The Lessons They Taught Me

The last weeks of 2020 have brought me two unexpected and grievous losses.

In mid-December, I learned that my high school Latin teacher died. I hadn’t seen James Bigger since my freshman year, but his imprint was indelible. A big man with capillaries tracing down his nose, a dapper dresser who wore three-piece suits to teach in a suburban public high school, Mr. Bigger dominated the classroom. He addressed us all formally and led us unrelentingly through the first-year Latin curriculum. I loved his class, which set the intellectual foundation for the next seven years of my life, carrying me from northern Virginia to Princeton, where I majored in classics. The way he unpacked the structure of the Latin language taught me more about my native language than twelve years of instruction in English did and made studying German and even ancient Greek a breeze. Brilliant teaching wasn’t enough to turn his three sections of Latin into a full-time job, however, so Mr. Bigger left us for greener pastures at the end of the year. Eventually he settled down into long-term employment at McLean High School in Fairfax County, a position he retired from a few years ago.

Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi could not have been more physically different from Mr. Bigger. A slight and unassuming man with an irrepressible mop of black hair, Ashkan was killed last week along with 11 companions, mountain climbing in Iran. Ashkan was one of the best doctoral students I ever worked with. He took two graduate seminars with me before inviting me to sit on his dissertation committee. It was a pleasure to read the work of this luminous young man, whose study of public space in his home city of Tehran fearlessly took on the intellectual giants of social science. Before graduating, he left Milwaukee to live with his adored wife, who was pursuing her own advanced studies in Denver. When the American Historical Association met there in 2017, the two of them graciously welcomed me and a classmate into their home, serving a feast that he had spent all day preparing. Although I knew that Ashkan was a mountain climber and accomplished harmonica player, the stunning landscapes on their walls introduced me to his eye for photography. Soon after, they returned to Iran to care for their aging parents and raise their baby. Ashkan landed a position at the University of Tehran and settled down for what we all assumed would be a lengthy tenure teaching and researching urban design.

While we might resign ourselves to the prospect that our beloved teachers may die before us, we are never ready to lose our students. I feel Mr. Bigger’s and Ashkan’s deaths as body blows, but our student-teacher relationships had long since transcended physical space. I never spoke to Mr. Bigger after he left my high school, but in 2010 I tracked him down for a long-overdue thank you message for his influence on my life. Although an ocean and a continent and failures of international diplomacy separated us, I never believed I had seen Ashkan for the last time. I sometimes daydreamed of visiting his growing family in Tehran, and I was delighted when just a few weeks ago he asked me for letters of reference for postdoctoral work in the US. In the shock of knowing that both are now forever beyond my reach, cut off from attending their memorial services, unable to find obituaries, I mourn by revisiting the lessons they taught me.

Once in Mr. Bigger’s Latin class, he stood right next to me and pushed his pointer finger down hard on my desk. “Never second guess yourself in language, Miss Seligman!,” he admonished in his typically florid tones. Patrolling the class, he had spotted eraser marks on my test paper, where I had replaced a correct answer with a wrong one. Did I end up getting that answer right? Thirty-seven years later, I have no idea. But with decades of teaching experience under my belt, I can see what he was doing pedagogically—building my confidence. He had taken my measure as a person and intuited that much more than language instruction, what I needed was to trust my first instincts. Learning a “dead” language suited me because I could deliberate over my answers, but for a “live” language—or to teach, or to parent—I would need to be able to think and speak on my feet. In the decades since then, I’ve often reminded myself, “Never second guess yourself in language, Amanda.” Eventually that confidence has seeped out beyond language—a little more slowly, perhaps, but I am still a work in progress.

In much less dramatic fashion, Ashkan also taught me. Since I was the professor and he was the student, it was ostensibly my job to do the teaching. But the best students also teach their teachers—about the stuff they are learning, and also about how to be in the world. In early 2013, I forwarded Ashkan an announcement about a public event relevant to his research. Born into an earlier generation, I would have been the kind of busybody who was forever mailing clippings to friends and family.  Not wanting to overwhelm Ashkan’s in-box, I cautioned him, “Tell me when these get annoying.” In gentlest fashion, he thanked me for the information and told me, “Acts of kindness never get annoying.” Although this might seem obvious to you, Askhan’s note pulled me up short—such a profound insight, delivered so straightforwardly. In retrospect, I can see that his message arrived the beginning of a journey to transform my teaching, learning how to make relationship and kindness the foundation of my pedagogy. In the moment, though, Ashkan’s words revealed the essential characteristic of a much younger person who already knew how to preach the gospel of kindness, even to his professors.

For years I’ve been telling my children that true love makes you a better person; if you are in a relationship with someone and your behavior becomes worse instead of better, if you feel yourself decaying instead of elevating, something is out of sync. You might love that person, but it’s not true love, not fully reciprocal, not one that you should commit your life to. Pedagogy is like that too. Minimal teaching fills a student with knowledge. Good teaching recognizes how relationship informs learning, motivates a student to dig deeper, creates aha! moments, earns hugs and tears at graduation. But great teaching transmutes you, you the teacher and you the learner. Great teaching—like great learning—builds you both into better people than you were when the classroom door opened. If you have passed through a crucible of great teaching, its lessons will spin out in unexpected moments, in forms tied to the original moment by a slender but unmistakable silver thread.

