|
|
Remarks on the Occasion of the Memorial Service for John Lovas, Teacher and FriendMartha J. Kanter, Foothill-De Anza Chancellor
July 27, 2005
John was first and foremost a teacher. He was an extraordinary teacher. He understood and lived his art. For he was at the same time always a student. He loved the uniqueness of people and the originality of their ideas. I was continually awed by how he was able to draw ideas from his students so effortlessly. That always struck me during the many times I came to his classroom. John was also a friend, a good friend, an honest friend, and that mattered to me, that he could be a teacher and friend.
Each quarter he invited me to visit a class. He always chose a class of students who entered the college without much academic preparation. First he prepped me about the methods he was using to engage them. Then, he had me sit with different students and listen to them explain what they were writing about, and why it mattered to them. I always left his classroom inspired and mostly amazed at how easy it was for John to teach them so well. His students were hungry to learn and it was crystal clear to me that they loved and respected John the many gifts he gave them.
To think that John taught them well for more than forty years is an inspiration in and of itself. It is a rare person who can do that: who can, as John said in his own words, “keep it challenging, but not in ways that you lose them.”
Since John’s passing in June, I’ve been rummaging around my office and house, picking up things he wrote or edited like the book on Leadership and Governance with Tom Fryer, or De Anza’s History on the Occasion of its 35th Anniversary, or an accreditation self-study from the 80’s, or De Anza’s 1999 Educational Master Plan, or the national award letter from ECTYC he sent me, or a book of student writings he published himself on 8 1/2 x 11 paper.
I remember him coming to my office during my first week as president, telling me not only what mattered to him, but what mattered to the college and what I needed to do. He welcomed me to the college and district during a very tough time in its history. Together we wrote about new designs and new models for learning; he patiently tracked me through the history of the college, the planning documents, the books, and the events that shaped its traditions and formed its future. John understood that making a difference takes time and effort. He understood the relationship and interplay between time and effort. But he also knew that you had to have important ideas, ideas that matter to people, ideas that can make a difference, as well as time and effort.
It’s hard enough to have a truly original idea or two in a lifetime, but even harder for us to connect one idea to another and another in order to create something that is profound, something that will make a difference to others, something that really matters. John was able to make that difference in people, to teach them the art of creative expression so that they could do things that matter.
We all know that John delighted in controversy, partly because controversy makes us think more deeply about what really matters to us, partly for the art of it, and mostly for the personal risk it requires of us. One of the first things he said I needed to understand was a part of Foothill’s history that involved “Tubesteak City,” a hydraulically powered bun that opened and closed around a hot dog, a controversial sculpture in the 1970s that ended up at the Oakland Museum of Art sometime later as a gift from the college. In that same conversation, we went from Tubesteak City to academic freedom to the future of La Voz and why the students’ voice through its newspaper really mattered to an institution. He had a remarkable way of searing the steak, if not the Tubesteak, time and time again.
I came to De Anza at a time of great controversy and transition. John reminded me that in September of 1968 he had worked with a number of faculty on the “Brown-Black-White Project” report that led to the initiation of multicultural programs on the campus from which was born the Ethnic Studies division in 1969. He always had a way of grounding the challenge of today in our history.
We have lost a great teacher and a great friend, but he has left us a legacy that we will treasure and use to guide us as we move our next big idea to fruition.
Let me close my remarks with a short reading from John’s blog of May 31, 2005:
“Hunting around for something else, I came upon this 5 x 7 note card where I had recorded the opening of a student essay from about 25 years ago. Should the student read and recognize this, I'll happily give credit:
‘Life is in a sense, a life long process. Many things come into it and many things go out of it. Changes occur everyday. If it takes a lifetime to live, how can it be possible that one single event can change a life so drastically for better or worse?’
Most teachers of writing will recognize this kind of problematic opening, full of cliches, circularity, wild generalities, yet raising a fundamentally profound question. In one sense, this represents the heart of teaching college composition. A student has an idea. The student has even formulated that idea as a question, which could easily drive an essay to consider the ironies and paradoxes we face each day. But the student has no sense of the particularities related to the broad question. The student says the obvious, not recognizing that the only effective means of conveying these ideas is through the texture of time, place, person and event. We need to know if the life changing moment came through a parent's death, being left by a lover, suddenly losing or finding faith--or hope, seeing the ocean for the first time, feeling the romance and pull of the full moon, or understanding some text in a way that re-educates perception (a term from John Dewey).
And so the teaching challenge is to get the student to connect the banalities to real experiences, observations, or recollections. When that happens, there's a real chance for a paper worth reading.”
Thank you, John. You will forever be here with us.
Discuss
|
|
|
