What prosecutor wouldn’t want to represent this patient suing his terribly absent-minded surgeon? The over-scheduled doctor had clearly been in the operating room too many hours that day and should never have agreed to one last appendectomy.
It was the definition of an open and shut case. Literally. After the patient had been opened and his appendix surgery performed, the surgeon had closed him up, using his no-scar-visible signature stitching.
Sure enough, no scar would later be visible. But neither was the surgeon’s scalpel the next day—until an x-ray of that poor patient, now complaining of a severe stomach ache, revealed it.
The prosecutor saved hours of research in having to prove the surgeon’s negligence. A legal Latin phrase gave him the perfect shortcut: res ipsa loquitor (pronounced “race ippsuh low-quitter”). The translation says it all: “The thing speaks for itself.” The prosecutor needed only to show the stomach x-ray to the jury and—presto!—that picture itself did speak louder than 100,000 words to the jury, screaming “Guilty!”. Next case.
I was thinking about that Latin phrase and decided that there could be the opposite motto to unite all of us English teachers, from elementary school to university graduate level. It would be: “the thing never speaks for itself.” “The thing” in this case is great literature.
If the classics such as The Canterbury Tales, Great Expectations, and even The Great Gatsby did their own speaking, allowing all students to understand them perfectly and thus glean for themselves everything worth knowing within their works, we English teachers would be out of work. In order to stay in the occupation we love, we might have to be retrained as history, botany, or even (God forbid!) computer science teachers.
The greatest writers produce art of such breadth, depth, and psychological genius that most young students have neither the emotional maturity nor the intellectual development to appreciate many of the universal truths often hidden within their masterpieces. It is our glorious task as English teachers to guide our students through the best that has been thought and written in our 1500 years of literature.
If we do our jobs exceptionally well, we inspire our students to become lifelong readers of intellectually stimulating , emotionally thrilling books. Of course, once they leave formal schooling, they will have lost us as their trusty guides. It is then when we hope a delightful transformation just might take place.
As adults, our best former English students have obtained the intellectual and emotional maturity to appreciate great literature without us. If they retain our literary guidance in their memories, they might discover that their favorite books can “speak for themselves” — just as that stomach x-ray forcefully did as evidence in the courtroom. They are now able to listen to what brilliant authors are saying to them without needing our intervention. Like proud parents, we teachers take great pleasure in watching our students become independent of us while still retaining the life lessons we instilled within them.
Allow me to conclude with another Latin phrase very common to the legal profession: pro bono, meaning “for the good.” In the legal sense, it means “for the public good,” as in cases lawyers take on for no charge because the client is too poor to pay for such advice. Might I be so bold to suggest that we teachers, though paid for our services, consider our work to be more of a pro bono calling than an occupation? With our salaries usually lower than those of other professions with similar education, we believe that we are performing a service for the public good.
What unites all teachers is our goal to make our students think in a clear, logical way. That is the holy grail of education. In medieval legend, the grail was the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea received Jesus’ blood at the Cross. Knights went on quests to find it. Today, in our secular world, perhaps a teacher’s quest is to instill the precious gift of open-minded, unbiased thought into the “vessels” of our students’ minds. Our world has never needed it more.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here