At this month’s All School Faculty and Staff meeting, we heard from Faculty members Andi Pieper and Matthew Davis about their experience teaching at Waterford. Below you will find transcriptions of the speeches given at the meeting.

---

Speech given by Andi Pieper, Class II Teacher

When I was asked to reflect on my first year teaching at Waterford, I found that the poem Finding My Place by John Burns helped me with my thoughts.

I love teaching at Waterford—from the very first week of teaching here, I felt as Burns wrote that I stumbled upon life and found glimpses of my rightful place and true purpose. I moved here in July from Texas, where I’ve lived my entire life until now. Texas has a lot of great things: Friday night lights football, friendly people with southern hospitality, Tacoma boots, chili cook-offs, lake time, table-side guacamole, and barbecue… and it has some excellent public schools. My entire career thus far has been in Texas public schools. My kids got a good education in Texas public schools. Over time, that experience of teaching in public schools really took a turn… current expectations of the breadth and amount of standards a teacher is expected to teach in one year, an overabundance of testing, daily requirements of having children on an iPad for part of their reading and math learning and handwriting. Over the past 6-7 years, it just didn’t feel like this is the way teaching should be.

From my first week at Waterford I felt energized, because this is the way teaching should be. Talking about the core values of integrity or curiosity with 7 year olds at morning meeting. Having the support of a specialist to teach technology, or science, or phonics. Taking them to the concert hall where they’re exposed to watching the ballet. Making connections between reading and writing to social studies or science whenever possible. Teaching handwriting on paper. Having the support of a schedule that enables small group instruction for every child in reading four days a week.

The liberal arts experience has come alive in Class II this spring. I think most of the Lower School knows, but for everyone else, we are in the middle of our longstanding endangered animal research project. Each Class II student chooses an endangered animal and we are teaching them how to research, in books using the table of contents and the index, and guide them on note taking and how to take notes on the topics of the characteristics of their animal, or diet, or habitat… They go through the research and writing process for FIVE different topics about their animals writing papers. In Class II, our social studies curriculum is based on learning about all seven continents, so we are able to make connections on where their animal lives in the world. We just studied measurement in math—forming connections and comparing the lengths and weights of their animals. We marked out in our classroom so they could see how big their animal would be compared to themselves and other animals, except the blue whale because it would take four classrooms, so we did that one in the hall. In art, my students have learned from their amazing art teacher how to draw their animal and have created a multimedia art project for their showcase. In science, they have been taught about different kinds of habitats and life cycles—we are making those connections. Even In music, they will be learning a song to perform. And the excitement of the students surrounding this project is incredible….I’ve heard from parents about how their children come home so excited and full of facts to share with the family about the platypus or the Komodo dragon or the orca.  

All of this connected learning—I’m realizing that’s what it means to teach in the liberal arts tradition. Making as many connections between subjects as we can, leading to meaningful and DEEP learning. The amount of knowledge that these students are gaining on how to research, how to search in a book for the answer to your questions, how to write an organized paper with a topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and the facts in an order that make sense—not to mention a true context for when to use which their, there, or they’re. THIS – THIS is how I want to teach. 

April and May can be a special kind of tiring for teachers. Right? We sit here today and we know what’s coming. As the poem said it can move at a dizzying pace, and the weight of existence can be pulling us down. I KNOW Waterford isn’t a utopia, and we all have challenges in our classrooms. It is a good time to remember that we are fortunate to teach in a place that encourages and expects this deep learning and connections between subjects, and a place that gives us freedom and room in our curriculum to do so. A place that lets kids be kids with multiple recesses a day in lower school to play outside. A place we are teaching character, alongside reading and math. This is how teaching should be. 

---

Speech given by Matthew Davis, English Teacher

I am here to talk about a senior seminar class that I’m teaching this term: Huck Finn & James, based on the novels by Mark Twain and Percival Everett, respectively. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been an important book in my life. In fact, I think that I can mark moments in my life based on my encounters with that novel. I remember reading it as a middle schooler and thinking about it as a cooler version of Tom Sawyer. In college I felt like I really “got” it for the first time, and it led me to my interest in American literature. In graduate school I dug into it more deeply, and I started teaching it for the first time. That was a chance to really get to know the book, because, as you know, there’s no better way to learn something than to teach it.

I never really felt doubt about my feelings for that book, either for the fact that I loved it or that I saw it as a brilliant meditation on race in America that brought our flaws into full relief while also providing us a chance for redemption. For a book that never hesitates to take organized religion to task, that novel felt like this skeptic’s first religious text that really mattered. In my opinion there could’ve been no better American hero than a 13 year old boy, raised on the streets by an alcoholic father, who found within himself the humanity to reject his society’s expectations and do the right thing, no matter what it cost him.

And then I tried teaching the book in high school. There are a few adages about teaching that I’ve found to be true over the years. One is: Never be afraid to cry in your car. Another is: If a first-year teacher can make it until Thanksgiving, they’ll make it the whole year (and probably beyond). And finally one that maybe just applies to English teachers, but I suspect not: Don’t teach something you truly love—they will break your heart.

The students were game—I really can’t blame them. They had heard about the book and the controversy associated with it, most of which revolves around the fact that the N-word appears in the text 219 times. I grew up hearing that word from time to time, from acquaintances that would never become friends, from anonymous kids on the bus, but also from my dad’s aunt. A woman who always seemed to be 89 years old, for decades. Her house smelled like fried bacon because every morning she cooked it in a cast iron skillet and then fried an egg in the “grease”—she and all of my relatives called it grease and not “oil.” She lived alone. That was the breakfast she made for herself.

