LETTERS FROM HOME: IN PRAISE OF TEACHERS IN LOVE WITH THE CALLING OF EDUCATION

May 21, 1998

Dear Dr. Dawson,

I wish the elated graduates who packed the Show Me Center Saturday had seen the university professors and staffers honored the next day at the retirement ceremony. They might have seen themselves 40 years hence in the faces of the retirees.

Professors are required to witness their students' graduation. Students might as well be there as their professors enter a new stage of life.

Overnight, the emotional switch turned from the graduates' joy at an accomplishment gained through perseverance to something akin to sadness over an accomplishment that took great perseverance as well. Though everyone did their best to remain composed, the retirees' somber faces and restrained body language relayed the feelings coursing underneath.

How does one leave behind one's calling gracefully?

As well-intentioned as the ceremony was, may I say it left me empty.

The proclamations containing the many whereases, the pictures taken with the president and the parting gifts -- a chair or gold medallion -- were nice and dignified.

I'd have rather heard all of you say what being an educator has meant to you, though perhaps the emotion of what it meant would have strangled your voices.

The graduates will remember the professors or teachers who somehow noticed their specialness, whatever it might be.

Bob Hamblin assigned my English class to keep a journal. After reading my rather excited feelings about the Vietnam War, he encouraged me to continue writing that way. He thought he heard a voice in there.

A retiring high school teacher said last week that former students sometimes return and thank him for help he didn't even realize he had given.

I had a yen for philosophy in college, though in the end concluded that the activity going on in most philosophers' heads is so entertaining that they ignore the instinctual knowledge in their hearts. In particular, I liked a professor named Jim Hamby, a former football coach who switched to philosophy. He was a Catholic who taught a course in situational ethics, a straight-talking jock who could discourse on Immanuel Kant. He loved golf, too.

This was a different way of being a man than I had encountered. I still can't tell you anything about Kant, but Hamby taught something golden about just being.

At Sunday's ceremony I learned that he also was famous for giving friends drawings of birds accompanied by essays. And that after his death you forgot about Shakespeare for awhile and set about trying to collect slides of the bird pictures Hamby had scattered across the country.

What Hamby did, to pass along his knowledge and his art, strikes me as the essence of what the people being honored Sunday had spent their lives doing.

In one of the old Frank Sinatra films broadcast after his death this week, he sang a line about wanting his arms about someone. While the words flowed out he tenderly embracing himself. You could dislike Sinatra for his politics and for the nefarious people he liked to hang out with, but he spoke and sang with his true voice.

A university can't give you your voice, the means to express who you are, but a university can help you find it.

Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.