“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
John Banville
We drove back to the mountains a few days ago for family reasons. On Tuesday, we traveled with Ima’s sisters—Madonna and Mary Sue—to Whitesburg, Kentucky for a birthday meal at Long John Silvers. The drive there was a trip down memory lane.
Nothing much has changed in that part of the mountains since we left except the amount of kudzu. For those of you unfamiliar with the vegetation, it is a fast-growing, semi-woody perennial plant—pueraria montana—that was brought to the United States in 1876 from Japan and heavily promoted by our government beginning during the Depression years to control soil erosion, especially in mountain areas. Some have called it “the vine that ate the South.”
I have always thought some mountain entrepreneur could make a fortune by discovering a medical use for kudzu. My secret hope is that it would be a graduate of the June Buchanan School or Alice Lloyd College, the two mountain institutions where we spent so much of our lives. In an age of spectacular biogenetic advances, it is not hard for me to imagine the amazing growth properties of kudzu enhancing human cellular properties. But then again, I have always believed that God has some special purpose for all forms of plant life.
At any rate, we drove through long stretches of highway where kudzu’s leafy-green carpeted covered everything: trees, ravines, creek banks, telephone poles and abandoned houses. In the early evening, these kudzu-covered objects take on strange, otherworldly shapes—an artist’s palette of myriad shapes and forms.
One staple of mountain culture that kudzu is swallowing up these days are old coal mines and the rusting equipment (and dreams) left abandoned seemingly everywhere. King Coal has given way to King Kudzu.
As we passed by one such kudzu-covered landscape, Mary Sue began telling her sisters about visiting an underground coal mine while attending my Philosophy 300 class at Alice Lloyd College. Her memory, in turn, triggered an avalanche of my own recollections. Because of insurance liabilities, it would be impossible to have a class outing like that in today’s world. But back then, I found a deep mine coal operator who would take my students down under. All these students would have their parents sign liability waivers and we would gather at the mine. Following safety and emergency lectures, we would don our hard hats displaying the company’s logos, climb aboard and lie down in the shuttle cars on rails (once inside the shaft, it seemed like the roof of the tunnel almost touched your nose), and descend deep into the bowels of the earth. It was a unique experience of dust, smells, and darkness. And when I say darkness, I’m talking about total darkness–cold, dark, wet, disorienting, total black absence of light. Sometimes crouching we would follow a mine employee with his lantern, past the coal roof bolters and to the face itself, where a giant, diamond-tooth augur would chew through a vein of coal to be sent by tram above.
What an experience for the students (and myself).
Why do it? Because almost every single student in my class had a family member that worked in the coal mining industry in those days, and I wanted them to gain an appreciation for how difficult a lifestyle it was for their relatives.
That was one of the many classroom experiences that made Philosophy 300—Issues and Values for Contemporary Decision-Making—such a special class. After Mary Sue mentioned it in the car, I sat in the back seat swallowed up by my own memories of the class. It all began when Dr. Jerry Davis, then-president of the school, called me up to his office. “Akers,” he said, “I think our students need a course that exposes them to Godly values, critical thinking skills, this unique mountain culture, and the worthwhile ideas contained in the history of this institution. We need to design a class that will serve them for the rest of their lives. And I want you to teach it.”
Out of our conversation that afternoon, Philosophy 300 was born.
It was such an honor to teach that course.
There are so, so many special memories.
In the early years, for example, Dr. June Buchanan herself would graciously appear in class as a guest speaker. Imagine that the co-founder herself, our beloved “Miss June” speaking to our students. Benny Moore would set up the film projector and we would show the old black and white original footage of Ralph Edwards’ This Is Your Life television program featuring Alice Lloyd. Miss June would talk the students through the whole experience and how they had to “trick” Alice Lloyd into attending the program. Miss June would also explain how important that program was to the survival of our small college on the banks of Caney Creek. At the time, Ralph Edwards encouraged the viewers to put a five- or one-dollar donation in an envelope and send it to the college. So many bags of mail arrived at the campus post office that they could barely handle it.
Those same donors—mostly women and widows—sent donations year after year. It was the financial lifeblood of the school.
Then Miss June would share her folksy philosophy with the students. One of her sayings has been forever etched in my memory: “a good teacher is one who takes his or her students to the moon and back every day!”
In addition to a long roster of special classroom guests, each semester I would bring an old cassette recorder into class, set it on the desk in front of the students and play the “Love Tape” by Leo Buscaglia. In terms of pedagogy, having the students listen to a tape recording is probably among the poorest teaching methodologies possible.
But the tape was pure magic.
Many of you reading this missive may not recognize the name Leo Buscaglia.[1] If you go to Wikipedia and look him up, be sure to visit the “In popular culture” section where it relates a mid-1984 Peanuts comic strip depicting Snoopy heading toward Charlie Brown and Sally. Snoopy (the dog) gives them both warm and sincere hugs. Afterwards, Charlie Brown explains his dog’s actions: “You can always tell when he’s been listening to Leo Buscaglia tapes.” That is an indication of Buscaglia’s influence in the culture of those times.
Buscaglia was an instructor at the University of Southern California. His “love” class was so popular that students had to enroll in it during their freshman year to make sure they could take it by their senior year. The basic premise of Leo’s presentation was that you can take all the in-depth courses you want—in economics, medicine, science, political theory, education and history—but if you lack love in your life, you have missed the meaning of it all. Or as he put it: “if you earn enough money to buy a mansion with five garages, each holding the most expensive cars inside, you still have missed it. Sleeping next to a cold Porsche at night is a bummer!”