So I was comfortable telling my students that Twain incorporated that word into his novel so many times because that’s just how things were in the 19th century. And certainly in the South. Even in Texas in the 1980s. He was trying to capture a time and a place, and he was relentless in his insistence that we as readers encounter that place in its glaring reality. I knew a little about that reality, and even if these kids hadn’t grown up the same way I had, this book was timeless. They would get it.

After my second year of trying to drag classes full of eleventh graders through this book, I finally decided to ask them what they thought of it. The question was benign, but what I really meant was: Why aren’t you getting this? I read through the perfunctory responses before getting to one that said, “I enjoyed this book. But it was hard to hear that word every day.” Did I mention that I used to read the word aloud in class when the passage of text demanded it? I was capturing reality, remember, and if Twain and I were going to force kids to confront this word on the page, we would have to confront it in class, too. That response occurred in the last class of the last time that I taught Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I’ve thought a lot over the years about whether or not I would ever teach it again, and I had decided that I wouldn’t, but Percival Everett’s James changed my mind.

Because it was never actually about that word, do you see? Though I will no longer read it aloud. It was about believing in my whole being that if that word bothered you then there was something that you just weren’t getting. That if the book bothered you, then you weren’t looking closely enough. There’s another adage I remember: “When you read Shakespeare, he’s not on trial, you are.” That’s how I felt about Twain and his 13-year-old protagonist. How tragic to miss the full weight of the novel’s redemptive arc because you don’t understand how southerners actually talked in the 1830s.

In the years that I thought about the novel from the perspective of a high school teacher, I finally decided to go to the oracle to find out what to do: James Baldwin. Though Baldwin wrote about a lot of books, I never knew what he had said about Huck Finn. And then I found an article from 1979 in which he makes reference to it. He says, almost as an aside: “When I was in elementary school there were no black writers or white writers whom I could regard as models. I did not agree at all with the moral predicament of Huckleberry Finn concerning … Jim. It was not, after all, a question about whether I should be sold back into slavery.”

So there it was. Not only was I wrong in my arrogance about the presence of that word, I was wrong about the power of that moral arc. Huck’s fateful decision to “go to hell” instead of turning Jim into the authorities rings much different if you aren’t invested in that act being heroic, healing, and redemptive. That was a powerful moment.

The reason that Percival Everett’s James changed my mind is simply that it tells what was never told: Jim’s story. It reorients Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into much more than a white liberal morality play. It does what Twain was never able to do: present a fully realized Black character who is more than a plaything for the boys in the novel or a mouthpiece for a convenient morality tale for me. The result is a rich character and an even richer novel that grounds itself in Twain’s novel but quickly leaves its borders.

The class I am teaching this spring—called Huck Finn & James—attempts to recreate the experience I had by putting these two novels into direct conversation with each other. We are almost finished reading Twain’s novel, and the day after we read the last scene we will begin the story again, this time from James’s point of view. Percival Everett creates a character in his novel that Twain was incapable of creating. James is willful, sarcastic, educated, and more often the one to level a joke than to be its target. In short, he is a fully realized human being, and he’s given the chance to take over the narrative in ways he was never allowed to before. Because there was always that subtext in Huck Finn. There are moments in the novel where Huck sees Jim’s humanity—when he’s crying about his family, or when he laments abusing his daughter because he doesn’t realize that she is actually deaf and she’s not being obstinate. Moments that allude to a much deeper consciousness we never get to see much of because in Twain’s book Jim’s most important job is serving as Huck’s teacher and moral guide, not as a man himself. But even then Twain could not give this task over to Jim completely—his role is mostly passive, as Twain leaves it up to Huck to recognize Jim’s humanity and to eventually do something about it.

Reading Everett’s take on these characters allowed me to fill in the gaps that I think make Twain’s novel a brilliant and yet flawed work of art. It is not flawed because of its language—though to dismiss the potential harm done by the irruption of that word at literally any point of the text is, to me, the height of arrogance and privilege. It is flawed because Twain created one of the most fascinating characters in American literature and didn’t let him see his full potential. The power in Huck’s moral choice is that what felt so radical to others at the time—that a White boy and a Black man could be friends, that Jim could be seen as a man above all else—was, by the end of the novel, just a known fact to 13-year-old Huck. He had been through it all with Jim in their impossible trip down the river, and what he knew above all else was that Jim was just like him, and Jim was his friend. And while we saw glimpses of those contributing moments throughout—Jim protecting Huck from viewing the dead body in the wrecked steamboat, his always being willing to take Huck’s watch so the boy could sleep while they endured the presence of the king and the duke—most of Jim’s character and inner life were hidden from us, and perhaps from Twain, too. And there’s an argument to be made that Twain had no other choice. So when I saw “flawed,” I guess I mean as imperfect as any great work of art must be. Because it cannot be all things for all of us at the same time. 

But reading Percival Everett’s take on the story makes me feel a sense of fullness that is not a case of the newer book “correcting” the older one. It really is its own book, and it strays from the original so much at times that you can lose touch with Twain’s story. But Jim always remains a character that you know and yet have never really known, and he’s finally given the chance to take over a story that was always partly his. It is a new experience of art for me that I will relish and won’t expect to see too often again. For that reason I had to invite others to have the same experience.

For the final project of the term, students will invent a conversation between Mark Twain and Percival Everett, where one great author interviews the other. They will read one book through the other, and hopefully they will experience new things about the characters that they have been getting to know all term. I’m sure we will all have much to say.