As the Spring term ends, I thought I\u2019d share with readers two vignettes from my teaching career.\u00a0 The intention is for us to remember how much of teaching is the emotional connection between student and teacher.\u00a0 For me, this is the reality of the experience, and is what makes possible the communication of mathematical ideas.<\/p>\n
This first story started when I got a terse note from the high school guidance office about James:<\/p>\n
“James has a difficult situation at home.\u00a0 Any leeway you can grant him about deadlines, tests, or quizzes would be greatly appreciated.”<\/p>\n
Well: my classroom was run with very few deadlines.\u00a0 Students could re-take quizzes and tests whenever they learned the material, except that I had to report to their parents quarterly about their progress, at which time they got a grade.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So it was easy for me to meet James’ needs.<\/p>\n
What was the ‘difficult situation’? I didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter.\u00a0 From the cryptic note, I assumed it was a divorce, and that the family was not anxious for everyone to know.\u00a0 But it could have just as well been a marriage: a new step-parent or step-sibling can take some getting used to.\u00a0 Or it could have been the birth of a new, much younger sibling.\u00a0 Any one of dozens of such circumstances looms large in an adolescent’s life.\u00a0 It didn’t matter to me–James needed to be cut some slack, so I cut it.<\/p>\n
James was surly, a sure sign of instability in his life.\u00a0 He made little irritating comments, usually addressed to me–within the bounds of adolescent propriety, but on the rebellious side.\u00a0 Something’s going on, I thought.\u00a0 Of course, it wasn’t really me he was angry at. \u00a0I was an authority figure and he needed a target.\u00a0 I was willing to play that role for him.\u00a0 I have found that the most constructive way to deal with this situation is to ignore the barbs and engage whenever the student shows a more positive side.<\/p>\n
So I found ways to dodge his anger and get at the person it was hiding.<\/p>\n
James had a habit of wearing bright orange gym shorts.\u00a0 I took to teasing him about them.\u00a0 “You’ve got to get rid of those shorts!” I would say, in various ways.\u00a0 James loved the attention and developed a variety of snappy comebacks.\u00a0 Eventually, he mellowed, promising me a pair of orange shorts as a gift at the end of the year.<\/p>\n
James often asked to leave class during the lesson.\u00a0 I knew full well that he didn’t have to use the rest room and was hanging out with friends in the hall.\u00a0 I went a step further, asking myself why he was not engaged in school, and what he might need in his life in order to continue attending school.\u00a0 I knew there was an answer, thanks to the note from guidance.\u00a0 But I didn’t know what it was.<\/p>\n
James was getting a straight C in the class.\u00a0 He wasn’t closing doors to mathematics, but couldn’t find the resources in his life to take the next step.\u00a0 I waited to see what I might do.<\/p>\n
In April, his father called, angry.\u00a0 Why is James getting a C?\u00a0 He has to go to a good college.\u00a0 I went to Harvard business school.\u00a0 A C is simply not acceptable.\u00a0 Why wasn’t I notified earlier that James was doing so poorly?<\/p>\n
In fact he was notified, quarterly, of James’ progress, but didn\u2019t respond.\u00a0 It turned out that he had a lot on his plate.\u00a0 During the conversation I found out what the matter was.\u00a0 His wife, James’ mother, was dying. She had been in and out of the hospital for treatment, and was getting ready to leave her family, and this world, forever.\u00a0 Now I understood fully James’ anger, and his father’s anger.<\/p>\n
We all feel helpless in these situations.\u00a0 There’s not much you can do or say.\u00a0 I told James’ father what a wonderful son he had, how James was doing a great job keeping his life together during this crisis, how he might not get the greatest grade, but that he would eventually be able to recoup his academic losses.\u00a0 In this most difficult yet of James’ years on earth, I said, it is amazing that he is able to keep up a C average in a difficult subject. These comments dulled the father’s hostility.\u00a0 I was part of the solution, not part of the problem.<\/p>\n
After this call, things got better between me and James.\u00a0 He knew that I was aware of his problems, and sympathetic to them.\u00a0 He looked me in the eye when he asked to leave the room and made arrangements to retake quizzes he had done poorly on.\u00a0 Luckily, James learned mathematics easily, and a few sentences from me set him back on the right path when the work got tough.<\/p>\n
I was moving from one classroom to another the next year, and part of my daily routine was searching the school building for useable cartons to pack away a 30-year accumulation of books and materials.\u00a0 One day, I found two empty cartons in the delivery room, and was carrying them down the hall when I passed James.<\/p>\n
He was stretched out on a bench in the hall.\u00a0 “Do you need any help with those, Dr. Saul?”<\/p>\n
I really didn’t, but he clearly wanted to engage me.\u00a0 I decided to accept the invitation.\u00a0 “I’d love some help, James.\u00a0 Would you like to help me pack some books?”<\/p>\n
We went down to my classroom.\u00a0 James and I talked about the books we were packing, how heavy they were, who had written them, who had given them to me–and eventually how it feels to be living in a house with a dying parent.<\/p>\n
Then he said, “My mom is going into the hospital again, for a week.”<\/p>\n
I gave James what I could–mostly the same words I had for his father, and especially how a C average is not so bad, given what he had to handle outside of school. He couldn’t stay too much longer, because he had an appointment with the dean at 3:00.\u00a0 I told him I was glad for whatever help he could give me, and not to be late for his appointment.<\/p>\n
