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Tributes to my Teachers listed in chronological order  Eleanor Spiers at Spalding Drive Elementary school in Fulton County, north of Atlanta, seems more remarkable to me every year that I teach seventh grade myself. We had no books, not even workbooks, only a classroom set of very dull grammar exercises. We sat in neat rows. We met her class just before lunch. We met her class just after we met for "spelling," and my classmates mercilessly reduced our soft-spoken spelling teacher to tears by interrupting and ridiculing her. (I didn't -- that class was agony for me.) But we'd file across the hall to Mrs. Spiers, who never raised her voice, never punished anyone, and never had to. We never interrupted. We never misbehaved. How did she do it? That's a mystery to me even today. A student once paid me the compliment, "You're strict, but it doesn't feel like it." That's how it felt with Mrs. Spiers, and she was much more successful at that than I've ever been. What she taught was, I'm afraid, superfluous. My verbs had agreed since third grade, and I'd used commas and quotes correctly since fourth grade at least. From her I learned easily to diagram sentences, and never did find any use for doing so. What she did for her students, however, was to encourage what was good in our writing. It's the same technique that Dr. Sclater would use to teach me music composition (read more). From time to time, we would take a break from grammar exercises, and she would have us write stories that we could read aloud to the class. My first one was, I'm afraid, like much else that I've done since, more sermon than story. It tells of a boy who wanders off alone in a public place and gets in trouble with delinquents. He escapes, barely, and concludes that he has learned his lesson. She praised it to the class as a prime example of "dry humor." I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained, "The story seems to be serious, but that's what's funny. It makes fun of that kind of preachy story that tries to teach children a lesson." She was wrong (or, as I think now, she was pretending to be wrong). I truly had taken my preachy story seriously. But I tried from then on to live up to her opinion of my work. top      Frank Boggs taught me in "chorale" at Westminster Schools from 1973 to 1977, but he has remained my mentor and friend to the present day. If my deepest ambition is to write sacred music that communicates mystery and grandeur of God, that's my response to glorious music that I learned to love through Mr. Boggs. Throughout my adult life, I've spent almost every Wednesday night in choir rehearsals, always seeking the joy of hearing my voice blend with others, creating a piece of music that glorifies God in its expression and craftsmanship -- regardless who else may hear it. Truly, my religious faith comes from music more than from scripture or doctrine. If I love musical theatre (not just Broadway, but opera, too), that comes from Mr. Boggs, too. He directed me in OKLAHOMA and LITTLE MARY SUNSHINE, and he has fed my interest in Sondheim with articles and programs since 1975. He stretched me by giving me the responsibility to direct a suite of Sondheim songs and the spring concert in 1977. My first song was a lyric that he set to music for me. Singing is not all that happened in choir rehearsals. Mr. Boggs exposed us to music, cartoons, reviews of theatrical productions, memories of performers, and discussions of religious meanings behind music. He once asked us, "Why did Vivaldi set the happy words 'peace on earth, goodwill to men' to slow, somber minor key music?" (I'd never thought to ask why any artist does anything -- and now it's what I always do.) At fifteen, I liked performances that were loud, fast, flashy, with some growls and maybe some screaming thrown in. Then I saw him in concert. I and my fellow members of the Westminster Ensemble had performed some numbers at a church in Tennessee, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. He'd told us that he'd be "singing a few numbers," but we realized later that he'd been kind: we'd been his warm up act. I remember that he sat at the piano, sang a song or two. Then, while he played some chords, he described for the audience how his grandfather used to sing a certain hymn while tending his garden. Then he lifted his hands from the keys, turned on the bench towards the audience, and sang softly, unaccompanied, a hymn of anguish: Oh, Lord, if indeed I am thine, If Thou art my sun and my song, Say why do I languish and pine? And why are my winters so long? Drive these dark clouds from my sky, Thy soul-soothing presence, restore -- Or take me unto Thee on high, Where winter and clouds are no more. That night I saw the difference between showiness and authenticity, the same difference between entertainment and art. He also gathered the young people in his care to discuss what he called "Quaker Questions," allowing us to share our memories, concerns, and questions -- bonding us and helping us to grow up. I remember asking him about the intense friendships I was enjoying at the age of sixteen: "Do adults have the same kind of friendship?" He answered honestly that the intensity probably would dissipate with time, but that friendship could deepen. Of course, now we're living that truth. top    Stephen Sondheim once remarked that making art and teaching are both attempts to share a vision of the world. In this sense, the artist Sondheim has been my teacher. His music and lyrics for the show A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC revised my view of the world. No production I've