Flying lessons

'Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." A placard bearing those words, a quote from Francis Bacon, hung prominently on the wall above George Schoenman's desk at Fairfax High School. Schoenman taught there from 1959 to 1994, and multiple generations of slackers and scholars alike learned indelible lessons about writing and discourse and literature and life from him.

When Schoenman died of cancer several years ago, although there was a well-attended memorial for him in the school's auditorium, the world beyond Fairfax failed to take note. Unlike celebrities and politicians and others whose lives and deaths become global media events, teachers like Schoenman enrich the world in mostly unsung ways and then pass into oblivion. It's always like that with teachers.

I knew Schoenman for a long time, first as his student, then as his colleague and, ultimately, as his friend. While an arrogant sophomore in Mr. Schoenman's fourth-period honors 10th-grade English class during the 1975-76 school year, I was immediately captivated by his wry humor, his digressive lectures, his sweet charisma, his informal classroom management (we were allowed to eat in class, we could get up and go to the bathroom or the water fountain whenever we wanted, and he let us call him "George") and his willingness to have his own literary insights challenged.

"I'm no expert. I'm not any better at this than you guys; I've just been doing it longer. If you think I'm full of it, go ahead and tell me, tell me I'm wrong," he used to encourage us when explicating a passage from a novel or a poem. Of course, if you dared to do just that, he'd then proceed to cut you up like sushi and lay you out on a tray. Humiliating? Oh yeah, especially if the girl you liked was sitting next to you. But it was all part of the Schoenman charm.

His methods worked, and have continued to work, over and over again year after year. In college, in grad school, in life, to this day, whenever something has to be written, I, like multitudes of Schoenman alumni, hear his voice talking about "clarity" and "organization" and "development," about the offbeat power of the semicolon, the importance of a coherent thesis and transitional phrases, about the glory of meaningful discourse.