The warlock of grammar
Sucking on Camels, hollering about syntax, mean Mr. Williams worked strange magic on his captive audience of teenage hotheads.

BY FIONA MORGAN
He walked with a cane, supporting his tall frame, and hooked the cane on the blackboard chalk tray. He looked like the kind of guy who could have coached high school football -- a very plain haircut, a gruff demeanor. He smoked unfiltered Camels, and we used to joke that he was only 40 years old, but the cigarettes made him look 70.

Mr. Williams was my high school English teacher for three years. I knew very little about his life, only that he'd fought in Korea, knew ancient Greek and Latin and lived alone. After the first few days of 10th grade, I tried to get out of his class. I couldn't understand how his repeating the same maxims about grammar errors and verbal misunderstandings could have anything to do with English literature. It took three years for me to realize that this cranky old man who liked to howl at his students was actually the most passionate and visionary teacher I would ever have.

At the age of 15, I was a ball of emotions. A vegetarian and vocal feminist, I argued with my emotions and would not have emotional arguments dismissed. But Mr. Williams never let any of his students get away with a single sentence that wasn't clear and well-reasoned. During a unit on Strunk and White, he sat in silence glaring at us, then pounded the table and yelled, "Omit unnecessary words!" Pound! "Omit unnecessary words!" Pound! "Omit unnecessary words!" The whole class collapsed into nervous giggles. What a freak, I thought. Get me out of here.

We could hardly get a word out. Students hemmed and hawed, trying the circular arguments that with other teachers sometimes got us out of assignments or won back lost points on a quiz. But he would only stare with his brows furrowed and repeat one of his parables. When his students punctuated their sentences with "like," he would say, "Shick" (the name of a local drug treatment center, implying that our verbal ticks should be treated the same way as a crack habit). He would tell us as we walked through the door of his classroom that we were being "rarefied," leaving the "vulgar" talk behind us. Then he would proceed to tell us the actual definition of "vulgar." Day after day. We thought he was senile.

I brought Mr. Williams a poem I had written. It was a long meditation on my spiritual core, something about water breaking against cliffs or something. This gesture was my attempt at establishing a rapport with the strange, cranky man who was so revered by my favorite teachers. He read it and pointed out the numerous mixed metaphors, vague modifying phrases, imprecise references to the geology and climate of a coastal cliff -- he didn't address the emotional quality of the poem at all. (Mercifully, he didn't rip it apart either.) I couldn't believe he could be so cold. Didn't he have feelings? Why read if you have no interest in the emotional content? But I knew I could not hope to be a writer unless I learned to use language. Later, on a grammar quiz, we were asked to write the definition of "syntax," and I realized I didn't have any idea what syntax meant. This seemed to me a symptom of a much larger problem: I was an A student who had learned to bluff my way through essays on the very same vague, abstract reasoning Mr. Williams was trying to cure me of. Maybe I did, like, need to go to Shick.

"Literature is the creation of a world!" He pounded on the table, reading from "Good Readers and Good Writers," Vladimir Nabokov's essay to young readers to read with critical distance and to look at any piece of fiction as a world unto itself. We'd finally seen a flash of what mattered to Mr. Williams about literature, why the stakes in precision were so high. He believed, as I did, that fiction was more real than reality.

Through learning about the precision and economy of language, drilling myself on left-brained details such as the difference between connotation and annotation, I escaped my emotional prison.

I came back to my school in the fall of my first year at college for a reception honoring Mr. Williams' retirement. A few weeks later, he would die from a chronic illness. The students at that reception had all been rarefied. Where once we had been stubborn and muddled, Mr. Williams had changed us. Now, almost completely cured of verbal ticks, we signed a book as he stood and greeted us. The book was nearly full by the time I wrote, "Thank you for making me see."
SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

More teachers we loved:
+ Remembrance of things present By Carol Lloyd
+ Greek love By Hank Hyena
+ The vocabulary of wonder By Scott Rosenberg
+ Teaching by daydream By Chris Colin
+ Radical redhead Miss Smith By Jenn Shreve
+ One valentine too late By Karen Templer
+ My Latin love affair By Andrew Leonard

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