Teachers I Have Known

Along the lines of my last post, I was thinking about those teachers who influenced me, the ones who taught me more than the subject at hand, who taught me to be a teacher and who are with me still.
The first is Dr. Robert Benson. He has recently retired after having taught Literature at Sewanee for thirty years. Although he was a student of the Agrarian Donald Davidson at Vanderbilt, that is not how he influenced me. The first class was English 202 in which we read The Divine Comedy. This was a class that met Tuesday Thursday Saturday at 8 in the morning(Yes we had Saturday classes back then). Now if you know anything about me anything at 8 in the morning is not my style. But I only missed the class once (the first one). It was Dr. Benson's passion for the subject that was so infectious. His knowledge of Medieval literature, history, and religion made this one of the best classes I ever had, and I still read whatever I can about Dante. I also had him for Arthurian literature in the summer of 1982 in the British Studies at Oxford program. This class met daily Monday through Friday for five weeks in one of the seminar rooms at St. John's College Oxford. We read Malory's Morte D'Artur in the original language. It was so intense that more than one of the students reported having dreams in that language. It also provided an opportunity to see that he had a wicked sense of humor. This was the summer after a movie about Arthur had come out Excalibur and students would be saying during class 'But it didn't happen that way in the movie!" This was mildly frustrating to Dr. Benson until one day I chimed in (sarcastically) "But that's not how it happened in Monty Python and the Holy Grail! He liked that one. In fact when I saw him several years later that was the first thing he said to me.
I learned from Dr. Benson to be passionate and committed about the subject and that the knowledge considered by some to be peripheral to the subject actually allows for a better comprehension of the subject.