The gift of great teachers
Evanston RoundTable, July 20, 2022
Be a great teacher yourself. Be a mentor.
After spending a glorious gap year walking around London, traveling around England and hitchhiking around Europe, I returned to University of Illinois in Chicago (known then as “Circle” campus) in September 1968. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do, since I’d been out of the classroom so long. But luck was with me: my first class that fall quarter in Early Modern European History was taught by Prof. George Huppert. Huppert was a small, quiet and unassuming man, but as I quickly came to appreciate, a giant of a teacher. He began the first class by pulling down a map of Europe and describing the geopolitical forces – mountains, plains, rivers, oceans and seas – that were paramount. Sweeping his hands across the map as if leading troops, he pronounced, “This is what shaped national destinies.”
It was a revelation. I had always loved history – had done a presentation on Greek history when I was in third grade – but this was of another order altogether. Huppert’s pacing, style, erudition and sense of humor were the perfect gateway back to academia. And his slightly accented English and natural reserve hinted at some interesting back story.
I declared history my major and took all his courses plus others on ancient and modern history. History is not just time travel to the past, I realized. It helps explain the present and predict the future. It’s one of the indispensable liberal arts.
Great classes, great subjects and great teachers inspire us and shape our lives.
Sam Arron, violin teacher extraordinaire.
My first great teacher was Samuel Arron, who taught violin in West Rogers Park. As a sophomore I had dropped out of U. of I. in Champaign-Urbana and returned home to Chicago. There, in a closet in my parents’ apartment, I found a cheap, beat-up violin that many years earlier had belonged to my uncle. As a kid he had even carved his name, MAX, in big letters across the bottom. I had it repaired and started studying with Professor Arron, as my father called him. He was like a professor – patient, wise, kind, almost a second father to me. At 19, I was far too old to consider a professional career, but still, with Arron’s guidance we flew through the standard scale and exercise books and over time moved on to the concerto literature: the lovely Vivaldi in A minor and the brilliant Mozart in G major. It started me on a lifelong journey into orchestra and chamber music playing that brought great joy and thankfully continues to this day.
Many years later I switched to viola, the violin’s big brother. My first viola teacher was Sam’s son, Julian. He was more rigorous and methodical than his father, which was exactly what I needed then. Over the last 30 years I have had many other wonderful music teachers, including Karin Addis at the Music Institute of Chicago, Claudia Lasareff-Mironoff at North Park College (now at UIC and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Li-Kuo Chang and Hui Liu from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Richard Young from the Vermeer Quartet.
But the two most influential were Milton Preves and Roger Chase. Preves, longtime principal violist of the CSO, taught me how to teach myself, one of the great gifts a teacher can bestow. I wrote about him in a 2012 profile that appeared in The Strad magazine, Saturdays with Milton.
One of the leading English violists, Chase, who was on faculty at Roosevelt University, taught me something important about the futile pursuit of perfection. At the time I was obsessing about the shape of the right hand holding the bow, specifically whether the old-fashioned Russian-style bow hold with straight fingers might be preferable to the more popular Franco-Belgian hold with round fingers. (In the unlikely event you’re interested in this rather arcane matter, here’s more information.)
I asked Roger: straight or round?
He sat me down and said, in his plummy Oxbridge accent, “Let me tell you a story” His teacher had been Bernard Shore. Shore was 18 years old when his right hand was severely injured in a grenade blast during World War I. As he was going into the operating room Shore told the surgeon, “Save every eighth of an inch you can.” He came out with a mangled index and middle finger. “But that didn’t keep him from a fabulous career as a performer and teacher,” Chase told me. The point was clear: it’s not perfect form that counts so much as assiduous effort.
Huppert had a story too, which he told me over coffee years later. He was 5 years old when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. His parents handed him off to his great aunt, who was married to a non-Jew, in the hope he could be kept hidden from the Nazis. “Even if there is only one chance in 10,000 for the boy’s survival,” he wrote in his memoir, speculating on what his parents were thinking, “the odds are better than if he stayed [with us].”
But it was too risky to keep him, so he was turned over to other relatives and later strangers. He wound up dodging Allied aerial bombs and scavenging for food with roving packs of boys through empty homes, a “petty criminal,” as he called himself. “On my own now, in the ruined streets, wearing tattered clothes, I walked aimlessly,” he wrote of Budapest. Starving, he blacked out and awoke in a Budapest hospital.
Dumped from one orphanage to another and handed off from one person to another across Europe, at war’s end he had amazingly survived that one-in-10,000 chance.
Eventually he made his way to the U.S., served in the Army, and studied history on the G.I. Bill at University of California, Berkeley, where he met his future wife on the first day of class and received his Ph.D in 1962. He started teaching at Circle campus in 1966. I met him two years later.
Talk about incredible stories of courage, bravery and perseverance.
Life without great teachers is like a year without sun. It deprives us of the sustenance, inspiration and joy we need to grow and mature.
You can be a great teacher too. Not in a school classroom, but in the classroom of life, helping and guiding a youngster. Try mentoring, as I did for 10 years under the auspices of the McGaw YMCA and Catholic Charities. My mentee, who lived in the Fifth Ward, and I met every Saturday to have lunch or go to a ballgame or watch a movie or enjoy one of a dozen other fun activities. I got to know his wonderful grandmother. People would say to me how nice that I was shaping his life in a big way. Yes, but it worked the other way too: he shaped my life in a big way.
Consider the gift of mentoring. The Chicago Scholars program and the Tutor/Mentor Institute are two places to start.
Be a great teacher yourself. Be a mentor.
Wow Lester. I love learning about your experiences and
this was one of the best and so well written. What
interesting people you have interacted with and
I’m so impressed how you have pursued passions
in your life such as traveling, meeting and learning
about various people, connecting with the viola
and all that comes with it. Another fascinating
article Lester.
Wow Lester. I love learning about your experiences and
this was one of the best and so well written. What
interesting people you have interacted with and
I’m so impressed how you have pursued passions
in your life such as traveling, meeting and learning
about various people, connecting with the viola
and all that comes with it. Another fascinating
article Lester.
Wow Lester. I love learning about your experiences and
this was one of the best and so well written. What
interesting people you have interacted with and
I’m so impressed how you have pursued passions
in your life such as traveling, meeting and learning
about various people, connecting with the viola
and all that comes with it. Another fascinating
article Lester.
Wow Lester. I love learning about your experiences and
this was one of the best and so well written. What
interesting people you have interacted with and
I’m so impressed how you have pursued passions
in your life such as traveling, meeting and learning
about various people, connecting with the viola
and all that comes with it. Another fascinating
article Lester.
Great story. We are all reflections of the many teachers who have influenced our lives.