I always wanted to be among those teachers who seem to command the fondest memories and the greatest respect, and in my high school experience—-the school where I teach today-—those would be Sara Steigerwalt, my speech teacher, and Carol Hirons, my journalism teacher. They generate fond and respectful memories, and I was terrified of both of them.

I also loved them.

I knew another teacher, with a fabulous reputation and whom I observed for an education class, who terrified his students; in fact, tyranny was the bedrock of his classroom technique. He did not hesitate to use humiliation and he used it frequently, and he did it to push his kids into thinking and speaking and writing in ways that made them better students, and it worked. He was gifted, charismatic, and passionate, and I hated the way he taught.

In his defense, he really did care for his students. The English loved the Parthenon, too, which is why they mutilated it, breaking off huge chunks of Antiquity so they could sail them across the seas and up the Thames to the British Museum.

I tried to be a Tough Guy, like him, early on in my teaching career, but something unexpected happened: My stomach began to hurt so badly that I would actually have to stop and catch my breath. I couldn’t sustain it.

So I went back to being myself. And, as much as I’d like to, mostly to salve my male ego, I can’t be a tough guy. It saved my pride a little when I came to realize that I deal with children, not calves at branding time.

Don’t be mistaken: That doesn’t mean I’m not demanding. I expect a lot from my kids, and I hold them to those expectations. And my most demanding demands are for civility and effort.

But I fail, every year, the basic Jesuit rule about teaching: Don’t smile until Christmas. This is because if I couldn’t be funny when I teach-—I was my high school’s Class Comedian, 1970—-I would almost certainly die, and it also means that sometimes, especially when I’m watching students write an essay or take a test, when they’re not watching me, they make me so happy that I can’t help but smile. Children are so beautiful, and what’s just as beautiful is thinking about the kinds of people they will grow up to be. They will, I think, do a better job than my generation did.

[Sure, Gregory. You teach really smart kids. I get that a lot from one or two teachers, who think teaching AP European History is easy. Here’s a little secret for them: It isn’t, and, by the way, I have taught all kinds of students, and I love teaching knuckleheads, having been one myself. One of my all-time favorite teaching experiences came in a support class for Alternative kids—the kids we try desperately to keep in school, and they taught me something valuable. They weren’t knuckleheads at all. They were some of the funniest and most honest and most decent kids I’ve ever taught, and some of them came from homes that would’ve made mine, sometimes a Reign of Terror with Dad as Robespierre, look like a Thanksgiving episode of The Waltons. ]

I once took one of those education classes—and you know how I feel about education classes—when we observed a not-very-competent teacher on videotape and the prof asked for feedback after. Mine was that the teacher didn’t seem to like kids much. The professor looked as if I were the Village Idiot with two of his prize hens under my arms. “Who said,” he asked, both rhetorically and icily, “that it’s necessary to like kids?”

I later taught two of his children. They were brilliant students and gentle, selfless human beings. I liked them. I really liked them. I came to realize that my professor must have been going through a hard time; he would father these two a little later in his life, in another, better, marriage, and when I met him again, at Parent Conference Night—-I didn’t bring up our previous acquaintance-—he was a changed man. He was much happier and he was, most deservedly, a proud father. He had done a beautiful job with them, and the gift he gave me in those children trivialized that bitter moment years before in his classroom.

I need to point out that I am not a saint, plaster or otherwise, either. I’ve screwed up in the classroom in ways that still make me flinch, years later. I’ve gotten angry—-absolutely and flamboyantly lost my temper, and reamed a class with more fury, minus the profanity, than a Parris Island D.I. could summon, and left them shaken.

Two years ago, I completely mishandled a situation involving a young man throwing the F-bomb at a young woman sixty feet away. I was furious, he was suspended, and, it wasn’t until much later that I realized she probably was fluttering her eyelashes, the whole time, in shocked innocence. What he said was completely inappropriate, and the chances were that she completely deserved it.

But that was kind of an exception. This is the part I love about getting older. I seldom get angry anymore. At my students, anyway.

I make an exception for most educational theorists, and that stems from their theories but it also has a lot to do with they way they savage the language I love so much. They B.F. Skinner English to death, and there’s nothing more infuriating and less enlightening than a sentence written by a typical Doctor of Education.