seen has ever lived up to the one I imagined, so probably it was a good thing that I missed my first opportunity to see the show. It was 1974, on a visit to Broadway with Atlanta's school of performing arts. The school's pianist Paul Ford invited me to see NIGHT MUSIC with him, but I saw a rock musical instead. Later, on Paul's insistence, I bought the original cast album. At first, I wasn't interested. I preferred loud, flashy, blatantly emotional stuff. But NIGHT MUSIC conjures a twilit world where love is the only concern, and where an orchestra fills the air "like perfume" (as Sondheim intended). A month later, nagged by the refrain to "A Weekend in the Country," I gave the album a second listen. This time, I "got it." I remember the moment when I saw how everything fit together perfectly. It's in the song "Now," when the lawyer Fredrik plans a "suggestive" strategy to put his wife into an amorous mood: In view of her penchant for something romantic, Desade is too trenchant and Dickens too frantic and Stendhal would ruin the plan of attack as there isn't much blue in The Red and the Black... In just those last two lines, there are four rhymes,a sly pun, with vocabulary that I had to open a dictionary to appreciate; and yet it all seems conversational, specifically suited to a late-Victorian Swedish lawyer who would likely have Stendhal on his bedside table. And though the accompaniment builds to a passionate climax here, it all grows methodically from the very first notes of the strings -- mirroring the lawyer's logical thought process. Seeing all that in an instant, I gave a little laugh. It was a pivotal moment for my life. I'd been a scornful atheist, but then I came to an important conclusion: there's more to life than mere matter. Evolution could not explain Sondheim's imagination, or the drive to work out so thoroughly the small wonderful details of that one song, or even the impulse to create such a perfect piece of music, words, and theatre. Nor could Darwin explain the pleasure I got from apprehending it all. Listening to the NIGHT MUSIC recording, I concluded that there must be a Creator, and Sondheim's art is a glimpse of the Creator's image. From then on, I followed strands from Sondheim outward to other interests. Recordings of his music by Cleo Laine and Bobby Short led me into jazz (thanks to tips from my chorus teacher Frank Boggs) and, from there, the great American songbook of standards. Composers compared to Sondheim brought me to Bernstein, Ravel, Reich, Janacek, Britten; and each of those pointed me to others, until I appreciated centuries of music. His artistry with words set a standard as I learned to appreciate Shakespeare, Beckett, Stoppard, and Updike. I studied music composition. The stories that I wrote for my Master's degree in Professional Writing connect to his art. Sondheim taught me directly once, as my college counselor. On another tip from Frank Boggs, I wrote Sondheim a letter asking for guidance about selecting a college. In my letter, I quoted an interview in which his mother said that young Steve always wanted to write words, compose music, and perform: "He wanted to be Noel Coward." I told him I was the same way, that I wanted to be him, and I asked for his advice. He responded that, first, it was his mother who probably wanted to be Noel Coward. Beyond that, he said to skip music appreciation, because even a little knowledge of music theory would do more for me than any course in listening (an insight that proved true, and that I use to guide me when I teach music to children). A year later, I wrote asking if my friends and I could meet him during a brief stay in New York (see the result here). He's had a few more notes from me in the decades since then, as when I heard the recording of SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, and I've always received a kind reply. Every angle of my inner life converges on the moment that I "got" A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. Writing music for theatre and for worship; helping students to create art and to apprehend history with an artist's imagination: what else do I ever think about? what are all my daydreams? how do I spend my free time? It all meets in the work of Stephen Sondheim. Read about the special meaning of Sondheim's SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. I finally got to see A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC on Broadway. See my blog, The Word Sanctuary Go to www.sondheim.org for a site created by hundreds who appreciate Sondheim much as I do.   Paul Ford soon left Atlanta for New York, where he quickly became the pianist of choice for Broadway shows. Looking up from the pit orchestra of INTO THE WOODS in 1987, he recognized me and warmed up with a song I'd done with him in ninth grade. Sondheim's ASSASSINS originally played with just synthesizer, drums, and Paul at the piano. He's currently touring the country as accompanist/arranger for Mandy Patinkin's recital of Sondheim songs. (back)      Dr. John M. Clum at Duke University showed me a deeper way to enjoy literature when he became the first English teacher to ask me a question I couldn't answer: "Don't you see the structure?" I was puzzled. "You mean, how many chapters the book has?" Yes, he said, that's part of it. "You mean, whether it's in first person?" Yes, he said, that's part of it. I ran out of ideas then, but I spent the rest of my semesters at Duke trying to find out what he meant. For the first time, after years of getting an A for essays that simply stated what was obvious to me, I started to use every essay assignment as a challenge to work out ideas that were