What's the most important lesson you learned from a teacher?

Post date: Nov 27, 2011 6:05:56 PM

This question was asked by Steve Silberman, 30^th September 2011

I had many excellent teachers, but today my memory spotlight landed on one distinct if distant image: Frl. Dr. Lunkenheimer, teacher of the Sexta, about 40 eleven-year-olds in their first year of high school. Picture provincial Germany in 1952; picture a prim, suit-clad lady, with hair drawn back into a plain knot, indefinably old, but she was probably still in her early thirties. She taught us how to write essays, and how to parse sentences, and she knew her stuff. After all, she had a PhD. My parents told me it would be more respectful to address her as Frau, rather than Fräulein. Frau Dr L. belonged definitely to the strict and distant type of teacher rather than the popular and chummy type. I liked her a lot and always looked forward to her lessons. Once she deeply hurt my feelings in front of the whole class and from this stemmed also perhaps her greatest gift to me.

As every pupil of a Gymnasium knows you have to learn poems. I knew many of them by heart already because my mother was a great fan of poetry. Almost every Sunday she would read poems to my sister and me. In fact I knew most poems before hearing them in school.

In a lesson with Frau Dr. L. we read and discussed a famous poem, by Goethe, entitled ‘Johanna Sebus’. The subtitle tells all: ‘In memory of the virtuous and beautiful seventeen-year-old girl from the village of Brienen who on 13^th January 1809, during the freezing of the Rhine and great collapse of the dam at Cleve, died while bringing help.’ Thus, a real life story was the subject of this very dramatic ballad, which starts with the foreboding and onomatopoeic lines, imprinted in the brain of legions of German schoolchildren:

Der Damm zerreißt, das Feld erbraus’t,

die Fluten spülen, die Fläche saus’t.

“Ich trage dich, Mutter, durch die Flut;

noch reicht sie nicht hoch, ich wate gut.”

You can find a translation at http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=4987&c=72

The story of the heroic girl is told by Goethe in tightly condensed form: she saves first her mother, carrying her on her back, then goes back to save another woman and her children (who also asked her to save their goat,) but she fails and drowns. The heart wrench of the poem is that all wanted to be saved by her, but nobody was there to save the heroine.

At this point in the poem a strange anomaly occurs: Goethe refers to the heroine as ‘Susie’, (“schoen Sus-chen”): Susie who still stands straight and good; Susie who stands like a star; Susie whose image floats above the flood.

Why on earth does Goethe call her Susie and not by her real name, Johanna? Somebody in the class asked this obvious question, and Frau Dr. L. said “I really don’t know”. I raised an eager hand indicating that I knew why: “Goethe didn’t’ like the name Johanna and he rather liked the name Susie.” Frau Dr. L. looked at me in surprise: “How do you know this?” “My mother told me”, I replied proudly. Inevitably, Frau Dr. L. immediately dismissed this explanation, telling the whole class that this information could certainly not be trusted. I was shocked and mortified. Surely, my poetry - obsessed mother would not make this up. Not to trust her word was simply unprecedented, and yet in this lesson I started to think. It occurred to me that you must always have precise sources for what you believe to be true – and be able to quote them at the right moment. The word of a trusted authority, even the greatest authority, is subject to scrutiny. The reverberating memory of the shock that I felt at the time made me think that this was a crucial lesson for me. Remarkably, much later in life I found this lesson to be encapsulated in the motto of the Royal Society ”Nullius in verba”, which roughly means “Don’t take anyone's word for it”.

I still thank Frau Dr. L. for having so abruptly started my conversion from childish believer to adolescent doubter. Ironically, Goethe’s ballad praises a young girl’s love for her mother. Yet, my story is about finding out that mothers are not infallible. And there is yet another twist. I still believe that my mother had a credible source for Goethe’s reasons for the name change. Searching the web I found mention of two possible reasons: The first reason: Goethe did not know the name of the girl when he first heard the story which inspired him to write the ballad; his information was clearly scanty as he had the age wrong with Johanna being only 16 at the time and not 17. The second reason: he disliked the real name of the heroine – my mother’s explanation! The letter of a young painter, Luise Seidler (1986-1866) is cited. She wrote in June 1809, a month after Goethe wrote the poem, that he avoided the real name of Johanna because of its strong connection with the Maid of Orleans.

And here is a proper source: http://www.amazon.de/Schroedel-Verlag-Goethe-Zeit-Leben/dp/3507602997