Thursday, January 08, 2004
I must make one prefatory statement. It is simply not possible to disassociate a Horace Mann education from the Horace Mann school as its own mikrokosmos. It sounds trite, I know. But classwork does not account for even half of the education we received. The school is a place quite unlike any other, and that is why the large part of this essay will be about Horace Mann and its students, and not its methods.
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The Horace Mann School was built at the top of a hill, and no student, teacher, or parent has ever forgotten it. An absurdly steep hill, might I add. We who took the subway were reminded of this matinally as we climbed said hill, calves burning.
This, it hardly needs to be said, is a metaphor. There are some things in life that follow you around, tugging gently at your sleeve and asking politely Please, sir, I’d like some metaphor. Horace Mann does not tug gently.
As said before, we are never allowed to forget that Horace Mann sits at the top of a hill, for one thing is relentlessly drilled into us: that we are “the best and the brightest.” This, not a single student ever believes. The competition amongst the studentry is so intense that the going gestalt is that everyone else is an ass, and it is entirely beyond everybody how anyone else managed to get into this school in the first place. To allow that someone else is smarter or better is to give up, full stop. It shatters its students’ spirits sometimes--that is, when it doesn’t exalt them. Horace Mann can seem cruel, but no one, however beaten down, will ever complain that an accomplishment went unrewarded.
Now, to extend the metaphor: one brand-spanking-new building, the Fisher Arts and Dining center, built at the crest of an extremely precipitous rise, overlooks the vastness of greater Riverdale, van Cortlandt park and beyond. This is not to be interpreted as saying that Horace Mann students have a tendency to look down on everyone. That’s unjustly pejorative. The only people HM students overtly disdain are their peers, which they do with highly practiced skill. But this is not the point. The view from Fisher is meant to symbolize the pedagogical methods practiced at Horace Mann, the exploration and critique of which, after all, is presumably the gist of the original question. And so I come to the education itself--at least, the intentional part of it. We will come to the more accidental part a little later.
Dedicated to the liberal arts, Horace Mann is a coeducational day school. It runs from pre-K through 12th grade. Students who make it from preschool all the way to graduation are known, appropriately, as Survivors. I myself entered Horace Mann in 6th grade, after attending P.S.9, a public school near my house. For the purposes of this paper, I’ll only be concentrating on grades nine through twelve. There are approximately 650 students in those grades.
Horace Mann has a clear system of requirements intended to provide a well-rounded education, but at the same time leave room for students to concentrate on their gifts. No student ever does the bare minimum, though. If one feels oppressed by the Man, it is usually because one is being prevented from taking a class on the grounds that six majors and two minors is excessive, a “rule” which the administration would like to make hard and fast, which will never happen, given the ambition of the students. Ambition is a major contagion at Horace Mann, with the symptoms being “testitis,” “gradeitis” (afflictions discovered and treated by Mr. P__ D___, of whom much will be said), and a chronic imbalance of the gastric juices, which causes, depending on barometric pressure, ego-bloating and ego-deflating. Horace Mann students are driven. They are pedal-to-the-floor, whiteknuckled-on-the-wheel, rubber-burning driven.
I am not going to give a full description of the departments and their offerings, but there is one program I would like to single out as being something which, if not unique, is quintessentially Horace Mann: the Independent Study seminar. Usually open only to seniors, the Independent Study program is a yearlong, full-credit course, for which a student selects a topic of interest to him or her and spends the entire year studying it with the aid of an assigned faculty mentor. There are two sections, and each student must give at least three presentations (teach the class for a full period) to his or her section over the course of the year. A mentor is only allowed one student, and must frequently choose between applicants. To those who take it seriously, Independent Study is the culmination of a Horace Mann education.
Even as HM students go, I was something of a special case (I still am: not since 1996 has a single graduate gone abroad for college). I consider my course of study a tribute to the spirit risk-taking the school encourages. Bilingual in French from age six, I completed the highest level of French, AP Literature, in 10th grade, thus finishing my language requirement. This opened up my schedule for 11th grade considerably. I chose to take three History classes at once and chuck Science altogether, which I hated (and hate) nearly as much as math. I also decided, on a lark, that I was going to spend the summer before 11th grade teaching myself ancient Greek, thus passing into Greek II without taking the beginner class. When the college office found out, they were a little uneasy. I was told by the head of the office that I had the strangest schedule he had seen in sixteen years. Naturally, I was immensely proud and went around telling everyone what Mr. S___ had said. I always liked Mr. S___. Lovely fellow, wore a fisherman’s hat everywhere.
So in 11th grade I found myself with an extremely lopsided schedule. I also found myself with two of my classes, AP Euro History and Religion (two of the three histories), taught by the same man. A little digression is warranted here, because I quite firmly believe that Horace Mann may be the only school in the world that would ever consider hiring Mr. D____.
It may no longer be the most shocking thing in the world to hear of a teacher who enjoys smoking marijuana with his students. Nor is it so unusual to have one who delights in taking them to hear the Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall. But I have trouble believing that there are all that many who, when discussing the crucifixion, order two students (troublemakers and Republicans both) to stand, pose as though crucified (arms straight out from the sides, and hold it for an entire period. This sounds easy, doesn’t it? Try it sometime.
