A Learning Experience

(a letter to the New York Times)

Thomas L. Friedman has it partly right when he asserts in today's New York Times that those teachers who best teach us how to learn are the ones who excite and inspire. Another eminently successful method, however, is sheer bloody terror!

As an example I offer Mrs. Smith, the French teacher at my "prep" school (English for rather snobby, elementary-level boarding school.) The most memorable example of her ruthless tyranny was when she forced me--unknowingly, I'm sure, but despite my stenuous objections--to consume a bowl of stew into which a fellow student had but recently thrown up. (Apologies to the squeamish: it does happen to be true.) Hardly lovable, then. She taught the rules of the French language by rote, including the irregular verbs and those ever-elusive genders; and the only excitement involved was the anticipation of a nasty rap on the knuckles with her ruler if you happened to forget.

Inspiring? No, not really. Yet I still remember, line for line, after sixty years, the whole of LaFontaine's "Le Corbeau et le renard." Not useful in itself, perhaps, but I thank Mrs. Smith for having taught me, however painfully, the mental discipline of learning. It's a tool that has proved invaluable in every subsequent learning experience since then.