produce sentences that I wince at and savor all at once, sentences that I am quick to include in a growing “student blooper” file.

Bloopers are not limited to student essays, of course.  Sunday School provides a venue for children to utter their own interpretations of the Bible.  A recent email I received revealed a few “Bible Facts from Kids.”  One young Bible scholar assures us that “Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day but a ball of fire at night.”  Another stated confidently that “Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.”  Yet another offered one concept of Biblical marriage.  “Christians should have only one wife,” the youngster said, before quickly adding, “This is called monotony.”

Church bulletins sometimes reveal less than enduring truths.  One bulletin announced, “Thursday at 5:00 p. m. there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers’ Club.  All those wishing to become little mothers, please meet with the minister in his study.”  Another bulletin proclaimed, “This afternoon there will be a meeting in the south and north ends of the church.  Children will be baptized at both ends.”  In one announcement for a church charity function, it was revealed that “The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the church basement on Friday afternoon.”

My favorite bloopers come in the written offerings of History students.  I grade essays for style as well as content, and sometimes students resent such meddling.

On one of my course evaluations one student moaned (and I quote directly):  “This is a History class not an English class  I do not feel me English down fall should make me loose points.  Even English class was give more than 5 min. after answering 40 problems to write 3 pages with no gram. & spelling mistakes.” Oh well.

In an examination essay, one of my very own students stated that “the biggest gold rush in the 1880’s was the 1849 gold rush.”  My students are not the only culprits, however.  Richard Lederer, a teacher in Concord, New Hampshire, is the editor of “Anguished English,” a book in which he compiled some favorite bloopers from his students at St. Paul’s School.

One of Mr. Lederer’s students wrote that “Ancient Egypt was inhabited my mummies, and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.”  In a unit on ancient Greece, a student revealed that “Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice.  They killed him.  Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.  After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.”

In American History, one student elaborated on the early years of Abraham Lincoln.  “Lincoln’s mother died in infancy,” the student wrote, “and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands.”  My favorite blooper came from the pen of a student contemplating the achievement of Sir Francis Drake when the explorer circumnavigated the globe.  Perhaps the student was confused when he or she wrote, “Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a hundred foot clipper.”  Oh me.

Thoughts on Walking Into the Past

Two decades ago, we left Kentucky for an Arkansas sojourn, for me to teach in the History Department of a small liberal arts college.

We returned to the Bluegrass after four years away;  we loved the tiny Arkansas school, but we missed terribly the rolling hills of western Kentucky.  If anything, our exile in the pancake-flat, mosquito-ridden delta rice fields of northeastern Arkansas taught me the intimate connection between the past, present, and future, something that any History teacher should already know.

Students—students of History at least—should also know how to make these connections.  What is History?  Why is it important to study History?  How does one study History?  These are questions that I have been wrestling with for some time.  These are questions my students have discussed in our classes this semester.

When we left Kentucky those many years ago for “the land of opportunity,” “the Natural State,” as tourism brochures proclaimed, Ron Watson, a resident of Hopkins County and a very fine poet, himself a native Arkansan, gave to me a farewell poem that made the connections clear in language that a small town boy from a western Kentucky county seat town could understand.  The poet described a father and son experiencing together the eerie sensation of “walking into the past.”

The experience took place in an old general store, no sprawling Walmart mind you, but the sort of place where old gentlemen in overalls gathered in the late afternoon to play dominos around a coal stove:

“It’s Saturday        
and we stop at the Dalton Store            
before putting in on the river.

Oldtimers are holding down a bench that hasn’t changed in 20 years and somebody shot Homer Bailey’s dog          
for running deer is what we hear as the screen door squeaks open and slams shut           
and swallows us into the general store  that is always darker than outside.

A fading red Coke machine           
is defining nostalgia against a wall and kids we might have been are standing on a footrail     
at the counter.

We hope it is black licorice and Moon Pies but they could be buying anything.

We try not to hurry         
and for a moment begin to blend as easy as shade into the slow scene,
to soak up the almost forgotten something          
we once were.

