TRIBUTE TO CHARLES ASCHMANN

There are teachers with whom I was more comfortable, teachers I loved more, teachers who loved us more – Mrs. Weiner, for example, who taught us in second grade because she liked us so much in first grade. There were teachers who were more fun . . . but no teacher taught me more than Charles Aschmann.

And it wasn’t always pretty. Sometimes it was downright ugly. He made me cry. More than once. He made me tremble in my desert boots on a daily basis. He made me feel stupid and arrogant, lazy and not-good-enough. I’d lie awake at night and worry about the book from his rare, out-of-print set (I think it was Vanity Fair) that he’d lent me and that I couldn’t find. He’d see me in the hall, and, in that booming voice, with that raised black eyebrow and slight curl of the upper lip, say “Why, yes, Ms. Sidebotham. I’ll grade that paper (return that test, write that recommendation) when you return my book.” (Eventually I went down to the Strand bookstore in the East Village and tried to replace his copy with another old, out-of-print one. When I gave it to him, with a teary apology because it probably didn’t match his set, he looked – for the only time in all the time that I knew him – sort of sheepish. I don’t think he knew how guilty I had been feeling -- he wasn’t always the most sensitive guy.)

I’ve said nothing yet about the weekly papers he made us write in AP English or the novels like Tom Jones and Adam Bede he made us read once a week or the volumes of advice he gave us about life (“Don’t say ‘yeah’ in an interview. Say ‘yessss.’” “Oh dear, you’re ill? Tsk. tsk. It’s survival of the fittest out there. People who get sick don’t succeed.”) He was naughty, given to double entendres whenever possible, but he was never lecherous. Just kind of amused by teenage hormonal insanity. My favorite story about him involves a response I’d written to reading Sanctuary by William Faulkner. In it, I wrote, “Honestly, most of the time I didn’t know what was going on in this book.” His comment in the margin of my paper: “Probably just as well.” Well, yeah. A woman in the story is raped with a corn cob pipe. (yuk)

Was he really condescending or was that part of his act? Because, at heart, Charles Aschmann was an actor. He really had done a lot of professional acting. On Broadway? Probably. Maybe. Who cares? The role of his life was English Teacher – confident, full of bluster, didactic, dogmatic, dictatorial, heartless, contemptuous, exacting, knowledgeable. He could say “The sky is green” with such authority that we would sit there, nodding our heads.

Sometimes I hated him, and sometimes I loved him. Now I just love him. He taught me more about literature than any of my professors in college. As an English teacher now (and I blame/credit him), I think of him all the time – and never try to emulate him. It wouldn’t work.

He really was an actor. When I came back to HHS years after graduating and talked with him, he let his mask slip a bit. He revealed that he had known a lot more about my personal life, for example, my parents’ divorce, than I thought. Other former students also discovered that he had been more invested in their lives than he let on. He was interested in our romantic lives, such as they were, and protective of his female students. He was fully up to date on any given boy’s shenanigans, whom that young man might be pursuing or making miserable. . . he was aware of heartbreak and substance abuse and violence, etc. He wasn’t, though, the kind of teacher who was going to let boundaries get limp. That’s what many of us needed in that crazy time when lots of people’s parents were acting like kids. He gave us something that sustained us: the presence of a reliable, ethical (if not compassionate) adult who took pride in his work. He wasn’t comfy, but he was essential.

Jan Sidebotham