Mid-way through the last term of my senior year at Cornell University, I suddenly realized that I had no idea what to do after graduation. I had enrolled in engineering physics, decided on the humanities before classes started, and went on to double major in philosophy and English. Were I not required to satisfy distribution requirements by continuing math and science courses, and taking some 101 courses in the social sciences, I would also have majored in history. Likewise, ROTC, required for 2 years. Knowing that I was fated to get drafted, I opted for the upper-class program to become an officer (I already thought of myself as a gentleman). After my commissioning, the Army, in its wisdom, deferred me for a year.
What was I to do with myself? I decided that, since I could not do anything, I could teach. I applied to the School of Education, which informed me that regular programs were full but invited me to apply to an experimental education program sponsored by the Ford Foundation. I applied, was immediately accepted, and became the first and only student in the program that summer; everyone else enrolled in the fall. I took three courses. Tutorials in educational philosophy and educational psychology aligned well with my undergraduate majors. A course in educational methods, taught by a high-school teacher, concentrated on the variety of audio-visual programs. If any of these courses had any influence on my teaching ability, I am entirely unaware of it.
For the fall term, I had a full-time internship at an upstate high school—a disaster before the start. The faculty had voted to reject the program, but Cornell persuaded the principal to accept it. Faculty resentment focused on me, the first, only, and last intern. My three supervising teachers were as unprofessional to me as could be, despite (maybe because of?) their students’ warm reception; my mentoring professor, hostile to me throughout the program, joined in harassing me. My department became aware of the situation and transferred me to a downstate school. I had one supervising teacher whose five classes I taught. For the first week, she sat in the back of the class and observed. Friday afternoon, she told me that she would no longer observe my classes because, so she said, I was already the best teacher in the school. My mentoring professor, despite a promise to the department chair, reduced my A to a B; I never cared, and he fooled no one. The faculty elected me to the education honorary Phi Delta Kappa. Shortly after I got my degree, he, who was not a member, did not earn tenure and ended up at a small, rural, and undistinguished state university, where his mediocrity could go unrecognized. OK, OK, I resented this specialist in audio-visual aids who cared not for good teaching.
I then spent two years in the Army, with service in the Washington, D.C., area and in Vietnam. If I were to believe Las Cruces liberals or progressives, I must have become “militaristic,” controlling, callous, incapable of good relations with people, especially the tender souls in high-school English classes. After all, I spent much more time in many more difficult situations in the Army than I did in my summer methods class. In fact, at the boys preparatory school where I taught for 2 years after my return from a combat zone, I was known, respectfully when not affectionately, as “Iron Mike”—a secret never confessed before—for being a by-the-book kind of dormitory floor master. But there the hot air goes out of the liberal-progressive theory. During the Thanksgiving break, the deputy headmaster who had hired me and his wife joined my wife and me for drinks. After some pleasant conversation, Fred broke in to say that he did not want to spoil me, but he had to report that, in just three months, he had already had several calls from parents of my students saying that their sons thought me the best teacher whom they had ever had. Hard it must be for some to believe that I escaped unscathed from the hardening and coarsening effects of Army life and armed conflict.
By the time I sought a professorship, the market for white, male, Shakespeareans had shriveled and twisted, skewed by reduced demand in general and increased demand for minority and female Ph.D.’s, and specialists in linguistics, criticism, and literature by people of color here and abroad. The irony was that professors in the Department of English at The University of Michigan thought that, if only one graduate student got a job in 1973, it would be yours truly. The pain of rejection was great, but I had the resources of a strong technical education, a strong humanistic education, and military experience to create a career as an independent consultant in defense, energy, and the environment. In fact, my career as a consultant was far more gratifying than one as an English professor could have been, for the fashions coming into play in my field were the antithesis of humanistic teaching and scholarly research.
However, when I retired to Las Cruces over a dozen years ago, I attempted a return to teaching by applying to NMSU and asking the Public Education Department (PED) about high-school teaching. The English Department hired me only out of desperation to have enough bodies to meet demand for instructors in technical writing. My two classes were the worst two class of my 45 years’ experience teaching intermittently in nine states and the District of Columbia; more ignorant, less interested students I have never known.
Meanwhile, the PED, after assessing my qualifications—four degrees (including an M.Ed. in secondary education and a Ph.D. in English), permanent NYS certification in English, diverse teaching experience, design and direction of a teaching fellow training program, recommendations for high school teaching, and an award for distinguished teaching at The University of Michigan—advised me that I qualified only for temporary certification at the starting salary of graduates with a bachelor’s in education and no experience—quite the incentive to return to teaching: not.
The moral of this autobiographical narrative: if I take myself as a touchstone, New Mexico public education functions like a mediocrity machine. Its high-school graduates even after a year of college instruction, including first-year English, are poorly educated and its government department responsible for K-12 public education does not care. No one in New Mexico has to share my intellectual interests, but everyone in New Mexico should care that the mediocrity of public education mires the state’s economy in reliance on unskilled or semi-skilled enterprises: agriculture, mining, and tourism, among others. Without a better education, graduates do not constitute a workforce attractive to growth industries requiring high-skilled employees. If you like the idea of New Mexico as a welfare state worthy of territorial status, carry on.
