Midcoast Senior College
A word from the faculty--Bill Brown
Bill Brown is widely known among our students for his fine courses: Hearing Shakespeare, Ulysses for Amateurs, Don Quixote, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Henry Adams, and Beyond Belief (offered twice because of the popularity of The Da Vinci Code). The Midcoast Inquirer asked Bill to reflect on his long career in the classroom and what our program at Senior College has meant to him.
from Bill Brown:
In spring of 1938, waiting for college graduation, I sliced a drive at the North Andover Country Club. Looking for my ball, another ball thumped at my side, followed by the formidable figure of Claude M. Fuess, the Andover Academy headmaster who had sent me into the world four years before. He asked what I was going to do after college. My only prospect was apprentice banker in Buenos Aires. "Come teach as an apprentice at Andover," he invited me.
In this casual manner I began a sixty-seven-year career, forty-two at Andover, the other twenty-five in alternative schools in and around Bath, including one of my own ~~ without considering there was any other desirable way to spend my life.
What sustained my enthusiasm were two driving forces. The first was thrust upon me by circumstances. The unofficial motto of the Andover from which I graduated was "sink or swim".
Teachers taught; students learned. Teachers were authoritative. Students either produced or fell by the wayside. The Andover to which I returned had not changed. But I could not take the platform before students two or three years younger than I. My choice was to sit down with them and share the mysteries, the vagaries, and the glory of the English language ~~ and thus open a two way street.
The second force was my awareness that the path to illusive truth lay through the mind, that the greatest service I could provide was to help students achieve a perceptive and efficient mind by which they could approach the truth.
As I come to the end to my years of teaching, at Senior College I am free from testing, grades, and a focus on adolescent minds. Here I pursue humanistic truth with active adult minds, from which I have gained as much or more than I have offered to them ~~ a teacher's paradise