Mr. D___ inspires bemusement in the indifferent students, worship in the spiritual and/or stoned, and often violent hatred in the contentiously intellectual. I was only the sixth student in history to have two classes with him every day (making me something of an expert on the man), and I must admit that I can’t rightly say which, if any, of these categories I fit into.
As a teacher in the strictly conventional sense--discipline, organization, didacticism--he is a complete and total disaster. As a teacher in the sense he conceived of it--a contagious enthusiast--he’s a genius. This meant that as a teacher of AP European History, which is a class built around a standardized year-end test, the purpose of which is to earn future college credit, he is a spectacular failure. On test day, much wailing and howling is generally heard from his students, who have an invincible certitude of their shared doom. As a Religion teacher, however, he is, well...something else. It must be said that he actually teaches very little. The only straight facts one may hope to get out of that class are the ones one finds oneself. As he likes to bellow, “SEEK! And ye shall FIND!” This is his response to any question, whether it concerns Catholic dogma, the precise date of the Easter Rebellion, or the location of the damn paper I handed in three months ago (he has a tendency to lose them). He also has a deafening baritone speaking voice, which he uses to its full effect at every opportunity. Mercifully, he usually refrains from singing, unless he comes in a little high.
But it is precisely this enormous personality, this shamelessness (he once asked us how many of us had seen our fathers naked, which at the time seemed a perfectly normal question, and it’s only now that it strikes me a slightly strange), this predictability, this absolute sincerity and enthusiasm contrasted against the popular conviction that he is completely full of shit, that makes him simultaneously larger-than-life and human. Those who really learn from him do so by scrupulously ignoring every single thing he said. Instead, we watch. See what this monster of a man is. See what he does to us. It’s like a poem. The poet’s duty, says Mr. Eliot, is “the continual extinction of personality.”1 It’s about the presentation of objects for the reader’s consideration. This is poetry. We don’t read to hear the poet’s mind. We read to hear our own.
Incidentally, I never did get to smoke with him. However, after I spoke about his class to a roomful of other religion teachers at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) convention downtown, he did take me out to a bar with some other teachers, where we proceeded to get thoroughly fashickered. These things are not so often done in America as they are in Ireland. It was very special.
These requirements are intended to provide students with the tools necessary to foster an enthusiasm for autodidacticism, which is one of the things I so respect in HM. Many schools will teach the student how to fish. Goody for them. The poor bastard. He’ll be eating fish for the rest of his misbegotten life. Horace Mann takes the student down to the lake, silently hands him a fishing pole, and moves off, sitting at a remove, watching as the student figures out how to fish for himself, and in doing so comes to his own conclusion about the methods involved, and their several application. That’s what Mr. D___ does, that’s what Horace Mann does: they will actually refuse to teach you how to build something. They will give you the tools and trust you to figure out how to build it for yourself. Monsieur Montaigne has his hand up:
'Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it to concoct.2
Those gastric juices I mentioned earlier? Small wonder that they should be all achurn, when they are so often called on for digestive purposes. For rote memorization is almost entirely verboten (except for the very major Pi-memorizing competition in 8th grade, where a dark horse, Kay, recently arrived from Nigeria, humiliated Doug S., widely considered the favorite. by reciting 300 consecutive digits of Pi. Doug only managed a feeble hundred. Kay became an instant celebrity. Five years later, this incident is still fondly remembered by those lucky enough to be there). Even History teachers are skittish about demanding that their students memorize dates, though this did not stop them from generally doing so (Mr. D___ notwithstanding). In place of rote, there is system of familiarization with concepts. That is to say, we are big fans of -isms of any kind. Romanticism, essentialism, Hinduism, take your pick. The idea is that the student develops the ability to discuss--and even comprehend--any kind of ideology, any kind of rational thought. That comes with one nasty side effect: the cardinal -ism on campus was Sciolism. We are Olympian bullshitters: on our AP European history exam in 11th grade (the scene of the aforementioned wailing and howling) , those of us who had not spent much time remembering the dates of the Long Parliament or the succession of the Tudors, but who had instead concentrated on the history of European ideas, performed rather miserably on the multiple choice. Our essays, though, were bloody stellar.
This is not to say for a moment that our classes are not rigorous in the extreme. I suppose I must back up the statement that HM can shatter a spirit. To begin with the physical side, HMers keep absurd hours. They have little choice. The workload, however abstract the pedagogical method may seem, is tremendous for many. People quite regularly stagger into school on three or four hours of sleep, wearing their exhaustion with pride. Pissing matches over who had studied longer or slept less were more than common. To have pulled an actual allnighter was an act which at any lesser school might have been considered pathetically nerdy. At Horace Mann it was an act of war. Such was the competitive spirit. I myself would often to go over to my friend Liz’s house on the East side at 1am to keep her up and give her a brief break from essay-writing. We would go walk in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Furthermore, HM students are astonishingly college-obsessed. The percentage of graduates who go on to an Ivy League college generally hangs around 37%, an astronomical figure. So there’s something of a standard to live up to. Everything a student does, every paper, every test, every little quiz, is major drama. Grade-induced tears are no less common than drugs (and the one not infrequently leads directly to the other). HMers keep absurd hours. They have little choice. The workload, however abstract the pedagogical method may seem, is tremendous for many. People quite regularly stagger into school on three or four hours of sleep, wearing their exhaustion with pride. Pissing matches over who had studied longer or slept less were more than common. To have pulled an actual allnighter was an act which at any lesser school might have been considered pathetically nerdy. At Horace Mann it was an act of war. Such was the competitive spirit.