Later I met him in the hall, where he told me that he his appointment was actually with a ‘cute girl’.\u00a0 I told him that I knew what that was like, and that we all shared certain feelings in life.\u00a0 And that we are not alone in handling them.\u00a0 He looked at me and smiled.\u00a0 He knew that I wasn’t just talking about cute girls.<\/p>\n
The next day, I met James in the hall again.\u00a0 He had come to math class, but left in the middle, and hadn’t returned.\u00a0 We were working on completing the square, a challenge for this group, but a challenge they must meet if they are going to attach any meaning at all to the quadratic formula.<\/p>\n
After an exchange of pleasantries, I asked James, “Do you know how to complete the square?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah, it’s not that hard, except when you get fractions.”\u00a0 It was clear, from the way he answered, that he knew how to do it, and had practiced it enough to know where the difficulties lay.<\/p>\n
“So come and take a quiz when you’re ready,” I said.<\/p>\n
“Okay.”\u00a0 James looked down.\u00a0 Then he looked up at me.\u00a0 “Dr. Saul,” he said, “Give me a hug.”\u00a0 I quickly obliged.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it is as important to complete a circle as to complete a square.<\/p>\n
“That building–that’s what scares me.”\u00a0 It was Ivan who said this, pointing to the Hancock tower in Boston, across the river.\u00a0 I was sitting with him on the MIT campus, talking about his problems adjusting to America.\u00a0 A brilliant mathematics student, he had come from Bulgaria for six weeks of study with equally gifted American high school students at a summer program I ran here.\u00a0 He was 17 years old, and the year was 1993.<\/p>\n
I had noticed that Ivan was too much in his room, not playing enough Frisbee, not bonding with other students.\u00a0 My job was to draw him out.\u00a0 So we were sitting, late one night by the banks of the Charles River, and talking heart-to-heart.<\/p>\n
“That building scares me,” he repeated.\u00a0 “America goes too fast, too far.\u00a0 The people move quickly.\u00a0 The cars goes fast.\u00a0 The food tastes like…nothing.”<\/p>\n
We took our meals in a student cafeteria.<\/p>\n
“But don’t you have trouble getting food back home?”\u00a0 I queried.\u00a0 The American experience was overwhelming him, and I hoped to turn him towards its positive aspects.<\/p>\n
“Yes.\u00a0 It is difficult.\u00a0 Prices have risen and salaries have not kept up.”\u00a0 He paused before taking the bitter medicine: “I think, wherever Communism has come, it leaves garbage behind.”\u00a0 His face got hard, and he was silent for a bit.<\/p>\n
Then, “I dream each night of having breakfast at home.”\u00a0 Home was Dobrich, a town in an agricultural area of Bulgaria which Ivan considered “not too small.”<\/p>\n
His monologue was strangely compelling.\u00a0 There was some reason why I had to listen, had to respond, to the expression of bewilderment, of events running away with him, and of his own country and his own upbringing, betraying him.<\/p>\n
For a while I didn’t understand my own reaction.\u00a0 And then, slowly and quietly, understanding came over me.\u00a0 I suddenly felt like a link in a chain, a stitch in a fabric.<\/p>\n
There are moments when the meaning of life overwhelms you, forces itself into your consciousness, and thrusts still deeper, into your unconscious mind.\u00a0 Suddenly, Ivan\u2019s confusion and awe, and even the tears he was clearly holding back, were mine as well.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a tall building that scared him.\u00a0 It something greater.<\/p>\n
In 1913, my grandfather Froim arrived in America from a small town in east Europe. Mother Russia had become more of a warden than a guardian to her Jewish children, who were leaving in droves to build America.\u00a0 Stories of his confusion have become family legends.\u00a0 When someone showed him the subway to the Bronx, he thought he was going down into a root-cellar.\u00a0 His cousin, who had arrived two years earlier, had to teach him how to drink liquids through a straw.\u00a0 Seeing the Woolworth building from afar, he tried to walk over for a closer look.\u00a0 But he didn’t realize how big it was, and how far away, and spent his whole lunch hour getting nowhere.<\/p>\n
I grew up with these stories.\u00a0 But why did I react to them so strongly?\u00a0 Why did my soul vibrate, hearing them?\u00a0\u00a0 Could it have been because I knew I would be having this conversation in Boston?\u00a0 Was it for this moment that my grandfather repeated them to me, these stories that took place in 1913, and were told me in 1963?\u00a0 Are these messages sent across the years, from one struggling immigrant to another, with myself as the medium?<\/p>\n
It was more, though, than giving back to Ivan what my grandfather had given to me.\u00a0 More: I was Ivan, I was Froim, and I was at the same time a father and grandfather to both.\u00a0 They say this happens, that the roles reverse as one grows older, and you begin to care for your parents as once they cared for you.\u00a0 But I didn’t expect these feelings at forty-something, with both my parents in good health.\u00a0 I wasn’t ready.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe child is father to the man,\u201d says the poet.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t felt the feeling to these words so strongly before, and was overwhelmed.<\/p>\n
And I wasn’t ready for the brush with eternity that these feelings would bring, of a contact with events that happen over and over again, and so occur outside of time.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the experience of the immigrant, or the foreigner.\u00a0 It\u2019s the experience of the child and the parent.\u00a0 Somehow, in this conversation, with a youth I hardly knew on the banks of a dark river, I felt a contact with the future as well as the past.\u00a0 My own children, and their children, will feel these feelings, will go through these experiences.\u00a0 And my adventures will become their legends.\u00a0\u00a0 The chain is still holding, the fabric unrent.<\/p>\n