My memory is so untrustworthy that I can’t be sure now whether I experienced that in person or just in books and movies.

I know when I was teaching elementary school, we set up a Chess Ladder where the students vied with each other to see their names listed, the constant battle to vie your way to the top, the constant struggle to stay there when you’ve finally made it.

I know, when I was a junior in high school, we had a Tennis Ladder. I played my way to the top, not necessarily because I was best, but because I outlasted the competition.

I seem to remember, and this must be from movies, how the hot shot kid with the answers got to sit in the front row at “the head of the class,” became the Professor’s darling, and we all hated him.

I do remember being shy in class, even afraid to answer, wouldn’t raise my hand, and the Professor would say, “Mr. Sterling, why don’t you join us?” and I would say, “I’m here.”

But maybe that didn’t actually happen. Though I think it did.

I remember as if it was yesterday how I thought, “I’m unintentionally arrogant,” but I couldn’t help looking down on those students I didn’t think of as competition, as they eagerly scrambled for a little bite of recognition, “Me! Me! Call on me! I got it!” and I thought, “The obvious is so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning…”

Apparently I wrote well enough with ragged insight so the Professor gave me the A and the class came to think of me as the elder statesman because I was a year older because I hadn’t quite completed enough units to graduate with my entering class and took an extra year to make up for my laziness and my remarkable naivete.

There was that one class on Literary Criticism, for seniors on the verge of graduation with a Degree, when they brought me a copy of the article under discussion because I had missed that session because I was out sick. They, and the Professor, were all excited about the way, apparently, we could at last find a foundation for literary analysis. I read the article, came to the next session, and sadly revealed that the author failed to make his case, and we all mourned together. But I thought, “Apparently they think of me as one who knows. But it seems so obvious…”

I do remember, in the eighth grade, Catholic school, St. Phillip’s in Pasadena, where the notion of “head of the class” was operative, and I held that position it seemed to me reluctantly, not because of my incandescence, but because the other bulbs were dim.

I had one competitor, only one. He was a boy transferred from a Jewish school where academics were promoted and respected. I think his parents had moved new to the area and wanted their son to get the best education available and there were no Jewish schools nearby.

We became friends in the way you tolerate someone “at your level,” and he ranked a close second, but didn’t mind being second, as if he was used to it. I knew nothing about Jewish heritage, the apparent inherited sense of guilt and accommodation necessary for survival, and I thought, “He’s a better man than I am,” though we were both still boys.

And even in graduate school, the program for the Master’s Degree in English, when the other students, almost all of them, believed the story I wrote as fiction and announced as such, was impossibly true, and I thought how intellectually lonely it is to seek and rarely find those who can converse at the same level.

That’s why, in my own teaching, I always took each student, at whatever “level,” as an equal as we sat together and discussed literature and life.
I loved my students as people, and they loved me back and loved the joy of learning, and continue to tell me so.

That’s why I keep saying it in every way I can.

If there’s a “head of the class,” I want us all to be there together as I, the teacher, sit down at the same level we share with democracy, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.