When I do get angry in the classroom, it’s more likely that I’m pretending to be angry. I’ve learned to pick my spots: those talks, at the right moment, can be marvelous motivators, and it’s fine with me if I’m the only person in the room who knows I’m delivering a monologue in the Globe Theater of my mind, usually as either Henry V or Richard III.

But when I do get genuinely angry, and, in the process, I belittle a student, here is what I’ve learned to do:

Apologize.

If possible, within earshot of that student’s friends.

Here’s why: Teaching is about human relationships, and a kid you’ve humiliated isn’t going to be in relationship with you. He’s going to shut down, he’s not going to learn, and you’ve failed him. And I do fail, with such blithe regularity, and in so many areas of my life, and while it’s all right for kids to see an adult fail, it’s essential for them to see that adult accept responsibility for his mistake.

The basketball player Charles Barkley was absolutely right when he said it wasn’t his job to be a role model. But it is for teachers.

Finally, all of us deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and I don’t have the right to take any student’s dignity away, and that is the difference between me and the brilliant, but abrasive, teacher I observed so many years ago.

That goes for my behavior outside the classroom, as well. If I want to buy something from the lunch ladies, I’ve made this a cardinal rule: Never cut in front of the kids. Wait your turn with them instead. Inside the classroom, I will never ask a student to do an assignment I haven’t done myself.

I believe these things so strongly and try to live them, too, because of the biggest single influence on my life: My Mom. She was no saint, either—-she had an Irish temper, on occasion, so I come by mine honestly—tragically, she died when she was only forty-eight, when I was seventeen—but in our short time together she was, to me, one of the strongest, one of the most brilliant, and one of the most generous persons I’ve ever known. Every moment I’m in the classroom is meant to honor her.

My values and my spirituality—-because, to me, teaching has always been a vocation, a ministry, and while my faith is mine, and personal, it includes Humanity—-are my way of letting my Mom touch, and inspire, through all the years of my career, the four thousand children who are hers, too, because her life still burns inside me.

My relationship with my Dad was fraught, but he was the most engaging storyteller I’ve ever heard in my life. You forgot to breathe when he was telling a story about our ancestors and you never, ever saw the punchline coming when he delivered it at joke’s end. I inherited that from Dad. I will always be grateful to him.

I’ve also discovered, years later, that “classroom management” isn’t about disciplining kids: It’s about disciplining yourself. It means thinking out your lesson—my role model in lesson design is Filippo Brunelleschi, the jeweler who designed the Florence duomo and engineered the incredible machinery that made its construction possible. It’s means you make your objectives clear, you know how to change the subject or the learning style at least three times in a class period, and you know your students–the last is as much intuition as it is science–and, most of all, it means what comes easiest for me: being excited about what you’re teaching and, for that matter, about the honor of being a teacher.

It is amazing how something so unmeasurable—educational theorists adore the term “data driven,” and they’re easy to visualize with tape measures, calipers, and slide rules, always measuring, and meanwhile an eighth-grade girl has tied their shoelaces together–is also so marvelously effective.

But it also takes a tremendous amount of hard work. My easy workdays are ten hours. We don’t, despite the popular belief, go home at three. School is why we’re scribbling in our weekly plan books at our kids’ soccer games, or why I’m grading essays at the local coffeehouse while my peers are stopping by for a cup before they go on a bike into one of our beautiful coastal valleys, or sipping a cappuccino with the New York Times Book Review. That’s not how teachers spend their weekends.

And while I love kids, they can take a toll: I’m also a raging introvert, and all those surging emotions and all the needs and all the questions that young people have can wear me out. Sometimes, on my prep period, I have to turn out the classroom lights and put my forehead down on my desk and just let the exhaustion take over for a little while. That moment comes to every teacher. It’s a price, we’ve decided, that’s worth paying.

Fortunately, I am not so absorbed in my own noble suffering that I’m not willing to share some outrageously cheap stunts. in the name of classroom management, that might illuminate the gifted young teachers that will replace me:

Not getting an answer to a question you’ve asked? Threaten to hold your breath until you die, in which case it will all be their fault, and will have to live with that for the rest of their lives! Somebody will raise her hand!

