A
pall of melancholy has descended over the nation, and perhaps the world, over
actor Robin Williams’s death at the age of 63.
This
irrepressible, gregarious yet lonely, man who made us laugh and cry and brought
us in touch with our humanity through several memorable performances will be
impossible to replace. He was truly a sui generis, and the heart is
inconsolable at the way he left the earth. The comic who chased our blues away
could not chase away his own demons.
Lost
in the adulation and tributes is any reflection on the role a community college
played in Williams’s formative years.
Robin
Williams was a student at the College of Marin (COM), one of California’s 112 community
colleges comprising 72 districts and serving over 2.6 million students.
From
1970-1973, he was active in the Drama Department at COM’s Kentfield campus.
Studying
as a classical actor, he appeared in the college productions of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Macbeth, the Wild West version of Taming
of the Shrew and Oliver, among others.
He was a protégé of the celebrated director
James Dunn, a COM graduate who founded the college’s drama department in 1964. As
Mr. Dunn recalled on learning of Williams’s passing: “I first knew he was more
talented than the other kids when he played Fagin in 'Oliver!' We were having
light board issues and by midnight had only made it through half the musical.
At one point he started talking to a baton he was carrying, and the baton
talked back. It cut the tension and he had people laughing in hysterics. I remember
calling my wife at 2 a.m. and telling her that this young man was going to be
something special.”
While his brilliant,
protean roles as an actor will be analyzed and cherished for decades to come, Williams’s
insight into what constitutes effective teaching should be studied by teachers
everywhere.
At a time
when teachers are under siege by the education-industrial complex, Robin
Williams taught teachers how to remain true to their calling through
performances in movies such as Dead Poets
Society (1989) and Good Will Hunting
(1997).
As a
floppy-haired English professor in Dead
Poets Society, Williams pulled out all the stops to get his stuffy,
boarding school students excited over the wonders of poetry, and of life.
Anyone questioning the employable value of a degree in English poetry is bound
to be swept away by the manic energy Williams infused into his character. “In
my class you will learn to think for yourselves again,” bellows Williams to his
class. “You will learn to savor words and language.”
What comes
through with blinding clarity at the end of his performance is the awareness
that poetry and literature, if properly taught, can transform us into
questioning, civilized and empathetic human beings.
Note to
English professors everywhere: Bring up Dead
Poets Society on your laptop, savor it one more time and then face your
students refreshed and rejuvenated.
In
1993, Alison King, an associate professor of education in the College of
Education at California State University in San Marcos, wrote an influential article in the journal College Teaching
titled “From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side.”
“In most
college classrooms, the professor lectures and the students listen and take
notes,” she began her article. “The professor is the central figure, the “sage
on the stage,” the one who has the
knowledge and transmits that knowledge to the students, who simply memorize the
information and later reproduce it on an exam – often without even thinking
about it.”
She proposed
replacing this passive and useless model with one of “active learning” where
students take charge of their own learning, thereby taking center stage while
teachers become the “guide on the side.”
In many of
his hyper-kinetic roles, Williams personified the “sage on the stage” model but
in Good Will Hunting, he was the
“guide on the side” par excellence, the kind we all dream for as we tried to grope
our way toward a meaningful life.
Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT who
also happens to have prodigious gifts in math and chemistry. He is unaware that
his gifts can rescue from his rough upbringing in South Boston and his frequent
brushes with the law. Until, that is, he meets his guide and soul mate, the
therapist Sean Maguire.
The rest, as they say, is cinematic
history.
Mainstream media will provide us with
all the data we need of Robin Williams’s work in theatre, TV and film. What we
need to discover on our own, as we revisit his various roles, is his humanity
and his indelible model of a great teacher.
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