As 2020 draws to its awful close, Jim Bigger and Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi no longer walk the planet. But they are not absent from my life. For the remainder of my days, I will carry the lessons they taught me, mix them up in my being, and reweave them in new forms, for my future students, my future teachers.

[X] High School

Friends,

If you were in a relationship with someone you really cared about—a partner, a parent, a child, a friend—and they said to you, calmly and clearly, “When you say [X], it hurts me.” What would you do? Would you push back, dismiss their feelings and their words, keep doing the thing that hurt your loved one? Or would you say, “I’m sorry that hurts you. Out of respect for your feelings, I will try to choose less hurtful words in the future.”

What if your friend said this?: “When you say [X], it hurts me. And, [X] is bound up in our country’s racist past. It reminds me of numerous other ways that my family and I are devalued because of how other people perceive us, a devaluation whose effects are too legion and devastating for me to recount for you now—and whose effects you are already aware of. When you keep saying [X] despite the fact that I have told you how it hurts me, it tells me that saying [X] is more important to you than our relationship.” Would you persist in saying [X] because your need to say [X] was more important than you need to heal your relationship?

If you went to high school with me, you probably see where this is going. It hurts me—and it hurts you, and it hurts us—that our high school was named after a man who gave his life to keep African Americans enslaved, subject to brutality, families broken, women subjected to unpunishable rape. Why is it more important to you to honor the name of a man who died a century before you were born than it is to heal your relationship with your friends, your classmates, your teachers, and the future students in that school?

JEB Stuart High School

            For the past several years, the Fairfax County School board has been enmeshed in a debate about what to do about the name of my alma mater: J.E.B. Stuart High School. General J.E.B. Stuart was a dashing cavalry officer who died in service of the Confederate army. Since the 1980s, when I attended, the high school has been one of the most ethnically diverse and stably racially integrated in the United States. Not only are there white and black students in significant numbers, but many students with family backgrounds in Asia and a majority from Latino heritage and origin. Photos suggest that the school continues also to have a significant Muslim population whose presence is not reflected in demographic data.

The arguments for dropping or retaining the school’s name are heated. Two of the most common reasons cited for keeping Stuart’s name on the school are that we cannot change history and the costs associated with the change.

It is true that we cannot change the past. But place, institutional, and personal names do change. Think about the name of the place where you live. Is the word for your city or neighborhood indigenous? The city where I work now does have an Ojibwe name that reflects the prevalence of Anishinaabemowin speakers in this area in the 19^th century. But would the earlier Woodland people who built Wisconsin’s effigy mounds have recognized “Milwaukee” as a meaningful name? The airport now named after Ronald Reagan replaced ones named for Herbert Hoover and the place named for George Washington. In the United States, women who marry and divorce routinely change their names, updating their identities to reflect changes in their personal histories. In all of these cases, people have chosen to update names, not to deny history but to reflect what is most meaningful to them in the present.

We do not have to be ruled by decisions made in the past. J.E.B. Stuart High School was named in 1959, as the “massive resistance” strategy came peaked in Virginia. Massive resistance was a political response to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board decision ordering racial desegregation of public schools. Rather than comply, whites in Virginia shut down public schools. White children could attend private academies. Black families made the wrenching decision to send their children to other states in order to get their educations. The story was different in Northern Virginia, where the postwar population had boomed. In contrast to the rest of the state, the Fairfax County School Board opened new schools. But no one could mistake the insult to African Americans intended by choosing to name a school after a Confederate hero. Black students might get a public education at J.E.B. Stuart High School, but for years afterwards they also carried on their résumés the name of a man who died for the principle that states could decide whether their ancestors were property or were included in the fundamental American value of liberty. The choice of school name was probably also a thumb in the eye of thousands of white “carpetbaggers” who had come south to work in the booming postwar federal government.

The second reason given against the name change is the cost, which would allegedly eat up funds better spent counteracting cuts to important school programs. The Fairfax County School Board website lists $678,000 in projected costs associated with new signage, in-school branding, athletic and band uniforms, and logo-bearing items. This argument is more compelling but still not persuasive. As the site also notes, items such as uniforms normally wear out and are replaced on a regular basis, and other items fall under the purview of the work of the booster club. The difficulty is coming up with all that money at once rather than amortizing it over multiple budget years. Replacing signage is a one-time cost that could potentially be covered by engaging the community and alumni in fundraising. Further, development professionals know how to turn a crisis into a fundraising opportunity. The school district could take advantage of the heightened interest of alumni in this issue to send out an appeal for the funds needed for special education, parental support, and smaller class sizes to raise private money.

            The naming of local institutions like schools, parks, and streets reflects local values. It is up to the Fairfax County School board to decide what it values more right now: retaining a local heritage name that branded the school as one where black students were second-class citizens or finding a new, less divisive name that students and alumni can carry with pride and help them want to give back to the school for generations to come.