My Portions of a Summer Service from 1999
Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
David Mix Barrington


READING [from _Anne of Avonlea_, by L. M. Montgomery]

(Anne is returning home after
her first day as a schoolteacher):

"Well, how did you get along?" Marilla wanted to know.
"Ask me that a month later and I may be able to tell you.  I can't
now... I don't know myself...  I'm too near it.  My thoughts feel
as if they had been all stirred up until they were thick and muddy.
The only thing I feel really sure of having accomplished today is that 
I taught Cliffie Wright that A is A.  He never knew it before.  Isn't
it something to have started a soul along a path that may end in
Shakespeare and _Paradise Lost_?"


SERMON SEGMENT:

I have a number of romantic images of education in my head, mostly
from 19th century fiction.  I think of Tom Brown at Rugby School in 
England in the 1830's, where Thomas Arnold was replacing a variety 
of brutal traditions and creating the model for my own small boys'
school, Roxbury Latin.  I think of David Powlett-Jones in Delderfield's
novel _To Serve Them All My Days_, who emerges from the trenches of World
War I to find a new meaning for his life in devotion to his students and
his school.  But mostly, I think of Anne of Green Gables in her one-room
schoolhouse on Prince Edward Island, as a student and later as a teacher.

You may know that my daughter Julia and I just performed in a musical
adapted from Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel about an orphan girl in 19th-century
Canada.  (A novel that is a particular favorite in Japan, where we performed,
but that's another story.)  I played Anne's first teacher, Mr. Phillips.
Mr. Phillips isn't much of a role model as a teacher, I'm afraid.  His
two concerns are maintaining some kind of order in the classroom and working
with one particular student, a girl he later marries.  His only interest in 
Anne is punishing her when she breaks a slate over a boy's head.

Fortunately Anne gets a new, better teacher in Act II.  Miss Stacy (played
by my friend Betty Wolfson) shows up and holds her first class outside in
the schoolyard.  In a rousing dance number, she urges her students to "open
the window, sweep out the cobwebs, open your mind to what is going on around
you".  Anne is so inspired that she becomes a star student and follows Miss
Stacy into the profession.

What do I find so romantic about these images?  The schools are small ---
very small in Anne's case.  There is a cohesive community dedicated to 
learning.  And all these teachers seem to have a pretty good idea of what
they want to teach.

The nature of a school community is a subject for a whole sermon at least.
A teacher helps set the values of his or her community:  indifference for 
Mr. Phillips, passion for learning for Miss Stacy and Anne, muscular
Christianity for Thomas Arnold, and human decency for David Powlett-Jones,
in both the political and personal spheres.  What are the values of today's
schools?

I know everyone in this room, and especially every teacher, has thought long
and hard about the Columbine massacre and what it might mean.  Right after it
happened, there were some moving statements about the culture that drove 
those boys to insanity, a culture of conformity and bullying that rewarded
the worst and suppressed the best in human nature.  I was amazed
at how many successful academics of my acquaintance would admit to 
fantasizing about blowing up their high school.  Now my high school wasn't
like that at all.  Do I have Thomas Arnold to thank for that?  I expect we'll
hear more about this when we open the floor for discussion later.

But I want to end by trying to explain _what_ I want to teach, which says a
lot about _why_ I teach.  My subject is mathematics and computer science, 
but I think the core of what I want to teach transcends subject matter.  I
like to think that Miss Stacy, who had to cover the whole curriculum, would
agree with me.  Here goes: three things I want to teach.

The first is how to look at the world.  If in Miss Stacy's nature study
class you encounter a caterpillar on a leaf, how do you see it?  There is
something to be said for seeing it with the eyes of a child, but opening the
window means being able to see it with other eyes.  The eyes of a scientist
bring the knowledge of its habits and life cycle.  The eyes of an artist try
to capture how it looks.  The eyes of a poet try to express its being there
in a way no one else can.  And of course my nineteenth century teachers want
their students also to see the caterpillar with the eyes of a faithful 
Christian, as part of God's ordered world.

The second thing is how to use your inheritance as a member of a civilization.
You are a member of American civilization, English-speaking civilization, and
human civilization, and you are heir to all of its treasures.  All the stories
Sara spoke of, our wonderful language and hopefully others, art, music, 
mathematics, science, technology, they are all yours if you will open 
yourself up to them.
Matthew Arnold, the son of Tom Brown's headmaster, said that his job as a
critic was "to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the
world".  I think that's a fine mission for a teacher.

The final thing is how to figure things out.  You, the student, can figure
things out --- it's useful and it's fun.  We teachers can show you the tools
and give you practice, on toy problems and increasingly on real problems.
But what we really have to do is give you the confidence to think things 
through, to open the window to your own blend of discipline and creativity.
Because, of course, this world needs all the problem-solvers it can get...