It wasn’t good for us. I am quite sure of this. It was excessive and unnecessary. But we did it, because if we didn’t, someone else would.
Students go to great lengths to impress Mr. D____ and be rewarded with an extravagant, sweeping bow. To hear from the great Dr. S___, “Son, you are a gentleman and a scholar,” was a major personal milestone. Many teachers attract cult followings, especially those in the English department (which, it is generally agreed, is by far the strongest department at Horace Mann). But nobody has groupies like Dr. L____. I call him Doc.
I had Doc twice. The first time was in 10th grade, the second time was when he was my mentor for my Independent Study senior year. My project was the translation of poetry, French-English, English-French, and, on rare occasions, English-English. The objective was to take apart a poem as one would a clock. I wanted to see what made it tick. I can say with certitude that it was the most important class I’ve ever taken. But then again, I wouldn’t call it a class. Once a week, I met with Doc for 45 minutes to go over my work (I was translating at least a poem a week), and we would edit. We would consider what kind of translation was called for, what kind of language, why one word worked better than another. The big project at the end was eleven completely different translations of the most famously untranslatable poem in the French language, Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne.” These ranged from imagining how Pound or Joyce would have done it (Joyce actually had tried it when he was my age. His was better.) to turning it into a limerick sequence. It still shocks me somewhat that this sort of thing was ever encouraged. Someday I shall go to Verlaine’s grave and press my ear to the ground. I am sure I will hear him spinning.
But I must digress further, because Dr. L___ was more important to my education than all of the other departments combined.
His motto is, “Seek the penis in the text,” and his students do so with the investigative fervor of Sam Spade. The Odyssey in particular will never be the same again. He is also a genius. A sick, sick genius. The first poem I did for him is one of the most sacred to the French: Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage.” After doing a straight translation, we decided to have a little fun. The only French-French translation I did, I punned the original relentlessly and turned it, using homonyms, into a poem about a man flashing a nun. The word Invitation was turned into “Un vit!3 Attention! Oh! Vois! Large...” He loved it.
But it must be understood that Dr. L____ was not just a curio. He was a more enthusiastic than excellent relationship counselor (as was Dr. S____). He was also, as a side job, a magnificent teacher. He has for many years taught the famous AP English class, so notoriously rigorous that it is the only one of his classes from which students often emerge loathing him. He is the faculty advisor for an occasionally dreadful, often hysterical publication described as The Mother of all Diaries (Horace Mann has approximately three times as many student-run publications as Trinity, despite a student body 1/16 the size. With a friend, I myself ran a journal of serialized fiction and general arcana for years), as well as for the Shakespeare Revels. That, I suppose, makes for a good segue.
For many students, extracurriculars at Horace Mann often overwhelm the curriculars. My friend M___, the Editor-in-Chief of The Record, the weekly newspaper (entering its 101st year of continuous publication), held a position which put such demands on his time that it was inevitable that his grades should have dropped the way they did. Every Thursday (“press night”) he and his editorial staff would be at school until ghastly hours. He would be the last to leave, often at around 1 or 2am. The result was that, while the most powerful student in the school (our Editor-in-Chief was like a Texas high school’s quarterback. No one knew who our quarterback was. Did we have a quarterback?), his grades suffered severely. His parents stood by him, though, understanding full well that what he was doing on the Record was more educational than any homework he was missing. The administration has a similar attitude. Extracurriculars at Horace Mann are immensely important. In the mission statement, they share equal billing with academics:
The Horace Mann School seeks to educate and nurture its students and help them fulfill their potential. To attain this goal, the School provides a challenging and rigorous set of academic and extracurricular programs.4
Extracurriculars very frequently took precedence over studies for me. It was merely a fact: if the theatre needed me more than the math department, well, there was no argument (except for maybe from my mother). That has something to do with my tendency to shake off requirements as a horse shakes loose a poorly cinched saddle. It’s a terrible habit, but if I find that if I have to choose between amusing myself (and in doing so, I firmly believe, educating myself) and doing what is asked of me, I will never--repeat, never, not even for the all-important college essay--choose the latter. I won’t blame Horace Mann for my pride (though it should accept some responsibility for my ego). After reading over my first attempt at a college essay, the first paragraph of which I, like a jerk, wrote in the style of Finnegans Wake, Dr. L____ said to me, “Sam, I don’t think you’re capable of writing a normal essay.” I responded that I didn’t know, I’d never tried. My grades were never stellar. They were good enough, though. I will always feel like I coasted relative to my colleagues. I never fully applied myself but to English. But that never felt like work anyway. There was other class to which I did apply myself, though: Theory and Practice of Politics.
