Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference
Mark Edmundson
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0375504079
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Frank Lears came to teach at Medford High School in the fall of 1969, he looked like easy prey to Mark Edmundson and his school-hating pals. At the front of the class, they saw a small, nervous man wearing a moth-eaten suit two sizes too big, with a large paperclip fastened to the left lapel. Lears, just out of Harvard, struck the class as absurd, the kind of teacher they could torment at will. And for some time, they did just that.
But Edmundson and his classmates radically under-estimated Frank Lears. Lears got rid of their tired textbooks and brought in Kesey, Camus, and Freud. He ran a group psychology experiment that no one in the room ever forgot. He opened the class to a panel of SDS members and a crowd of proto–Black Panthers. He risked life and limb in a snowball fight with Edmundson and his football-playing buddies. He shook things up.
Lears’s opposition to the lockstep life of Medford High got under the skin and into the minds of Mark Edmundson and his friends--friends like Dubby O’Day, a fatalistic goof-off majoring in spitball ballistics. The conflicting ways of life represented by Lears and Medford’s formidable football coach, Mace Johnson, confronted Edmundson with a choice. At real cost--the cost of conformity and belonging--Edmundson chose to go Lears’s way.
With a touching depiction of his father and of the deep grief caused by his sister’s death, Edmundson beautifully conveys the family he came from. He evokes the 1960s with all the era’s tumult and promise, and shows how Frank Lears started him thinking.
Teacher is a moving portrait of Edmundson’s transformation. It pays tribute to an exceptional man who, free in himself, struggled to make his students free as well. Sometimes, we are lucky enough to experience a miracle that turns our lives around. For Mark Edmundson, Frank Lears was that miracle.
believed in it before there was much reason to, then, at exactly the right moment, cast his superb editorial eye on the manuscript. I have profited from his help no end. Katie Hall took the book over and, with dash and generosity of spirit, saw it through its final phases. Michael Pollan read and reread the book, always improving it with his comments and continually bolstering me with his encouragement. Those who know Michael and his work will understand how fortunate I am to have such a
Johnson’s emphatic downrightness, his willingness to promulgate and live by a code that was nearly chivalric, that drew us to him. Here was a blue-collar bastion of Camelot, created by the coach; here was a place where you could be measured by a discerning eye and given a seat—or denied one—at the Round Table. You’re not a man, it’s been said, until the other men acknowledge you as one. In Mace Johnson, overemphatic, loud, monovocal, we had identified someone with the right of investiture. It
world disappears. And now the coaches talk more forcefully, more fluently, risen as they are on the wings of our pain; they go on with epic panache about how, compared to what we’ll face someday, this is nothing. Compared to the burdens we’ll have to bear, this is just small potatoes. Not long ago, the United States Marines have gone nose to nose with the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. A war is being waged, prisoners taken and prisoners shot. And we are the raw material that is now being
strategically or not, he was chary of giving out much by way of personal data. You had to keep your ears open, because a good deal was to be found in the intonation. This intonation business was very non-Medford. Medford spoke in one tone of voice—loud, assertive, fragrant, obscene. The intonation thing, the irony thing, suggested a combination of worldliness and modesty, and would eventually make the Medford yawp sound almost frightened, a way of worrying about what might be said in reply and an
inspired prophets. I spoke up and said that most people I knew would never do such a thing—no way. And I can still remember the way Lears settled his gaze on me as I talked. His soft brown eyes were mesmerizing; it was as if a deer had somehow acquired preternatural intelligence and could combine warmth with the greatest level of comprehension. It struck me then for the first time that when this guy listened to you, the experience was of a different order from when anyone else did. He wasn’t