Paid-up, the kids spill toward us in a stream that we divide. 
We turn to watch it reconnect down the dark aisle          
that points like a chute in the cool  dimness toward a door that opens like a tablet of light.”

I have tried to picture a father and his small son standing hand in hand in the middle of the store’s darkened aisle soaking in “the almost forgotten something we once were.”

Standing in the present, the father and son gaze into the darkened interior at “kids we might have been,” standing at a counter buying perhaps “black licorice and Moon Pies,” only to have the representative group from the past “spill toward us in a stream that we divide.”

And even as the past comes hurtling into and through the present, the familial pair “turn to watch it reconnect” into the future, “toward a door that opens like a tablet of light.”

These connections between the past, present, and future also link together an understanding of history and ourselves.   “As far as we’re concerned, there’s no such thing as a dead past,” Kentucky’s Historian Laureate Thomas D. Clark told an interviewer in 2001.  Dr. Clark, who died at 101, knew whereof he spoke.  “You’re part of the past,” he said.  “Everything you do, everything you touch in some way has an intimate association with the past. . . .Even human prejudices are age-old.”

Now, what can we—students, teachers, and newspaper columnists and readers—learn from that?

Teacher’s Journal: Best Guide in England

For the next two weeks, students will line up at my office door for advising conferences.  They seek out guidance, and for better or worse, their assigned college advisor is to be the guide.  It is that time of the semester when Murray State students can pre-register for classes for the Fall, 2011 semester.  Yes, we are already thinking of the Fall semester!  Before students are allowed to register, they must meet with an advisor to chart out their courses.  By last count, I had some twenty advisees.

It is always a daunting task to sit down with a student to chart out courses, to chart out a life.  Some students know from the first day they step foot on our campus what they wish to major in.  Others will change majors multiple times during their undergraduate careers.  This is a crucial time in a student’s life, a time of seeking out one’s life calling.  And here am I, trying to dish out advice to young, impressionable young people.  Here am I, someone who is so often in the dark, trying to help students see the light.

I suppose one of the most frightening things to discover in life is that one’s mentors are less than perfect, even flawed individuals.  Oh, the horror of finding out that a teacher or coach or minister is, after all, human.  We would like to think that those we have trusted to be our guides are everything that we have unreasonably built them up to be.  But then, when the years have diminished that aura of goodness or greatness, that patina of invincibility, we come to find out that even our most trusted guides have struggled with the vagaries and meanness of life just like everyone else.

At the end of his tour of England, and at the end of his book, In Search of England, H. V. Morton encountered near Kenilworth, just northwest of London, “on one of those hot sleepy midsummer afternoons, when the heat throws a haze low over the meadows,” the ruins of Kenilworth Castle.  Upon his approach to “this rambling, chocolate-red ruin” Morton “met an elderly man in a black coat who was saying goodbye to a crowd of American trippers.  He waved his stick in the air and stamped his feet on the ground, and instead of smiling at his vehemence, they appeared to treat him with considerable deference.”  Morton was to learn that the old man served as the official guide to the castle ruins, and that he deserved his reputation as “the best guide in England.”

The old man collected another group of tourists, some of whom, “having no proof as yet of his virtues, laughed behind his back as he waved his dramatic stick.”  Soon, though, it became clear that this tour would be one like no other, for “this old man,” according to Morton, had “soaked himself in Kenilworth.”  “He lives Kenilworth, he loves Kenilworth.”  At one point, Morton wrote, “from the mouth of this extraordinary guide flowed a magnificent oration.  He built up the tattered walls of Kenilworth for us, [and] he took us through the Middle Ages. . . .  There was not a sound now from his flock.”  He seemed to embody the ruins;  he seemed “to our astonished eyes,” Morton recalled, “to be the spirit of the place.”

According to Morton, “it had been a remarkable tour de force.  He left us rather bewildered, rather like children when the story had been told.”  For in one brief hour’s tour, the guide had taught the group “about the long pageant of history that is England, the evil and the good that have marched side by side down the centuries.”  “England!” he finally cried out to the tourists.  “You now stand in the heart of England.  Are you proud of her, of your share in her? . . . I know that I am.”  What a performance!  What a guide!

