R. I. P. Dr. Louise Cowan

A great soul has left the world.

Dr. Louise Cowan passed away on Monday.  I was blessed to count myself as one of her students at the University of Dallas where I attended graduate school. (Her obituary in the Dallas Morning News.  Simcha Fisher also posted a tribute.) I took her Southern literature class. To listen to her lecture was to sit hypnotized, enthralled in the literal sense by her voice and her profundity, completely unaware of the passing of time. As Jo Brans wrote in D Magazine in 1979, "Whenever I hear Louise Cowan talk, I want to be Louise Cowan." She captured such deep ideas with such clarity and apparent simplicity.  Of course, that love affair in Their Eyes Were Watching God is symbolic of the cosmic union of earth and sky, soul and body, God and Man, divine and human, eternal and temporal! She had a way of explicating a text that made you see patterns you never saw before and realize that all images, all the arts, lead the mind to ruminate on transcendent things.  She even gave a lecture once on Pulp Fiction that made it seem like the film makers had created another Divine Comedy.

Not only was she an incredible teacher who made her students feel that the truth and beauty of good literature could lead them toward salvation, she also was a lady of manners, grace, and fortitude.  She was in her eighties and still teaching when I was in grad school. And she still had style and great legs. I think she didn't finish her Ph.D. until she was forty, so her career began late. She seemed ageless. And she made her students believe that they, too, could do what she did - find joy and connection in sharing the beauty of poetry and literature.

Not long ago, Dr. Cowan contributed an essay to a collection entitled What is a Teacher. She wrote:  “Teachers are consecrated persons who have made the choice to lead others into learning. If they are to lead others into learning, they must continue themselves to be learners.”

She certainly embodied this herself. May she continue to inspire future teachers. She may become a patron saint of those who love literature.

Photo from http://porterbriggs.com/teaching-good-poetry/

Sing, Muse, of wrath and men and memories

This week I started the World Literature class I am teaching for the community college at the base. For the last two weeks, I have been rereading Gilgamesh, Genesis, and Homer.  Why don't I do this more often?


I had forgotten how good Homer is. Maybe it’s the Stanley Lombardo translation of the Iliad that seems more vivid this time around; maybe it’s my perspective as a middle-aged mother that makes the relationships seem more poignant, the violence more grotesque, the losses more severe. Maybe being in the middle of the journey, longing for home, gives me more empathy for Odysseus’ trials.


While reading, I had a flashback to seventh grade. Over a period of 3-4-5? weeks, our social studies teacher narrated the Iliad and the Odyssey to us, a bunch of 12 year olds. He didn’t read it, and he didn’t refer to a stack of notes. Now I wonder how much he had memorized, if he was telling this story to 6 or 7 times a day to classrooms of 7th graders, year after year. He was a grandpa when I had him as a teacher, so he must have been telling the story for 20 some years prior. And he taught the same stories to my younger brother 10 years later. He spent a lot of time with Homer.

Now I don’t remember the details of what he told. But enough of what he said stuck, so I was familiar with the narrative thread when I finally read the two epics for myself in college.


But it’s just now, a couple decades+ later, that I realize the small miracle of what this teacher did. He never had to reprimand the class. He had a quiet voice that held that room of pubescent preteens enthralled. No one interrupted. (Of course, probably some kids napped). Unlike a high school social studies teacher whose class exploded daily in chaos, this teacher had cast a spell. For fifty minutes a day he taught us what it was like to sit at the feet of a bard.


This same teacher was also my first track coach. He encouraged me to run and win. And he introduced me to my second track coach, who helped me earn a scholarship to a school where I could study the great books. (And get my MRS.)


I called my mom to see if she knew whether or not this teacher is still alive. Since my parents moved from the small town where we went to school to a smaller town, she didn’t know any news about him.  I’m not sure whether to send him a thank you note or invoke his spirit as I go to class tonight.

Small talk

On Saturday night we went to a party held by one of my husband’s co-workers. I hadn’t met 90% of the people there, so I spent most of the time feeding my children and myself. I would’ve fed my kids more, but they eventually found the game room where they became happily ensconced playing air hockey, foosball, video games and Nerf basketball (do I want one of these rooms?), so I had to make conversation. Although I’m not naturally a socialite, I have learned to chitchat about weather, food, Christmas shopping, vacation plans…

Just when I was looking at my watch, my husband introduced me to another co-worker who looked more socially awkward than myself. After brief introductions, it came out that this guy was a math major who wanted to return to academia after getting out of the Navy. At first I thought this was where the conversation was going to stall, when it turned to favorite teachers. And then we found common ground, sharing stories of teachers who had made uninteresting subjects seem fascinating with the talent of drawing perfect unit circles, or passion for obscure military battles, or gift for telling stories and making connections between esoteric math concepts or obscure literary figures and the way of the world. These memorable teachers had another gift also, I think, of connecting with their students as individuals.


At one point in time, I wanted to emulate these teachers, but I’m not sure I have that gift of sharing my love of a subject with my students in a way that inspires their curiousity. Certainly I didn’t inspire a love of Latin in my Latina Christiana classes at our homeschool co-op, since they started a KAL club (Kids Against Latin), although I think they had fun trying to compose a play with their limited vocabulary. And I’m afraid I forced my British Lit class to swim in excess information, so they ended up nearly drowning. When I taught the physics for middle schoolers class, I had the unfortunate experience of having about 75% of the experiments we conducted not turn out as planned. (I have the consolation of remembering that my ESL physics-for-liberal-arts-majors professor in college had a similar outcome.)



Lately, I’ve been trying to decide if I want to take a few classes to get certified to teach in a regular school, now that my kids are in school. But while subbing, I was reminded of how much policing school teachers have to do. I’m happy to report that I subbed for one of those teachers who will be remembered by his students as a favorite, but that may be because he is good at incorporating media into his class.

Periodically, I wrestle with the little voice that says “get a job, get a job.” I wonder if this voice is a relic of the progressive feminist mentality I’ve subconsciously absorbed, or a sincere desire to do something more productive than blogging. It’s only compounded when I read articles like the one in Sunday’s paper that cited a study saying that the mental health of children whose father was deployed was better if their mother worked outside the home, than if she were a stay-at-home mom (presumably because she has adult interaction and occupations to make time pass quickly).


At any rate, I haven’t any immediate desire to add complications to an already busy schedule next semester when el esposo is in Afghanistan. And I have a long list of books to read.