Last night I thought of Monsieur Garrapon. Perhaps I should not say "last night," but rather this morning. I saw the clock from where I lay in bed, and the time was 4:15 a.m. I was not dreaming, but rather lying there in one of those stretches of time in the night when old men like myself cannot sleep, but rather devote themselves to thinking over their life, what they have seen and done and accomplished, and what many of their experiences have meant to them over the years.
Monsieur Garrapon was a French literature at the Universite de Caen, in Normandy, France, where I spent about four months studying. I cannot remember a thing about the other three or four instructors I encountered there, and I cannot remember much about Monsieur Garrapon except for several details. My impression is that he was not tall -- perhaps 5' 10" in height --, that he spoke very clear and measured French, and that his medium-length hair was what we would call "dirty blond." Since I was 19 and he was probably in his late forties at the time, and since I am just now turning 71, if he were still alive he would now be around 96. It is rather unlikely that he has lived this long. He taught a course about the plays of Moliere, the great French 17th Century dramatist, and he also had a great deal of contact with foreign students such as myself.
At French universities, if my experience at Caen is any indication, success or failure are left very much up to the student. A student took a course, attended classes, and studied like hell to prepare for the final exam. There were no assignment such as "Read pages 200 - 350 for next Tuesday." Since this was a course in the plays of Moliere, I remember Professor Garrapon stating at the first class meeting that there are many editions of Moliere's plays and that he recommended 10 or so for various reasons. He explained these reasons as he listed them on the board. It was up to the student to decide which edition or editions he would study, and to go out and find them. The course was about "the plays" of Moliere -- ALL the plays. And so we were to read ALL the plays.
What I remember most about Professor Garrapon were his lectures. He came to class, opened notes he only occasionally referred to, and delivered brilliant, finely polished lectures that left the class with insights few other teachers would have had and that we students would never have had without his instruction.
It was also Professor Garrapon from whom I learned a literary technique the French call "explication de texte." This technique really shows whether or not a reader has worked hard to understand an author's writings. It consists of a very close reading of between half a page and a page of what an author has written, and then analyzing what is on the page. How is this small sample of text typical of the author's writing ? How is it different ? What does it mean ? How does it mean whatever it means ? Are there ambiguities in the writing ? Are these intended. How did the author's life affect what is in the text ?
Professor Garrapon demonstrated the meaning of "explication de texte" by performing a number of these in his classes. He was brilliant. His analyses featured a great deal of intellectual enthusiasm. I shall never forget them.
In short, he was a great teacher. I'm sure that even now, so many years after his death, he is remembered by thousands of his students.
Let me tell you, also, about two teachers I knew from primary school and junior high. I remember almost nothing about two of them except what each told me.
The first was my third-grade teacher, Ms. Askew. I recall her as a very prim, upright and prissy lady, middle-aged, very precise and fussy. The main thing I remember is that several times she said to our class, "The only thing a customer can be short-changed on and never complain is education." In teaching as a substitute teacher at a Bay Area high school, where most of the students behave as though they don't care about their studies at all, I have often recalled her statement.
Unlike Ms. Askew, one teacher had a detrimental influence on me. This was a Mr. Needham, who taught my sixth grade class in Massachusetts. Mr. Needham said something to me that no teacher should ever say. His words affected me for many years.
For some reason, our seventh grade class was given a test to determine our language learning abilities. A week after the test, our teacher announced the scores. He went down through the list of pupils present, passing out a little slip of paper with the score on it to each student. When he came to my name he said, "Come and see me at the end of the class." There was no piece of paper, no score.
At the end of class when everyone else had left he told me, "You got a very, very low score on this test. It is so low that it shows you wouldn't ever be able to learn another language. Don't try to, because you'll fail."
That summer I was sent off to an elite private school for summer session. One of my classes was Latin, which I failed. At the start of the normal school year, I decided to try French.
At the end of the year I again had a failing grade. This time, however, I was told by the instructor, Mr. Fish, that I had "passed numerically, but I thought it would be better if I failed you."
Again I attended summer school. This time, I took introductory French. I must have learned something in Mr. Fish's class because at the end of the summer my grade was A. After that, I took French every semester, and I always got an A. What I had needed was confidence. I learned French well enough to receive advanced standing in it when I entered college.
In my first year of college, I continued studying French. Then at the start of summer after my freshman year participated in a French foreign study course that sent me to France. It was in the fall at the Universite de Caen, where I met the Monsieur Garrapon.
