Death of a Salesman

We've been reading Death of a Salesman in my Modern Literature class. It's a stunning work of art. As I told my students, for Arthur Miller to have written one play like Death of a Salesman is amazing -- to have also written The Crucible seems unfair.         

There's a moment in the second act when Willy Loman, the salesman of the title, goes to a restaurant to have dinner with his two sons, Biff and Happy. Biff, who has carried the burden of his father's unrealistic expectations all his life, needs to tell Willy the truth about another failure. But Willy doesn't want to hear it. "I'm not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind because the woods are burning, boys, you understand?" he says. "There's a big blaze going on all around. I was fired today...and I'm looking for a little good news to tell your mother." Biff tries and tries to get the facts across to his father, but in the end, he breaks down and tells Willy the comforting lies he's asking for.         

It's hard to give bad news. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the parents whose kids are in academic distress don't come to Open House. That night, several of those parents showed up at Open House and asked me how their kids were doing. And I told them comforting lies. I called them later and gave them the facts and made some excuse about why I hadn't been more candid. But the truth is that I just hated to give them bad news.         

I hate to give students bad news, too. I hate to see them fail, especially when they do it to themselves. After my first hard year, I told myself not to get emotionally involved. If a student is determined to fail, I vowed, I won't stand in his or her way. They need to suffer the consequences of their own choices. But then this week, when a handful of my students were on the verge of failing one of my courses, I eased up on them. I lowered my standards to let them pass.         

As a parent, I know this is fatal. If you continually give your children a pass on responsibility, they grow up without any. I think May and I -- mostly May -- did all right with our kids, who are turning into responsible adults. So why do I find it so hard to bring the hammer down on my students?         

When speaking of good teachers, we usually begin by saying how much they love children. Sometimes I wonder whether people who are fond of children might be the wrong sort of people to be teachers. Maybe we need teachers who are hard-hearted disciplinarians, the educational equivalent of those Parris Island drill instructors who make Marines out of unpromising raw material by tearing down young people's warped self-images and rebuilding them from the ground up. I know there are moments when I wish I had the authority to make my students do push-ups or run laps or go on all-night forced marches. Wouldn't that be better for them, in the long run, than giving them another extension on that paper that was due last week?         

I know that the teachers I learned the most from were the tough taskmasters. I know all the research shows that students do better when expectations are high. I know I should have failed those students. But the woods are burning, and it's hard to see through all the smoke.