I began to respond to today’s question on Pete Wilson’s blog (withoutwax.tv) and found that I simply couldn’t keep my answer to the question he posed down to a length that was appropriate for the forum. So, I thought I’d put it in this blog entry. The question posed was:
Which class in high school or college impacted you the most? Why?
Some of the classes influenced me the most in college were literature and humanities classes taught by Professor Howard Fulweiler. I remember them vividly because Prof. Fulweiler was an amazing man. He was well past the age he could’ve retired (and he did finally retire before I graduated) but continued to teach because it was his love. He was the old school type that still wore the tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. Other students who got the younger, hipper professors leading their sections might’ve felt sorry for us for getting the old guy, but we quickly realized how extremely lucky we were to get to learn from him before he was gone.
Professor Fulweiler had a white beard and his voice had a gravelly quality. Listening to him speak, you could easily imagine him as a pirate (or at least a pirate’s grandfather). It could be entertainingly rough and gruff one minute and warm and soothing the next. He had an awesome and enviable passion for literature and when he would read us passages he would throw himself into a character. You could just tell that in his day he was surely a fantastic actor – Shakespearean or otherwise.
He was a major influence on me as a freshman when I decided to change my major to English. Each week he would make us write pensees (one page papers containing our thoughts on our reading assignments) and then critique each others work before submitting. It taught me how I could use the analytical part of my mind, which everyone had always told me should be concentrated on a math or science field, to dissect and interpret my true love – literature.
He was seemingly a contradiction. He told us stories about being in the army and struggling to read Ulysses by James Joyce at night while in his barracks. He was proof that the ancient notion of ‘warrior poet’ was possible. You needn’t be either a manly man or a lover of art and the written word. You could be both at once. And he singled me out at the end of both semesters with a letter commending my work. Looking back, validation from a man like that was huge.