new to me. I took risks, and, all of a sudden, the student who knew everything about art realized that he had barely begun to appreciate it (for the same lesson applies to music and visual arts). Dr. Clum led me to the right destination following the pivotal wrong turn in my life, the very same day it happened. Nothing in my freshman year had excited me or challenged me so much as "Music 101-102" taught by the university chapel's gentle and jovial organist Fenner Douglass. On the first day of classes in my sophomore year at Duke, I took my seat in "Music 103," anticipating that I would declare a music major and pursue a career in music composition. Then the head of the Music department entered and announced, "If you're interested in composing music, get out now: this department is for scholars and performers only." I stood, walked out, and phoned Dr. Clum to enroll in his class as a drama major. Years later, I had to recognize that music was my true love, and I still regret not withdrawing from Duke right then and transferring to some school where I could have pursued music composition. I may have made a wrong turn, but Dr. Clum led me to the same destination anyway. (As Sondheim wrote it in a song: "I chose and my world was shaken / So what? / The choice may have been mistaken, / The choosing was not. . .") Besides the insight about "structure" in art, he taught me these lessons: Following a monologue that I performed for his class, using all the actors' tricks I knew, he gently pointed out that I was "acting" instead of trying to communicate what was specific to the text. That was the first of many times that he confronted me with how much more I had to learn about things I'd thought I knew. When he cast me as the husband of the heroine in the nineteenth-century classic HEDDA GABLER, he created a seminar for the cast so that we could study the social and artistic context of that play. Rehearsing and studying for four months, I experienced depth in a role for the first time. Another experience I had for the first time in that course: He gave me the first grade lower than "A" that I ever received on a paper about literature. I was indignant. In a conference, he said, "Lord knows, it's a good paper. I just expected more from you." That "B" actually precipitated a crisis for me, and Dr. Clum was again there to help me towards the right goal. After I'd calmed down, I recognized how right he was. After eight years of secondary education, I'd never had to think in a literature course. All of my work had been reporting or describing what was obvious to me. I went back to Dr. Clum, who was also my academic advisor, and asked him about that. His answer was simple: Enroll in a certain unusual course taught by General Irving B. Holley, and that course redeemed all the others, and became the basis of everything I've taught my students in history and literature courses ever since (read more about General Holley). He did me a favor by casting me (for a class performance) in a play by Pinter. I hated the play, I hated the role, I didn't understand it, it seemed stupid, it seemed sordid -- and then he helped me to understand how the words could say one thing but mean another, how characters can use words for weapons (or defenses). Then his question, "What animal is your character like?" got me to think about a cat, with its caution, its alertness, its laziness, its hedonism. Portraying that part in that play taught me the main lessons that I've been imparting to my drama students ever since. In a playwriting seminar, I treasure above all the conference I had in his office on the top floor of the old Carr building. My play about a busybody secretary named "Lotty" was going nowhere. It was a true-to-life depiction of real experiences I'd had in a summer job at a department store -- but, just like real life, it had no direction. "What can I do?" I asked him. Without speaking, he rose from his desk and closed the door to the hallway. Then, smiling, leaning up against the door, he said in a low voice, "Kill Lotty." I laughed. First, it was such a shock, and it felt like a real conspiracy. Then, I saw pretty quickly that he was right. Murder would be an exaggeration of what we all felt, and that would make our feelings more clear than my accurate report of actual events. I'd learned how something can be more true than actual. Dr. Clum continues to write plays and books, while teaching classes at Duke. The academic program in Drama that he created now thrives. The story of his struggle to raise drama from a club activity to an academic discipline was the subject of my researched paper for Dr. Holley, which can be found in Duke's archives -- listed on the archives web page. I hear from Dr. Clum that my history "Dramatic Changes" stands today as a reference for researchers. top    Gen. Irving B. Holley The opening gambit in Dr. Holley's class shook me up more than any other single thing any teacher ever did. I knew immediately that my adviser John Clum (read more) had been right: "He'll make a scholar of you." Up to that point, I'd had no idea what that meant. He welcomed us to a seminar on the meaning of "the liberal arts," a phrase that meant nothing to me, though I'd spent six years at two "liberal arts" institutions (Westminster, Duke). We would have readings to do for our class discussions (and shame and woe to anyone who ever came to class unprepared to discuss the readings in depth!), but we would have no quizzes, no tests, and only one graded assignment, to write a research paper. The first draft would be due in December; the second draft would be due in May. My eight classmates and I had been sitting at