Houston
Academy is an institution that prides itself on its fine teaching, and
certainly this pride is well deserved. As
I told the teachers at our opening faculty meeting, I believe that teaching is
the most noble of professions. For
relatively little pay, they work every day to make this world a better place. Moreover, for every CEO, star athlete, congressman, musician, doctor, or lawyer out
there, there were one or more great teachers who were instrumental in making
them who they are.
The
older I get and the more experience in education I have, the more I appreciate
the fine education I received at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and in my
graduate studies. A great number of educators influenced me profoundly. My high
school football and wrestling coach, Bob Cloy, taught me tenacity, resiliency,
AND that a great coach SHOULD also be a great classroom teacher. My high school
French teacher, Susan Kokoszka, taught me to revel in a culture that was not my
own and that uncompromisingly high standards yield incredible results. In my
undergraduate and graduate education, I was exposed to some incredible minds:
Dan Franklin, Mynra Gantner, Art Casciato, Steven Bauer, Jack Kirby, and Ryan
Barilleaux, to name a few. However, if I
had to pick one teacher to honor as having the most profound influence on my
life, it would have to be my undergraduate history and American studies
professor, Elliot Gorn.
As
a teacher and a student, I have observed that effective educators can take a
variety of forms. I have learned a great
deal from teachers with disparate methods and demeanors. “Elliot,” as he instructed us to call him,
had a rare combination of intellectualism and informality that enabled him to
impart a great deal, while creating one of the most comfortable learning environments
I have ever encountered. As I got to
know him, I was awestruck by his scholarship.
Yet, Elliot never pretended to know all the answers. Instead, he always found the questions that
forced me to think conceptually. In
Elliot’s class, I learned how to make abstract connections relative to complex
social phenomenon. Importantly, though,
Elliot never let us forget that society and history deal with real people with real lives, who face real
issues.
I
won’t go so far as to say that Elliot taught me how to be a scholar, because I
did not really learn that until graduate school, but what he did teach me was
how to think like a scholar. In
Elliot’s class learning, for me, became both a pleasure and an obligation. I genuinely enjoyed the readings, the class
discussions, etc. However, he engendered
the kind of personal loyalty that made me determined not to disappoint him in
any writing or work I did. Elliot took
my work and my thinking seriously. This
gave me confidence. Consequently, I pushed
myself to intellectual limits I had not previously discovered. I came to recognize that education is not a
product; education is a struggle. I do
not mean this in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that education is a
process of disclosure that is not and
should not be easy. I learned that there is much greater
satisfaction in unearthing something difficult than in repeating something
tired. I look back on some of my early
work in his class, and I think it would have been very easy to mock my clichés,
but somehow he taught me to reject them without making me feel like an
idiot.
Nonetheless,
my struggle in his classes and my success in his classes helped me decide that
I loved learning and loved teaching enough to make learning and teaching my career.
As a teacher, I have incessantly worked to give my students the sense of
excitement at intellectual development that I found in Elliot Gorn’s class.
The
excitement and enthusiasm of a new school year always causes me to reflect on
what teachers like Elliot Gorn gave to me and countless other students in his
care. Noting that no one has been
inclined to respond to my blog, I would invite the HA community and readers of
this blog to share their story of a teacher/coach who inspired them and shaped
them. Please comment below!
