English 101, FAC, Calvin College, 1981

Place: FAC, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI

Date: 1981

Prof: Gordon Bordewyk

My freshman English teacher, Professor Gordon Bordewyk, assigned us a small task: Find an article, examine the first and last paragraph, and analyze how well they adhere to good essay practices.

Now, I was an avid reader of TV Guide and read it cover to cover every week, even subscribed when I was a freshman. So, instead of trek to the library, I picked an article from that magazine to analyze.

I'm sure Prof Bordewyk, whom I liked very much, thought I hastily thumbed through a copy in the dorm TV room, chose an article at random, and did a brain dump at the typewriter.

That was not at all true (I actually wanted to write for TV at the time), but it probably looked that way.

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This is the same Professor Bordewyk I wrote about before and who remembered me by name many years later. Either I made an impression on him, or he had a great memory. (I hope, if the former, it was a good one).

He had an eclectic pipe collection in his office, at least a dozen. That end of the hall in Calvin's English Department smelled delightfully of pipe tobacco. If whirring mental gears produced a scent, it would smell like that.

I smoked a pipe in those days.

I used to be an English teacher. I think teaching core courses is among the most thankless jobs one can have, yet may occasionally yield a promising glimmer.

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If freshman English is tough to teach, it's even tougher to learn for budding wannabe writers, which included yours truly. I thought I knew it all and was being held back by talentless peers and an intentionally constricting maze of rules that led to creative dead ends.

Of course, now that I'm on the other side of the life-expectancy bell curve,  I know better, and actually look back fondly at my professors, like Gordon Bordewyk, who gently corrected me in the classroom, for I was conceited (if well-intentioned), and that sort of character defect never helps a writer.

It's no coincidence that "humility" resembles "humiliation."

But my humiliation was entirely a dialog with myself. Prof. Bordewyk needn't have been kind; he could have ripped me a new adjective, but he didn't.

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I positively loathed using index cards when writing essays. It's just not how I organize my thoughts. ENGL101 was the last time I used them.

It was a good tool to have in my toolbox, but I'd worn it to a nub by the time I left high school.

[2014-05-22]

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