Dave Eggers heaps praise on an old English teacher.
From an article on Salon...
I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce's hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. "Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?"
Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn't known, until that moment, how badly I'd wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home -- my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food -- but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn't assigned reading, for weeks I brought "As I Lay Dying" to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he'd notice. (He didn't.)
He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position -- of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read "Macbeth." Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play -- the first paper I typed on a typewriter -- and turned it in the next day.
I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, "Sure hope you become a writer." That was it.
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