a seminar table for about five minutes while this wiry, feisty little general with cotton-white hair and thick glasses spoke to us. According to the schedule, we would be there for the next two hours. But what would we do all that time? Then he set an 8x10 black-and-white photograph on the table. "As we pass this photograph around, I want you to make observations. You first." He handed it to me. "I see Civil War soldiers around a cannon," I said. "That," he said firmly, "was not an observation. It was an inference. We'll do those later. What do you see?" Chastened, I said that I observed what appeared to be a cannon. He nodded his approval, and I passed the picture to the student on my right. Each one of us observed a detail. The ninth student had a tough time observing something that the rest of us hadn't seen. Then the picture returned to Gen. Holley. We were relieved to have passed our first test, and waited to hear the point of it. "Now, do it again." He passed the picture to me once more. The picture made the rounds three or four more times, as we saw more and more details that we hadn't noticed before. Then he passed it around several more times for us to make inferences from all the details. What we did with that picture -- noticing details, drawing conclusions -- is what we then did with facts found in our research. He said that, by making us dig deeply under a "little postage stamp-sized" piece of the history of Duke University, we would learn one most valuable lesson: how much there is to know about everything. Or, how little we know about anything. My first draft, grandly titled "A History of Drama at Duke," was the longest paper I'd ever written. There were twenty-some typed pages, with four pages of additional notes and sources. I'd read old news articles, interviewed retired professors who remembered early plays on campus, and I'd put together what I thought was a finely-written essay. But on the title page, Dr. Holley wrote a whole paragraph about how the title mis-represented the paper. On every page he pointed out facts not verified, inferences not based on facts, whole decades of information that I'd skimmed over. He spent more time writing the comments than I'd spent writing the paper. Especially he asked me over and over again, "How do you know this?" And ultimately he asked, "Okay, if this is factual, then, SO WHAT?" This paper became my obsession, and my pleasure. The final draft contained not a single sentence from the first draft, it focused much more narrowly on just one thread -- how an academic program emerged from one of the many drama clubs on campus -- and was forty-some pages long with forty more pages of notes and sources, with an appendix listing every play performed between 1920s and 1979. That paper remains in the Duke Archives, and I'm proud to see it listed in their web site, and to learn that my work has served as a resource for other researchers in the years since. There are two other anecdotes about him that I'd like to preserve here. We came to class once, prepared to discuss a sixty-page essay that he'd reserved for us in the library to read. He surprised us by telling us to take out a piece of paper for a pop quiz! He asked only one question: "Define 'belletristic.'" None of us had any idea. "Yet you came to class after reading that essay, and seeing that word, and none of you was even curious as to what it meant?" He was scornful. How could we hope to learn if we skipped over what we didn't know? I never made that mistake again. He taught us to be careful to keep records of every source, every idea, and to keep these labeled and dated. I went out to buy a file cabinet, I started to use folders for different topics, and my whole approach to school work, and even to play, changed. I had to laugh, though, when he called me in for a conference. After some pleasantries, we both took out pads and we each made notes about what the other man was saying! It seemed to me that we could have saved time simply by writing down our own words and exchanging pads. In my own teaching career, I've tried to give my junior high students a sense of what General Holley gave me. top    Dr. James Sclater At age twenty-eight, I had to admit to myself that musical scores, not words, were what I wanted to write more than anything else. I thought I'd quit teaching and go back to college. Fortunately for me, a top-rate composer lived nearby and he took me on as a private student. He told me not to quit doing what I loved, and he advised, "If you get a Ph.D. in music composition, you'll still end up teaching," adding, "unless you're Andrew Lloyd Webber." Seriously, he assured me that I'd learn as well by composing what I wanted as by reading about others' works or by doing workbook assignments. There's a lesson in that for all teachers. Dr. Sclater taught by encouragement, and that's not the same thing as praise. He'd study what I'd composed, withholding comment for what seemed to me a long time. He'd ask questions about why I'd written certain passages. Finally, he'd point to a portion of my work and say, "Now, that is interesting!" and he'd point out how good it was, in ways that I wasn't even aware of. Then he'd advise me to "do more with it." That's as close to praise -- or disapproval -- as I ever got. Still, I always left his office feeling that, though it would take work, there would be something good and my own at the end of my labors. That is, he gave me courage to go on. Here's what I wrote about Dr. Sclater in the preface to my Master's portfolio: My musical composition teacher, Dr. James Sclater, freed me right away from a misconception. Composition was not about