A Tale Of Two High School Philosophy Teachers

instructors who, for better or worse, introduced me to the discipline

It isn’t common here in the United States for students to get introduced to philosophy in any substantive manner before they perhaps encounter it in college. Odds are if you did get to take a philosophy class in high school, it was as an elective, either a social studies or English elective in a public school, or as a religion elective in a religious school.

I actually had what were effectively two philosophy classes during the same academic year — unless my memory is mistaken — back when I went to Catholic Memorial High School. One of them was explicitly billed as a Philosophy class, and looking back on it, didn’t really measure up to that name, for reasons I’ll tell you about shortly. The other wasn’t supposed to be a Philosophy class at all, but ended up so partly by chance and partly by design. I took the first one as a religion elective in Fall, and the second one as a required religion class in Spring of my junior year.

If my only exposure to the discipline had been that first class, which was titled “Introduction to Philosophy”, I might have still found my way to the discipline, literature, and activity to which I’ve devoted 33 years of my life. But perhaps, even probably, not. That first class was a pretty bad experience.

But fortunately for me — and unfortunately for her — the nun who was supposed to teach our Sacraments class got sick, eventually died, and had to be replaced last-minute with a substitute teacher. It was his version of that class that really turned me on to the subject, and undid the damage the first class had done.

Mr. Lowry’s Introduction To Philosophy

I was actually excited to sign up for that first philosophy class. It was an elective, and after two years of sitting through the rather stale religion classes we were all required to take up to that point, getting to actually choose a class for myself was an attractive prospect. I knew a little bit about philosophy from the very occasional contact we’d make with it in other classes.

For example, you couldn’t get through World History without having to memorize the sequence Socrates, who taught Plato, who taught Aristotle. I also had read my very first philosophy book, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, given to me by my uncle Aimé (I would estimate I understood maybe 1/10 of what I read in it at that point!) So I was game for signing up.

The class was taught by Mr. Lowry. The crowd of older burnouts I ran with knew him quite well already, since he was a disciplinarian who would bust us for “wandering the halls” or other similar offenses. He wasn’t entirely joyless, but certainly didn’t share in any of our enjoyment, and he wasn’t someone who could relate well to students.

Mr. Lowry and I had really only one thing in common. We both played banjo. I had inherited, or really just taken and picked up, my dead dad’s old Vega longneck banjo, and would play stuff on it ranging from Kingston Trio to Back Sabbath songs. Mr. Lowry played his banjo along with another religion teacher, Mr. Norton on guitar during the monthly masses we had to attend.

I’m not sure why, but the textbook that Mr. Lowry selected for our class was Martin Gardner’s The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. When I first got my hands on the book, I was actually quite happy, since I had previously read some of Gardner’s columns in Scientific American. I didn’t find his Whys quite so interesting, though. I did keep my copy after the class ended, and took it with me to college, where I read it through again, and confirmed to myself — at least at that time — that I didn’t want to give it another read, or even keep it.

Perhaps if I reread it now, decades later, I might find some charm to it. But it didn’t possess or convey any then. And Mr. Lowry’s use of it as a textbook for our class certainly didn’t contribute any additional interest. In his hands it became a dry, dull book, I suppose because those words could just as well describe Mr. Lowry.

I remember being alternately bored and frustrated each class session. He did the stuff teachers do: write things on the board, read and reference stuff from the book, occasionally ask questions, either waiting for a hand to be raised and if not just calling on a student. But Mr. Lowry could take a subject that seemed interesting and just suck the life out of it.

I remember just one incident well from the class. He was handing back our tests midway through the semester. One of the topics we had discussed was whether God’s existence could be proven through any sort of evidence or argument, or not. He had asked a question on the test that at least seemed interesting, along the lines of: “If you were God, would you make your existence hard or easy to prove? And why?”

My answer was something like: “I would make my existence very hard to prove, but not impossible, and then if anyone did manage to prove it conclusively, I would immediately burn them and their writings up with a lightning bolt, so that nobody would know that someone had proven God’s existence. And that way, the very interesting conversations about the matter could keep on going for humanity, which would be a good thing for human curiosity and intellectual debate.” He assigned me a complete zero for my answer.

