I went from TASIS England to the University of Pennsylvania, where I finished my B.A. in English in 1989. After a few years of working in the corporate world, I went back to Penn in 1993 for a PhD in English, and finished the degree in 1998. I...
I went from TASIS England to the University of Pennsylvania, where I finished my B.A. in English in 1989. After a few years of working in the corporate world, I went back to Penn in 1993 for a PhD in English, and finished the degree in 1998. I was lucky to get a job right out of graduate school, and I've been working at Rutgers University in Newark ever since.
It was TASIS England that made me a serious reader, and I've been grateful for that ever since. Virtually all of my classes helped to shape me, but two in particular - Pre AP English in eleventh grade and AP English in twelfth - were fantastic preparation for an academic career in literature. I remember being amazed, as I finished my comprehensive exams in graduate school, at how many of my answers came from my TASIS England years.
My flight to England a week before I started at the school was my first trip out of the country - I had virtually no experience with the wider world until I was fifteen. I now teach on the Newark campus of Rutgers, which is the most ethnically diverse campus in America - in a class of forty, the students might come from fifteen different countries and speak nearly as many languages. That makes it a very exciting, but also very challenging, place to teach. On the surface, an urban university in Newark, New Jersey is as far as you can get from the eighteenth-century elegance of TASIS England's bucolic setting. But there are some deeper similarities between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Coldharbour Lane around multiculturalism. And I keep thinking back to my years at the school as my first exposure to the globalism that's such a big part of my career.
Oh, I vividly remember my first meeting with Mrs. Fleming. It was just a few weeks after I arrived at the school, when I was working with a friend, Steve, in our weekly community service project. In came Mrs. Fleming, who gave Steve a big kiss hello. Steve introduced me - "This is Jack, he just started here" - and I got my first of many extravagant kisses from Mrs. Fleming. they continued right up until graduation day.
I think her most important legacy may be the personal feeling about the whole TASIS system - it really seems to have been put together with someone with a vision, not by a focus group or a panel of soulless experts. TASIS has a quirky charm that I've always admired. She certainly managed to attract dedicated and creative teachers, the best I ever had.
I try to get back once a year, but sometimes twice, for a few weeks each time. My academic work usually takes me to the major libraries in London and Oxford, with occasional jaunts to Cambridge and Edinburgh. But after a few weeks on my own, my wife will join me for a little holiday, and we'll try to get somewhere we haven't visited before - the West Country, the Hebrides in Scotland, little villages in Wales, anywhere that strikes our fancy. And in recent years we've also been adding trip to the Continent, using England as a base.
What I like about both of them is their complexity - they're inexhaustible. Every time I turn to either of them, I'm amazed at things I never saw before. With some writers I have the sense that I understand them pretty well. Shakespeare and Johnson both keep slipping out of my grasp, and that keeps them always fascinating.
I've admired Shakespeare a long time, but Johnson was a comparatively recent development. When I was a student at TASIS England and later an undergrad at Penn, I read bits of Johnson - and couldn't imagine anything more tiresome. What I realized after a few years after finishing my B.A. was that what seemed simple to me was in fact extremely rich.
I've been teaching college students since I started grad school in 1993, so I've got nearly two decades of experience (and thanks for making me feel old). People like complaining about how students are getting dumber with every generation, but that's just nonsense - today's students are every bit as good as when I started.
There are some differences. It's a much more wired generation, of course. I was among the first people in the humanities to have a Web presence (I had a home page in 1993, a few years before most people had heard about the Web), but now we have a whole cohort "born digital." Being always plugged in as a lot of advantages, but it can also make you subject to a lot more distraction. I hope students don't let the technology interfere with the extended concentration they need to engage with serious thinking. You can't read novel, prove your theorems, or model organic molecules when your attention is divided.
College admissions has become a much more aggressive game on all sides. Universities eager to boost the number of applicants they receive, which lets them appear more selective. And students seem to think that their future will be determined forever by the college they attend.
I'm not sure it's healthy. Good students can get a good education at all sorts of places; your life isn't over if Princeton says no. When the letters start coming in the spring, don't be too upset at the rejections; selective colleges have to reject a lot of perfectly qualified applicants, so you can't take it personally.
Take advantage of all the cultural resources you have at the school, in London, around Britain, and on the Continent - the museums and the concerts and the plays and everything else. It's easy to forget how spoiled you are in Thorpe, so take advantage of it while you can. And, if your college and career plans take you away from England after you graduate, promise yourself to return whenever you can.
This article first appeared in the TASIS England Today magazine, Autumn 2011 issue.