After the performance, Morton followed the guide back to the gate.  There he was, already waving his stick at the next group preparing to take the tour.  Morton complimented the elderly guide “on the dramatic genius of his address.”  “Ah,” the old man said as he peered out at Morton.  And it was only then that Morton saw that the guide was partially blind.  “I am glad that you feel like that.  I was an actor once . . . but”—and “here he pointed to his eyes”—“my career ended before it began!”  Morton then realized that “the best guide in England” was all but blind, and that it was his failing sight that allowed others to see so well.

Good Teaching Makes Students Hungry for Learning

How can teachers “get through” to students?  How did the influential teachers that taught me in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college get through to me?  What were their devices?  How did they practice the science or the art of teaching?  I discuss these things with my students who are preparing to teach history in high school.  Is teaching a science or an art?  And is it possible, after all, to teach someone how to teach?  We discuss these things.

Just last week I plucked from my bookshelves at home a worn volume, published in 1914.

Nothing but the cutting edge of research for me!  The pragmatic psychologist William James published a series of “talks” he had given in 1892 as public lectures at Harvard.  The author of the influential “The Varieties of Religious Experience” now turned his attention to the topic of teaching in “Talks to Teachers on Psychology:  And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals.”  James applied his understanding of psychology to the art of teaching.

James made it clear where he stood on the question of whether teaching is an art or a science.  “Psychology is a science,” he wrote, “and teaching is an art.”  Furthermore, he stated, “sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.”  Now, I realize I am out of my element here.  My colleagues in the Department of Psychology or over at the College of Education know and teach the literature on teaching and learning.  Still, William James makes a great deal of sense to me when he asserted that “the science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly.”

We teach certain scientific principles in our various disciplines.  For example, in the discipline of history we teach how to collect and analyze data from primary and secondary sources.

In history, we applaud the rigor of scientific analysis.  According to James, science can “help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly;  and to criticize ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.”

James continued, “A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress;  but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to this own genius.  One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently.”

I am not sure that my teachers were all geniuses, but I do know that they had a genius for opening up the world to me.  I am sure they learned how to do that not in a college class such as my Teaching History course.  I am sure, instead, that they learned the art of teaching on the fly, in the classroom and at home as they prepared for each new day.  Or as James put it, “the art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation.”

To know history, or any other discipline, to have a head knowledge of the subject matter is not enough.  The teachers who inspired me knew their history and literature and science and mathematics, to be sure, but they also knew something else.  They knew how to animate the subject.  Or as James put it, teachers “must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us.”

William James spoke from his own experience, but this has been my experience as a student as well.  “In teaching,” James said, “you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach . . . that every other object of attention is banished from his mind;  then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day;  and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.”

I do not remember much of the subject matter that my teachers taught me years ago (although I must have absorbed more than I think), but “to my dying day” I will remember how the women and men who taught me so well worked me up “into such a state of interest” that I was thirsty for more.  I am still trying to quench that thirst.

Spring Break A Mixed Affair For Teachers

I write these words with the prospect of an academic spring break ahead, and as you read this column, students, faculty, and administrators are absorbed in the middle of a week when the usual schedule of classes, office hours, committee meetings, and campus activities is in full force.

Next week, however, these campus activities will be temporarily suspended.

This is not to say that work will be cease, because spring break week often provides needed time and freedom for faculty members and administrators to play catch up, to concentrate on overdue projects or looming deadlines.

Many students, like professors, chairs, deans, vice presidents, and the president, spend spring break week deep in serious work.

Not all students head for the beaches in Florida.  Some students tend to take off early, stretching spring break week to a week-and-a-half or two.

I have been known to maliciously schedule a major examination the last class session just before spring break, to keep my History students on campus a while longer, but some professors postpone examinations and major projects until after the break, as I did this semester.

Imagine all those students at Daytona Beach, brushing sand from the pages of Biology and Calculus and even History textbooks, taking a few minutes from their ruminations every two hours or so to frolic in the surf!

