Rules Matter

Rules matter.

This is not a profound statement, of course, but I do often find myself mulling over rules this time of year.  It’s May, and for a school teacher that means the brief end of yet another nine-month foray into the wilds of education.  As an English teacher, May also means plenty of research papers to grade, with many misplaced modifiers, sentence fragments, and unclear pronoun references to go with them.

Grammar rules do matter, but it isn’t so much the rules in and of themselves.  What matters is the idea that we agree on a certain way of doing things.  One inch margins may look nice, for example, but they don’t necessarily make you a good person.  If we can at least agree on the margins, however, we can then move onto more important ideas.

This May, though, I have been thinking about rules a little more than usual, particularly those English rules, because this is the last May I have had the tremendous privilege of working with Mr. David Ruff.

Mr. Ruff, or Ruffy, as he is often called by so many colleagues and students, former and otherwise, is retiring from teaching after thirty-two years.  For most of his life he has taught his students rules that matter about our language.  He did his utmost to instill in his students a framework for composition and a background in literature.

 Mr. Ruff was amazing at his job.  Mr. Ruff was so good, in fact, that trying to discuss these gifts in this mere column will simply end up sounding trite or rushed or a little bit of both.  Instead I will touch on, very briefly, three ideas we might consider about ourselves and about life in general, ideas solid in my mind after working with Mr. Ruff for just a few short years.

To begin with, as mentioned, rules do matter.  Rules can change, of course, and they do, particularly when it comes to language.  However, we do need those common assumptions to help clarify and streamline our dialogue, to get the very most out of our discourse. 

Unfortunately, we wallow now in a culture that, in some ways, has done away with many rules, grammatical and otherwise.  Basic assumptions of civility are often tossed aside.  Respect for our elders and compassion for our young, two tenants absolutely vital to a civil society, seem to fray at the edges like a worn out rug. 

Secondly, questions matter.  Knowing the rules and having enough respect for each other to follow them never negates questioning those rules and also questioning each other.

One of the most important experiences of my career happened just two years ago.  After months of working on a new curriculum for our freshmen students, we presented the finished product to the department.  I was proud of our work, which has always been a vice of mine, and I was ready to soak up the kudos from our department head.

Mr. Ruff, though, had questions.  “Why was this story chosen instead of that one?”  he asked, along with “What happened to this novel and that assignment?” 

His questions weren’t rude, nor were they meant to belittle. They were just legitimate questions that needed answered before we presented a new curriculum to hundreds of ninth graders.  We needed to know why we were doing what we were doing. 

Do you know what happens when a society stops asking itself tough questions?  Do you know what happens to a nation that no longer thinks it’s necessary to ask why it’s doing what it’s doing?  Be patient.  You’ll find out in November.

Finally, people matter.

After being moved to the high school I quickly learned that if I was going to be absent, it was kosher to tell Dave.  I learned this after about the third time I missed a day because of a sick kid.

“Everything OK?” He’d ask.

This confused me at first and I wondered if he was being nosy, which didn’t seem to be his style.  However, I quickly learned that his concern was genuine.  He just seriously wanted to know if everything was OK.  He also wanted to know if I would be gone in the future, but not in a “big-brother, keeping tabs” kind of way, but in a “Hey, keep me in the loop so I can best help out your sub.”

 Group unity was important to Mr. Ruff, and so he often invited us all out to his compound in the outback of Altamont each summer to reconnect before August.  From his perspective, we weren’t just colleagues, we were a team, and regardless of our differences, the team was the thing.

Nowadays, sometimes it seems we risk devolving into extremely solo individuals, our playlists and queues always waiting, ready to rock-a-bye-baby us into our own sleepy day dreams.  These might seem like harmless habits, benign symptoms of a technologically enhanced world, but if I’ve learned anything else this past year, it’s that without each other, none of us stand a chance.

Returning to this idea of question-asking, then, we in the English department have been asking ourselves one question for the last few years, sometime out loud, but often quietly to ourselves:  “Now what?”  For so very long, to be a teacher at Effingham High School meant also to be Ruff’s colleague; to be a B-winger meant to arrive at work after he did and to often go home before.

What we all might consider, then, is this: when in doubt, cite your sources.