Pedagogy

I have one, and really only one, piece of evidence that suggests that man may be corrigible. When I was little and fat and bumming rides from my teachers, I once shanghaied one of those teachers into driving me into the Wal(star)Mart out on Niagara Falls Boulevard past the 290 so that I could buy the Wall, in exchange for store credit that I got from two unopened Britney Spears cds that my dad had won at a silent auction. My evidence of corrigibility? It's that although on the day and for some weeks (months?) after, I viewed this as a potentially momentous day -- "THE DAY I HAD MY EYES OPENED BY THE WALL" -- I now have come around to think that the Wall is a very very stupid record. Sonically, sure, it's fine, but it has some of the most ridiculous pseudo-profound lyrics on record. I once sat around and thought about how "Mother" was a song that REALLY GOT ME. Yikes.

Anyway, I bring this up because I wanted to write a post about bad and almost-bad teachers in the world of literature and I was going to title this post a quote from "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" but all of the quotes from it were just totally stupid. So now, boring title, interest anecdote and message of hope about how there is hope for all of us. And I bring up teachers not just because I will have some again soon, but also because I am reading the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a book about a woman who is rather a bad teacher, which makes for quite a good book. I can't imagine a really really good book about someone who is a really really putatively good teacher, because it would a) probably be inspirational and b) be by someone the teacher had inspired and c) thus be uninteresting to really everyone who wasn't there. Good teachers are like weird dreams: you have to be there for either adjective to really be important. So here are my favorite bad teachers, in no particular order, and presented as generic types:

The Wackford Squeers: Wackford Squeers, master of Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickelby, is in practice really the worst kind of teacher possible. He's an idiot (his lessons are hilariously inaccurate); he is a cheat, both ripping people off and, when that seems like too much work, enabling other terrible people acting in loco parentis to rip their wards off; and, like so many teachers in fiction, he hates children. In fact, like his most apt pupil, the Trunchbull from Matilda, he hates children more than anyone in the book in which he lives. The best you can say about him is that he tries to do right by his family; but even then, he did name his son Wackford, though he must know full well, from experience, that being named Wackford sucks. He (and the Trunchbull) fall most obviously on the "bad person" end of the bad teacher spectrum.

The Deasy: Lord, do I hate Deasy, from the Nestor chapter of Ulysses. Like Squeers, he fails to meet what one would think are the basic qualifications for being a teacher (know something; don't hate children); and, worse, he's a blustery anti-semite. His methods are not as outlandish and cartoony as Squeers's, so he slides a little ahead on the list. But. What an ass. The two big coffee-mug quotes that Stephen gives us in the Telemachiad part of Ulysses -- "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and "God is a shout in the street" -- seem to me prescient about half the time and stupid the other half. When I feel the former, I blame Deasy for not appreciating his assistant, and when I feel the latter, I blame Deasy for not telling him to shut up. The guy's just a dick.

The Jean Brodie: The other people I have on this spot are Henry Burlingame, from the Sot-Weed Factor, and Hannah Schneider, from Special Topics in Calamity Physics. These people are the renegade teachers, the anti-authority, stick-it-to-the-man ones, and the reason that they -- of the hundreds of such fictional teachers -- made the list, is that they are the three I can think of whose books suggest that they are actually kind of silly. Miss Jean Brodie, who will not shut up about her prime, really introduces her charges into the fine points of objectivist philosophy, and also really likes Mussolini. She is not unlikeable; she is just a bad teacher. No matter how dumb you think forcing ten-year-old girls to get through their primers is, it is probably not a better idea to tell them all about the Great Loves of Your Life on school time instead. Likewise, Hannah Schneider seems a little too enamored with the idea of herself as The Cool Teacher at Private School (she has on her walls Italian posters for American movies, sheesh), and Burlingame manages to endorse every possible position in his tutelage of Ebenezer Cooke, so at least about half of them must be bad. These teachers get closer to the "bad teacher" (or bad influence, as opposed to bad human) end of the bad teacher spectrum.

The Pnin: And here's Pnin, that terrible teacher of Russian, whom I really really like, and in whose care I would really really not want to entrust my children's education in any language, Russian or otherwise. Pnin stalks around fighting insane fights about library books and being secretly heartbroken over and over again, at the hands of his horrible narrator, and for this I find him totally lovable; but still, you can't get away from the fact that his course appears to consist of bad puns and unexplained opinions about Russian writers.