Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404170163
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: by JACK SPRAKER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Richard J. Murphy Jr. Ohio State University Press. $29.50.
The debate over education in Virginia and throughout the country rages on year after year. Politicians - Democrats, Republicans and the occasional stray independent - cry out for reform. The taxpayers echo their cries, wanting something better for their hard-earned dollars. They all point to the statistics, the test scores and the dollar signs, demanding that something be done.
In the prologue to his collection of essays, "The Calculus of Intimacy," Richard J. Murpjy Jr., an English professor at Radford University, reminds us "that the essential act of school is, in terms we are accustomed to using, incalculable." For Murphy, education is a very human activity, an activity that is hard to understand when we focus simply on the numbers.
Although these essays on teaching will interest educators, they have something to offer the general audience as well. Murphy does not confine his account of his teaching - from his first job a a high school English teacher in California to his present position - only to the classroom or bog readers down in pedagogical theory. His account unfolds in wonderfully narrative essays that any reader should find compelling.
These essays send out the accumulative message that everyone should hear: although our daily activities may often be mired in frustration and doubt, through love and faith we can lift ourselves up to make our interaction with other human beings - at work or at home, in the classroom or anywhere - a joyful success. However, an abstract statement such as this cannot accurately represent the concrete power that these essays have. Each builds on the next to teach this important lesson.
The essays that focus on the author's family bring insight to teaching that educators will appreciate, but this focus will also find apreciative readers outside education. In "His Son the Writing Teacher," Murphy recalls his father's attempt to write a chronicle of his life, to "save these thoughts from extinction," in the final years before his death in 1989. Although his father managed only several pages of scattered notes, Murphy uses his conversations with his father over these recollections, recalling his own memories of his father, his wife and his children, to discuss the importance of personal writing.
It is the personal nature of Murphy's writing that makes this collection so enjoyable and allows it to communicate wisdom in a way that abstract, theoretical books on teaching and learning cannot.
In "Sursum Corda" - a remnant from the Roman Catholic Church's Latin Mass meaning "Let us lift up our hearts" - Murphy shows us optimistic ethusiasm as a countermeasure against frustration and doubt. The essay focuses on his mother's death in 1958 and the signet ring she gave her husband in the midst of the despair and confusion of World War II.
He writes of this hopeful gift in such a hopeless time: "Where did she get such recklessness? What grace touched her spirit? Sudden, impulsive, with a hope that was positive and insistent, that rushed out of her smiling face. Where did that come from?"
Where, indeed, readers may ask, and in "The Calculus of Intimacy," Murphy gives us his answer.
\ Jack Spraker teaches English at Radford University.
by CNB