A TRIBUTE TO HUGH SACKETT
THE
BUSINESS OF A
TEACHER — by Andres Reyes ’80 —
The business of a teacher: a. Is to become a schoolmaster: to cry for the moon, to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, to bring sight to the blind, and keep his own eyes open. b. To teach a boy how to read a book (the hardest of all tasks), how to read print (the sight of history), how to read things (clues to truth), how to read persons (by the eyes of empathy). c. To refuse to accept that intelligence tests have tested intelligence, even when he thinks they have. d. To take his pupils up the high mountain and prevent them and himself from knowing they are right. e. To stop teaching at the first possible moment and get out of a pupil’s light. A. B. SACKETT
I
FIRST READ these precepts in 1975, in my Second Form year, and I imagine that Hugh Sackett must have shown them to me. They had been written by his father, A. B. Sackett, well known as the progressive and reformist headmaster, from 1928 until 1959, of Kingswood School in Bath, England, which Hugh had attended. I suppose that Hugh presented these precepts to give some idea of what was expected, over the next five years, of him as my faculty advisor and of me as his advisee. As ever with such dicta, the fluency of the words
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Groton School Quarterly
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Spring 2018
belies the difficulty of their execution. But all of my time at school, it seems to me, Hugh admirably fulfilled the “business of a teacher” as set out by his father. In those more conventional, rule-laden days, advisory sessions at his dormitory apartment—always a steak dinner (called a “snake dinner” by Rogers Scudder, my advisor in the spring when Hugh left to excavate)—were formal, but friendly, and one easily got a sense on those occasions of the man behind the master. “Teaching was his business, and he wanted others to share his wonder at the enthusiasm for