Honey and Ashes

Can the good that good teachers do ever completeley cancel out the bad that bad teachers do?

By Howard Good

Growing up, I not only had some teachers who were boring or confusing, but also a few who were truly bad. Bad teachers are bad in the moral sense. They don't necessarily lack an understanding of pedagogy or a knowledge of their subject areas. What they lack more than anything is empathy, the ability to feel with and for others, which the philosopher Sissela Bok has called "the very foundation of morality."

I was never the type to be the teacher's pet. According to family lore, I couldn't sit still when I was young, but was always banging around, which may account for my slovenly appearance in old pictures, my shirt falling out of my pants and my hair sticking up in the back like an effusion of wild ideas. I suppose that if I were a schoolchild today, I would receive calming doses of Ritalin. But in those far-off, more pharmaceutically naive days, I received instead the contempt of certain teachers.

Three stand out in my mind with peculiar vividness, as if backlit by the flames of Hell—Mr. Pitti, Mr....