The Teacher who opened my Mind

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One pays for the kind of mental exhilaration that Lears initiated in his students. One pays in self-doubt and isolation, in the suspicion that what seems to be true resistance is merely a perverse substitute for genuine talent, a cheap way of having something to say. Lears’s path, so appealing in its first steps, separated me from my family, cut me loose from religion and popular faith, sent me adrift beyond the world bordered by TV and piety and common sense. One step down that road followed another, and now, at 50, I probably could not turn around if I wished to.

 Still, the image I most often hit on when I think about Lears glows brightly. It’s late spring, a gloomy dead day. He’s standing beside the beat-up phonograph at the back of the room with a record he’s brought in by the Incredible String Band. I dislike the record and open my book, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which has not been assigned in any class, and disappear into it. He cranks the music just a little louder. I keep reading. But then, curious, I raise my head. The racket of the String Band floods in. And there in the back of the room, Lears is dancing away. He’s a terrible dancer, stiff and arrhythmic. Not until I saw Bob Dylan in concert did I ever see anyone dance so self-consciously. It struck me that this was probably the first time anyone had ever danced in this classroom. But here was Lears, bringing it off. It was like some strokes of light rendered by a painter for the first time, though with an unsteady enough hand. Lears had scored a benevolent victory over Medford High School. (You could say that he’d beaten them at their game, but really he’d shown them a new one.) He had a right to a little celebration.

After high school, Mark Edmundson studied at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and at Bennington College, from which he graduated in 1974. He moved to New York, where he wrote for the Village Voice, drove a cab, and worked as a stagehand and security guy at rock shows. Edmundson taught at a “hippie school” in Woodstock for three years, before enrolling at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in English. He has taught English at the University of Virginia for nearly 20 years. This essay is adapted from his new book, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference (Random House). A version of this essay originally appeared in Lingua Franca (March, 1999). 

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