Theory and Practice was (and I use the past tense here because a lobby of jealous history teachers conspired to kill it, much to the teacher’s dismay) an intensive four-person political philosophy class. It was not on any Horace Mann course listing because it was essentially a clandestine operation. The four of us were asked by the teacher, Dr. T___ (a singularly dedicated intellectual), to participate in this class, which was not open to anyone else. We were under orders not to speak to our peers about it because chances are that the moment word began to spread about a ‘secret philosophy class,’ Dr. T____ would have students beating down her door.
Because of the size of the class and the passion of the students, we studied a wide range of essential philosophical texts with a greater focus than any generic political philosophy class might have allowed for. Though that meant our discussions were absolutely riveting, it also made for a rather mighty workload. We generally ripped through our texts in two to three weeks (given these texts (Locke, Aristotle, Freud, Friedan, etc.), I think that qualified as ripping). At the end of each trimester, we wrote a 10-page paper.
Dr. T. did not get paid for teaching this class, though it took up three periods a week. This was, if anything, a pedagogical experiment. It grew organically out of the hunger for intellect and exclusivity that Horace Mann had planted in us. There were no tests. There was no one “eternally thundering”5 in our ears. No teaching went on. Only learning. This is a more perfect pedagogy, when that pedagogy is almost imperceptible. That way, the student is allowed to hold onto whatever pride he feels at having learned something for himself. He feels more validated as a student, and as an intellectual, and, fine, yes, as a person. That, then, provides an incentive for further autodidacticism. A class like this, where the organization is so loose, and the course taken so dependent on the students’ impulses, is the class most conducive to this sort of selfperpetuating learning. It was also a more perfect pedagogy because of the way we were impelled to work: not by grades, the conventional method, but by our peers. Working in such intimacy made us understand just how essential it was that every one of us be up to speed, because sluggishness in one would drag the whole class backwards. It was not the threat of a low grade that kept us focused, but the threat of a sideways glare from a fellow. “Everyone has his eye on you, so you’re practically forced to get on with your job.”6 It was Utopian: theoretically perfect, practically impracticable. We never resolved a single point--not one! But it could have worked, and it was a major blow when we found out that Dr. T, who loved the class and treated it like her baby, would not be allowed to teach it again. I was, and am, terribly disappointed in the termination of Theory and Practice. It, more than any other class that exists at Horace Mann, begged finetuning and streamlining--perfection, really. More to the point, it deserved perfection, or at least improvement, more than any other class.
I have, in this essay, done as well as I could, in the confines of this form, to give a description of the atmosphere at Horace Mann. I have, to the best of my taxidermic abilities, sculpted the Horace Mann student as he or she is, fur, horns, and all. You have read about the pervert and the mystic. You know the variety of classes offered. Most importantly, you know the pedagogy. And yet, massive aspects of life have been cut out altogether: the matter of socioeconomic stratification in a school where a sizable percentage of students are the scions of millionaires is a subject that could easily occupy another forty pages. It grieves me severely that I had to neglect social matters, so integral an element of anyone’s education. I have also had to throw out mediation on the political humour of the school (in a word, Liberal). I had to leapfrog the publications, the proliferation of which speaks volumes about the HMer’s desire either to create or simply to be heard. This question, “Critique your own education,” is one which I regret having had to condense into essay form. It is a question that begs book form, with chapters and a novelist’s angle. But I must cut myself off. And so I must conclude this essay. But what better way to conclude than to talk about conclusion, or the major downside of Horace Mann, the one no graduate can ignore: sooner or later, you have to leave.
This is not about nostalgia, regardless of the ineluctable flares of it the reader catches as she reads. This is about change. Deep, fundamental change. I chose this topic because Horace Mann, like I said, does not tug gently. One’s life becomes so tremendously gathered up in that of the school, that to leave is to be a little shattered. Much as you hated it sometimes, you want it to be the same. Because you loved it, too. A few weeks ago at a reunion party at a friend’s dorm at Columbia, someone laughed, “We’re such dorks!” And I yelled out, “I PINE FOR DORKS!” To quote a friend who graduated two years ago: ‘Even here at harvard there's no one who matches this group in crazy humor and drunken (or not drunken) intellectualism.”7 I asked some friends, “A) How did you love Horace Mann, and B) How did you hate Horace Mann.” My friend Sam’s reply was so pitch-perfect and poetic that I cannot help quoting it in its entirety:
Late, I loved Horace Mann with one foot out the door. First I loved by fits and starts. In the fit of a blizzard and the start of the rein of those cherry blossoms, the school fit me fine. I loved Horace Mann exuberantly. And critically and consciously, in comparison to the city schools, aware of the privilege. Resentful of mindlessness of the unmindful privileged.
Early, I hated Horace Mann consistently. Eighth grade I counted down the number of school days left, starting from Halloween. I hated it aggressively, wanting to reject it all for the smallness of some of the people, their thoughts and worlds. But finding fight and respect, I loved it in flight. I loved it through the teachers, friends and power. Owning it for first time in the final year, I loved it at last. 8
I also asked, “How has Horace Mann fucked you forever?” They generally responded that they didn’t think it had, but I think they’re lying. Horace Mann has fucked me quite solidly, I think. Exposed only to an extremely rarefied intellectual environment, how could I be any other way? They made us leave last June. Handed us our diplomas and booted us out the door. But I’ve written this essay in the present tense for a reason. It stays with me. It hangs over me. Set amid the people of the greater world now, the people of a new continent and country, I still find myself looking for the people I left.
