The things our students remember

The great reward of a career in university teaching (Lord knows, it isn’t the pension) is getting a hint, now and then, that in ways large and small one has had some influence on some students.  That occurred to me recently in exchanges with two former students whom I taught on two campuses and nearly four decades apart.

One came from a fellow who, as a sophomore at Marquette some 40 years ago, had taken my beginning newswriting class. Kevin was given one of the university’s major alumni awards this spring for his superb work as a p.r. man over his career for Marquette and for two NFL teams, and I wrote to congratulate him. In his reply, he reminded me of an episode at the beginning of the course. I had given the students their first in-class writing assignment, a story based on notes I handed out. My purpose was to get an idea of the level of writing skill each student was bringing to the class.

“I began writing my story with a pen,” he wrote, “until you stepped up to me and asked: ‘What are you doing?’ When I explained that I couldn’t type, you replied, ‘You’re going to have to start learning right now.’” He added, “Lesson started and learned.” And he said he had often told that story over the years.

I had not remembered that, and what I thought he might have recalled was my reaction to an assignment later in the semester.. After I had gone over in class the elements and structure of the speech story, I gave the students a copy of a speech and told them to write a story about it as homework. 

At the beginning of the next class, as I picked up the stories, his caught my eye. He had handed me simply a copy of the speech--neatly typed and letter perfect, by the way. 

Why had he turned in a copy of the copy I had given him, I asked. Kevin said that he thought that was the best way to faithfully convey what the speaker had said. That was hard to argue with, but I managed to convince him that a well-written story could get a speaker’s major points and the flavor of the speech across to readers and in an economical way that was best-suited to the limited space of a newspaper. He learned that lesson, too, and he turned out to be an excellent writer.

Within a week or so came an email from another Kevin, a Loyola graduate of more recent years who, as a freshman, had been a student in my introductory writing course. I always thumped Will Strunk and E.B. White’s slim The Elements of Style like a preacher at a revival in that course and used some of White’s essays as examples of excellent writing—among them, the poignant “Once More to the Lake,” which I could never discuss with a class lest they see their professor in tears. 

Kevin  told me that he had moved to New York City earlier in the year and one of the first things he had done was to buy a copy of White's "Here Is New York.”  He said he wanted to tell me that and to say that he “found it very instructive and surprisingly accurate even 60 years after it was written.”  I was delighted to hear from him and to know that a bit of my adulation of White as a writer had rubbed off on him.

I have to confess, though, that that wasn’t all he remembered of me. Kevin had been in the class in the spring of 2005, and in the fall, during our “Katrina semester,” studied  at Loyola University of Chicago.*  My family and I had taken refuge from the storm and its aftermath  in Chicago, too, and I had made use of the free semester to do  research at the Newberry Library.  Kevin and I met near there late one gorgeous autumn morning for a long, chatty lunch. Afterwards, he reminded me in his note, “We were walking back towards the L station when I heard the train go by beneath our feet. I said to you, ‘I think I just missed my train,’ to which you responded, ‘Don't worry, Kevin. Trains are like women. You wait 15 minutes and there's another one.’”

“I wanted to let you know I think of this advice often,” he wrote, “and it has brought me great comfort over the years.”   

My “advice” of course was a twist of the old gag line, “women are like trains,…” but I did not mention that.  

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*Kevin’s story of his arrival in New Orleans the weekend before Katrina and his almost immediate departure for what he and the rest of us at the university thought would be “a brief holiday” was the lead of an article I wrote that fall for the magazine  Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education on the effects of Katrina on Loyola and Spring Hill College in Mobile and the response of the country’s other Jesuit institutions.