Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story

The Significance of Reading

45 The Significance of Reading While Bob’s passion for poetry remained undimmed in his senior year, he had realized that he could not emulate a life as fanciful and carefree as that of the poet Shelley. Everyone in the United States was preoccupied by World War II. Many of Bob’s classmates were leaving college to support the war effort. Hundreds of deaf people were already in Akron, Ohio, working at Goodyear and Firestone, which manufactured parts and supplies . Many of Bob’s friends were altar-bound, enticed by promotions and high salaries offered to people employed as war plant workers. Although Bob had entered college with no ambition other than to earn a degree, by his senior year he was giving serious thought to becoming a teacher. Doc had insisted that he would make a good teacher of English, as well as providing a role model for deaf students. When Bob saw his classmates going off to support the war effort, he felt torn. He began to give serious consideration to leaving college early. In an essay for Doc’s advanced English course that year, he summarized how, once again, the professor had come to his rescue: “I still don’t know exactly why I am not wearing a golden wedding 46 Teaching from the Heart and Soul band. . . . Perhaps it was because, like Don Quixote, the gods on Mt. Olympus took pity on me and decided to exhort a Sancho Panza–like professor” to help him make the wisest decision .1 Bob had written to “Burke” Boatner, the superintendent of the American School for the Deaf, who offered him similar advice. Bob’s father, who greatly respected Boatner, also urged his son to stay in college and finish his education. He had more than once remarked how impressed he was with the “literary ” content of Bob’s letters home. It was evident to both his family and his professors that Bob had developed a strong foundation in literature. Still, he did not know what to do with it. Becoming a full-time poet was a luxury he had reluctantly forced himself to reject. “Thank God I listened to these Three Wise Men!” he said later.2 Lloyd Harrison at ASD and Frederick Hughes at Gallaudet were certainly inspirational teachers, but Doc showed a special ability to teach from his heart. A truly great teacher who brought out and cultivated Bob’s innate love of English and literature, Doc “encouraged me to write, write, write—not only for his classes but also for the student publications The Buff and Blue newspaper and Quarterly Literary Issues.”3 Bob had become editor of both the Quarterly Literary Issues and the Gallaudet yearbook . Doc’s encouragement to study the works of Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and the Americans— Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Sandburg, Frost, and others had helped to develop the range and quality of his verse. Even though there was no strong personal bond between Bob and Frederick Hughes, this deaf professor also had an influence on Bob’s thinking about entering the teaching profession . “Teddy,” as he was affectionately known to his Gallaudet The Significance of Reading 47 students and colleagues, was much more than an ordinary teacher. He was witty and, to Bob’s delight, a sports lover. For many years, Hughes coached the Gallaudet football and basketball teams as well as the track squad. Throughout his time at Gallaudet, Bob remained spellbound by Hughes’s mastery of sign—his ability to combine sign language, English, and mime. Bob took all the economics and dramatics courses the professor taught and took every opportunity to attend Hughes’s lectures onstage at the Literary Society meetings and in the college Chapel Talks on Sunday nights. When Bob thought about becoming a teacher, he aspired to emulate Hughes’s magical style, using the whole bag of tricks in teaching the King’s English to deaf students: motivating them to develop their expressive talents in writing, and taking it a step further by dramatizing their presentations of poetry and short stories onstage in the theater. Because of Hughes’s influence, and his faith in Bob as a student , Bob believes all this became a reality. Perhaps the most important piece of writing Bob produced during his college years was an eight-page essay titled “The Significance of the Reading Problem.” This article, which began as a term paper for...