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The Horace Mann School was built at the top of a hill, and no student, teacher, or parent has ever forgotten it. An absurdly steep hill, might I add. We who took the subway were reminded of this matinally as we climbed said hill, calves burning.
This, it hardly needs to be said, is a metaphor. There are some things in life that follow you around, tugging gently at your sleeve and asking politely Please, sir, I’d like some metaphor. Horace Mann does not tug gently.
As said before, we are never allowed to forget that Horace Mann sits at the top of a hill, for one thing is relentlessly drilled into us: that we are “the best and the brightest.” This, not a single student ever believes. The competition amongst the studentry is so intense that the going gestalt is that everyone else is an ass, and it is entirely beyond everybody how anyone else managed to get into this school in the first place. To allow that someone else is smarter or better is to give up, full stop. It shatters its students’ spirits sometimes--that is, when it doesn’t exalt them. Horace Mann can seem cruel, but no one, however beaten down, will ever complain that an accomplishment went unrewarded.
Now, to extend the metaphor: one brand-spanking-new building, the Fisher Arts and Dining center, built at the crest of an extremely precipitous rise, overlooks the vastness of greater Riverdale, van Cortlandt park and beyond. This is not to be interpreted as saying that Horace Mann students have a tendency to look down on everyone. That’s unjustly pejorative. The only people HM students overtly disdain are their peers, which they do with highly practiced skill. But this is not the point. The view from Fisher is meant to symbolize the pedagogical methods practiced at Horace Mann, the exploration and critique of which, after all, is presumably the gist of the original question. And so I come to the education itself--at least, the intentional part of it. We will come to the more accidental part a little later.
Dedicated to the liberal arts, Horace Mann is a coeducational day school. It runs from pre-K through 12th grade. Students who make it from preschool all the way to graduation are known, appropriately, as Survivors. I myself entered Horace Mann in 6th grade, after attending P.S.9, a public school near my house. For the purposes of this paper, I’ll only be concentrating on grades nine through twelve. There are approximately 650 students in those grades.
Horace Mann has a clear system of requirements intended to provide a well-rounded education, but at the same time leave room for students to concentrate on their gifts. No student ever does the bare minimum, though. If one feels oppressed by the Man, it is usually because one is being prevented from taking a class on the grounds that six majors and two minors is excessive, a “rule” which the administration would like to make hard and fast, which will never happen, given the ambition of the students. Ambition is a major contagion at Horace Mann, with the symptoms being “testitis,” “gradeitis” (afflictions discovered and treated by Mr. P__ D___, of whom much will be said), and a chronic imbalance of the gastric juices, which causes, depending on barometric pressure, ego-bloating and ego-deflating. Horace Mann students are driven. They are pedal-to-the-floor, whiteknuckled-on-the-wheel, rubber-burning driven.
I am not going to give a full description of the departments and their offerings, but there is one program I would like to single out as being something which, if not unique, is quintessentially Horace Mann: the Independent Study seminar. Usually open only to seniors, the Independent Study program is a yearlong, full-credit course, for which a student selects a topic of interest to him or her and spends the entire year studying it with the aid of an assigned faculty mentor. There are two sections, and each student must give at least three presentations (teach the class for a full period) to his or her section over the course of the year. A mentor is only allowed one student, and must frequently choose between applicants. To those who take it seriously, Independent Study is the culmination of a Horace Mann education.
Even as HM students go, I was something of a special case (I still am: not since 1996 has a single graduate gone abroad for college). I consider my course of study a tribute to the spirit risk-taking the school encourages. Bilingual in French from age six, I completed the highest level of French, AP Literature, in 10th grade, thus finishing my language requirement. This opened up my schedule for 11th grade considerably. I chose to take three History classes at once and chuck Science altogether, which I hated (and hate) nearly as much as math. I also decided, on a lark, that I was going to spend the summer before 11th grade teaching myself ancient Greek, thus passing into Greek II without taking the beginner class. When the college office found out, they were a little uneasy. I was told by the head of the office that I had the strangest schedule he had seen in sixteen years. Naturally, I was immensely proud and went around telling everyone what Mr. S___ had said. I always liked Mr. S___. Lovely fellow, wore a fisherman’s hat everywhere.
So in 11th grade I found myself with an extremely lopsided schedule. I also found myself with two of my classes, AP Euro History and Religion (two of the three histories), taught by the same man. A little digression is warranted here, because I quite firmly believe that Horace Mann may be the only school in the world that would ever consider hiring Mr. D____.
It may no longer be the most shocking thing in the world to hear of a teacher who enjoys smoking marijuana with his students. Nor is it so unusual to have one who delights in taking them to hear the Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall. But I have trouble believing that there are all that many who, when discussing the crucifixion, order two students (troublemakers and Republicans both) to stand, pose as though crucified (arms straight out from the sides, and hold it for an entire period. This sounds easy, doesn’t it? Try it sometime.
