Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

The Quaker Who Changed My Life

Part 1

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Let Your Life Speak

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If childhood is the experience of being exposed to values, to a view of the world, to a vision of what is possible and to unconditional love; if childhood is a time of shaping and discovering who you are, a time of trust in people who know life more intimately than you do, whose courage you absorb by watching them live, for me there were two – one in my family, the other as a teacher in a Quaker school. In both I learned what is important and what isn’t. I learned how to think, how to care beyond myself, how to question. And I hope that since then I have been able to do something worthy of the teaching and love I received in both.

I first arrived on the Sandy Spring Friends School campus, a new Quaker school in the green countryside of Maryland, on the day I turned 22. I had flown out from my college in California to Maryland to be interviewed by the headmaster for my first-ever job – teaching English. Most of my attention was on what I was wearing, how my hair looked, and whether or not I would be able to convince the headmaster that I knew enough American and British literature to get the job.

C. Thornton Brown was the headmaster’s name, although everyone called him Thorny. He was anything but prickly. Firm but kind, he was immediately an experience of simplicity, of bone-deep authenticity, speaking truths, it seemed to me, just by being. I would begin to learn from him from my first hour there.

But before the interview I was introduced to the head of the English Department, Peter Kline, and invited to sit in on one of his classes. I was glad because I was curious to see what sort of English department the headmaster had appointed.

I expected literature analysis or poetry exposition but got instead a 40-minute “Composition Class” which began with a six-line child's drawing of a stick figure house. Peter had quickly drawn that house on the chalkboard. The students were to give Peter specific directions, accurate in every detail, such that he would reproduce the drawing exactly.

Of course they could not do that. One student said, “First draw a box.” Peter drew a round 1930's hat box with stripes, a huge ribbon, and a handle. When they finally got the idea that they would have to be tediously precise in order to get him to draw the stick figure house, one said, “First, draw a horizontal line seven inches long.” And Peter, almost demonically, lifted his chalk to the very top of the board and drew the horizontal line there.

You can imagine how steamy the frustration was by the end of the class. But interspersed among the students' futile attempts to be pristinely accurate were brief but probing discussions about concepts like ambiguity tolerance, lability, and paradox. Finally the bell rang. I was reeling.

Peter assured me that there were more straightforward literature classes in the department and that I would be interviewing for one of them. But I had seen enough to keep me wide-eyed for a long time. This school clearly was not going to be Hockaday or Scripps College.

Nor were the students going to be Neiman Marcus “graduates.” There was more hair on the heads of the boys around that campus and fewer bras on the girls than I had seen even in the antiwar shots in Time. But Peter and I walked across the green lawns from his classroom under the Infirmary to Moore Hall and down the steps to Thorny's office as if everything were remarkably ordinary.

Thorny came out of the tiniest office I had ever seen, shook my hand, and motioned me into the also tiny chair by his desk. He sat down and leaned back. I crossed my legs in my very short 1968 (Neimans, of course) gaberdine suit skirt. I was not just over-dressed but absurdly dressed for this place. And I already sensed uncomfortably that this culture was real in some way I could not yet understand, and that I was a flagrant anomaly. I had no skills at all to deal with that then, so I smiled and waited for Thorny to speak.

But he didn't. He just waited. The quiet, probably all of five seconds but feeling like 500, was agony for me. I had never sat with anyone in quiet before except in the so-called “Moment of Silence” of our Methodist Church services during which the choir sang. The silence in front of me now was silent. And excruciating. Quickly I pulled myself out of this uninvited dip into profundity and did exactly what I did best – talk.

If I had been taught anything about the social graces in my privileged family/private school/women's college upbringing, it was to fill in the awkward spaces in any conversation. I certainly did not learn how to be in those spaces. If anything, I was taught to prevent them. At all costs. As a result, I was then probably the best fill-in-the-quiet expert ever raised. Give me a quiet moment in a person's chat, and I could scoop it right up, kiss it with this and that until it transformed itself into a conversation prize-winner all its own. And this I could do so skilfully, so speedily, no one ever suspected there had been a near catastrophe of silence in the first place.

I learned that if it is done expertly, the person who went quiet like that so precariously will never thank you outright, but will be unconsciously grateful to you for the rest of their lives. That put it squarely in the middle of the “stars-in-your-crown" category of social service. Almost a religious duty.

So I talked a stream -- at first about relevant subjects like my major in literature, my senior thesis about the Hopi Origin Myth, about the joys of grammar, and then about Peter's maverick Composition Class and the spontaneous probing discussion between him and the students that popped up every now and then, and about, as a last ditch, the lovely campus.

Thorny continued to listen. So I didn’t stop. I went on about things like my flight there, my birthday, my wonderful sister who had driven me from Washington and was waiting for me out in the car, and my upcoming graduation from Scripps. I did, finally, run out of things to say.

Thorny was still quiet, still leaning back in his chair, listening. I was exhausted. I knew that whatever was happening in that room was foreign to me. And that I was powerless to prevent it. So I surrendered. I shut up.

Thorny then said, “Well, we need an English teacher for the 10th and 11th graders and a PE teacher. Can you do both?”

“I can do the English, definitely,” I said. “What sort of PE?”

“Girls hockey and whatever else you want to do. And you would have weekend duty one weekend a month and one evening a week here for dinner and Faculty meeting. We can pay you $3500.”

“Okay," I said, not having ever negotiated a contract before, and being unable to come up with any objections, the way you would have no idea how to steer a tiny boat past Tierra Del Fuego.

And that was that. I was hired. That was how it always was with Thorny. Things were unadorned, genuine, disarmingly quick.

And life-changing. Six months into that first school year I walked into his office. He had asked to see me because he had had a complaint from the mother of one of my English students. He was now in a slightly larger office at a slightly larger desk, a bit more head-mastery, I felt, which was a relief. He motioned to me to come in, he smiled, said hello and set down the copy of Rudder Magazine he had been reading. (Later I would understand that sailing was not just his passion; it was his lived metaphor for leadership.)

He leaned back in his chair, of course, and said, "Mrs. Andrews called me. She thinks you are corrupting her daughter by teaching D.H. Lawrence in your Senior Literature class. What do you think?” He was quiet.

I sat up straight and made my university-graduate defence of great literature and said something about how Shakespeare and The Bible were much more lewd than Lawrence (I was desperate). Thorny listened, as always. And as always, I went on and on. When I couldn't think of anything else to say, I looked at him.

And he stunned me. He said gently and slowly, the way he spoke about everything, "Nancy, I don't care which books you teach. But remember one thing: the students are learning you. They will probably forget about D.H. Lawrence. But you and your life they will remember. Let every class you teach be guided by that. Now go back to work. I'll handle Mrs. Andrews."

He smiled. I thanked him and left his office, dazed. I felt I had learned 100 years of wisdom from him in two minutes, and that it would take me 100 more years to digest it. He had never raised his voice, or interrupted me, or lifted his white eyebrows. He had just sat there, showing me what he meant. He was teaching me him, too. I was learning about ease and integrity and about seeing what is simply true. I am still learning that from him 57 years later.

Eventually I realised that he was an embodiment of the Quaker lesson to “let your life speak.” I ponder that to this day.

I guess you don't have to be alive to keep teaching if you have taught your life while you lived.

End Of Part 1

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