My secret for any success was simple:
always come well prepared, welcome
laughter and don’t take yourself too
seriously (memento mori).
To my colleagues in the English
department who have unwaveringly
supported me for 40 years and to my
many students, best wishes. As the
Irish saying goes, may the wind be at
your backs.
Paul Douglas
There have been numerous Holly-
wood films about inspirational teach-
ers who dramatically change the lives
of their students. Think of Mr. Hol-
land’s Opus, a film in which one of
this teacher’s most challenged students
becomes the state’s governor, and his
former students perform the premiere
of his musical opus. And of course
there are the students in Dead Poets
Society supporting their fired literature
teacher by standing on top of their
desks and reciting Walt Whitman’s “O
Captain! My Captain!”
Unlike these imaginary teachers at
the end of their careers, I’ve had a
more mundane experience over the
past month: cleaning out an office
with a 40-year detritus of lecture
notes, 35mm slides, audio and video
tapes, compact discs, photographs,
painted window screens and objects
such as the illegal heating coil used by
a prisoner at the Western Maryland
Correctional Facility. I’ve experienced
no cheering students remembering
inspiring moments in the classroom,
no letter from a student who later
became a Nobel Prize winner, no teary
reunions with a promising student
who became a governor.
Instead I’ve found former student
Katie M’s recording of her 88-year-
old Irish grandmother, Gwen G’s
photographs of Pennsylvania-German
gravestones, Ann M’s paper on Eastern Shore workboats, Sam F’s video
of decoy carvers, Sarah R’s painting
of Scheherazade and Wilma R’s taped
interview with her Vietnam-veteran
uncle. When I handle these materials,
I remember my students and hope that
they might remember something that
they learned from me.
A poem by Charles Wright, “It’s
Sweet to Be Remembered,” cap-
tures my feelings about whatever
influence—unknowable but I hope
positive—I may have had during my
teaching career. Wright says that “No
one’s remembered much longer than a
rock/is remembered beside the road/If
he’s lucky.” He then observes that it’s
“nice to imagine some kid someday/
picking up that rock and holding it in
his hand/Briefly before he chucks it/
Deep in the woods in a sunny spot in
the tall grass.”
In my imaginings, the “kid some-
day/picking that rock and holding it
in his hand” is one of my students
who saw or heard something in my
class and thought “that’s interesting.”
Perhaps the “kid” is a 50-year-old ac-
countant who remembers Ken Kesey’s
criticism of 1950s conformity. Perhaps
he’s the father of a teenager who
wants to join the military to fight in
Afghanistan. Will the father remember
Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They
Carried and the main character’s rev-
elation that fleeing to Canada to avoid
going to Vietnam would have been
an act of bravery, while following the
patriotic exhortations of his family
and friends was a form of cowardice?
Will my former student share with
his son what he remembers from our
Professor Paul Douglas taught world folklore, folklore
and literature, and American studies for 41 years. A
Fulbright Fellow, he has taught and represented TU at
universities in Turkey and China, and published articles
in National Geographic Magazine and The Smithsonian
Journal of History.
class discussion about the ambigui-ties of combat? Or perhaps there is a
former student vacationing with her
husband and children in New England
and pausing at a Puritan cemetery to
explain to them the meaning of the
skull and wings on the gravestones,
or another mother thinking about the
family folkways that she is continuing
when she makes a traditional wedding
soup for her new daughter-in-law.
I will never really know what influence I have had, or even if I have had
much, but I hope that there will be
some rock, “deep in the woods in a
sunny spot in the tall grass”—perhaps
a student, or two or three who will
remember something valuable or
interesting from one of my classes and
will think about how their education
influenced them in small, but sometimes meaningful, ways.