Several years later when I attended graduate school at Berkeley, I worked as a French translator for the United States Joint Publications Agency in San Francisco. I might add that other events later in life took me to the South Pacific, where I also learned spoken Samoan well enough to serve a number of times as a court translator. So much for Mr. Needham's prophecy.
But all the rest of my life I remembered that Mr. Needham had committed the one sin a teacher can commit against a student. He told me I could never succeed.
At Dartmouth College I had many good instructors, but one, a writing and English instructor named Arthur Dewing, stands out above the others.
Professor Dewing was known as one of the college's most demanding professors. He took his students and their work seriously. He expected them to take themselves and their work seriously, too.
Once a week as we entered his freshman English course we turned in compositions, placing them in a pile on his desk. A story, perhaps apocryphal, circulated to the effect that one day he'd entered the classroom and asked the class if anyone had written anything wonderful. Met with silence, he was said to have swept the whole stack of compositions into the waste basket and told the students, "Okay, try again. This time make your work wonderful."
Professor Dewing was a tough grader. Rumor had it that the last A he'd given anyone was to Budd Schulberg ten or fifteen years earlier.
Professor Dewing looked somewhat like an elderly Humphrey Bogart. He spoke with a similar tough, clipped accent. I had a freshman English course with him the second semester of my freshman year. After that, because I'd received advanced placement in English before entering the college, he allowed me to take part in his creative writing course, which I did for the rest of my years at Dartmouth.
His creative writing course involved writing perhaps 5,000 or more words a week, meeting with him on a one-on-one session in which he read that week's work and discussed it with you, and then meeting with the whole class every two or three weeks.
The key fact I learned from Professor Dewing is that a writer must write, then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite everything. He examined the smallest details in my work. Was the word I had used in a sentence really the right word? As we sat in his office, he puffed on his pipe and read aloud what I had produced that week. How did each sentence sound ? What was the rhythm of each sentence ? ("Read Melville," he said.) He took my work seriously and he expected me to take it seriously, too. I remember laboring through through 12 rewrites of one piece. The effort proved worthwhile. It won the college writing prize that year, as well as the senior class writing prize.
My encounters with Professor Garrapon and Professor Dewing took place 50 years ago. Both must surely have passed away now, for at the time I knew them they were both late middle-aged.
I regret that to either or them I never sufficiently expressed how much I valued and appreciated their teaching.
Monsieur Garrapon was a French literature at the Universite de Caen, in Normandy, France, where I spent about four months studying. I cannot remember a thing about the other three or four instructors I encountered there, and I cannot remember much about Monsieur Garrapon except for several details. My impression is that he was not tall -- perhaps 5' 10" in height --, that he spoke very clear and measured French, and that his medium-length hair was what we would call "dirty blond." Since I was 19 and he was probably in his late forties at the time, and since I am just now turning 71, if he were still alive he would now be around 96. It is rather unlikely that he has lived this long. He taught a course about the plays of Moliere, the great French 17th Century dramatist, and he also had a great deal of contact with foreign students such as myself.
At French universities, if my experience at Caen is any indication, success or failure are left very much up to the student. A student took a course, attended classes, and studied like hell to prepare for the final exam. There were no assignment such as "Read pages 200 - 350 for next Tuesday." Since this was a course in the plays of Moliere, I remember Professor Garrapon stating at the first class meeting that there are many editions of Moliere's plays and that he recommended 10 or so for various reasons. He explained these reasons as he listed them on the board. It was up to the student to decide which edition or editions he would study, and to go out and find them. The course was about "the plays" of Moliere -- ALL the plays. And so we were to read ALL the plays.
What I remember most about Professor Garrapon were his lectures. He came to class, opened notes he only occasionally referred to, and delivered brilliant, finely polished lectures that left the class with insights few other teachers would have had and that we students would never have had without his instruction.
It was also Professor Garrapon from whom I learned a literary technique the French call "explication de texte." This technique really shows whether or not a reader has worked hard to understand an author's writings. It consists of a very close reading of between half a page and a page of what an author has written, and then analyzing what is on the page. How is this small sample of text typical of the author's writing ? How is it different ? What does it mean ? How does it mean whatever it means ? Are there ambiguities in the writing ? Are these intended. How did the author's life affect what is in the text ?
Professor Garrapon demonstrated the meaning of "explication de texte" by performing a number of these in his classes. He was brilliant. His analyses featured a great deal of intellectual enthusiasm. I shall never forget them.
