Todd Shy. Teaching Life: Life Lessons for Aspiring (and Inspiring) Teachers. New York: Avenues The World School Press, 2021.
Nowadays the opinions of middle-aged white men have a lot more competition for air time than they used to.
As a member of that not-endangered but lately chastened species, I struggle every day with the question of whether I am worthy to engage in the public square of ideas.
After all, it is time for other voices to be heard. They have unique takes on life, unique life experiences that have not been hitherto prioritized, to say the least.
That’s why longtime educator and independent school administrator Todd Shy’s new book is something of a curiosity. Billed as a meditation on the art of teaching in the spirit of two very well-known American white men, Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, it restates several of the same truths that educators have been restating for some time now: teaching to the test is poison, the best teachers inspire, lectures aren’t such a bad thing now and then—to name a few. It’s almost as familiar (to me, at least) as the apple that Shy’s cover artist put on the front of the book.
What’s more, Shy’s Recommended Reading appendix includes some significant nuggets about teaching that one might think of reading before one reads Todd Shy.
(One quibble: in his recommended movies, he leaves out Jack Black’s sublimely ridiculous The School of Rock, which is to me the first and last movie one ever needs to see about education. “Look. Here’s the deal. I’ve got a hangover. Who knows what that means?” “Doesn’t it mean you’re drunk?” “No. It means I was drunk yesterday.”)
What, then, does a white man in this day and age have to say about education—or indeed, about anything?
Turns out, in Todd Shy’s case, quite a bit.
One of the back-cover blurbs says Teaching Life is a “love letter to teaching and to life.” In my opinion, it is actually a love letter to Shy’s two daughters, who inexplicably (like my son, by the way) chose the profession of their dad against all rational indicators to the contrary.
Shy begins and ends the book with a message to his daughters, and in between, though there is indeed a fairly significant amount of writing about teaching, really what Shy has produced is a memoir, a chronicle, that his daughters, grandchildren, and great grandchildren can use to honor and appreciate him.
This is the true, beating heart of Teaching Life.
In the course of 25 short essays (“lessons”) on topics ostensibly about education, the reader learns that Shy has lived an extraordinary fifty-something years. He grew up in rural Appalachia, went through public schools, played high school basketball, was transformed by reading literature provided by a beloved teacher, Ms. Acuff, had a “significant religious experience,” attended Princeton seminary, taught English and History in rural and urban North Carolina, attempted and failed to write and publish novels, was an award-winning reviewer of books, and finally ended up in New York City as the principal of an ambitious new educational experiment called Avenues The World School.
It’s beautifully considered. Shy knows his way around a sentence, a metaphor, an image. His description of reading Thomas Wolfe for the first time as a high school junior is a brightly polished gem of a moment:
One winter day [Ms. Acuff] loaned me a collection of short stories by Thomas Wolfe, who was from Asheville, two hours away, just across the mountains. My basketball team had a road game that night…I was sitting near the front of the bus as we headed toward one of the coal towns deep in the surrounding mountains. And I had that book. And because the days were short, to read I had to hold the book high to catch remnants of afternoon light. The bus had no heat; the window was creek cold. The spine of the book was dry and cracked. Ms. Acuff couldn’t have opened it for many, many years. I turned the borrowed pages with gloved hands… The narrow mountain roads were white with winter salt, and little clusters of clapboard homes tucked against the rocky slopes like oyster shells in Lowell’s poem. Smoke from the chimneys, clean wood smoke, dissolved in the gathering night. On porches were unboxed stacks of logs; in driveways, pickup trucks and American cars…I leaned close to the cold window, adjusting my book to the passing light. Everything felt alive, everything lay exposed, available.
This passage blows away the notion that those who can’t do, teach. It’s the kind of thing I would be proud of writing for my children.
And that’s not the exception in this book: the well-observed moment, the wise reflection. It is indeed advice for teaching, but so much more. Lesson 7, “Against Endless Preparation,” is probably my favorite essay that combines wisdom on teaching with a vignette from Shy’s life.
There is another thing, moreover, that makes this book unique and valuable: exactly its status as a book written by a man, and more specifically, a man who has survived the trenches of the middle school front lines.
Traditionally, men are underrepresented among middle school teachers, the level at which Shy mostly taught in North Carolina. It’s regrettable. As a middle school teacher myself, I have found the company of my own gender to be bolstering. In schools where I have had a core of male colleagues, it is so much more possible to find support and solace in the way that I, as a man, find comfortable. It is no knock to my female colleagues that dealing with the challenges of teaching middle school is easier when I can talk to a male colleague or three about sports over a burger or a beer and then, gently, ease in to the subject of a difficult student or parent or personal issue in a setting where I know I will be understood.
Students, too, benefit from having a diversity of voices and experiences in their classrooms. And, in my professional opinion, middle school students who experience men as nurturers and fosterers of their young adolescent selves receive something valuable and still unusual in our society where men are rightly being called to account for the sins of their gender but have not yet figured out what their new, proper place in society should be.
Shy sprinkles his narrative with gratitude and appreciation for male colleagues, including this paean to one man in particular:
My friend Dave is…one of the best teachers I’ve ever known. We are exactly the same age. I taught 7th grade history; he taught 8th. My students would become his students. We coached basketball together. The year his son was born, I covered his coaching duties for several weeks, and he wanted to pay me for it out of the stipend he received, but I wouldn’t take it, so instead he bought two tickets and drove us to see Bob Dylan in Winston-Salem…I think together we saw 15 to 20 shows… Like his teaching routines, his memory was methodical and seemingly infallible. If Dylan played an obscure song, Dave would smile and tell me later that he hadn’t played that since 1998, or whenever it was…Dave was the most reliable person I’d ever met—mentally, morally, professionally.
It’s probably too much to ask for a chapter of this book to have been written with a title such as “Teaching in the Company of Men,” but in a way, the whole book radiates with this vibe. So much of the quoted wisdom is from men. One notable example involves Dr. Michael Thompson, an unapologetic champion of the need for teachers and schools to pay attention to the emotional development of adolescent boys:
A mother in the crowd told [Thompson] she was worried because her son wouldn’t ever cry, in fact, fought hard against it if he was clearly starting to. She said she told him over and over it was okay… but he wouldn’t listen, and what could she do? She was clearly distressed, and when she finished, Michael Thompson said… Do you think your son has ever seen his father cry? The woman lowered her head and said no… Or an uncle…Or any adult male in his life? The woman holding the microphone didn’t answer because she was sobbing.
Shy then goes on: “To teach students without every addressing the emotional part of life is negligence.”
Amen.
Truth be told, I am not the best target audience for this book because I’ve lived just about everything Shy talks about. In fact, the number of things I have in common with the author is nothing less than astounding.
That’s why I am passing on this book to my son, who teaches high school Social Studies. If Todd Shy’s daughters are receiving a precious chronicle of their father’s life along with teaching advice, my son will receive an example of a life lived in education to which he can relate in ways that he couldn’t with a book about teaching full stop.
We white men are still trying to figure out what life is supposed to be for us in a post-white supremacist world. Todd Shy has given us a good idea of how to chart that journey.