Composing a Further Life

sections are run by senior faculty members. It’s for the students who come in with lower math SAT scores, haven’t had the same education as the other kids that are there, and just get overwhelmed by it, get discouraged. About half of these students are black or Hispanic and half are white, but a lot are kids who are there because they play hockey well or some other sport, from an urban public school or a Catholic high school, and a solid working-class background.
    “Comparing somebody who’s gone to a wealthy suburban high school to somebody who went to high school in a big city? Very different. Very different educations. The kid from the suburb is our kind of kid. He’s easy for us to teach.” The issue is not so much one of intelligence but of the attitudes that students bring to learning. “I get kids,” Dick told me, “who come to biology class with their Bibles … very rigid in terms of moral beliefs.… But they’re now doing these intensive sessions at Amherst and it’s working, to the extent that kids who ordinarily would not have scored in or around the class average now are.”
    I listened in a sort of wonder. Dick had told me that minority students do not seek him out and that he is not part of the “black scene” in the Pioneer Valley, and I suspect he is regarded as a tough grader. But I have listened to him patiently laboring to explain a difficult concept.
    There is a big difference between, on the one hand, supporting programs that will systematically strengthen the skills of students who come in with poor preparation so that they graduate on an intellectual level with their peers and, on the other hand, cutting them slack so they are held to lower standards. Having taught for a semester at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, I have learned that giving easy grades is no favor—upholding high standards and supporting real effort is.
    I’d also noticed the reference Dick made to the way Melvin Calvin might boost the grade of a student who was showing an “upward trend.” A highly competitive institution can guarantee distinguished graduates by its admissions. But the real question is how an institution both challenges and supports students so they can develop further in school as well as after they graduate. That same balance applies in rearing children. We talk about legacies—but our legacies are not only in the help we give to those who come after but also in the demands we put in front of them.
    Partly because of the glamorous progress of genetic research in recent years, American society is beginning to tilt again in the direction of genetic determinism, which made it especially reassuring to me to hear a biology professor talking about drawing out potential so that a student who had not seemed particularly promising could be successful given a second and even a third chance. We have made huge progress in enhancing the prospects of children born with disabilities, but we continue to be willing to write older students off for lackluster performance and to condemn those who have gotten into trouble with the law as unredeemable instead of noticing how much learning and change is possible, even rather late in life. What Dick had to say about the importance of teaching and about what he had gained from his own teachers was especially powerful as he reflected on his earlier jobs and marriages, looking back on himself as demanding and self-centered.
    Dick is an example of someone who managed to go a long distance by being smart and then grew into real wisdom and a talent for happiness, but he was amazingly open in speaking of earlier failures in his personal life. In working with life history material, I have made a practice of focusing on individuals whom I truly admire and of letting them decide which parts of their lives they wish to share and which they would like to leave behind. Sometimes this means hearing only one side of the story. When I wrote
Composing a Life
, I understood that people have difficulty discussing the losses and failures in their lives, and that this is something which must be respected. But it gradually became clear to me that such experiences need to be shared, along with the triumphs, both for the teller and for the listener. We compose our lives from both pleasant and unpleasant materials, but the painful materials are harder to talk about. One way of addressing those lacunae was to include in that book the story of my own unhappy