I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I obtained eight years of elementary education in a two-room school, where I encountered a stern but engaging teacher who awakened my intellect with instruction that would seem rigorous today in many colleges. History figured large in the curriculum, exciting for me what was to become an enduring interest.
I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.
It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever.
I grew up a middle class, colonized child of teachers and librarians and people, women especially, who treasured education.
Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.
From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.