I've always been a Steinbeck fan since reading long ago The Grapes of Wrath'.
'Like captured fireflies'......is taken from his book, America and Americans, a short and BRILLIANT piece he wrote for the california Teachers Journal.
When working with teachers, either in Master's classes at university, or in teacher workshops, I often used this as an opening impetus for discussion.
I love it.
'Like captured fireflies'......is taken from his book, America and Americans, a short and BRILLIANT piece he wrote for the california Teachers Journal.
When working with teachers, either in Master's classes at university, or in teacher workshops, I often used this as an opening impetus for discussion.
I love it.
OK. Enjoy:
My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked “How much longer do I have to go to school?” “About fifteen years,” I said. “Oh! Lord,” he said despondently.
“Do I have to?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s terrible and I’m not going to try to tell you it isn’t. But I can tell you this - - if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”
“Did you find one?”
“I found three, ” I said.
It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and mathematics teacher in high school, my second a professor of creative writing at Stanford and my third was my friend, Ed Ricketts.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artist. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three had these things in common - They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.
I shall speak only of my first teacher because in addition to the other things, she brought discovery. She aroused us to shouting, book waving discussions.
She had the noisiest class in school and she didn’t even seem to know it. We could never stick to the subject, geometry or the chanted recitation of the memorized phyla.
Our speculation ranged the world.
She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.
She was fired and perhaps rightly so, for failing to teach the fundamentals. Such things must be learned. But she left a passion in us for the pure knowledge world and me she inflamed with a curiosity which has never left me.
I could not do simple arithmetic but through her I sensed
that abstract mathematics was very like music. When she was removed, a sadness came over us but the light did not go out.
She left her signature on us, the literature of the teacher who writes on minds.
I have had many teachers who told me soon-forgotten facts but only three who created in me a new thing, a new attitude and a new hunger.
I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.
I can tell my son who looks forward with horror to fifteen years of drudgery that somewhere in the dusty dark a magic may happen that will light up the years… if he is very lucky.
My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked “How much longer do I have to go to school?” “About fifteen years,” I said. “Oh! Lord,” he said despondently.
“Do I have to?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s terrible and I’m not going to try to tell you it isn’t. But I can tell you this - - if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”
“Did you find one?”
“I found three, ” I said.
It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and mathematics teacher in high school, my second a professor of creative writing at Stanford and my third was my friend, Ed Ricketts.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artist. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three had these things in common - They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.
I shall speak only of my first teacher because in addition to the other things, she brought discovery. She aroused us to shouting, book waving discussions.
She had the noisiest class in school and she didn’t even seem to know it. We could never stick to the subject, geometry or the chanted recitation of the memorized phyla.
Our speculation ranged the world.
She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.
She was fired and perhaps rightly so, for failing to teach the fundamentals. Such things must be learned. But she left a passion in us for the pure knowledge world and me she inflamed with a curiosity which has never left me.
I could not do simple arithmetic but through her I sensed
that abstract mathematics was very like music. When she was removed, a sadness came over us but the light did not go out.
She left her signature on us, the literature of the teacher who writes on minds.
I have had many teachers who told me soon-forgotten facts but only three who created in me a new thing, a new attitude and a new hunger.
I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.
I can tell my son who looks forward with horror to fifteen years of drudgery that somewhere in the dusty dark a magic may happen that will light up the years… if he is very lucky.
*California Teachers
Association Journal, November 1955, 51,7. Copyright 1955 by John Steinbeck.
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