The Story I Am. Roger Rosenblatt

they look like: fifteen young people in jeans, sweatshirts, and sweaters, bodies hooked over a white sheet of paper, pursuing memories, dressing them up, and watching to ascertain that their hands are following their minds’ instructions. The flower is laid aside on the desk, its work done. The students are off now like hounds. They follow the scent to funerals, weddings, proms. One girl will remember lying in the night grass under a blue moon with her little sister. Another will recall a last dance with a midshipman in navy whites. A boy will alter the scent to that of lilacs, and swoop back to a childhood Eden near his father’s rectory.

      This is where education becomes private. This is the nub of it. It is out of sync with the conventional images of education in America. Write about those images: the teacher is a pale, bloodless deacon, drained by unsatisfied longings, preposterous, out of things. She is the withered maiden, he is Ichabod Crane, humiliated to death by the village nitwit. The only way he gains respect is to become Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle