Marginalia on The Browning Version with and How It Might Play Out in 2014

          My favorite play, not counting every musical comedy ever written, is Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version, a play about a teacher who realizes, as people are urging him to retire early, that he has been a total failure.  It was written just a couple of years after I was born, but I only recently realized that he had me in mind.  I just looked it up and found this synopsis:  "Forced to retire from an English public school, a disliked professor must confront his utter failures as a teacher, a husband, and a man."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1578111/

(I just Googled that whole sentence and several links appeared.  Apparently one borrows from the other!)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205789/plotsummary

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0637859/

http://mymaxsavingsclub.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=5746515&PHPSESSID=bi0ph2v8hcndjlpqon7mp71ic5

http://www.solarmovie.is/watch-the-browning-version-1951.html

http://uwatch.to/Watch-The-Browning-Version-Online-Movie-ID2572

http://arka.foi.hr/~jozemberi/josip-zemberi-bcc/movie.php?id=698&r_page=128&lang=en

http://arka.foi.hr/~jozemberi/josip-zemberi-bcc/index.php?page=70&r_page=1&lang=en

https://kickass.to/the-browning-version-1951-mkv-t7975206.html

So everyone uses the same summary!  Does that mean that it hasn't been given a second thought?

           Anyway,  I would take exception with the “must.”  What I admire about the man is that he confronts these failures when he could choose to see his failures as those of everybody else.  I admire his courage in admitting that he’s failed.  I’m trying to have that much courage. 

          The above is something I wrote in 2009, five years before I retired.  The same year, I also wrote this:

          When I think of my very long career as a teacher, I see that it’s not without its triumphs.  I remember receiving cheers every evening I walked into my class of beginning students with advanced enthusiasm.  I remember their pronouncing, “Good teacher!  Good teacher!”  as they left the classroom at 8:30.  I also remember a reassuring experience that occurred when I  taught in an intensive English language program at Golden Gate University and a student thanked me at the end of the semester, saying that the other students had stopped working in their grammar class because the teacher had gotten lazy,  but they’d continued to work in mine because I continued to work so hard.  (I usually like to tell the story slowly, from the beginning:   I, in my late forties, used to watch a younger teacher, so vibrant and bubbly, bouncing around  in the classroom where she taught a grammar-focus class to our international students  before I moved in to teach them TOEFL Skills. Seeing her energy, I  realized for the first time that I didn’t bounce anymore, I realized that I was…old!  Or at least older. I wasn’t that bubbly, bouncing teacher who kept the class over the time it was scheduled to end so I could come in and start my class.  Then, at the end of the semester, a student told me, “We’ve been talking about you.  We keep working hard in your class because you keep working hard.  We’re not doing much in our grammar class because the teacher has stopped working.”  I thought for a moment about  who that teacher might be, and I realized that it was the bouncing, bubbly one I’d felt so drab beside.)   Early in my career at the community college, I taught a beginning class in the morning and an advanced class in the evening, and I felt--and was perceived as--very successful.  I got the beginning students to exchange and build on  dialogue like:

A:    Excuse me.  Where's the bus stop?

B:   Over there. 

A:   Oh.  Thank you.

Then in the advance class in the evening, in addition to going through the very popular, decontextualized Azar grammar exercises, the students and I listned to a recording of The Glass Menagerie and had very stimulating discussions about it.

When my students gave me cards, cakes, and bouquets, I felt they meant them as tributes, not bribes or even as perfunctory courtesies, which I'm afraid they became at the end of my career.

So all things considered, I’ve been more of a failure than a success, and now, almost 40 years after I started teaching, I’m suffering from internal bleeding.  I see students struggling and even the non-strugglers don’t always triumph.  I can understand.  They work hard, but they don’t get A’s.  Sometimes they don’t even get B’s.   Sometimes they utterly fail.  I can identify.

            All those movies of teachers who inspire— Good Morning, Miss Dove, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dead Poet's Society, Dangerous Minds, To Sir with Love, Lean on Me, Up the Down Staircase, Mr. Holland’s Opus,  Music of the Heart, Stand and Deliver, etc.  aren’t quite balanced by The Browning Version, Terrance Rattigan’s play of a classics professor who realizes, as they are urging him to retire early, that he has been a failure as a teacher and who,  instead of blaming his students,   blames himself.