Mr. D___ inspires bemusement in the indifferent students, worship in the spiritual and/or stoned, and often violent hatred in the contentiously intellectual. I was only the sixth student in history to have two classes with him every day (making me something of an expert on the man), and I must admit that I can’t rightly say which, if any, of these categories I fit into.
As a teacher in the strictly conventional sense--discipline, organization, didacticism--he is a complete and total disaster. As a teacher in the sense he conceived of it--a contagious enthusiast--he’s a genius. This meant that as a teacher of AP European History, which is a class built around a standardized year-end test, the purpose of which is to earn future college credit, he is a spectacular failure. On test day, much wailing and howling is generally heard from his students, who have an invincible certitude of their shared doom. As a Religion teacher, however, he is, well...something else. It must be said that he actually teaches very little. The only straight facts one may hope to get out of that class are the ones one finds oneself. As he likes to bellow, “SEEK! And ye shall FIND!” This is his response to any question, whether it concerns Catholic dogma, the precise date of the Easter Rebellion, or the location of the damn paper I handed in three months ago (he has a tendency to lose them). He also has a deafening baritone speaking voice, which he uses to its full effect at every opportunity. Mercifully, he usually refrains from singing, unless he comes in a little high.
But it is precisely this enormous personality, this shamelessness (he once asked us how many of us had seen our fathers naked, which at the time seemed a perfectly normal question, and it’s only now that it strikes me a slightly strange), this predictability, this absolute sincerity and enthusiasm contrasted against the popular conviction that he is completely full of shit, that makes him simultaneously larger-than-life and human. Those who really learn from him do so by scrupulously ignoring every single thing he said. Instead, we watch. See what this monster of a man is. See what he does to us. It’s like a poem. The poet’s duty, says Mr. Eliot, is “the continual extinction of personality.”1 It’s about the presentation of objects for the reader’s consideration. This is poetry. We don’t read to hear the poet’s mind. We read to hear our own.
Incidentally, I never did get to smoke with him. However, after I spoke about his class to a roomful of other religion teachers at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) convention downtown, he did take me out to a bar with some other teachers, where we proceeded to get thoroughly fashickered. These things are not so often done in America as they are in Ireland. It was very special.
These requirements are intended to provide students with the tools necessary to foster an enthusiasm for autodidacticism, which is one of the things I so respect in HM. Many schools will teach the student how to fish. Goody for them. The poor bastard. He’ll be eating fish for the rest of his misbegotten life. Horace Mann takes the student down to the lake, silently hands him a fishing pole, and moves off, sitting at a remove, watching as the student figures out how to fish for himself, and in doing so comes to his own conclusion about the methods involved, and their several application. That’s what Mr. D___ does, that’s what Horace Mann does: they will actually refuse to teach you how to build something. They will give you the tools and trust you to figure out how to build it for yourself. Monsieur Montaigne has his hand up:
'Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it to concoct.2
Those gastric juices I mentioned earlier? Small wonder that they should be all achurn, when they are so often called on for digestive purposes. For rote memorization is almost entirely verboten (except for the very major Pi-memorizing competition in 8th grade, where a dark horse, Kay, recently arrived from Nigeria, humiliated Doug S., widely considered the favorite. by reciting 300 consecutive digits of Pi. Doug only managed a feeble hundred. Kay became an instant celebrity. Five years later, this incident is still fondly remembered by those lucky enough to be there). Even History teachers are skittish about demanding that their students memorize dates, though this did not stop them from generally doing so (Mr. D___ notwithstanding). In place of rote, there is system of familiarization with concepts. That is to say, we are big fans of -isms of any kind. Romanticism, essentialism, Hinduism, take your pick. The idea is that the student develops the ability to discuss--and even comprehend--any kind of ideology, any kind of rational thought. That comes with one nasty side effect: the cardinal -ism on campus was Sciolism. We are Olympian bullshitters: on our AP European history exam in 11th grade (the scene of the aforementioned wailing and howling) , those of us who had not spent much time remembering the dates of the Long Parliament or the succession of the Tudors, but who had instead concentrated on the history of European ideas, performed rather miserably on the multiple choice. Our essays, though, were bloody stellar.
This is not to say for a moment that our classes are not rigorous in the extreme. I suppose I must back up the statement that HM can shatter a spirit. To begin with the physical side, HMers keep absurd hours. They have little choice. The workload, however abstract the pedagogical method may seem, is tremendous for many. People quite regularly stagger into school on three or four hours of sleep, wearing their exhaustion with pride. Pissing matches over who had studied longer or slept less were more than common. To have pulled an actual allnighter was an act which at any lesser school might have been considered pathetically nerdy. At Horace Mann it was an act of war. Such was the competitive spirit. I myself would often to go over to my friend Liz’s house on the East side at 1am to keep her up and give her a brief break from essay-writing. We would go walk in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Furthermore, HM students are astonishingly college-obsessed. The percentage of graduates who go on to an Ivy League college generally hangs around 37%, an astronomical figure. So there’s something of a standard to live up to. Everything a student does, every paper, every test, every little quiz, is major drama. Grade-induced tears are no less common than drugs (and the one not infrequently leads directly to the other). HMers keep absurd hours. They have little choice. The workload, however abstract the pedagogical method may seem, is tremendous for many. People quite regularly stagger into school on three or four hours of sleep, wearing their exhaustion with pride. Pissing matches over who had studied longer or slept less were more than common. To have pulled an actual allnighter was an act which at any lesser school might have been considered pathetically nerdy. At Horace Mann it was an act of war. Such was the competitive spirit.
