What Should We Teach Our Children?

What makes for a good teacher? I was challenged a few days ago to tread on thin ice by an anoynomous commentator. What about the education of children?

I begged Kathy to get in the discussion. After all, curriculum is part of her master's studies, but she was not taking the bait.

How about this for a wild swing at the subject: Through the sixth grade, all of the children will work through Euclid's Propositions, study Greek so they can read Homer, study Spanish so they can read Lope, study French so they can read Voltaire and then read Shakespeare and the Bible. And they should learn to type.

Now, Uncle Toby, a major departure from the subject to warm to the idea of good and bad teachers:

I remember wanting to write my big English paper for the year about Robert Service. It must have been 10th grade or so. I was friends with the "Smart English Student Girls." Not really friends, because they were at a more respectable 10th grade social level, but at least we could talk about poetry. Neither was very good looking by 10th grade standards and I was not even in the game at that age, so there was little to cloud the discussions.

The Daughter of the Banker, Smart English-Student Girl (Please understand, none of us had ever set foot in the British Isles, this was what passed for English language literature in Denton, Texas in the mid-60's. I think they call it language arts now.) told me I could not write about Robert Service. He did not write about nice subjects and besides his poetry was laughable, because it rhymed. The teacher would never allow it.

I can't remember if the teacher allowed the paper or not, but she made it clear that she concurred with the view that Robert Service did not deserve a paper. And I can't remember the teacher's name.

Robert Service was a banker who wanted to be a cowboy or a gold prospector. All of us Walter Mitty's see the world in a similar way. I am a lawyer who wanted to be a prize fighter or a mule skinner. So maybe that was the hold Service had on me.

Our lives overlapped by eight years. He died in 1958. In theory, I could have at the age of seven managed to get over to Lancieaux, France and met the great man before he died.

The things I could have done, if I had just known. I was in Chile in 1972. I could have have gone north and tapped on Pablo Neruda's door. I could have met the great man before he died.

On one occasion I did. C.P. Snow was giving a lecture at the University of Texas in 1969 or 1970. As a freshman student, I had not heard of him, but my English teacher, Maureen McElroy told me to go meet the great man before he died. And I did. (Actually, it was not even a close call because he died in 1980, but it would most assuredly have been my only chance).

Maureen McElroy also taught me about the miracle play. And Marlowe. And Ralph Roister Doister. And Gammer Gurton's Needle

So why was I captured by rhyming poetry? And why was it risible to the Smart English Girls?

Did you know that the Romans did not have rhymes. Latin poetry does not rhyme. This came through the Arabs.

Jorge Green taught me that. And this: "Abenamar, Abenamar moro de la moreria, el dia que tu naciste grandes sinyales abia."

Was it T.S. Eliot who said, "Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third?"

It is like that for me. Maureen McElroy (English Teacher) and Jorge Green (Spanish teacher) divide my little world of teachers between them. There is no third.