In Plain Engel-ish

Thinking back on why I became the type of English professor I did, I remember my fourth grade teacher, Mrs Yount. She was a great influence on encouraging  my ultimate profession — but only indirectly. In fact, when I was in her class I had already decided on my future career, and it most certainly was not going to be in the teaching profession. No, my ten-year-old self was definitely going to grow up to be a physician. Was it an early love of medicine? Hardly. I bowed to no one in my dread of Dr. Souter, my pediatrician. She...

I was not obsessed with dinosaurs as a young child, but I was definitely impressed with them. I remember seeing all the drawings in books and being astounded at how enormous and powerful they were. Since Mom and Dad, from my six-year-old perspective, also seemed huge and all-powerful, it was unsettling to know that dinosaurs had them beat by a mile on both counts. And I was wowed that dinosaurs roamed the earth a hundred years ago. Well, it turns out that it was closer to 164 million years ago, but to a kid, anything that happened before your grandparents...

When I moved to my new home last year, I told my young realtor, Jacob, that I no longer wanted to be responsible for a lawn, since LeRoy had been our landscape architect and groundskeeper extraordinaire. I said that I’d prefer a townhouse or condo. Using tact that belied his mere twenty-six years, Jacob suggested we look at condos first since “as opposed to townhouses, they’re just one story, Dr. Engel.” He hastily added that he could tell that stairs would be absolutely no problem for me at all — but still…This was his tactful way of guiding me to...

When my sister married and moved from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, Dad, Mom, and I drove out to visit the next summer. I was seventeen but had never been west of Chicago. I was really excited about this road trip. Crossing the Mississippi River was a big exclamation mark for me, as was Missouri with the Saint Louis Arch, which had just been completed the year before in 1965. More exclamation marks for the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and Kansas City barbecue with its thick sweet sauce. The excitement petered out once we crossed into Kansas. We’d already driven...

I was a good student, but that certainly did not mean I enjoyed tests. Of the four most common types in the 1960’s — true or false, multiple choice, fill In the blank, or essay — I was (surprise!) a specialist in the last of these, writing pages of blather, long on patter, short on matter. But in high school I discovered my crown jewel in the tiara of testing: the oral exam. I loved the oral exam because it was the only type of test that taught me more about being a future teacher than they did about how I performed...