A Teacher to Remember

His reputation was always ahead of him – a caustic, insulting and inconsiderate instructor who flunked 70-80 percent of the members of his English 4 classes. His tall lean frame gave him that mean and hungry look which further terrorized future students in “Contents and Style.” Naturally he was avoided by second year students who had to take the course during the second semester. When they went to the Gym to communicate with God on Sunday afternoons, they never missed in their petition the immediate recall to the US of Peace Corp volunteer Douglas Griffith. But the Lord was so busy at that time with the deteriorating situation in Vietnam to attend to anxiety of incoming English 4 students. So when I enrolled in the course in my fourth semester stay at MSU Marawi campus, I noticed that 8 out of the 13 members of the class were already fourth year and graduating students.

The senior female members of the class who weaved scary tales about Mr. Griffith called him “the pelican.” They never explained why. Probably, because he was always solitary and walked with his shoulders hunched a little forward, his bespectacled eyes hardly leaving the ground.

During the first meeting of our class all 13 of us occupied the last row of seats in one of those small classrooms in the old Gym in front Raja Indarapatra Dorm. The pelican arrived and was apparently amused by our cowardly position in the room and immediately barked:

“You should not change this sitting arrangement. You should remain in your exact position till the end of the semester.”

He moved with his back to the door and of a sudden kicked it with the force of a provoked horse, shaking precariously the tender walls of the room and sending the chalk powder that accumulated at the bottom of the blackboard in different directions. He thereupon bellowed:

“I would not allow anybody in this class to drop this course!”

We were given a diagnostic writing exercise on the topic “On Education.” I wrote that education does not improve the individual and the character of a nation. For instance, I argued to support my thesis, the most educated people in the world today are the Americans. But look what they are doing in Vietnam…blahblah…”

The result was devastating. My paper was bloody red all over. So many faults found: problem on antecedents, wrong tenses, wrong infinitives, dangling modifiers, so many passive and kilometric sentences, wrong punctuations, unnecessary and inappropriate words, spelling, etc. The sickening point was the remarks:

“You are a damn ass. You have nothing to say. You are simply playing with verbal garbage!”

The papers of my nearest seatmates were graded 3- , 4+ or 5. I could not locate my grade with all the red embellishments on my paper. Then my classmate and roommate, the late Mar Pagang, spotted it. It was the biggest 5 I ever received in my life. The mark actually occupied the entire page – starting with a long line on the top most border of the paper from right to left, moving along the left border down to the middle, crossing the center to the right border, moving along the right border down, and then curbed at the bottom back to the left border. It was amazing how he could shrewdly and artistically humiliate a person.

Doug Griffith exuded with dramatics that impacted on our consciousness. Our topic one foggy, muddy, cold day in November was definition. He began by asking the first student on his left side of the row: What is a chair?

“A chair is something you sit on,” she replied.

Almost automatically Doug dropped and sat on the floor, the bottoms of his white trousers, as well as his delicate hands muddied all over.

“So this is a chair!” He shouted. “Is this a chair?” he asked the girl while he was still sitting on the muddy floor.

“No Sir, that’s a floor.” She answered trembling.

“A minute ago you declared this is a chair. Fickle minded.” He rose and asked the next guy what his definition of a chair is.

“A chair is an object to sit on with four legs,” he replied.

“So this is a chair!" He cried as he climbed and sat on the table. “Is this a chair? He demanded.

“No Sir, that’s a table,” said the guy bewildered.

The next girl on the line defined a chair as an object with four legs with a writing arm. The instructor pulled from a corner a classroom chair with a missing leg and put it in front us. He looked at the class and looked at the chair and then kicked it like a football raging: “So this is not a chair!” The chair bounced on the wall and broke another leg. The girl grew white in fear.

So the questioning continued down the line. There was no satisfactory definition of a chair; the last ones were suffocated with details that begged a distinction between a chair behind a table, a bench and a writing chair. “Now, now, you, “he said addressing to me at the end of the line, “after hearing all their definitions, what is your definition of a chair.”

I didn’t know what to answer. To repeat what they said is catastrophe. After some seconds of hesitation I replied:

“My definition of a chair is a combination of all their definitions.”

The class was silent waiting for an explosion. It never came. The instructor clasped his hand behind him, moved back and forth in front us, and then announced: “Class dismissed.”

Until now I do not really know the value of my answer. It means nothing to me. It fails to define a chair. It appeared that it simply played on internal logic that Doug probably thought difficult to debunk. Anyway, there were many similar thought-provoking and emotionally jarring incidents after that to put across our teacher’s message that we should be sharp, definite and accurate in how we think and how we say it.

There would be plenty of writing exercises at the end of his topical lectures. We were required to maintain a journal, a thick notebook, where we jot down daily a paragraph or two on something - our observations on things around us, our reactions to facts and events, our fears, anxiety, doubts, confusion, love, hatred, impressions, imaginations, dreams, and what have you. He would diligently collect the journals Friday afternoon, read and correct them on weekends and return them to us on Monday morning. He introduced us an impressive thin book of 85 pages, “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White which he encouraged us to own a copy.

“Read this book,” he said. “Master this book. You don’t have to read any other books on writing after this. If you can master this book you can write on anything on any form because the essentials are here.”

Over time my impression on Doug changed. His “terror” stance, his dramatics and antics were after all designed to provoke his students into deep and powerful thinking to liberate them from the prison of shallow action-reaction thoughts and behaviors. I realized that his criticisms of one’s work were well-placed and his suggestions were directed to improve the expression of thoughts.

My change of attitude also changed the quality of my outputs. Soon, some of my papers were read in class. My grade also underwent radical metamorphosis.