As part of the Marlboro Film Intensive curriculum, students read Garret Keizer’s 1996 book-length essay, No Place But Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community. Keizer is a respected essayist and contributing editor to Harper’s magazine. He also appeared on the Colbert Report recently to discuss his work. Essayists are usually pretty adept at stimulating passionate dialogue, so our class was fortunate to have him attend our class and lead discussion on his book and related topics including “noise,” the subject of his latest book.
Our group struck up an intimate and energetic conversation about Mr. Keizer’s experiences in public education. Students offered stories about their own experiences in the schools. After the session Mr. Keizer agreed to share his thoughts on the class and he sent us the following note.
After the close of my visit with the Northern Borders film project class, I was asked if I might write a paragraph or so summarizing my responses to the experience. Hoping I understood the request accurately, I am providing the following observations.
First, I was gratified to find the class so friendly and attentive. This was by no means a case of “warming up” to the visitor, but rather a predisposition to see that the visitor was made to feel at home from the start. As a result I found that I was able to direct all of my energies to the questions posed to me and little or no energy to matters of personal presentation and rhetorical strategy.
Second, I was delighted by the range of questions. I have been in book discussions where a single issue or exchange winds up predominating, not always with the greatest relevance to the overall purpose of the gathering. In this case, the open agenda seemed to enrich the discussion rather than permit it to go astray. To the best of my recollection, most of the questions fell into one of the following categories:
- Questions of clarification relating to “Getting Schooled” or No Place But Here
- Questions relating to education (with several sub-categories such as classroom management, parental involvement, personal experiences with school, home-schooling, etc.)
- Questions relating to the social and cultural context of the Northeast Kingdom and of rural communities in general
- Questions relating to the “writing life”
- Questions relating to characterization in Northern Borders
That’s an impressive range, I think, and I’ve probably failed to account for one or two questions that elude classification. In retrospect, I feel I can stand by the answers I gave, though I wish that some of them had been more succinct.
Finally, I left the campus impressed by the sense that the issues raised by the reading and discussion, as well as by the filmmaking project, actually matter to the students. That certainly contributed a great deal to making the experience matter to me. And I had fun.
Garret Keizer
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