This is a confession of sorts, a personal mea culpa, on one hand and a memorial for a treasured teacher and academic on the other. The memorial I have in mind is for Dr. Gayle Byerly, who was one of my professors in the English department at Ursinus College during the mid to late seventies. Byerly died last week at the age of 85 with family beside her in a small town outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (see Snyder Funeral Home).
As an undergraduate student, I had an opportunity to work with Byerly just at the time when computers were becoming functional enough to help in linguistic analysis, which she specialized in. In fact, she published an article on the use of computers in the humanities in 1978, the year of my graduation. She inspired me and like-minded friends to be rigorous in our approach to literature and grammatical structures in the use of language. I remember thinking of her field as the emerging “science” of Shakespeare. She was hard core English.
I appreciated that. Two years prior to studying under Byerly and her colleagues in the English department, I had been a Chemistry major. I found it hard but rewarding because of the discipline and precision required not just to pass courses but to understand the natural processes and logic involved. That was not something I was used to.
That world was so new, however, that I stumbled, failing a course for the first time in my life. It was in intermediate calculus of all things, which I had been studying since my senior year of high school. I figured that if I hadn’t gotten the hang of vectors by then, I never would. English and philosophy, both of which I loved, beckoned in the distance. That’s when Byerly acted as a land bridge between two vast continents; one materialistic and reductionistic, the other temptingly transcendent where rules existed but danced about in strange ways.
Dr. Byerly made those strange ways familiar and natural. I studied semantics, semiotics, transformative grammar, and anything else I could get my hands on regarding this new science. When she added basic computer programming, I jumped at the chance to learn more. As I recall, I stumbled once or twice again, but she always treated me and others with respect and patience. She was demanding–that is true–but her insistence on precision made the small victories and accomplishments in basic coding that much more worthwhile. If I had to put it in a few words, I would say she was concerned about and driven by the search for truth.
I am not exactly sure how she saw the relationship between truth and teaching; that is, whether one caused the other or vice versa. But I do know they were both important enough to her that she couldn’t have one without the other. What good is truth if no one can hear it? What of teaching if it is not firmly planted in truth, even if not very fashionable (i.e., “trending”) truth?
Perhaps this is why she did not coddle us or leave us to our immature theorizing about life, language, and love. I include love, because it was Shakespeare and Keats that we applied all that transformative-generative theory to. I could tell that during her time at Ursinus she loved us, loved her work, and loved life. After all, she wasn’t really that much older than us, which is something that makes me sit back today and reflect on in awe. That was quite miraculous.
As a final note, I want to confess (another mea culpa) that I finally understand what Byerly and her colleagues went through trying to channel not just our spirits but our thinking. Teaching is complex, dynamic, and challenging. It is neither for the meek nor for those with an ax to grind, ideological or otherwise. It requires personal sacrifice and commitment. Gayle Byerly gave both from her heart as did her colleagues. I know this, because I have spent the past twenty years of my adult life teaching at a university. I know the real deal when I see it.
Requiescat in pace, Dr. Byerly.
Image credits: feature by Annie Spratt; books by Clarissa Watson; group by Kelly Sikkema. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”
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Thank you Rob. I majored in chemistry, and there were times during my four years that I thought about changing majors to avoid all of the lab time — something I wasn’t vey good at anyway.
But I persisted, and that degree enabled me to have a rewarding career in the chemical industry.
After college I taught high school chemistry for two years, went to work in industry for 30 years, and then ended up teaching business courses at Ursinus for the following 15 years.
In the high school classes, I was imparting information to the students. But, at Ursinus, I viewed myself as a facilitator, not so much a teacher. I tried my best to use my experience to guide students to the readings, the principles and the case studies that would give them insights for life in their careers.
I hope it worked, and I am in touch with former students from time to time who do speak approvingly of our time together in class. I thought your tribute to Gayle Byerly was thoughtful and heartfelt. I wish I had done much the same for some of my own teachers. To the extent I did not, I regret that.
Thank you for this, Vic. I am willing to bet that you are still a mentor and inspiration to your former students. As for teachers, it’s never too late to write about them and their influence on you, especially at Ursinus College.
Chemistry, I didn’t know that. Maybe that is where I get it from, although I love chemistry!