Also, I will sometimes lie down on the floor and pretend to take a nap, and ask them to wake me up when they want to re-engage in the class discussion.

It’s useful to have a few stage tricks, too. Sometimes I will have to chew out a kid, but we’ll go outside to do it, get our signals straight again, and then I will hit a locker (darn it, they are gone now) with my fist and we’ll re-enter the classroom with the kid rubbing his arm and wincing. When they laugh, it’s because the joke is ours––mine and the kid who got into trouble––and we’ve turned the tables on something that could have been hurtful.

I hate them in the classroom, but parents with cell phones are quite useful. It’s a marvelous thing to call to the door a student who’s frittering away a chance to study for an exam, hand him your cell phone, and whisper:

“It’s your Mom.”

By the way, I once asked a parent, and my anger was not well disguised, who was texting during my Back to School Night presentation to turn the phone off. He did.

Early in my career, in a Catholic high school, I had a rambunctious class that wouldn’t settle down for the lesson. I assigned them an essay instead, due the next day. I collected them at the beginning of class and then, in front of the classroom, ripped them all apart and threw them into the wastebasket.

“Now,” I said, “do you understand why I was upset with you yesterday?”

I believe they did.

Another time, I got so frustrated with a class that I left the room and walked out in seeming cold fury. Then I ran around to the other side of the building, where there’s a bank of windows, and crawled under the lowest ones and brought my face up, glowering, very, very slowly, as if I were a periscope. When they started laughing, I got them back.

I’ve gotten the kind of angry teachers can get with a kid that’s such a bad anger that it keeps you up all night. We lose a lot of sleep worrying about you, American students. Here’s what I finally learned to do: I go to the records office, find the student’s folder, and look at the first-grade school photo. That little, little boy, whose hair has been combed so carefully, is your student, too. And if his hair’s not combed, then you begin to understand how the two of you arrived your sad meeting place, and you can start to look for a better one.

At the same time, my humanitarian tendencies are tempered by a catalogue of snappy lines:

When they’re supposed to be doing quiet seated work:

“I can hear voices, and the last time I checked, I wasn’t Joan of Arc.”

I asked two chatty girls to leave the room, then went outside and asked them: “There are two variants of the Plague. What are they?” They knew: Bubonic and Pneumonic.

“Which variant are you two?”

Bubonic?

“WRONG! You are pneumonic, because you’re more contagious. You’re out here because the two of you were talking, and then there would be two more, and two more after that, and what that means is that one of your friends is going to miss a question on the next exam because they’ve been distracted. They’ve been cheated out of a chance to study. Do you understand?”

They nodded. Enthusiastically. I was kind of flummoxed, but the best part was I got the chance to do a little re-teaching.

Two boys were sending eye signals when they were supposed to be reading. Some teachers would immediately launch an all-out nuclear strike. I waited instead, in the bushes, for twenty-four hours, then took them outside.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “I’ve been teaching for a long time, and can always tell the kind of guys who are going to give me trouble, the kind of guys I’m going to butt heads with.”

Pause. The pause is the most important part.

“And you aren’t those guys.”

Pause. I learned to pause from the sportscaster I so admire, Vin Scully.

“I like you.”

And then you describe the behavior, and why it’s a problem, and they get it.

They get it, too, when they get a good grade on a difficult test, or they try to answer a difficult question, or when they are kind to another student, because when I pass that student’s desk and give him or her just the briefest pat on the shoulder, they know what I’m saying: You matter, your did your best, your behavior is admirable, and I admire you, too.

When it comes to behavior, I am, ironically, the worst note-passer in my own class. A 15-year-old honors student last week told me she was having a panic attack and left the classroom in tears. Later I passed her a note: I’ve had them, too. So have Lincoln, Adele, Johnny Depp, and John Steinbeck, We’re not weirdos. We’re humans, you and me. Love, Mr. G.

In the early summer of 1944—when Eisenhower pauses at the end of his weather officer’s report for June 6 and says simply, “Okay, we’ll go,” when Rome falls to Mark Clark’s armies, and when horrified Marines watch Japanese civilians leap to their deaths from the cliffs of Saipan—the war, for Americans at home, was both distant and painfully intimate, but even the war could not touch the work to be done.