fulfilling grand harmonic designs, though music theory class and program notes at the symphony might give that impression, just as English literature classes can give us the impression that Shakespeare one day thought, "How can I explore the theme of death? I know! Hamlet!" Instead, musical composition is about playing with sounds the way children might invent a game with some found object. "Find something that sounds good and develop it," Dr. Sclater said. But he cautioned, "You need rules, even if you have to make up your own." For example of both principles, Dr. Sclater showed me a stripped-down notation of Brahms's Second Symphony, final movement. He pointed to the start, a flourish of just twenty notes. For the remainder of the movement, Brahms tosses around the first four pitches; repeats, transposes, segments, elongates, shortens, and reverses them. Each new use leads to another musical episode, until he moves on to do the same with another distinctive passage from that opening flourish. Dr. Sclater's punch line was that the opening theme itself grew from the bass part in the first measure of the symphony! But one idea's leading to another helter-skelter doesn't satisfy an audience's need to feel a piece's movement towards a goal, just as a game without rules is only chaos. For this example, Brahms followed models that limited his options of key, length, tempo, and final chord. Dr. Sclater gave me another useful piece of advice, another way to use material economically. "Never think of just one song," he told me. "Make it a suite." Dr. Sclater is mentioned in my acknowledgement below. To go to Dr. Sclater's own web site, with links to hear his music, link here. top    Ken Bolinsky joined our faculty at Walker School as upper school drama director and Chair of the Arts department four years ago. One sign of his leadership literally is a sign on my classroom's wall. It's a photograph of Rodin's most familiar image with the heading, "What does it mean to think like an artist?" The lower school's art teacher distributed copies of this poster following a day-long retreat that Ken organized for our department. Before that meeting, I knew my colleagues in the department by name, barely. At the retreat, we found common terms, skills, knowledge, history, and values that we could all highlight in our courses. We borrowed from the set of national standards for arts education, which Ken had helped to develop. I was new to the department then, and I had inherited a curriculum in which "drama" meant "acting scenes" and little more, but Ken fired us with ambition to step out of our arts niches, to make ourselves central to the entire curriculum. Since then, I've used the Rodin poster to inspire my drama students when they begin their work that now involves them in play writing, composing, designing, critiquing, and, yes, acting. top "Acknowledgements" W. Scott Smoot, A Writing Teacher Writes a portfolio completing work for the Master's of Arts of Professional Writing at Kennesaw State Universitytop I am grateful to my instructors and classmates in Kennesaw University's MAPW program. Robert Hill alternated encouragement with probing questions that made me squirm to explain myself to myself. Greg Johnson discerned precisely what I'd hoped to achieve in my stories before telling me, gently, that I had not quite achieved it. Todd Harper's sequence of assignments and his innovative use of computers during class helped me to synthesize years of teaching experience into practical form. In their different fields of creative writing and composition studies, JoAllen Bradham and Susan Hunter share the same great teacher's quality: I would sacrifice weekends, sleep, and meals rather than disappoint them. The Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project has opened my eyes to ways that a teacher can share expertise outside of the classroom. Its director Sarah Robbins is a kind of educational matchmaker, finding new venues for teachers, myself included, to share their talents. She also helped me through a point of deep discouragement when I doubted that I had a place in the teaching profession. Darlene Luke, armed with a phone and a mouse, broke through paper barriers that kept me out of the program and, three years later, those that wouldn't let me graduate. top At the Walker School, administrators Don Robertson and Nancy Calhoun all but ordered me to get my Master's, and paved the way via the school's generous faculty development fund. Colleague Kim Ragan gave moral support and specific encouragement for my approach to teaching English.top There are other friends and mentors who have not seen a word of this portfolio, but who shaped the imagination that conceived it. Jim Sclater's teachings about music, and his patient instruction of me, gave me new models both for writing and for teaching. John Clum at Duke University showed me a deeper way to enjoy literature when he became the first English teacher to ask me a question I couldn't answer: "Don't you see the structure?" For her example of self-discipline and risk-taking, I offer a tip of the finished hat to Leesha Faulkner. Teacher Eleanor Spiers made me feel like a professional writer in seventh grade. Five years earlier than that, my mother patiently typed my stories, and my father led me to earn my first certificate of the profession, a rejection slip from Little Golden Books. He also gave me my first initial after his favorite writer W. Somerset Maugham, and I thank him both for the W. and for his thirty years' self-restraint before telling me that my course in life had been pre-determined. top

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