On Teachers
Note: This is the first of what I hope will be two entries about teaching. It may turn out to be more.
As this current crisis deepens, I’m finding it hard to focus on my teaching work. Instead, I’m thinking of the teachers I’ve had over the years. The first was my paternal grandmother, Elizabeth. She insisted that everyone in the household speak to me in full words, and actual English from the very beginning, and nobody has had a greater influence on my understanding of language or storytelling. Grandma used to tell me stories when she tucked me into bed in her grand old house in Central Ohio. She was a dynamo of energy, but she was elderly, and often, as she spun her tales, she’d begin to fall asleep. Her wig would slip back on her scalp, slowly revealing the steel-gray braids plaited close against her scalp, and her stories would drift into the fantastic. She told me how the Three Little Pigs sailed to the moon to escape the Big Bad Wolf and J. Edgar Hoover, or how Abraham Lincoln led the Hebrew slaves to Mars. I loved her stories when she was wide awake, but every time she started to drift off, I knew I was in for a treat. I’d even tell her she was falling asleep, and she’d deny it, as if the accusation offended her deeply.
My next great teacher was my older sister, Lisa Leandre. She’s eleven years my senior, and honestly one of the most gifted educators I’ve ever encountered. My parents taught me a lot, but something about the way Lisa teaches elevates the exchange of information into something like mysticism. I’ve had moments in my own career where I felt so keyed-in, and the students felt so ready that it was like unzipping their skulls and pouring the information into their brainpans. All my sessions with Lisa felt that way. There is something in the way she combines her voice, gesture, and phrasing, that just makes information stick. She taught me to read and write in what must have been a few weeks—and that’s not to my credit as a student. Anyone who has worked with Lisa in education will tell you the same thing—she’s just an excellent instructor.
Many of my Elementary teachers were excellent—especially Mrs. Ayeh and Mrs. Bradley—oh! And our Art Teacher, Tom Fox. I found out much later, after his death, that he was independently wealthy, and taught for the sheer joy of it. He was always our kindest teacher—to the point that, as a kid, I felt it impossible that he liked our art as much as he said he did. Having taught elementary classes, I know now that he told us the truth. I hope he rests easy.
The summer after 7th grade, my family moved to Paramaribo, Surinam, and I spent two years attending a Southern Baptist missionary school. I found adjusting to the new locale deeply difficult. In my mind, I imagined living in the tropics would be just like living in all the footage of Hawaii I’d seen in movies and on TV. Maybe I’d find a cursed tiki doll and endanger my family with its fell magic. It wasn’t like that at all. Surinam is more like Sub-Saharan Africa than it is like the South Pacific, but that was where I first encountered the fiction of Octavia Butler and Nancy Kress, issues and issues of Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction. I learned names like Gardner Dozois, Gregory Benford, Jerry Pournelle, C. L. Moore, and Samuel R. Delany. More on that later.
After Paramaribo, we moved to Tunis. My school in Surinam tried to use the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s correspondence courses for all high school classwork, and for a number of reasons, that didn’t work for me at all. I’d always been the youngest one in my grade, because my birthday was a bit late, and I’d started school at four years old. In Tunis, I had to do ninth grade over. I don’t regret it at all, since it gave me the opportunity to spend an extra year being taught by Liz Thornton. Liz was my English Teacher at The American Cooperative School of Tunis. There was just something about her that I liked right away. I liked the laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, I liked how sarcastic she was, and I liked the way she’d bite her wrist whenever our class drove her completely nuts. She also interacted with students as if we were actual human beings, rather than hormone-juiced homunculi somehow witched to horny life. Liz taught us about literature—and forced me to read and write about books like Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness while most of the class stuck to lighter fare. More than that, she taught us how to integrate ourselves into the fabric of a city not our own. My family shopped locally as well as at the Embassy Commissary, but Liz was always giving pointers about where to get the best tabouna, which harissa to buy, and which cafes to visit in the Kasbah. I had a pathological aversion to authority, and I often hated the very idea of school. Much of the time, in protest, I blew off classwork and homework, but I never acted that way with Liz. I always knew she had something to tell me that I wanted to know.
These aren’t my only great teachers. Nancy Gregory was a huge influence at that same school in Tunis, Nellie Bridge, Daryl Morgan, and Mark Levensky at Evergreen were all extraordinarily helpful to me, and then, after I dropped out, every one of my teachers at Clarion West: Nancy Kress, Kathleen Goonan, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Elizabeth Hand, China Mieville, and the Great One Himself, Chip Delany. Delany was our last instructor at Clarion in 2003. He came in for week 6, when we were all dead on our feet. We’d all been writing more and faster than we ever had in our lives, lived and workshopped together for more than a month, and endured upsets to our personal lives and mental health, and Delany came straight in, with his tattooed arms, his long beard, and his high cheerful voice, and woke us up again. He taught us how important blocking is to sex scenes, how training yourself to be a stupid reader can help manage the intricacies of clarity, and how to commit fully to transgressive material. Of the great stars of SF that I was privileged to meet while they were (are) still in the field, he was second only to Octavia Butler. Just knowing he’s still here warms my heart.
These musings take me up to (semi) adulthood, but I haven’t touched on my own teaching. I’ll save that for Part 2.