How true.
A couple other concepts from Leo’s presentation stand out for me, even after all these years, and I have not listened to the tape in over two decades. First, our parents did the best they could at the time. He followed this up with interesting and funny stories about his parents, family and childhood. I have mentioned this to my two daughters on several occasions.
Another idea from Buscaglia’s love tape that has made a lasting personal impression was his story about a childhood memory from art class. He was in special education at the time (even though he spoke five languages at the time, his English was poor). His favorite class was Art Class, taught by a haggard old lady, who brought in paper pads and paints and said, “students, today we are going to draw a tree.” Johnny, one of his classmates, relished the assignment—he had climbed trees, fallen out of trees, ate the bark off trees, made helicopters out of the leaves and seeds—so he grabbed the paints and scrawled a vibrant, alive picture with all sorts of swirling colors. He proudly presented the picture to the teacher. “My God,” she exclaimed, “brain damage!” Then she went to the front and drew a picture of a tree that looked like a lollipop on a stick with round red spots for apples. “That is a tree,” she told them.
Buscaglia made the point that the teacher wasn’t interested in the student’s view of a tree but expected them to echo her own view. The point: that is a common problem with our education system.
If I thought about it longer, I could come up with dozens of life lessons derived from that tape.
The fragile ”love tape” is in a box somewhere in our garage. (Do you remember the final scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”?) I will never part with it. It remains one of my most prized possessions.
Another standard feature of Philosophy 300, as I recall, is what I came to call “the Game.” I would walk into class holding a sheet of paper with words on it, usually an abstract quote from a book like The Mind’s I. I would tell the class the rules of the game: “you need to tell me, exactly, what is on this piece of paper;” the time period of the “game”; “you can only ask only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions”; each student can ask up to three questions (as long as the answer to the first two questions were “yes”); the student who gave me exactly what is on the sheet of paper would get an automatic “A” for the grading period; failure to come up with the answer would result in severe penalties for everyone in the class; I would be the final arbitrator of all disputes; and no cheating was allowed.
In each and every instance, the class would come up with the answer. But it is worth noting that the class students went through the exact same process to resolve the challenge and at similar time frames. First, there was a prolonged period of complaining and gnashing of teeth; “that is unfair,” or “how can we do that—its impossible!” were the common refrains.
I would simply reply “you are wasting time.”
Then they would try to figure it out. They would begin by making wild-haired guesses and ask broad, universal questions. Eventually the students would start to hone in on a more granular process, asking letter-by-letter and word-by-word questions. The process was always the same. In fact, the process of solving the problem would be so similar that I once considered writing a paper about it and submitting it to an educational research journal.
What did I hope to accomplish? I am convinced that the “game” reflects an individual’s decision-making process better than any other single class exercise. The class starts with a seemingly insolvable problem, works through the process of frustration at the magnitude of the task, and finally develops a coping process—moving from broad generalities to specifics—to arrive at a solution. And, since the process involved the cooperation of everybody in the class, the winner would always feel guilty when he or she received the final reward.
I have had former students, many years later, show me their worksheets from the “game” series of classes.
As I’m sitting here writing, a thought occurs: it would make a great storyline for a sci-fi short story to have a future advanced society play a version of the “game” involving some of us in an “ancestral-nested simulation” reality. (More intellectual than the Squid Games). But then again that is just the way my warped brain works.
Many of you will have a problem dealing with my next point.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in at least one class session during the course of a semester, God would show up. I know that sounds presumptuous, but I witnessed it happen semester-after-semester. I never knew when it would happen, how it would happen, and certainly could not force the circumstances where it would happen. But during one class the students would be made aware that they were not alone in the universe, that the God of Creation genuinely cared for them, and gave them a glimmer of insight into their assignment for life. It was always an emotional class. The class where I profoundly felt the honor of being involved—the true essence of Philosophy 300.
“Sigh.”
Even now, after so many years and so many experiences in life, I fondly recall those days in Pippa Passes and standing in the shower listening for God’s voice and desperately trying to get inspiration for an idea for the classroom. Ideas to stimulate the imagination of those student hearts and minds entrusted to me for that moment in time; ideas that would foster and nurture critical thinking; ideas that would nudge each of those incredible students toward their respective assignments, ideas which God intended for their respective lives.
I have come to recognize an important truth: those times were the very best of times. Times when I saw the God of this universe in action.
[1] Felice Leonardo Buscaglia (1924-1998), who went by the moniker of “Dr. Love,” was an author, of five national bestsellers, a motivational speaker popular on PBS, and a professor in the Special Education Department at USC. Following the tragic suicide of one of his favorite students, he began offering a non-credit course at USC called Love 1A.
Jeemes Akers is the author of the futuristic techno-Christian trilogy: Prawnocuos Rising; Prawnocuos Resplendent; Prawnocuos Falling. The trilogy tells the story of a group of Christian youths, living some 30-35 years in the future, who are dealing with an increasingly techno-paganist world as they, and newfound friends, frantically race around the globe in a bid to halt the next pandemic and fend off powerful global technological megacorporations. Jeemes also writes missives, or essays, and shares them as well as his original artwork on his website https://jeemesakers.com/