When I asked him why I didn’t get any credit for my answer he said that it wasn’t right. I pointed out that he was asking us for our own views and to explain them. His response, curt, aimed at ending the conversation was: “The test presupposes the class”. We were essentially supposed to regurgitate the answers he had decided in advance for us, which were either coming straight from Gardner (where Lowry agreed with him) or from Lowry’s lectures (where he had his own ideas). And that was that.

Mr. Lorenzo Takes Over Sacraments

Spring semester of junior year I was registered for Sacraments with Sister Something-or-other. I had prepared myself for another dull, learn this-and-that-and-get-through-it class. At least a few of my friends would go through the same course with me.

I came in the room, and there was a short and slight, simply dressed, close-shaven-headed man at the teacher’s desk observing us. I sat down at my desk, and the room filled up before the bell rang. He asked one of the students close to the door to close it, and went to the chalkboard, and wrote his last name on it in capital letters. “I am Mr. Lorenzo, and I will be your teacher for this semester. You were expecting someone very different, but there’s a reason I’m here. Let me tell you about that, and then I’ll tell you a little about myself, and what I have in mind for this class.”

He went on to tell us that the nun who was supposed to teach our class had unexpectedly fallen very ill — as it turned out, she died later on that Spring — and that Catholic Memorial had needed to find a qualified replacement at the very last minute. So they had hired Mr. Lorenzo, and he had come a long way to teach our class (and take over the other classes the nun was slated to teach).

“I’m from Seattle. I’ll tell you a good bit more about Seattle later on in this class, but I’ll say this: Seattle in our present time has a lot in common with the Carthage of St. Augustine’s time. You’re going to hear a lot about Augustine, because he’s a saint very dear to me. I think you’re going to find him very relatable, because he is someone who was tempted and sinned a lot before he finally found his way back to God. Like so many of us.”

It turned out that Mr. Lorenzo — as he would explain to us at several points in the semester — exhibited an affinity for, an imitation of, and going beyond that, a fierce love towards Saint Augustine. And not just Augustine as a saint, an otherworldly spiritual figure who reportedly lived among us people on earth, but rather the whole Augustine.

Augustine the unruly, messed-up kid. Augustine the seeker, joining a cult, studying philosophy, living out friendship. Augustine who loved and went into deep depression at the untimely death of his young friend. Augustine who was as much a fuckup (my term, not Lorenzo’s) as the rest of us. Particularly me, at that age.

Mr. Lorenzo revered and related to Augustine because he himself had experienced an “Augustinian conversion” as he called it in his own life. He would later tell us in broad outlines, clearly holding back details given our ages, how in Seattle he had for years lived a dissolute lifestyle alternately losing himself in pursuit of the many modalities of pleasure to be found there and in seeking something higher, something better, something more meaningful, something that transcended the mire he gradually recognized himself ever sinking into. Like Augustine, he had for a while joined a cult. Like Augustine, it took a long time, and some false steps, for his conversion to develop.

There was no better person, he thought, whose thought and teachings to center a Sacraments class around than Augustine. And since he had been granted considerable latitude in how he wanted to teach the class, that was precisely what he intended to do. We wouldn’t be using the textbook usually assigned for the class. In fact, since it was too late to get a suitable substitute, we would do without any textbook.

Mr. Lorenzo planned to teach the class the old-fashioned way by lecturing on the topics he wanted us to consider, introducing us to ideas, leading discussions and inducing us to think as deeply as we could about the matters we hit on. For after all, Augustine was a deep thinker, and the sacraments he could inform us about were even deeper mysteries.

Mr. Lorenzo’s Class As Introduction To Philosophy

Our Sacraments class, oriented as it was by Mr. Lorenzo’s desire to bring us into conversation with one of the great early Christian philosophers, Augustine of Hippo, turned into a philosophy class from the very first day. This took place in several mutually reinforcing dimensions. Threeof them come to mind right away — and you can tell what an impression this little softspoken, monkish guy made on the unruly teenaged metalhead burnout I was by how readily his class, his approach, and his personality comes back to my mind nearly four decades later!

