Reading the Teacher

In my algebra class, Daniel, a smart, newer student, expressed his frustration
that whenever he gave a tentative answer to an algebra problem, he could
not tell from my expression and follow-up question whether his answer was
wrong or right. That led to my wondering how much of his school learning
thus far had been spent on learning to read his teachers instead of learning to
grapple with the material itself. Which got me to thinking about the
difference between the two. And that led me back to Fort Wolters.

I was brought up in a conservative farm town where everyone put their hand
over their heart when the American flag passed by in a parade. The United
States in my childhood was the bastion of freedom and democracy, holder of
the moral high ground. When the Vietnam War heated up during my high
school years, I struggled with knowing what was right. I wanted America to
triumph but voices of dissent raised questions that I didn’t have the
background to understand. I read articles in Time magazine that explained
the reasons why we would win the war if we just stayed the course. The
evening news reported the body counts; there were always more of the
enemy killed than Americans.

I went to a liberal arts college where most students were against the war—
perhaps partly because it was the sixties and that’s what college students
were supposed to believe. But I still had that conservative farm town
foundation in me and I couldn’t really be against the war, not if there was a
chance we could somehow win it.

At the end of my freshman year, I hitchhiked home across the country. As I
was going across Texas, I met a guy who asked me if I wanted to spend the
night on an army base. I couldn’t quite believe I could spend the night on an
army base but I said sure. And I did. I went through the chow line and got
fed and I stayed in the barracks – which was a series of small rooms with
about four soldiers per room. And there we talked – or rather, I mostly
listened.

Fort Wolters trained helicopter crews. Almost everyone there was either
going to Vietnam or was returning from Vietnam. The soldiers I listened to
had just come back. Just come back in the sense that they had hardly talked
to anyone stateside so they were, I presume, still strongly in the state of
mind that had, for them, evolved over there. Vietnam was great, said a
helicopter machine gunner. You’re flying along and you see a guy walking
along a road, you just blow him away. It was great, he said, with no
awareness of how his stories were blowing me away.

This memory came to mind as I reflected on Daniel’s comment. When I was
struggling to figure out Vietnam by reading Time magazine and noting the
daily body counts and listening to speeches of the president and his generals,
I had been “reading the teacher.” Those soldiers started bringing me in
contact with the “lesson” itself. There was no way we were going to win the
hearts of the Vietnamese, no matter what the president said, if their fathers
and grandfathers were shot from the air while walking down the road. Body
counts based on incidents like that would only lead reasoning into a fantasy.
We must focus on understanding the lesson itself, not grow dependent on
following the leading questions of “teachers.”