to a Former Teacher from a Future Teacher

Dear Thomas McGrath,

Do you remember my senior year? Final period AP Lit, a class full of kids eager to get home, yet, you had our attention. You demanded it. I never knew how you were able to get us engaged. But now, after sitting through college lectures and small class discussions, the 100, 200, 300, and 400 levels, it is just now starting to dawn on me. You taught what you were interested in. I’ve since witnessed multiple other teachers and professors use the same method, their passion for a topic becomes infectious, students cannot feign their interest after a few classes. There is a difference between reciting what is in the curriculum versus sharing precious knowledge and instilling it in a younger generation, carefully placing building blocks and setting them up with thinking tools so they can get something out of a piece of writing.

I remember that I had no friends in your class. Yes, I became acquainted with my peers after seeing them every day but there was no one in that class that I got along well with. It was hard to keep a conversation going with the people around me, we just had nothing in common, and it’s hard to make small talk in high school. That was not an issue for you. Rather than lecturing for a whole 50 minutes, you introduced us to Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, Douglas Spaulding from “Dandelion Wine”, Janie Mae Crawford from “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. These people, places, and ideas filled the silence. You treated them as if they were real and talked about them as if they walked amongst us. One couldn’t help but speak up and be engaged in your class when you challenged “A Farewell to Arms” as an anti-war novel or made us act out embarrassing scenes from Shakespeare. Your love for these authors poured out of your outdated PowerPoint slides and into our minds. 

Your obsession with imagery is what brought these characters and scenes to life. I remember spending two whole class periods focused on a chapter of “Dandelion Wine” about a lawnmower. The initial reading seemed ridiculously boring but after picking apart the word choice and relating it to a modern summer day, I was able to share the exact same feeling of nostalgia as Bradbury did in 1928. 

It is because of you that Ernest Hemingway and Jack London feel like grandfathers to me. I recall their stories of man-versus-nature when the wind rustles the leaves of a tree or my stomach rumbles in class. And after some careful consideration, to answer your question, no, I don't think Hemingway was crazy. It turns out he was actually being gang-stalked by the CIA. 

Although your class made me grow fond of people and places I’ll never know, there could’ve been more. We stayed within the “safety zone” of white male authors writing white male stories. The only time we explored beyond this curriculum was with Zora Neale Hurston. It was a fantastic unit but then it was back to Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even more Ernest Hemingway (I too love his work because of you, but we seriously spent at least 50% of our class talking about him). Thank you for continuing to expose me to the “classics”, but these were stories deemed socially significant decades ago. Try teaching Colson Whitehead or Karen Tei Yamashita, fall in love with authors unlike yourself and you too can learn and feel something new.

Overall, my memories of high school are full of skipping class, getting high at lunch, and not doing any work. However, I vividly remember your class because the discussions we had just felt like I was socializing with friends over a shared interest. You set us up with a general background but let us steer the conversation, letting us crack jokes and ask questions. Through this we became familiar with a plethora of books, poems, and plays, but also became comfortable with thinking and talking about literature. I thank you for everything you have done for my literacy and love for English. I have already started my list of Hemingway works that I one day hope to teach.

Respectfully Yours,

Lloyd Epelbaum