Well . . . maybe not, but diligent students will nonetheless be greeted back on campus with exams, quizzes, and research paper deadlines.

Students in my History of Kentucky class have told me that they plan to conduct research on Kentucky county reports over the break.

There they are, whiling away the hours in museums, libraries, and archives.  Other students are spending spring break away from studies and parties, choosing instead to serve on campus ministries’ mission trips or other volunteering activities.

Still others have gone back home to spend time with families and old high school friends.

For me, spring break week is a mixed affair.  The University’s spring break does not coincide with Cammie Jo’s spring break at Murray High School, so our daughter will continue to hit the books at school with track practice following the school day.

Still, I always look forward to spring break with giddy delight, a week away from the usual routine of classes and committee work.  I have finally realized that my determination to schedule examinations the last class session before spring break will backfire on me, requiring furious grading during a week of supposed peace and tranquility.

Of course, I will pay for it during the last half of the term, but at least spring break will be “grading free.”

“There is no rest for the wicked,” said Russell Jacks in Jan Karon’s Mitford books.  “No rest for the wicked and the righteous don’t need none,” the old sexton would say.

Spring break certainly fails to alleviate all of the burdens of the teaching trade.  Anxieties still remain, and I peck away at my writing projects, long deferred during the hustle and bustle of the semester.

So I work away and try not to think about the rush to come.  After all, “no man ever sank under the burden of the day,” wrote George Macdonald.

“It is when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today, that the weight is more than a man can bear.”

Oh, there is one other problem keeping me from the successful completion of my burden of work.

One’s children can be brutally honest—can’t they?—especially with their parents.

I remarked to my son, rather innocently, that all week I had experienced trouble in preparing my Sunday school lesson.

I try to teach a vibrant, inspiring group of the faithful at my church.

Believe me;  I learn more from these saints each week than they learn from me.  I simply mentioned to Wesley that “the lesson had just not come together” this week.  (I think that’s the way I put it.)

Wesley shot back immediately, “Daddy, there is only one reason for that.”  “And what is that, Wesley?” I asked.  “March Madness!” he replied.

Concerning Scholarly and Creative Activity

Faculty at Murray State University are evaluated each year in three categories:  teaching;  service (in the department, college, university, and community);  and scholarly and creative activity.

Murray State is a teaching university, so teaching always comes first, but professors are also expected to carry a sometimes heavy service load.  And as much as we disparage the use of the dreaded phrase “publish or perish” we are also expected to be involved in scholarly and creative activity, before and after tenure.

In his book “The Pleasures of Academe:  A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education,” my colleague and friend, Professor James Axtell, recently retired from the Department of History of the College of William and Mary, has included a chapter titled “Twenty-five Reasons to Publish.”  Axtell calls for “habitual scholarship” and he argues against what he believes to be a false dichotomy between scholarship and teaching.

For Axtell, “genuine scholarship has a vital role to play in the intellectual life of all institutions of higher education, particularly in research and doctoral universities and in liberal arts colleges and comprehensive universities that have collectively decided to raise the quality of their overall performance.”

As a regional, comprehensive university, Murray State continues to strive to raise the quality of our overall performance.  According to Axtell, scholarly and creative activity must be “an academic habit to be cultivated” because “the process of scholarship is important to the continuing vitality and integrity” of the institution.

I do not have the time or space to discuss all of Axtell’s “Twenty-five Reasons to Publish,” but I can mention a few of the most compelling.  While the teacher’s “status is exclusively local,” the teacher/scholar’s “may be national or international.”  The publishing teacher is able to extend the walls of the classroom to a much wider audience.  Axtell even argues that published books and articles “like progeny of a human sort, are a lease, however small, on immortality.”  Books “are not only tombstones that the authors get to script and carve themselves before death, they often survive well beyond death and remaindering.”  “The nonpublishing professor,” Axtell writes, “takes his hard-won and extensive knowledge to the grave.”

Active teacher/scholars are also able to enrich their teaching within the walls of their classrooms.  University faculty should be “convincing exemplars of the life of learning.”  According to Axtell, students “need to see, through living example, that education is a continuing process.”

