The Teacher who opened my Mind

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What if everyone held class outside on sunny days? Suppose that happened? And from there, Lears went on to draw a picture of life at Medford High School that had people outside on the vast lawn talking away about books and ideas and one thing and another, hanging out, being lazy, being absorbed, thinking hard from time to time, and reveling in the spring. It was Woodstock and Socrates’ agora fused, and Lears spun it out for us, just as he had for McDermott. What if that happened, he asked us? How tragic would it be?

We went outside whenever we chose to after that. It was very odd: I had been at Medford High for three years and I had never seen McDermott lose a round. After class was over that day, Tom Cappalano, the quarterback, said, “You know, Lears can really be an asshole when he wants to be.” In Medford, there were 50 intonations you could apply to the word “asshole.” Spun right, the word constituted high praise.

That year of teaching was the last for Frank Lears. He got married, went to law school, and, I heard, eventually moved to Maine, where he could pursue a life a little akin to the one Thoreau, his longtime idol, managed to lead during his stay at Walden. I haven’t seen Lears in about 25 years. But I do carry around with me the strong sense that the party, the outdoor extravaganza, he invited us to, me and Nora and Dubby and even Jingles McDermott, is still a live possibility. I had great teachers after Frank Lears, some of the world’s most famous in fact, but I never met his equal. What I liked most about him, I suppose, was that for all the minor miracle of what he accomplished with us, he was no missionary: He served us but also himself. His goodness had some edge to it. He got what he wanted out of Medford High, which was a chance to affront his spiritual enemies, though with some generosity, and to make younger people care about the sorts of things he cared about, to pull them out of their parents’ orbit and into his. All good teaching entails some kidnapping.

As well as some sorrow: Good teachers have many motivations, but I suspect that loneliness is often one of them. You need a small group, a coterie, to talk to; unable to find it in the larger world, you try to create it in the smaller sphere of a classroom. Lears, who seemed at times a little lost in his life, a brilliant orphan, did something like that with us.

What Lears taught—or at least what I gleaned from him—is that anything that’s been successfully institutionalized, however rebellious it may seem or however virtuous, is stifling. What’s called subversion only lasts for an instant in a school or a hospital or a home; it’s quickly swept up to become part of the protocol, an element in “the way we do things around here.” At the time, Kesey and Camus collided well enough with the dead protocols of Medford High, but now, for all I know, they fit in fine—alienation has become standard issue.

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