In short, he was a great teacher. I'm sure that even now, so many years after his death, he is remembered by thousands of his students.
Let me tell you, also, about two teachers I knew from primary school and junior high. I remember almost nothing about two of them except what each told me.
The first was my third-grade teacher, Ms. Askew. I recall her as a very prim, upright and prissy lady, middle-aged, very precise and fussy. The main thing I remember is that several times she said to our class, "The only thing a customer can be short-changed on and never complain is education." In teaching as a substitute teacher at a Bay Area high school, where most of the students behave as though they don't care about their studies at all, I have often recalled her statement.
Unlike Ms. Askew, one teacher had a detrimental influence on me. This was a Mr. Needham, who taught my sixth grade class in Massachusetts. Mr. Needham said something to me that no teacher should ever say. His words affected me for many years.
For some reason, our seventh grade class was given a test to determine our language learning abilities. A week after the test, our teacher announced the scores. He went down through the list of pupils present, passing out a little slip of paper with the score on it to each student. When he came to my name he said, "Come and see me at the end of the class." There was no piece of paper, no score.
At the end of class when everyone else had left he told me, "You got a very, very low score on this test. It is so low that it shows you wouldn't ever be able to learn another language. Don't try to, because you'll fail."
That summer I was sent off to an elite private school for summer session. One of my classes was Latin, which I failed. At the start of the normal school year, I decided to try French.
At the end of the year I again had a failing grade. This time, however, I was told by the instructor, Mr. Fish, that I had "passed numerically, but I thought it would be better if I failed you."
Again I attended summer school. This time, I took introductory French. I must have learned something in Mr. Fish's class because at the end of the summer my grade was A. After that, I took French every semester, and I always got an A. What I had needed was confidence. I learned French well enough to receive advanced standing in it when I entered college.
In my first year of college, I continued studying French. Then at the start of summer after my freshman year participated in a French foreign study course that sent me to France. It was in the fall at the Universite de Caen, where I met the Monsieur Garrapon.
Several years later when I attended graduate school at Berkeley, I worked as a French translator for the United States Joint Publications Agency in San Francisco. I might add that other events later in life took me to the South Pacific, where I also learned spoken Samoan well enough to serve a number of times as a court translator. So much for Mr. Needham's prophecy.
But all the rest of my life I remembered that Mr. Needham had committed the one sin a teacher can commit against a student. He told me I could never succeed.
At Dartmouth College I had many good instructors, but one, a writing and English instructor named Arthur Dewing, stands out above the others.
Professor Dewing was known as one of the college's most demanding professors. He took his students and their work seriously. He expected them to take themselves and their work seriously, too.
Once a week as we entered his freshman English course we turned in compositions, placing them in a pile on his desk. A story, perhaps apocryphal, circulated to the effect that one day he'd entered the classroom and asked the class if anyone had written anything wonderful. Met with silence, he was said to have swept the whole stack of compositions into the waste basket and told the students, "Okay, try again. This time make your work wonderful."
Professor Dewing was a tough grader. Rumor had it that the last A he'd given anyone was to Budd Schulberg ten or fifteen years earlier.
Professor Dewing looked somewhat like an elderly Humphrey Bogart. He spoke with a similar tough, clipped accent. I had a freshman English course with him the second semester of my freshman year. After that, because I'd received advanced placement in English before entering the college, he allowed me to take part in his creative writing course, which I did for the rest of my years at Dartmouth.
His creative writing course involved writing perhaps 5,000 or more words a week, meeting with him on a one-on-one session in which he read that week's work and discussed it with you, and then meeting with the whole class every two or three weeks.
The key fact I learned from Professor Dewing is that a writer must write, then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite everything. He examined the smallest details in my work. Was the word I had used in a sentence really the right word? As we sat in his office, he puffed on his pipe and read aloud what I had produced that week. How did each sentence sound ? What was the rhythm of each sentence ? ("Read Melville," he said.) He took my work seriously and he expected me to take it seriously, too. I remember laboring through through 12 rewrites of one piece. The effort proved worthwhile. It won the college writing prize that year, as well as the senior class writing prize.
My encounters with Professor Garrapon and Professor Dewing took place 50 years ago. Both must surely have passed away now, for at the time I knew them they were both late middle-aged.
I regret that to either or them I never sufficiently expressed how much I valued and appreciated their teaching.
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