It wasn’t good for us. I am quite sure of this. It was excessive and unnecessary. But we did it, because if we didn’t, someone else would.
Students go to great lengths to impress Mr. D____ and be rewarded with an extravagant, sweeping bow. To hear from the great Dr. S___, “Son, you are a gentleman and a scholar,” was a major personal milestone. Many teachers attract cult followings, especially those in the English department (which, it is generally agreed, is by far the strongest department at Horace Mann). But nobody has groupies like Dr. L____. I call him Doc.
I had Doc twice. The first time was in 10th grade, the second time was when he was my mentor for my Independent Study senior year. My project was the translation of poetry, French-English, English-French, and, on rare occasions, English-English. The objective was to take apart a poem as one would a clock. I wanted to see what made it tick. I can say with certitude that it was the most important class I’ve ever taken. But then again, I wouldn’t call it a class. Once a week, I met with Doc for 45 minutes to go over my work (I was translating at least a poem a week), and we would edit. We would consider what kind of translation was called for, what kind of language, why one word worked better than another. The big project at the end was eleven completely different translations of the most famously untranslatable poem in the French language, Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne.” These ranged from imagining how Pound or Joyce would have done it (Joyce actually had tried it when he was my age. His was better.) to turning it into a limerick sequence. It still shocks me somewhat that this sort of thing was ever encouraged. Someday I shall go to Verlaine’s grave and press my ear to the ground. I am sure I will hear him spinning.
But I must digress further, because Dr. L___ was more important to my education than all of the other departments combined.
His motto is, “Seek the penis in the text,” and his students do so with the investigative fervor of Sam Spade. The Odyssey in particular will never be the same again. He is also a genius. A sick, sick genius. The first poem I did for him is one of the most sacred to the French: Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage.” After doing a straight translation, we decided to have a little fun. The only French-French translation I did, I punned the original relentlessly and turned it, using homonyms, into a poem about a man flashing a nun. The word Invitation was turned into “Un vit!3 Attention! Oh! Vois! Large...” He loved it.
But it must be understood that Dr. L____ was not just a curio. He was a more enthusiastic than excellent relationship counselor (as was Dr. S____). He was also, as a side job, a magnificent teacher. He has for many years taught the famous AP English class, so notoriously rigorous that it is the only one of his classes from which students often emerge loathing him. He is the faculty advisor for an occasionally dreadful, often hysterical publication described as The Mother of all Diaries (Horace Mann has approximately three times as many student-run publications as Trinity, despite a student body 1/16 the size. With a friend, I myself ran a journal of serialized fiction and general arcana for years), as well as for the Shakespeare Revels. That, I suppose, makes for a good segue.
For many students, extracurriculars at Horace Mann often overwhelm the curriculars. My friend M___, the Editor-in-Chief of The Record, the weekly newspaper (entering its 101st year of continuous publication), held a position which put such demands on his time that it was inevitable that his grades should have dropped the way they did. Every Thursday (“press night”) he and his editorial staff would be at school until ghastly hours. He would be the last to leave, often at around 1 or 2am. The result was that, while the most powerful student in the school (our Editor-in-Chief was like a Texas high school’s quarterback. No one knew who our quarterback was. Did we have a quarterback?), his grades suffered severely. His parents stood by him, though, understanding full well that what he was doing on the Record was more educational than any homework he was missing. The administration has a similar attitude. Extracurriculars at Horace Mann are immensely important. In the mission statement, they share equal billing with academics:
The Horace Mann School seeks to educate and nurture its students and help them fulfill their potential. To attain this goal, the School provides a challenging and rigorous set of academic and extracurricular programs.4
Extracurriculars very frequently took precedence over studies for me. It was merely a fact: if the theatre needed me more than the math department, well, there was no argument (except for maybe from my mother). That has something to do with my tendency to shake off requirements as a horse shakes loose a poorly cinched saddle. It’s a terrible habit, but if I find that if I have to choose between amusing myself (and in doing so, I firmly believe, educating myself) and doing what is asked of me, I will never--repeat, never, not even for the all-important college essay--choose the latter. I won’t blame Horace Mann for my pride (though it should accept some responsibility for my ego). After reading over my first attempt at a college essay, the first paragraph of which I, like a jerk, wrote in the style of Finnegans Wake, Dr. L____ said to me, “Sam, I don’t think you’re capable of writing a normal essay.” I responded that I didn’t know, I’d never tried. My grades were never stellar. They were good enough, though. I will always feel like I coasted relative to my colleagues. I never fully applied myself but to English. But that never felt like work anyway. There was other class to which I did apply myself, though: Theory and Practice of Politics.
Theory and Practice was (and I use the past tense here because a lobby of jealous history teachers conspired to kill it, much to the teacher’s dismay) an intensive four-person political philosophy class. It was not on any Horace Mann course listing because it was essentially a clandestine operation. The four of us were asked by the teacher, Dr. T___ (a singularly dedicated intellectual), to participate in this class, which was not open to anyone else. We were under orders not to speak to our peers about it because chances are that the moment word began to spread about a ‘secret philosophy class,’ Dr. T____ would have students beating down her door.
