John Buccheri
My Teachers
Recently, the occasion presented itself for reflection on the teacher who had most profoundly affected my life and mind. As compensation for my inability to single out one individual, I was flooded with images and memories of several teachers who in ways great or small have left their stamp on me. These men and women continue to insinuate themselves into the fabric of my teaching, and remind me that sometimes even small actions, enacted with conviction and love, help students on the path to the lofty goals I should be setting for them. I have selected a few memorable teachers to present in a short tour of my personal pantheon. As the new school year gets under way, I invite you to stroll thoughtfully through your own "Hall of the Greats."
Mary Dunn, an elementary school math teacher, taught me the mystery and beauty in numbers and their relations. I had no idea why, but she always said "cipher" instead of "zero" or "oh." The rapidly executed syllables of her speech clicked out like the sound of a typewriter as she let us in on the secret of "casting out nines" to check our addition. So, you don't know how to cast out nines? Add, say, 919 and 724 to get 1643. To check the sum—
Scratch out the two 9s from 919, leaving 1
Scratch out the 7 and 2 (7+2=9) from 724, leaving 4
Add the remainders: 1+4=5
Similarly, cast out nines from the sum, 1643
Scratch out 6 and 3, leaving 1+4=5
This matches the sum of the "nineless" addends.
Secure in addition, you might simply re-add to check your work. But for me, at the time, this more cumbersome checking process was magic!)
Gunnar Nelson was my homeroom teacher in eighth grade. After saluting the flag, we spent that otherwise humdrum time before our assigned classes with the "Increase Your Word Power" page he had clipped from the Readers Digest. On weekly quizzes, we were required to use in sentences words like "sacerdotal," "quotidian," and "obnubilate," words I remember more for the music of their sounds than for their practical use. Nelson was passionate about the power of the word.
The word on Dorothy Shapleigh was that she was among the first women to have been granted a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Yale University. If this were true, we might wonder why she spent her career as a high school English teacher. I believe she loved witnessing the passion for literature come to light in the eyes of her students as she prodded even the most reticent of us to express ourselves in class.
Her assigned reading lists were daunting, impossible really. And I didn't like that one bit, because it interfered seriously with my after-school basketball (those of you who know me will understand that my hoop idol was not George Mikan, but Bob Cousy). Years later, I realized Dr. Shapleigh had taught me what it meant to love students through how you challenged and supported them.
Clarence Nordstrom was a rather humorless biology teacher. I guess you'd have to be, to get a bunch of teenage boys to take seriously a term like "gonad." To his credit, I remember more biology than I'd like (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species are terms that, still today, roll easily off my tongue). From him I learned the power of good organization and clear thinking.
Kenneth MacKillop, a composer and music professor at Tufts University, was my chief mentor and the man who turned my ears, eyes, and imagination to music. In many one-on-one sessions, I came to know the excitement of uncovering the artfulness in music, and experienced first-hand how to shape sound into a multitude of expressive shadings. When he was through with me, my fate—a life in music and a life in the academy—was sealed.
At the Eastman School of Music, Jared Bogardus taught me to experience piano playing as deeply satisfying and soulful—as the psychologist Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi calls the "optimal experience of flow." The work of getting into flow involved lots of singing, sometimes while playing from memory the left hand part with my right hand, and learning each voice of a fugue as an independent musical gesture eager to dance with its partner(s). Without his patient tutelage, I would never have sensed the intimate link between music and human spirituality.
From early days in the classroom to this day, I continue to learn from my students in ways too numerous to tell. I am so very grateful for the privilege my students afford me to help shape the way they think and feel about their art and so to change who they are as musicians and human beings.
To conclude this tour, I present my most fervent, dedicated, and tender teacher. As a child, watching my mother's delicate hands on the piano keys and listening to the sounds of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Chopin, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff (the disposition of her taste is not hard to divine) turns out to have been THE formative experience of my life. Today, at eighty-five, she is teaching me how to grow in years with grace, compassion, and love. I try to listen carefully.
Please take a moment now to reflect on your teachers. It will do wonders for your students.