            I’d so much rather blame the students.

            But when City College gave me a beautiful tote bag with one side saying “Teachers inspire,” I knew it wasn’t true of me and decided not to subject myself to ridicule.  I won’t use the one I got at CATESOL, either, because it says something like “Great teachers.”  There’s not a tote back that says “Teacher not so good,” though students might go online to say that.  There’s no tote bag saying “Teachers overwhelm and confuse,” but that’s what I too often do.

But before we mourn my failure, let me make one confession:  One of the reasons that I’ve failed is that I’ve done exactly what I’ve wanted to do, not what the students wanted and  not necessarily what was wise.  What I liked about teaching is the learning.  The preparation of, say, the illustrations for the song “Grant Avenue, SF, CA, USA,” which I used for my intermediate speaking and listening class every Lunar New Year.  I’m propelled by the sheer pleasure of going online and Googling  “shark fin soup picture” and “Bean cake fish picture” and actually seeing the pictures come up on the screen, available at large size to be copied and pasted and printed out. {Note from 2014:  I was printing out in 2009.  By 2014, I could just bring my iPad to class.}

            I set out to be subversive.  For our NorthStar unit on Lies and Truth, I’d introduce propaganda:  The Kuwaiti Incubator Hoax, Jessica Lynch’s faked rescue, Collin Powell’s plagiarized “British intelligence.”  I’d make them aware of watch dog groups like FAIR.com, holding the media responsible for its distortions, and Snope.com, holding friends responsible for the vicious gossip they sent through the e-mail.    But when I gave them an essay test on the material we’d read and, I thought, discussed in great and clear detail, some  wrote that Jessica Lynch had faked the Kuwaiti Incubator story and that Collin Powell had gone before the U.N. Security Committee to announce that the British had plagiarized their evidence for weapons of mass destruction in  Iraq.  (Did that require covering the copy of Picasso’s Guernica at the United Nations for fear that it would counter the rallying to war?)

For years I’ve written songs for my students, to help them learn vocabulary and grammar points.  I’ve come to realize that this might be a form of torture to them.  I found out after years of using the  professionally written “Tie a Yellow Ribbon on the Old Oak Tree” that it was used in aversion therapy.  Noise-makers were forced to listen to it until the pled for mercy and promised to keep their own noise-making down.

        I worked on our campus treasure the Diego Rivera Mural with a Grant for Instructional Improvement, and even though it attracted editors from London and Madrid and people from many parts of the world, my own students sometimes balked at the assignments connected to it.

We took a docent tour of the mural and had a library orientation focusing on it.  We went over the steps of the mural research project in detail –orally and in writing—step by step—purpose and procedure.  I asked the students to keep a research log so they could relate any problems they had as well as discoveries they made, and I gave them credit for every step they took.  Then I got a call from a librarian:  “The students are very frustrated because they don’t understand what they’re supposed to do.”

          So, here I am, a day before we meet at SFSU, where I got my MA back in 1978, the same year I got married and decided not to stay in the field in spite of my experience in Tonga, Spain, and Algeria.  But I did go back into the field in 1982, when my son was not yet three years old, and I stayed in it until I retired this past May.  Now I have my morning hours free to reflect on how I connect to The Browning Version, which LA Theatre Works,on a recording I have from Audible, summarizes like this:

In Terence Rattigan’s classic drama, an aging schoolmaster at an English secondary school faces the harsh judgments of his students, his fellow teachers, and his frustrated and spiteful wife. But can a lone act of kindness from a sympathetic student change his heart?

https://store.latw.org/plays/the-browning-version/  (The online version uses vicious instead of frustrated.)

I have reservations about this summary too even though I think it's more accurate than the one cited (and used and reused) above.  I'm not sure it's a change of heart the failed teacher needs.   Maybe the question is whether the student's act of kindness can save his heart, which is nearly broken.  For some reason my heart is not broken.  I'm sorry that I wasn't more successful as a teacher or at least perceived to be.  Maybe what I feel is more embarrassment and frustration.  But I want to consider The Browning Version page by page for the next few days and see how it applies to me and my students and colleagues.  I also want to see how it might play in 2014--with ESL students.  (Once the student is speaking English as a second language, everything about the dialogue changes, too.)