Word: make
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...make students remember, a teacher "must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health." Nor can he get away with a shaky memory ("ridiculous and dangerous," says Highet, "like . . . a doctor who gives one gram of digitalis instead of one grain. . . or a merchant who cannot find the goods his customers want"). And if he lectures in the stumbling, halting manner of a Stanley Baldwin, he runs the risk of having the same effect: "Half an hour of [it] put everybody to sleep. Several years of it put Britain to sleep...
Largeness of Heart. The teacher must also know how to organize his course, reminding students of the whole, "pointing out the peaks still to be scaled, the valleys unexplored," as they examine each of the parts. "The last three or four days of teaching can make a good course or spoil it," warns Highet. "Usually they are given up to a mad rush through the last ten experiments, a sketchy outline of the century still to be covered, an earnest but hollow adjuration to 'look over this for yourselves, with special attention to,' or something else of that...
...lyric poetry. Stopping by Woods is one of the loveliest poems ever written. Every U.S. schoolboy knows Birches. His lines carry the tone and temper of New England's dour and canny folk, often have the tren chancy and inevitability of folk sayings. Frost has made "good fences make good neighbors"* part of the language. Chores are "doing things over and over that just won't stay done"; home is "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take...
...disciples. Today's bright young men look to the intricate, mannered, literary methods of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for their models. They grudgingly admire Frost as a kind of 19th Century relic, resent his commanding popularity, and smart under the reproach: "If Frost can make himself intelligible...
Courage, says Frost, is the human vir tue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge, courage to make the best of what is here and not whine for more: "Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better." Frost is something of a philosophical an archist. Liberals and reformers move him to sly mirth. He has no confidence that the earth can be improved through social action or scientific gimcrackery: "One can safely say after from six to thirty thou sand years of experience that...