Here are those three dimensions, in bullet-point form:

• the class became philosophy by virtue of the content Mr. Lorenzo confronted us with

• the class became philosophy through the pedagogical approach that Mr. Lorenzo adopted and introduced

• the class became a philosophy class by the existential and personal model Mr. Lorenzo presented us with

What would you call a class where, although we did discuss a number of religious matters and concerns, we spent the majority of the semester thinking about and discussing literary genres and what can be accomplished with them, theories about the nature of the human person, cosmological and soteriological models, metaphysics and epistemology, human emotions and ethical development? Would you call that a philosophy class, even if it was ostensibly about the sacraments and had a religion designation?

What if I recounted to you how Mr. Lorenzo, on the second day of class, began introducing us to some key ideas drawn from the works of Plato? His view was that, if the main goal for the class was to introduce us to Augustine and help us explore (and perhaps even make our own) some of his key ideas, then there were some other thinkers he would need to introduce us to. Plato was necessarily one of those, since Augustine himself was heavily influenced by Platonic thought. Mr. Lorenzo (in retrospect, quite rightly) decided that it would make good sense for him to bring in Aristotle as a contrast to Plato for us students, so we learned a good bit about his philosophy as well.

He also did mention a bit about the Stoics on the way to Augustine’s own thoughts, and he spent a good bit of time with an overview of that messy movement called “Gnosticism”, with emphasis on the counter-church Augustine himself joined for some time, the Manichaeans. This brought us back to Plato and the notion of the demiurge and a living Good beyond phenomenal being. And then, we got into the thought of Augustine himself. But not just his thought, not just his ideas and arguments. We learned about Augustine’s story, his life, his struggles, his failures, and his eventual conversion.

A Philosophical Approach and Model

Without ever making it explicit, as far as I remember, the approach that Mr. Lorenzo adopted as a pedagogue in his classroom was decidedly philosophical. He spent a portion of each class session lecturing about the topics, ideas, and themes for that day, using the chalkboard extensively. His lectures were interactive, though, intended to foster, provoke, and prolong discussion from us students. Anyone could raise their hand and ask a question, or even raise an objection, at any point, and he would pause, listen, and then patiently explain the matter, usually smiling, occasionally frowning in thought if someone brought up a particularly interesting issue.

He encouraged us to argue for or against points, to linger over any unclarities, to push our ideas further or deeper than we originally intended to, to look closely and carefully at how concepts or experiences were connected together. Not all of the students responded well to his approach, to be sure, since this was foreign to those whose main focus was just figuring out how to get through the class, to pass the tests or write the papers he gave us. For all of us, it was an initiation and a consistent practice in how to learn about philosophy in a philosophical manner, and quite a few of us responded to this in a much more positive way. It became the class I looked forward to the most that semester — the first time any academic class beat out gym for me!

Then there was the example that Mr. Lorenzo provided us. He was kind but honest with us as he gave feedback on papers and essay questions, pointing out where we missed something, went down a blind alley, or could have gone further. He was also uncharacteristically — for an adult at that time, speaking to high-school students— forthcoming about his own previous life, his struggles, his conversion.

Like Augustine, he was someone who was very different from us, but also someone relatable, someone who clearly understood the struggles towards the good, in thought, in emotions, in lifestyle, in relationships, that people go through. He was transparent, respectful, perceptive. He showed, or suggested to me, and I expect other students in the class, what a real living person of mind and heart could be like.

I can’t say that myself I’ve entirely — or even often — as a teacher, lived up to anything like the example Mr. Lorenzo provided in that brief time of a few months. But I carried with me down through the decades, that example as at least one lodestar and measure (of several, to be sure) to strive towards. My life on multiple levels was permanently enriched by that class with that teacher, long before I even considered philosophy as a possible profession.

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This piece was originally published in my Medium.