My father was a teacher, but a certain kind of teacher, and for the most part only that kind of teacher. Not a leaper but a plodder; highly organized in his presentation of materials, reflecting not so much the orderly mind as the discipline of a man climbing a mountain.
He was organized because it mattered a great deal; because there was much going on he could not control or even understand and the proven pathways made some sense at least of how one might get from here to there. He propelled himself with a fierce work ethic and inch-by-inch progress through mazes of data, technical solutions to practical problems, and administrative bureaucracy. The most important thing he told me about his life as a high school teacher – when I was in my early 20’s – was that it was clear to him early on at Brooklyn Technical High School that most of his students were smarter than he was. There was no embarrassment for him in that fact, just a different kind of tuning necessary in his teaching apparatus.

 
My path was different. Less diligent in its way, though notable for periods of intense and extended hard work through courses taken and courses taught, periods all the more regular as I got older, left school for a time, returned with fresh perspective, left again, returned again, and made my way to and through an unusual teaching career.

 

I was more of the leaper to my father’s plodder. He was at one point the chairman of a two-year technology degree program at a city college in New York while I was a graduate student in literature at Columbia University. He regaled me with a story one day about sitting on a school-wide promotion committee, railing against a system that failed to reward faculty who published technical articles in non-academic publications, while giving promotion points to people who “sit under a tree reading poetry.” That sounded suspiciously like the kind of work I was actually doing in my own graduate program.

 
But once I began teach at Columbia, I began to understand my father’s experience teaching smarter students than he’d ever been, or was at the time. I also, at some level, understood the wisdom of his nonchalance about it. A few years further down the road, teaching full-time at Harvard University, I thought more consciously about that fact. Most of my students – just about all, really – were smarter than I was. They knew more than I’d known at their age (which was only eight or nine years earlier). Many knew more than I knew at the time. Unquestionably all knew more than a few subjects far more deeply that I ever would.

 
I taught writing classes, specifically Writing About History and Writing About Social and Ethical Issues. I taught my students some facts – and the teaching of facts seemed to me quite important; I enjoy it still and we need more of it, generally – but more method. In particular, I taught them – or tried to – how it felt to write well by the standards of the schools, workplaces and public transit points of ideas toward which many colleges and universities point their students.

 
And, in the words of poet Robert Bly, I tried to teach them a kind of leaping. Bly was a wonderful poet and teacher. He talked about poems doing their work the way that animals might, elegant step following elegant step, pausing in moments of beauty, radiating tension when the air sharpens for a moment, and then – after the measured pace of perfect stride after stride, they leap. A sudden movement that might end with a bloody encounter, or a short flight over a fallen tree: the leap is what an animal can do that a man or a woman can’t. It is what a poem can do that a simple story never does. It is everything we think is impossible, but it is also the clear culmination of every simple, beautiful step we have taken, now taken to its purist, most impossible expression for just one flashing moment.