Richard Anderson, a long-standing English teacher at IHS, will be retiring after this year. He has a new novel coming out within the next year and bold plans for travel abroad. His speech bobs and weaves in his search for adequate diction, and his allusions to classical works run rampant. This is an interview that gets to the root of one of IHS’s most tenured educators.
Luca Greenspun ’17: Where were you born and raised?
Richard Anderson: I was born in Watertown, New York, in 1943… [long pause] and spent my first twelve years there, Watertown, going through a lot of foster homes. My mom died before I was born so my dad was my sole caretaker, and [chuckle] that didn’t work out terribly well. I got a sort of Charles Dickens education as a youngster: living in adult homes, some of which were generous and kind, and some of which were rather brutal. In Watertown, there’s a lot of corn-growing and gardening and agriculture and in the summertime, people who need extra bodies to lug and haul, they go to social services. So I went to a whole bunch of places and there was no kind-of-a-home.
LG: Tell me about your formal education: where did you start, what schools did you attend? What was your higher education?
RA: Right. After I finished high school—and I was very good in high school—I took a number of AP classes at the end, best of which was Latin. I’ve gotten continually glad I took that and did very well, and when I got out of high school graduation was smooth, etcetera etcetera etcetera, but I did not know what I wanted to do. So I took a long hiatus to kind of find my way. And that eventually ended with a total surprise to myself, along with my friends and colleagues, when I volunteered for the Marine Corps. I did that, I enlisted for three years, mostly because I knew that if I hung around Ithaca and partied I was going to probably make that my life’s work; because it was bloody fun and I had wonderful friends. So I just wanted to walk out of that picture and I wanted to go to something totally unknown. So I found myself. I enlisted for three years. In that time, on the government’s money, I saw Okinawa, I saw Japan, I saw Florida. And I had not traveled until that point. So all of a sudden I’m getting a very different context, culturally speaking, in which to kind of see where I was as a human being. Learned some Japanese. So that was a success. I was incredibly lucky not to have an extension on my voluntary time and go to Vietnam. Many of my friends did.
Then the hippie in me came out. The Vietnam years where we all did things that I’ll not mention in this interview, to kind of put [the war] away [trailing off]. Put that nightmare away. So the Vietnam era, and I was decidedly a happy, protesting, go-ahead-and-spray-stuff-in-my-face in New York City. We’ll always be on the bus! We’ll always be singing Bob Dylan! And we’ll always tell you that you suck, government!
LG: Right on. What is, would you say, your crowning achievement?
RA: That I have become an excellent teacher is my crowning achievement and I am extremely satisfied in that role. I’ve loved doing it, and now I’m loving that I won’t be doing it after this year. And there’s no contradiction in terms, it’s that there’s a whole new pattern open and the time to do it, and [I’m lucky to have] the finances to go to Paris this summer and stay for ten days. A lot of travel, a lot of things to do, a lot of time and finances to do them with; I feel blessed and I feel extraordinarily lucky. And to have had a career that made me grow as a human being, and helped other people grow as human beings, has been just immensely satisfying. So I’m a lucky and a happy dude.
LG: Happy camper?
RA: [grinning] Happy camper.
LG: So your plans for after IHS include travel…
RA: That would be the biggy. I am now seriously considering and investigating the possibilities of the trip to Paris with my sister-in-law, who is coming at the end of the summer—leaves me time to investigate other possibilities, which I don’t want to lock in necessarily. But I want this option, that option, that option. We’ll see.
And the first one that I’m exploring is [pause for suspense] teaching English in France. And how to get one’s name established in that roll call, if you will. The research I’ve done on it to this point, that teaching abroad thing, is: whoa! Paris needs all kinds of teachers, tutors, etc. Or those who want English skills, speaking and writing skills. So it’s a rather larger market. It just came to me one day as a sort of peripheral thought of “Hmm, what if I want to stay in [Paris].” So that is now what I’m very psyched and excited about. And I will be sending in an application for teaching abroad.
LG: Best of luck.
RA: Thank you.
LG: I know you have a novel coming out soon; tell us about that.
RA: It is delightful to just be engaged in it. It started out more memoir-ish in a sort of “how I got to be where I ended up.” Now I’m struggling with: do I want to kick that memoir form into a work of fiction? Although I sometimes wonder in some of the memoirs I’ve read if there is truly a distinction between “this is a documentary report of my life” as opposed to this fictional setting. Well, the fictional setting allows you a lot of room; to change history, and to accent things, and to deaccent particularly negative things, perhaps. In short, it allows you to sort of rewrite your life, but I don’t want to rewrite it. [laughing] Embellish, though.
LG: Are you going to miss anything about this place?
RA: I am. I’m going to miss [pause] the wonderful time I’ve had helping students to become wonderful human beings. Philosophically, intellectually. I think the most important thing in my career teaching has been [long pause] to make both learning and joy partners. I think the rigor of the learning and the pleasure and fun of it are not mutually exclusive. And I feel successful when both happen in my classroom, and not happy when they don’t.
LG: Are you still enrolled at Cornell University?
RA: I proudly say yes. I still am enrolled at Cornell University. One of my goals is to be still enrolled at Cornell University when I croak. That will make me very happy. On my last breath I’ll go “Cornell University, student on very extended leave!” And that happened, as you know, I started up at Cornell in Industrial Relations because it was a lot cheaper than liberal arts. And I didn’t like huge tomes of [gesturing a heavy load] transcripts of law that were very less than… exciting. So I was doing rather badly in this major and at the end of my first year, my freshman year, which I spent essentially hanging around the quad and writing and walking and thinking—it was educational, but it wasn’t education in my particular field. So my advisor said “You know, uh, you know Richard, I think maybe we oughta do something now because it’s pretty clear your intelligence has not been in question, yada-yada, but your grades are pretty not-so-good. I think maybe you should take a leave of absence and see if you can kind of get it together and decide if this is really what you want to do,” and I said, “Well, that’s an excellent idea.” So I filled out the forms for a “leave of absence,” and that “absence” has now reached 48 years, but I’m still enrolled at Cornell University. [I’m] proud of my alma mater that I didn’t go to.
LG: Go Big Red. One last question here. Advice to youth?
RA: [Pause, repeats question a few times] Stay open enough that your dream comes to you. Do not let institutions, school being one of the most potentially dangerous in this regard of smashing your vision for yourself, hang with that dream and never betray and you will have nothing to regret for the rest of your life. That is what I wish for youth. Be the author of your life, and always remember that Socrates told us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I would modify the great Socrates proclamation [to add] “and the unlived life is not worth examining.” And that’s what I would want my students to never forget. Live. To the full. [Pause] And that’s a successful life.