John Dunaway
French & Interdisciplinary Studies
Mercer University
How much are our students worth?
At the conclusion of my classes last week, one of my students came up to ask me some questions. I knew that if I took the time to help her, I would be late for my departmental meeting. I chose to help her, and sat there for several minutes, answering her questions.
It was a lesson I had learned from Dr. Wallace Fowlie during my undergraduate days at Duke University. His dedication to his students, which grew out of his own devout faith, was deeply influential in my vocational journey. He encouraged us, spent time with us, shared meals and movies and long conversations with us.
Fowlie’s lecture on a poem by French symbolist writer Stéphane Mallarmé was the moment of epiphany for me.
Mallarmé evokes his struggle with creative sterility in a sonnet about a swan (“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”). He imagines a swan trapped in a frozen lake as his metaphor for himself, and asks: Can the virgin and beautiful possibilities of Today shake off the frozen sterility of winter and make it possible for the majestic bird to sing again in ecstatic flight?
Fowlie’s wondrous way of guiding our class out of confusion into insight on the richness of Mallarmé’s evocation convinced me that my calling in life was to do something like that with my own students some day.
I recall how he compared the whiteness of the wintry landscape to the white of the blank page facing the poet as he struggles with the sterility of writer’s block (a problem not unfamiliar to undergrads like me who were supposed to write explications of such poems!). After all these years, it’s not Fowlie’s words I recall so much as the genuine joy he was expressing in his analysis of the poem. He was inviting us personally to join him in this joyous adventure and even help complete what was missing in it.
Whenever we enter the classroom, we should remember that a watershed moment, a vocational epiphany is possible for some student on that day. When we enter the classroom, we are daily treading on holy ground. As God told Moses: “Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is HOLY GROUND.” (Exodus 3:5)
© 2006 John Dunaway