Renoir, “Child with Toys”
Mother’s Day
Since today is Mother’s Day—the one hundredth anniversary of the holiday, no less—I am posting a moving speech that my colleague and friend Ben Click gave where he talks about his mother. The occasion was Ben being named Teacher of the Year, our College’s most prestigious award. Readers of Better Living through Beowulf have encountered Ben’s work before, generally articles on Mark Twain. Indeed, his piece “Huck Finn’s Censorship History” is the most visited article on this website.
Ben teaches such courses as “The Rhetoric of Humor” and “Rhetoric and Poetics,” and in his acceptance speech he used a rhetorical form, the encomium, to simultaneously talk about his mother and about the process of teaching. Great teachers, Ben tells us, learn their craft from great mothers.
By Ben Click, Professor of English, St. Mary’s College of MD
…When I told my family that I was nominated for this prestigious award, my youngest daughter remarked, “Does that mean you’re the best teacher at the college, Dad?” I had to laugh because it reminded me of an interview I once saw with John Lennon (he was a member of the Beatles, a popular band from the 1960s), where the reporter asked him if Ringo (he was the drummer in that band) was the best drummer in the world? Lennon replied: “He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles.” I think my response to my daughter might have been something similar: “Honey, I’m not even the best teacher in my own office.”
But this talk of superlatives is just fodder for the funny. In seriousness, I know the superb teachers that I get to work with—they are hard working, thoughtful, wildly creative and diverse in their pedagogical approaches, and—damn smart. Thus, it’s unlikely, given these surroundings, that my words today will equal or do honor to the prestige of this award.
However, being trained in rhetoric, I have been given the opportunity to offer some praise today—in the form of an encomium for my mother. Let me explain briefly: An 11th century rhetor/philosopher Michael Psellos wrote an encomium on his mother. A century later, the scholar Gregory of Corinth identified it as one of the four greatest speeches ever composed. In his ecomium, Psellos praises his mother for her supervision of his education. In essence, his ostensible subject, his mother, serves as a foil for his praise of good rhetoric, which she embodied and passed on to her son. I’d like to try the same but substitute my mother for Psellos’s and replace rhetoric with teaching. In short, in praising my mother I will praise teaching.
My mother lived a hardscrabble existence as the youngest daughter of a German father and mother who scratched out life in south central Texas on a small farm while raising two sons and four daughters. My mother, Mary Lou Folschinsky, was an ugly duckling child (by her own admission) who grew into a striking beauty. When I was a boy, she seemed a paragon of natural eloquence. I loved hearing her voice—I still do. It’s the same voice that told me three months ago, “All I knew was that I didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife—that’s hard work, boy! I picked cotton, shucked corn, and drove a tractor and pickup truck by the time I was twelve.” I have the same love for that voice and same admiration for hard work whenever I hear this 90-year-old woman talk.
When I told her that I was thinking of this idea of praising her as a form of praising teaching, her response was, “Well, your father made sure you kids were going to get an education.” And that’s true: he did. He helped with our homework; he corrected our grammar; he used the big words at the dinner table that I’d have to look up. But her humble deference to my father’s influence on us belies her formidable affect in that regard. Stealing a reference from my favorite undergraduate professor, Bill Cozart, I turn to antiquity again, to Plato’s Socrates who said: “A teacher is a ‘midwife of souls.'” Bill connects the line to teaching thusly: “This image implies that, just as a midwife assists in the birth of a new human being, we who teach are helping students bring into being their best selves, their fullest potential.”
While my mother may not have sat at the table working through algebra homework as we got older, she served as a model for what learning is, and in that she helped us be our best selves, explore our potential. For example, she read the newspaper cover-to-cover everyday, clipping articles related to our studies and our interests. In high school it might be articles on the energy crisis for a mock bill I wrote for government class. When I was an undergraduate majoring in botany, it was articles about the forestry industry. When I was a doctoral student, it was articles on teaching writing, Mark Twain, and sometimes even a famous rhetorician who had died, even though she has never been able to pronounce the word rhetorician. And of course, anything to do with my musical heroes: Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, the Stones, Elvis (Presley and Costello), Stevie Ray Vaughan and any number of blues and jazz greats. She continues the practice to this day. She listened to us and took a vested interest in what interested us.
In the car rides to school, she not only let us play the radio stations we liked, but she listened and sang along to the lyrics. This could prove to be quite funny. My sister and I still giggle at the memory of her singing about the sexually ambiguous character Loretta Martin in the Beatles song, “Get Back.” Paul McCartney sings: “Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman, but she was another man.” For that song I think she just liked the beat!
To conclude, this is the same woman who, as a young bride, was forced to separate from her husband for a year shortly after her marriage because of World War II, who left her daddy’s farm in Texas a year later, drove all the way to Seattle to board a ship that would arrive on December, 1947 in Yokohama Bay, only to witness the devastation of WWII while reuniting with my father. Talk about a long and winding road.
Does my encomium of my mother rival Michael Psellos’s ecomium of his mother? Not at all; it hardly comes close. But it does relate something about teaching. To me, teaching seems to be an act of finding a voice and giving a voice, an act of helping others know what they don’t want to be as well as helping them come to know what they can be, an act of knowing what hard work is, an act of assisting with potential, an act of listening and taking interest—an act of humor, sometimes humility, and always humanity.
All these acts my mother taught me, it is what I try to do, and it is what St. Mary’s does best. Thank you for this award: it signifies the opportunity to teach among and learn from these fine teachers and you fine students.