In my junior and senior years of high school, I was knocked down and then altered by the murders of King and Kennedy, by a sinister and fear-mongering Nixon, by the televised violence of the Chicago convention, and by Vietnam, by its daily, useless devastation. I read Ramparts, Fanon and Cleaver, Hunter S. Thompson, Marcuse, histories of the War. I marched in demonstrations and engaged in long arguments. Somehow, in circumstances I no longer remember, during the summer between my senior year and freshman year of college, I agreed to a public debate with a Nixon supporter to be held in a pavilion at a local Benedictine Monastery.
I prepared as if I were readying for a verbal fist fight — memorizing facts and figures, lines of defense, versions of attack. One friend drove me there. No one else showed up. We stood and looked out on the empty road and not one car appeared. What is notable here is not that this episode was a bust, but that I had no fear of speaking before an audience of strangers, some of whom would have been hostile. I do not understand why, but this has always been the case — I have ever been confident when called upon to speak in front of large numbers of people. No matter what manner of schlub I had felt myself to be, no matter how goofy or timid I was elsewhere, throw me before rows of waiting strangers, and I could spin words like an Irishman long native to his local pub, made for the task. Maybe the job was waiting for me all that time.
I did not set out to become a teacher. No long time dream time for me of ‘educating young minds’, of being ‘the light of knowledge that shines in the darkness’. I would have laughed at such puerile idealism and been embarrassed at such narcissism. No, super mature me first thought of the Marines, then a fireman, then a philosopher. I had not one fraction of one notion of what I wanted to be. I was Lloyd Dobler well before “Say Anything”. I had a pretty good idea of what I didn’t want to do — factory work had cured me of one route, I could not imagine selling anything, it never occurred to me to apply to the State Police*, I had not taken the courses necessary to throw myself at medical school, and I had never ridden a horse so becoming a Wyoming cowboy was out.
In my sophomore year of college, I had to make a decision on a major. In the back of my mind I carry my father’s Depression experience admonition even now: “Find a job where they can’t lay you off and where they have good benefits.” As if I were tossing darts at a board, I haphazardly let my hand check off “Education” and “Communications” as my career goal: Mike Wall, High School Teacher! I think I was sure I would never have to take the classroom step, but then I had just turned 19 and had no more facility for forethought then a goose.
I began taking education courses, those classes best designed to make one hate the very idea of teaching, taught by windbags and the harmless walking dead, dried up sticks of professors who had given up caring about actual teaching when great lizards roamed the planet. Every class emphasized to me how easy it was to simply pile up lists and plans and objectives and rules and evaluations and grades and domains and tests and assignment designs and classroom management strategies and grading rubrics group work handouts on mimeograph paper that turned your hands blue and whose chemicals got you high or gave you a headache. The only good result of those classes was that almost all of my fellow travelers also understood them to be pointless. You had to get the grade. That was all. The economy was tanking. This was the early ‘70’s. Teaching jobs were rare. You needed A’s. Get the A, get the job. Then figure out what on this good green earth you had done to yourself and to those poor kids sitting before you like the sly predators you remembered yourself as having once been.
*That took a while. After 8 years of teaching, loving the job still, but being restless, I called the PSP recruitment office to inquire about applying to the Academy. I was serious. I had thought this through. I spoke with a PSP corporal, a young woman. We talked for a while. Then, with the application to be readied to be mailed, she asked me my birthdate. I was less than one month past the top age the PSP accepted. If I had made that call even two months before ….
