"Some Things I Learned from Mr. Glover, Part 1" by H. Scutt

Work Eight Periods a Day

The first time Ms. Peña told me I should volunteer for coverages, I nearly laughed in her face. For three years, coverages had been the bane of my existence. I dreaded the ten minutes of homeroom; any second could bring one of Ms. Peña’s minions with a yellow rectangle of paper, like Blind Pew delivering the black spot in Treasure Island. The idea that I would voluntarily submit to a daily time-bomb was, at first, laughable to me. “It’s better to work straight through the day,” Ms. Peña explained. “You stay in the zone and time goes faster. Plus, it’s good money.” Like a child, however, merely hearing the truth was not enough. Seeing is believing, and I couldn’t believe Ms. Peña when she told me. But when I thought about it, it occurred to me that I had seen the truth for three years. The truth in action was Mr. Glover—the dean who was always a dean and never asked for rest.

For me, teaching started out as a series of five performances a day. Between shows, I would try to catch my breath backstage or hastily rebuild the set for my next act. A coverage was like doing improve comedy before a crowd that expects the philharmonic orchestra. Yes, a teacher should be able to put on a good show, but there’s a reason actors only take the stage once a night.

They called James Brown the hardest working man in show business because he would do more shows in a year than a year has days. They called him the Godfather of Soul because that’s what he was. He must have known the same thing that Ms. Peña told me and Mr. Glover demonstrated: Be who you are all day long.


You Have to Care Enough to Know Enough

I started teaching knowing very little about how to teach. I am constantly embarrassed by new teachers who begin their first day with talents and knowledge that it took me years to approximate. The only advantage to my own slow evolution is that I have become intimately reacquainted with ignorance. The experience of ignorance has nothing to do with how smart you are, how old you are, or even how wise you are. Ignorance is nothing more than the experience of not knowing, and we all know what that feels like. Ignorance is also the necessary state of any student, and it is what proves we have something to teach them.

All people, even teachers, must make some sort of compromise with ignorance. Knowing only that we know nothing, we specialize in something in the hope of doing at least one thing well. We accept the fact that we may never know as much as we want to know about Sanskrit or arc welding or geometric proofs. In exchange, we focus on sweeping ignorance from a small patch of solid ground where we can plant the seeds of pride and confidence.

Mr. Glover often says, “You have to care enough to know enough.” I certainly didn’t know enough when I started teaching. And if I know enough about anything now, it’s because I listened to Mr. Glover. First of all, he’s very particular about phrasing. I once misquoted him as saying, “You have to care enough to know.” I did not recognize the significance of that second “enough” until he corrected me. Knowledge is always a truce with ignorance, a line between the limited-known and the infinite-unknown. In this situation, we can never know more than enough. Enough for what? Well, enough to do what we came to do, which is teach students.
I would never be so insolent as to claim that I care for students more than any other teacher. I care plenty about my own pride, though, and vanity alone was reason enough to get better at a job I did not do very well at first. But vanity is its own kind of ignorance, and eventually it was no longer enough to inspire progress. For me, that was when Mr. Glover’s aphorism became the most important.

You have to care enough to know enough. This statement isn’t about pride or vanity or even tenderness. It is an epistemological axiom—an assertion about the nature of knowledge and ignorance. To seek more than a platitude in Mr. Glover’s words is to discover a source of professional empowerment. Our daily encounters with the unknown can always be put into this perspective: How bad do you want to know? Do you care enough to know enough? Whether we answer yes or no, Glover’s rubric returns the power to decide to the teacher.

The true philosophical depth of Mr. Glover’s credo should be a matter of continuous examination, not just the topic of my bottled summary. Nevertheless, it represents one of the things I wish I’d known when I started teaching, and I will forever appreciate having learned it at all.