Conversations with Great Teachers

1. Teaching in the School Room

Teaching in the School Room 1 “Good teachers have to have a sense of where they are.” John Faggi prep-school english teacher John Faggi has taught English for over twenty years at the College Preparatory School in Oakland, California, one of the preeminent private high schools on the West Coast. Graduates from those years frequently identify him as their best and most memorable high-school teacher. He attended Andover as a scholarship student and later received his BA from Princeton and his MA from Harvard. After serving in the Peace Corps, he taught at the Athenean School in Danville, California, and at Choate. What do you really teach? What I hope to teach is pleasure. Maybe it’s because I am at a school where the kids are pretty able, but I think the teaching of skills is really secondary. It just happens with the work they have to do. What I just want them to do is really see how literature is a way to enjoy life, and to live a better life, because they’re more sensitive to feelings and ideas and the depth of life—you know, as T. S. Eliot said about Dante, the “heights and depths of human emotion.” And when Holden [Holden Caulfield is the narrator in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye] is watching Phoebe go around and around on the carousel and he’s crying, that moment is . . . teaching literature is filled with moments like that, in which life stops and we can look at it. What I really love is when kids at any skill level seem to have a fire lit under them and get excited about something and love it and really enjoy it. I love it when they come into class wanting to say something, wanting to ask something about what we have read—something that isn’t about getting a good grade, that isn’t about how to write the five-paragraph essay. The older I get, the more bored I am with that stuff—it just doesn’t seem very important to me. Sometimes I think I don’t teach certain things as well as I should because I don’t think they’re very important. So I want the kids to enjoy and appreciate and find pleasure. One of my best students ever reminded me of this. Liza is a TA for me in Partners [a summer program to give an academic boost to middle-school-aged underserved students]. When my Partners students were discussing a poem, I heard her say, “Well, what do you like?” And I realized that although I had put several questions on the board, I had 4 | Conversations with Great Teachers not included that one. And I felt a little sheepish. So at the end of class, I said to students, “I overheard Liza say, ‘What do you like?’ and I want to make that the first question you should ask. What gives you pleasure? What’s fun and interesting?” And then when kids get more sophisticated, they can ask a question, and be intrigued by what they don’t understand, and enjoy that. I think that’s another thing I want to teach—a kind of balancing act in which you can learn to appreciate what you don’t understand. Art is not an exact science and it never will be. When it’s taught like one, it’s taught poorly. That’s why I don’t like the five-paragraph essay— because it’s so mechanical. In terms of appreciating literature, the sooner they can live with techniques like paradox and irony, or a consistent contradiction where you can’t decide—it’s this or that, no it’s both—the sooner young students can get to that point, the happier I am, the better I feel I can teach. I think I also want to teach . . . “reverence” is not the right word because it sounds a little sanctimonious, but a kind of appreciation that makes them stop. Because I think life is increasingly fast. The high-tech world is a world that doesn’t encourage concentration of the kind we value, that we’ve grown up with. They don’t grow up with that in their lives. I think I want to teach them slowing down, whether it’s for poetry or anything else. I also believe in certain kinds of principles of...