Dr. Thom Dunn

John Scott Academy's Renaissance Man

We asked Thom (he’s “Thom” not “Dr. Dunn” in class, for reasons he makes clear in his own words below) for a few words on his teaching philosophy, and here’s what he wrote:
 

I teach a course, ideally, because I want to go on that course, even without students. I am primarily a learner, a student myself.

You’d think a 66-year-old teacher would have firmer pedagogical convictions, but all I’m sure of is that study, exploration, making connections – all of it – is what I love most, and I hope most that students who choose to walk with me, to sail out over the horizon as it were, are themselves on a freely chosen course, doing what they love and want to do. It’s the doing. The going.

Often things don’t go well, and we all become bored, ho-hum tourists following an equally bored tour guide through beauteous fields, forests, and mountains that we cannot appreciate because a tour is a tour is a tour. But then a fresh breeze touches us on the cheek, and we come alive again, exploring, discovering, playing with words and rhetoric and stories. Cracking wise, chasing pretty fish into deep water, getting way past ourselves, backtracking, pondering, or maybe snoozing awhile in the sun.

So why do students need me – why do they need a teacher at all? Well, they don’t necessarily need me – nor I them. But a teacher can be a course setter, a man or woman of certain experiences, a coach, a moderator, a hand on the tiller of the good ship Conversation as she makes her way across the sea of what can – and perhaps ought to be – known.

I work and strive to become one with my students – primus inter pares (first among equals) – and to reduce the notion of myself as director, task-master, presenter of points, sayer of sooth.

I go on and on, I know. And I will continue to go on and on, for if I have any preachment, any gospel, it is this: 

Learning is life,
Life learning,
And my god takes joy in both…
You come too?

Our Literary Renaissance Man

Two or three years ago Thom Dunn was holding forth on poetry in one of my literature classes. Just before the mid-class break, he delivered, in his wonderful reading voice, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” The students were visibly impressed. They had certainly heard poetry read. I start nearly every literature class with a piece of poetry. But my talent for reading poetry is as nothing compared to Thom’s. His voice draws you right into the poem, and his love of words impresses the feel and meaning of a poem onto your brain.

During the break I mentioned to one or two of the students, “You know, he wasn’t reading that poem. He had the text in front of him, but he only referred to it occasionally. He was delivering the poem from memory.”

I got a “say what?” look.

But he was. Thom has a gift for poetry. He has over the course of the years memorized poetry, as my mother used to say, “by the yard.”

Thom will, for example, be teaching a class on one of Shakespeare’s plays and suddenly break into a whole speech by Hamlet or Macbeth – a spontaneous and flawless performance.

Thom is retired now from his post as a professor of English at Miami University, but he has been a resource for me for several years, and used to drop by every now and again to discuss literature (mainly poetry) with my students when I taught at The Schilling School.

Thom is perhaps my oldest friend in Cincinnati, and when I began talking about starting John Scott Academy, he was entirely supportive. We had many a long discussion about teaching. And though Thom is jealous of his time in retirement, when the school actually opened, there he was, giving of his time, talent, and energy, team teaching our Literature I course with me. (Really, he does the teaching; I’m as much a student as anyone else.)

“We are all students together,” is the way Thom would probably put it.

A “Massachusetts man” by birth, Thom came west for college, taking his BA at Ohio Wesleyan and his MA and PhD in English at the University of Cincinnati.

His graduate school focus was on Middle English and his doctoral dissertation was on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but his teaching and learning career has taken him from that to Shakespeare to science fiction to the literature of cultures not Eurocentric.

The design of Literature I includes an examination of Matthew Arnold’s “twin pillars” of our western culture – the Hebraic and the Hellenic traditions. It progresses from there to England, thence from Bible and morality plays to Shakespeare, and finally outward from the home of our mother tongue to the rest of the world and the stories that make up our savory stew of cultural, ethnic, racial, political, and religious diversity.

There is no telling where a Thom Dunn class may wander, but I am always confident that the wandering is like Robert Frost poetry: It may look like the aimless walk of a somewhat disheveled man on his way to wherever his feet want to take him, but like the words of the craggy New England master, there is no footfall of Thom’s that is not purposeful.

I am minded of a Literature I class at John Scott Academy that Thom dubbed a “potpourri class,” a two-hour presentation that seemingly meandered from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas, and included along the way T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and vocabulary.

It was one of those classes that, when they come together, are beautiful learning experiences.

This one came together. The discussion was lively, and the entire experience provided the kind of intellectual stimulation that cannot be measured quantitatively, but is qualitatively priceless.

One measure of the value of that class might be the enthusiasm with which one student discovered (thanks to the Internet) T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and connected it to Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, which he had just read and was preparing to write an essay on.

Meandering like that I will take any day at John Scott Academy, where the motto/mantra is, “Let’s walk together for a while, you and I.”

John Overbeck