That month, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley of coastal California, this is what you would see, if not clearly, because the cold morning fog can be dense: labor contractors drop off pickup loads of field workers at the Harris Bridge, which spans the creek that gives the valley its name and that nourishes it.

The workers cross the bridge whistling, an incredibly beautiful, almost baroque whistling, Mexican folk tunes from the time of the Revolution, or love songs, as they walk down to the fields to their work with their lunches–wine-jugs filled with drinking water and perhaps chorizo-and-egg burritos, wrapped in wax paper, the  fuel a man needs to do the kind of physical work that would make most men sit in the freshly turned field, gasping and woefully regarding their quickly-blistered hands, within fifteen minutes.

Their summer work might be in a new bean field and the whistling would stop because it is such a tax on men who work beans, whose breathing soon becomes laborious and therefore precious. To begin a newly planted field of beans, the field workers have to drive wooden stakes into precise parade-ground lines along the furrows, so that the bean vines can use the stakes to climb and twist—they will eventually yield bell-shaped flowers–toward the sun.

The sun invariably appears in late mornings when it burns the sea fog away and the colors of the valley, wheaten hills and verdant bottom land where the crop is in, are reborn, vivid and sharply focused.

To drive the wooden stakes, the field workers use a heavy metal tube, hollowed, with a handle attached that resembles that of an old-timed pump primer pioneer men and women once used to draw water out of the ground. So the whistling stops and is replaced by the rhythmic ring of the stake drivers as the workers pound hundreds of them into the field.

It is a musical sound, but, of course, what you cannot hear are the grunts of the men at each stroke of the stake driver and what you cannot feel is the enormous weight that exhausted arms and shoulders soon take on and what you cannot avoid, if you think about it sensibly, is admiration for the men who feed you. In turn, they are determined to feed families who live in camps or tarpaper shacks in the Valley, or, for some, part of the work force that will dominate agriculture here for the next twenty years, for families who are living in the tier of states of northern Mexico.

In 1944, Mexican nationals are doing this work. Four years before, many of the laborers would have been Japanese, but they are gone now, to bleak, colorless, and hopeless camps–where they would cultivate hope nonetheless– like Poston or Gila River. A few of them, as the war begin inexorably to wind down, will begin to trickle home. The Kobara family will be the first. But many, many families–now unfamiliar surnames in yellowed 1941 high school yearbooks–will never come home. The wound may have been too deep.

Beans are no longer central to the agriculture of the Arroyo Grande Valley, but once gain, Japanese American farmers—like the Kobaras, the Ikedas, the Hayashis—are. Agriculture has changed—the seemingly limitless groves of walnut trees that once competed with row crops are gone, victims of a malevolent infestation of insect larvae.

Today farmers grow more exotic crops, like bok choy or kale, and along the hillsides once given over,  in the 19th centur, to beef cattle, there are new farmers and nearly endless row of wine grapes, multiplying every year, profitable, lovely, and greedy for water, a commodity that isn’t always plentiful in California.

That is why beef cattle haven’t dominated the coastal hills since the 1860s, when the drought that periodically afflicts the state hit as hard as it ever has. The cattle, either killed outright by ravenous coyotes come down from distant folds in the hills, or dead of thirst and hunger, would have covered the hills with their bones.

It was that kind of drought that may have brought a field worker–not a Mexican, but an American, a New Mexican–to these coastal valleys in 1940.

Much of his native state, of course, in the years before, had been swept away by the Dust Bowl. Winds had carried the copper-red soil as far east as the mid-Atlantic to drop it, like gritty rain from a place that had none, onto ships still sailing freely between continents.

Those ships would lose their freedom in the years immediately after, and the coyotes that hunted them without fear, of course, were U-boats come out of their lairs in Kiel, and later in L’Orient. U-boat captains called this “The Happy Time.”

The U-boats would someday kill that young field worker, if indirectly, as part of an inexorable chain of events that would lead him to Normandy, 5,500 miles away from the fields that border Arroyo Grande Creek, and to pastures bound by hedges and grazed by fat dairy cows, cows that lowed piteously to be milked in what had become killing zones. One of them, dead in the crossfire, may have provided scant cover for the field worker, now a rifleman, Private Domingo Martinez, from the German machine-guns that harvested crops of young men.