Teacher: the One Who Made the Difference.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Position: Book Review

BY MARK EDMUNDSON RANDOM HOUSE 2002, 278 PAGES, $23.95

Although Mark Edmundson is now a professor of English at the University of Virginia, he once was a student indifferent to everything but football, pool, and alcohol. Edmundson detested his courses at Medford High School, located in a working-class enclave just outside Boston. He refused to do homework and, like most of his classmates, regarded teachers as enemies to be either obeyed or subdued. One instructor, Franklin Lears, a slight, ungainly man who wore old, ill-fitting suits, was unlike any other at Medford. Teacher is a memoir of Edmundson's senior year, 1969-70, when Lears managed to change his life.

A recent Harvard University graduate assigned to teach philosophy to hostile students accustomed to rote instruction, Lears aroused Medford resentments toward intellectuals and the middle class. He was not Mr. Chips and did not attempt to win his surly charges over through love and compassion. Instead, he employed contempt as a pedagogical tool, offering himself, patiently, as a provocation. He resorted to snowball fights and musical recordings as well as classical literature in his attempts to bring life and hope to Medford High. By the end of the year, most of Lears' students had been goaded into thinking for themselves.

At an impasse in his own teaching, which, though formally elegant, he felt was failing to inspire, Edmundson began reminiscing about Lears, who had abandoned the profession after just one year and whom he had not seen in three...