This is an essay that I didn’t want to write. And if I wrote it, I didn’t know whether I’d share it. As I write these first sentences, I’m still not convinced that I’ll share what I write. But I’ll write and then decide. If you’re reading this, you know what I decided.
I write to honor Eugene Smith, a friend/mentor/guide/teacher who taught me the most important lesson I learned as a teacher. My almost-40-year friendship with him seems too personal to share – especially since I just learned that he passed away last October. He was 95 when he passed. Though we met many years ago and lost touch for a while, we reconnected in 2011. The last time I had lunch with him was in 2020, just after his birthday and just as the pandemic was starting to keep all of us apart. Then we exchanged e-mail messages during the pandemic until he stopped responding. We lost touch during 2021, and while I reached out a few times, I figured the non-reply was because he was getting more frail and unable to reply. Until that point, he remained vibrant while looking for opportunities to engage in the world around him.
His retirement years inspired me. One of the joys of my life was being able to edit one of the books he self-published in his late 80s and early 90s. He still had words he wanted to contribute to the world even as he transitioned into his ninth decade. His last book, for which he asked me to write a review and which I read drafts of chapters as he wrote them, was especially meaningful since it was a lightly fictionalized version of his own journey to becoming an educator. In my review, I wrote:
This book is worth reading because of the connection it makes between the humanity of a teacher and the work of a teacher – and how those two complement each other. It is not a recipe for becoming a teacher, but it does offer an image of one teacher that is inspiring enough to encourage someone considering the profession. That image allows the reader glimpses into how that teacher has been able to sustain himself while continuing to teach well into a stage of life when people are expected not to contribute to the world around them.
He gave copies of that book to people who attended his ninetieth birthday celebration. In its pages I learned much about what shaped him. That allowed me to discover his life well beyond our professional relationship. You can read about some of his professional accomplishments in the obituary that’s online. However, I now choose to write about the personal journey he helped me make from someone who understood the technical skills of teaching to someone who came to see the importance and value of seeing teaching as principally an act of building relationships.
I’d been teaching for five or six years when I met Eugene. At times, I hear or read someone claim that teachers had a teacher in their life who inspired them. That wasn’t true for me until I met Eugene – well into the start of my career. I often comment that the teachers I encountered throughout my own education taught me how not to teach. I became a teacher to ensure that learners wouldn’t have the same soul-denting experiences I had in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education. Within a few years of starting my career, people told me I was successful at the work. By the time I met Eugene, I’d figured out how to write and deliver lessons, how to organize a curriculum, how to manage a classroom, and how to create engaging sessions. So I didn’t need anyone to teach me the technical side of the work, though he did help me add to those skills. What I learned from Eugene was something more significant than the skills he helped me hone, though.
I majored in English literature as an undergraduate, and that degree left me wholly unprepared to teach secondary students how to write – which seemed more critical than teaching them about Chaucer or Wordsworth. That’s why I applied to and was accepted in a master’s degree program where I could focus my coursework in composition and rhetoric at the University of Washington. I took courses in composition theory and rhetoric, and I met Eugene as he taught one of those courses. In my first year in the degree program, I also applied for the Puget Sound Writing Program’s summer fellowship program where teachers from the region spent six summer weeks focusing on learning about the teaching of writing. In the year after I finished the PSWP summer fellowship, Eugene became the program’s director. So we had many common points of contact.
I learned about grammars from him – and, no, that’s not a typo. He was the first to teach me that grammar is an organization system, and that there are many, formal organizational systems beyond the traditional, Latin-based system that’s typically (and badly) taught in schools. He, for example, exposed me to Chomsky’s transformational grammar that remains critical to how I think about how people learn and apply language. And he taught me about Vygotsky and the connections between thinking and language. It all revolutionized how I thought about what my students did when I asked them to write – and what I needed to do to support them. But those weren’t his biggest lesson for me.
Because I was completing the master’s degree in summers and evening, finishing the degree took me a few years. I outlasted two advisors (one was hired away and the other retired), and the English department eventually assigned Eugene as my advisor. I was happy about that since I’d gotten to know him a little through his courses and as he became the PSWP director. I didn’t need career advising since I had a pretty good idea that I’d be a secondary English teacher for the rest of my career (a good lesson to me, now looking back, on the foibles of career planning). But I did enjoy meeting with him and talking about the work of a teacher. He always had great insights from his own experiences and passion about teaching. I’d share what I was doing in my classes, and we’d discuss what that was working and what wasn’t.
When I met Eugene, I taught in a semi-rural area that was about 50 miles south of the university, and there weren’t any peers with whom I could have those discussions. For example, I told him about the plays my students were writing, and how I, as a personal exercise, wrote an introductory act for one student play in the students’ colloquial dialect employing iambic pentameter to show students meter while stretching my writing skills. At one point, he made the trek to my school to see what I was doing and spend the day with me – not as part of a course or as an evaluation. He wanted to see what the school and kids and classrooms where I taught were like. For two summers, he hired me to teach PSWP’s summer writing institute for kids. He and I had a connection unlike any other I’d had with any teacher to that point. He was genuinely interested in more than papers I wrote and comments I made in a graduate seminar. And more than the lessons of those seminars, our connection contained the most important lesson he taught me.
Eugene taught me that teaching is always about those relationships. It wasn’t that I could or should ignore a course’s content. Learners came to my class to learn whatever content I taught, and having the skill to create a learning environment that engaged them around that content was important. But helping students develop a relationship to that content requires a relationship with each student where they see my care for them and their success first. If you’ve been a student of mine, and you felt that I wanted to know you well enough to understand your needs and to address those needs, thank Eugene. He was the one who modeled that for me and taught me the primary truth that teaching is about relationships. I’ve worked to recreate that for the students I was fortunate to have taught because of how much his care for me meant to me. I may not have been successful at that with all of my students, but it always has been a goal for me, whether I was teaching secondary students, undergraduates or graduate students.
So this is a note of thanks to an amazing friend who taught me the most important lesson in the profession where I spent most of my working life. And I decided to publish it because I want that thanks to be public. Every teacher should be as fortunate as I was to have known and benefitted from such an extraordinary friend.
