- Ruined LORD OF THE FLIES for me
- Almost ruined TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for me
- Insisted the classroom window be kept open all year... including in January... in Wisconsin... knowing full well I wasn't allowed to wear my coat to class
- Told my parents at conferences that I wasn't trying that hard (with consequences)
- Picked on everyone in the class, but one day really ripped into a friend of mine for using a word I had used in an earlier assignment, making me want to fold up into my desk and disappear
- Introduced New Criticism to us in the worst possible way, by making it look idiotic instead of meaningful
- Forced us to write 2-word rhyming papers which is a stupid assignment for the 8th grade
- Forced us to write 1-sentence papers, see above
- Told my parents at later conferences that I was really starting to shape up thanks to all he taught me, which was nothing
- Spent 5-10 minutes at the top of class playing with a basketball instead of teaching...
- Ruined Fleetwood Mac for me for about 9 years, which is either a small crime or a large crime, depending on how you view that band
- At the end of the year, made us write evaluations of him including grades...
- ...and told us they would be anonymous, but collected them in alphabetical order. (Ever wary of a trap, I gave him a B+ but now I would give him a D-.)
And yet, there is one thing he taught us that has always stuck with me, that I try to remember in my own writing and tell my students (paraphrased). In my memory he told us this on the first day and I wrote it in my notebook, underlining each word separately -- one of the only notes I would take in his class all year. Here is the teaching: Writers make conscious choices. It doesn't matter how caught up they get while writing or how "naturally" one scene needs to flow toward another, the writer is always in control, for better or worse (and sometimes it's definitely worse). When Homer wrote "Sing to me of the man, Muse," he decided THE ODYSSEY was going to start there and not with "When Odysseus walked in the front door after 20 years the first thing he saw was his son, but he couldn't tell it was him" or "Once upon a time, when men were men" or "Odysseus had 99 problems, but his wife wasn't one."
When I teach writing now and my students throw up their hands and say "That's the end!" I goad them: What happened next? Where did it go after that? How did the character feel? How did others react? Sometimes it's as little as taking a story that travels from A to B, and nudging it in the direction of C, but that is always within their power.
I'm not going to say it was worth it, but I'm grateful for that piece.
