There’s a one-page paper inside a folder in a storage tub in a closet in a childhood home. That’s where academic relics from high school spend purgatory, until they ascend to the attic or burn in a heap of trash. (I was a pyromaniac as a youth before this “recycling” movement came along. Team Red, not Team Green.)
On this paper is the black ink of 17-year-old me, I think, writing in the voice of John Proctor to his family while he was jailed. It was a creative assignment given to my English class while we studied Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” which might as well have been the nickname of the classroom as Andie Martin perceived it. She was dark-haired and slight, and often taught the unwilling. She occasionally had to quell a rebellion. One time calling roll, she said a particular student’s name, and he replied, “Call me sir!” I think she called his parents, instead.
On this paper is the red ink of Martin’s pen — an ‘A,’ not a bloodletting of revisions. I, too, counted the works of Cliffs Notes among my favorites with Hemingway and Dante and Homer as a youth, but I took this homework seriously. I had been scribbling fictions inside journals since I was four, when my knowledge of proper syntax was so underdeveloped that I used hyphens in place of spaces to separate words. Imagine-reading-sentences-like-this-for-pages-at-a-time. Toying with English in a fictive world was my favorite childhood hobby. Why not bring that enthusiasm to a one-off piece of schoolwork? I did, and Ms. Martin wrote ‘A’ in her ink, and she gave me a follow-up assignment that I’m still working on: Do this for the rest of your life.
She read my in-character letter, perhaps 300, 400 words, and she made an investment. She encouraged me. She handed me a piece of paper, looked me in the eyes, and said …
—
“Don’t you forget this.”
It’s the end of the best scene of “Dead Poets Society,” a 1989 drama starring Robin Williams (John Keating) as an unorthodox, passionate lecturer who made the real world better from the fictional one in which he existed. He taught poetry with zeal. He damned the textbook, asking his students to rip out the pages of “excrement” in which its author asked its readers to judge poems by a two-dimensional graph. “We’re not laying pipe,” he told the class. He later says to it, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.” It’d be overwrought if it weren’t so full of love.
One of the film’s main characters, Todd Anderson, played by a young Ethan Hawke, was slow to buy in. He sheepishly told Keating during a lecture that he had failed to complete a writing assignment upon being asked to present before his classmates.
“Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing,” Keating told the entire room as he stood beside Todd’s desk. “Well I think you’re wrong. I think you have something inside of you that’s worth a great deal.”
He then wrote a line from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on the chalkboard: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the [roofs] of the world.”
“Todd, I would like you to give us a demonstration of a barbaric yawp,” Keating said. He beckoned Todd to stand up and walk to the front of the room. It’d be bullying if it weren’t so full of love.
“YAWP!” Todd screamed after four listless attempts. Keating was excited to draw something from the untapped student, but there was work yet. He pointed Todd in the direction of a picture of Whitman that hung from the wall.
“What does he remind you of? Don’t think — answer.”
Todd spoke some gibberish. “A sweaty-toothed madman,” he eventually said. Keating encircled him. The camera encircled both. Keating covered Todd’s eyes and asked him to elaborate. Todd’s mind worked faster, his voice became louder.
I close my eyes and this image floats beside me
A sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brain
His hands reach out and choke me
And all the time he’s mumbling
Mumbling truth
Truth …
… like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold
The turntable needle scratched across the record. The class burst into laughter at the speaking of the last line, and Todd opened his eyes, briefly in danger of regressing toward shyness.
It’s at this point Keating said the words any reticent student would relish to hear: “Forget them.”
“Forget them,” he insisted again as he rushed to Todd to cover his eyes once more. “Stay with the blanket.”
Todd stayed with the blanket and finished with fervor. The class, turned from audible chuckling to silent stupefaction, began to clap. Keating rose from the crouch he assumed a few feet away after he let Todd take flight, walked to him, put his hand behind his head, and said …
—
“Chris, you have to do this.”
“This” was writing in some capacity, whether for kicks or for work. It didn’t matter. What did is that Ms. Martin took notice, and the notice was crucial. Curious as I was as a kid, I stubbornly felt inadequate, perhaps as dramatic youth are wont to feel, but especially me, which is also what dramatic youth are wont to say. Everything I jotted or massaged or completed was private. It became habitual, and old. And then a teacher came along.
Todd and I are the lucky ones.
There are characters in which you can see yourself and your life — Robin Williams, or my high school English instructor, beckoning a sort of skill or expression or something from Ethan Hawke, or me, in a rousing scene on-screen that played out much less dramatically in my actual classroom. But I can relate, and I can smile, and from a movie, I can grin at the idea of an exceptional teacher making a difference in a pupil’s life.
