A jocular portrait of a schoolmaster

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Our Word of the Week is teach, and that’s got me to thinking about the figure of the schoolteacher in our popular imagination — and in my own experience.

One of the sins of my boyhood, I am half embarrassed to admit, was to draw pictures of the teacher I hated the most, whom I won’t name, as “Gidget” from those silly beach movies, or as Billy Jean King playing tennis, or as Dumbo the flying elephant, putting her face in while drawing the rest according to the form. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it. I really shouldn’t have passed them along to one of the girls, to make her laugh. That, by the way, is one of the reasons why God made boys: to make girls laugh. In any case, this teacher and I locked horns for two years. She was sour and embittered, the poor old lady; hardly ever smiled, and when she did, it was like tinfoil. She once refused to accept an art project from me because, as she said, “Your grapes are too large.” My usually unflappable father got steamed up over that. She tried a little to push “poetry” on us, but flimsy stuff, like Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” which she intoned quite solemnly. I don’t wish to say anything derogatory about Mr. Kilmer, a devout and intelligent man who died a hero’s death in the second Battle of the Marne in 1918. But “Trees”? Not for this boy, anyhow. I guess we’ve all had some teacher whom we couldn’t learn anything from, and all teachers, as I know now from my own experience, will get students whom they simply can’t reach. I’m sorry for the trouble I caused her. She did say publicly, when I was applying for admission to three diocesan high schools, that I was “not scholarship material,” and another of the teachers made a wager with our 8th grade class, to give everybody a month free of homework for every scholarship I got. Of course I proceeded to get scholarships at all three — free tuition, in fact, and one of the schools, the one I chose, had no scholarships at all till I applied there. Oh well.

I did have a really good British literature teacher in high school, who knew her subject and who loved it for what it was, and not for anything political. Miss Manley had fun with it and the fun was contagious. I still remember one of the first poems we read in that class, the 16th century Scots-English ballad that begins with a mother asking her son, “Why dois your brand sae drap wi’ bluid, Edward, Edward?” Miss Manley relished it and did her best at a Scotch accent. I must say that my mother never said anything like that to me. That year we touched on all the great poets in England, “from Beowulf to the Beatles,” as she said, and though I now see she was pushing things a bit with the Beatles, still, with her I read Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and so many others for the first time — Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I immediately loved, and Tennyson, Browning, Keats, and Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” It meant a lot to me, because my plan was to be a math professor to earn a living, and write poetry to fulfill what I thought God put me here on earth to do.

But there’s yet another side to the teacher, maybe hard for us to remember, because we’re all encouraged to take ourselves too seriously. It’s the schoolmaster as partly a figure of fun, a comic sort, sometimes because he really does have a sense of humor, but sometimes because he takes himself a bit too seriously, as I said, and so do the people around him. That used to happen, because the schoolmaster, second only to the minister, was the best-read person in the village, and because the kinds of knowledge he had were sometimes strange to the farmers and the weavers and the millers and the housewives, and because he was surrounded by children, who had to look up to him, to do what he told them to do, to be somewhat afraid of him, and often the boys — it would usually be the boys — might do things like impersonate him when he wasn’t around to overhear.

It’s that figure that Oliver Goldsmith, in his famous and wistful poem “The Deserted Village,” portrays for us in the selection I’ve given below. Goldsmith was one of the most amiable of English authors; I’m a great admirer of his gentle and sensitive novel, The Vicar of Wakefield. Dr. Goldsmith — he was a physician — was a frequent companion to his friend Samuel Johnson, who could often overwhelm the good fellow with his bluff and formidable opinions. I admire Johnson immensely, as a man of letters, a critic, a conversationalist, a thinker, and a Christian. But sometimes it’s nice to have somebody like Goldsmith around. I hope you’ll think so too.

Wilhelm Schuetze, The Schoolmaster (circa 1870)

Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way,
With blossomed furze unprofitably gay,
There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school;
A man severe he was, and stern to view,
I knew him well, and every truant knew;
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day's disasters in his morning face;
Full well they laughed, with counterfeited glee,
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he:
Full well the busy whisper circling round,
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned;
Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault;
The village all declared how much he knew;
'Twas certain he could write, and cypher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And ev'n the story ran that he could gauge.
In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For even though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound,
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.
But past is all his fame. The very spot
Where many a time he triumphed, is forgot.
Near yonder thorn, that lifts its head on high,
Where once the sign-post caught the passing eye,
Low lies that house where nut-brown draughts inspired,
Where grey-beard mirth and smiling toil retired,
Where village statesmen talked with looks profound,
And news much older than their ale went round.

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