While many students will soon forget the details and facts presented in a class, “few will forget the passion with which their professors approached the subject day after day or the inspiration they gave them to think the subject important and worth pursuing.”  To profess, and that is what professors actually do, “is to maintain a continuous search for new knowledge and to teach others not only what one has learned but how to do the research itself.”

For Axtell, “one fact that is always lost in the fractious turf fights between teaching and research is that publication of scholarship in books, articles, and other media is a form of teaching in itself.”  “A well-conceived, well-written, well-distributed book,” Axtell argues, “reaches and therefore teaches far more students than the author’s evanescent lectures will reach in a lifetime.”

Furthermore, “habitual scholarship is the healthiest, most efficient, and most academically acceptable way to prevent the burnout that threatens” every faculty member.

“To avoid mid-career plateauing and late-career depression,” Axtell writes, “professors should have scholarly projects that hold their interest and renew their enthusiasm for their subjects and disciplines.”

For the teacher who learns to practice “habitual scholarship” throughout a career, retirement can bring added joy.  When some professors retire, Axtell concludes, “they often find themselves at loose ends without an audience, the applause and responsiveness of a class, or the daily routine of teaching, however much they may have complained of the `rat race’ during the school year.”  “Habitual scholars, by contrast, make easier transitions because they always have their reading, research, and writing, which, if arteriosclerosis doesn’t set in prematurely, should be as, or better than, the work they produced on the job.”

After all, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who lived to be 88, wrote more histories, “many of them superior to his earlier efforts,” after he retired from Harvard in 1955 than during the tenure of his long teaching career.

I know this column holds little solace for struggling faculty trying to find time to juggle heavy teaching, service, and research agendas, while at the same time having a fulfilling family and social life at home and in the community, but scholarly and creative activity is just part of what is means to be a university teacher.  As Pericles said, “to have acquired knowledge without the talent of imparting it is just as though one had never thought it.”

What To Do About Procrastination

Procrastination is the bane of my existence as a teacher.  I see it in my students every day, but as Terry Ellis, my former pastor, consistently quoted:

“There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us,

That it ill behooves any of us To find fault with the rest of us.”

And so it is with me, the worst procrastinator of the lot, not a positive example for my students, or for my son or daughter for that matter.  A few days more and then I will plow through those examinations, just waiting on my desk to be graded.  Another cup of coffee, and then I will be ready to answer those emails.  I will wait to prepare my discussion notes until after lunch.  There’s still plenty of time before the next class.  Surely, those thank you notes can wait.

I always seem to find something else to do, other than the job at hand.  Quite simply, I put things off.  Even as I write these words I have other writing projects languishing in file folders and scattered notes, one project still hanging over my head for a decade now.  I have neat stacks of projects waiting to be completed.  I carry these stacks, along with my laptop, home from my university office with the idea that I will work on them after supper, and then I lug them back to the office the next day undisturbed.  My various projects are well-traveled, if unfinished.

I write off this procrastination to an inner tendency toward perfectionism, but I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with that unknown poet when he or she wrote:

“If a task is once begun

Never leave it till it’s done.

Be the labor great or small,

Do it well or not at all.”

And so despairing that a job will not be done well, I simply put it off for another day, when I can do the thing right.

A big thing must wait until I can really do it justice.  Little things don’t matter anyway.  Big or little, it’s all the same;  surely, the thing can wait.  But then, in the way of things, the little things pile up into a big thing.  I remember reading as a child the Julia Fletcher poem, a rhyme that alerted me, even in my child’s mind, to the fact that little things, taken all together, amount to big things through the tick tock of time:

“Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

Thus the little minutes,

Humble though they be,

Make the mighty ages

Of eternity.”

In the whole scheme of things, it is after all a matter of priorities, I think.  What tasks simply cannot wait?  Must this thing be done immediately?  Well . . . I am in the middle of that engaging novel.  A few pages more;  then, I will hop to it.  In the meantime, a nap would be really nice too.