David Tyack took me seriously. From the moment we met, he treated me as an intellectual peer — something he did with every student, no matter their age or experience. He listened to me as if I was an accomplished scholar, which I was not. He responded to my work as if my capacity for growth was unlimited, which I did not yet believe. He shared his time with me as if I deserved it, which I was sure I never would. He was a teacher, through and through.
I was a first-year graduate student when we met, and David was recently retired. Consequently, I never took a class with him. Yet he became my teacher, and the power of his generosity was such that I have no recollection how it all began — how it came to be that we would walk together among the redwoods, gather among friends for reading groups, meet with our spouses in tow for lunch. My wife and I were in our 20s at the time. David and his partner, Elisabeth Hansot, were campus luminaries. Somehow, through what seemed like a case of mistaken identity, they treated us as equals. O brave new world that has such people in it.
Because we were not in class, there was never an explicit lesson; but because David was a teacher — in the fullest, and truest sense of the word — the lessons accrued over time. As David absorbed me into his orbit, I began to think of myself differently — not as an accomplished novice but as a novice expert. And those accruing lessons accumulated around this new identity; they gave it shape, that it might endure.
This is what a teacher does. It is a kind of alchemy. The student’s future self is conjured, as if by magic spell, and given substance through a new set of habits, skills, and dispositions.
There is no puff of smoke, no big reveal. The magic of teaching, it turns out, is more graceful than that. There is a new self, yes. And there is an old self. But between them there is no identifiable seam — no rupture, no rend. The student remains, and yet is somehow changed.
David Tyack died quietly on Oct. 27, 2016, surrounded by the universal love and admiration of his students. I am not sure if he felt us from our various distances, scattered as we are around the country and around the world.
I am sure, however, that we continue to feel him, both in our lives and in our classrooms.
Because of David’s influence, I am a better teacher, a better scholar, and a better man. I have him to thank for so much. Each day, then, I try to pay his teaching forward, clumsily attempting the magic that was his stock in trade. Thus it is that past is prologue — that the seeds planted by a teacher bear fruit and, in turn, more seeds. How beauteous mankind is.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Schneider
Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the UMass Center for Education Policy.