Because of the size of the class and the passion of the students, we studied a wide range of essential philosophical texts with a greater focus than any generic political philosophy class might have allowed for. Though that meant our discussions were absolutely riveting, it also made for a rather mighty workload. We generally ripped through our texts in two to three weeks (given these texts (Locke, Aristotle, Freud, Friedan, etc.), I think that qualified as ripping). At the end of each trimester, we wrote a 10-page paper.
Dr. T. did not get paid for teaching this class, though it took up three periods a week. This was, if anything, a pedagogical experiment. It grew organically out of the hunger for intellect and exclusivity that Horace Mann had planted in us. There were no tests. There was no one “eternally thundering”5 in our ears. No teaching went on. Only learning. This is a more perfect pedagogy, when that pedagogy is almost imperceptible. That way, the student is allowed to hold onto whatever pride he feels at having learned something for himself. He feels more validated as a student, and as an intellectual, and, fine, yes, as a person. That, then, provides an incentive for further autodidacticism. A class like this, where the organization is so loose, and the course taken so dependent on the students’ impulses, is the class most conducive to this sort of selfperpetuating learning. It was also a more perfect pedagogy because of the way we were impelled to work: not by grades, the conventional method, but by our peers. Working in such intimacy made us understand just how essential it was that every one of us be up to speed, because sluggishness in one would drag the whole class backwards. It was not the threat of a low grade that kept us focused, but the threat of a sideways glare from a fellow. “Everyone has his eye on you, so you’re practically forced to get on with your job.”6 It was Utopian: theoretically perfect, practically impracticable. We never resolved a single point--not one! But it could have worked, and it was a major blow when we found out that Dr. T, who loved the class and treated it like her baby, would not be allowed to teach it again. I was, and am, terribly disappointed in the termination of Theory and Practice. It, more than any other class that exists at Horace Mann, begged finetuning and streamlining--perfection, really. More to the point, it deserved perfection, or at least improvement, more than any other class.
I have, in this essay, done as well as I could, in the confines of this form, to give a description of the atmosphere at Horace Mann. I have, to the best of my taxidermic abilities, sculpted the Horace Mann student as he or she is, fur, horns, and all. You have read about the pervert and the mystic. You know the variety of classes offered. Most importantly, you know the pedagogy. And yet, massive aspects of life have been cut out altogether: the matter of socioeconomic stratification in a school where a sizable percentage of students are the scions of millionaires is a subject that could easily occupy another forty pages. It grieves me severely that I had to neglect social matters, so integral an element of anyone’s education. I have also had to throw out mediation on the political humour of the school (in a word, Liberal). I had to leapfrog the publications, the proliferation of which speaks volumes about the HMer’s desire either to create or simply to be heard. This question, “Critique your own education,” is one which I regret having had to condense into essay form. It is a question that begs book form, with chapters and a novelist’s angle. But I must cut myself off. And so I must conclude this essay. But what better way to conclude than to talk about conclusion, or the major downside of Horace Mann, the one no graduate can ignore: sooner or later, you have to leave.
This is not about nostalgia, regardless of the ineluctable flares of it the reader catches as she reads. This is about change. Deep, fundamental change. I chose this topic because Horace Mann, like I said, does not tug gently. One’s life becomes so tremendously gathered up in that of the school, that to leave is to be a little shattered. Much as you hated it sometimes, you want it to be the same. Because you loved it, too. A few weeks ago at a reunion party at a friend’s dorm at Columbia, someone laughed, “We’re such dorks!” And I yelled out, “I PINE FOR DORKS!” To quote a friend who graduated two years ago: ‘Even here at harvard there's no one who matches this group in crazy humor and drunken (or not drunken) intellectualism.”7 I asked some friends, “A) How did you love Horace Mann, and B) How did you hate Horace Mann.” My friend Sam’s reply was so pitch-perfect and poetic that I cannot help quoting it in its entirety:
Late, I loved Horace Mann with one foot out the door. First I loved by fits and starts. In the fit of a blizzard and the start of the rein of those cherry blossoms, the school fit me fine. I loved Horace Mann exuberantly. And critically and consciously, in comparison to the city schools, aware of the privilege. Resentful of mindlessness of the unmindful privileged.
Early, I hated Horace Mann consistently. Eighth grade I counted down the number of school days left, starting from Halloween. I hated it aggressively, wanting to reject it all for the smallness of some of the people, their thoughts and worlds. But finding fight and respect, I loved it in flight. I loved it through the teachers, friends and power. Owning it for first time in the final year, I loved it at last. 8
I also asked, “How has Horace Mann fucked you forever?” They generally responded that they didn’t think it had, but I think they’re lying. Horace Mann has fucked me quite solidly, I think. Exposed only to an extremely rarefied intellectual environment, how could I be any other way? They made us leave last June. Handed us our diplomas and booted us out the door. But I’ve written this essay in the present tense for a reason. It stays with me. It hangs over me. Set amid the people of the greater world now, the people of a new continent and country, I still find myself looking for the people I left.
