By the time you read this school will have started up again, and I'll be back in the classroom, teaching. In my last column, I reminisced about a grade-school teacher who influenced me deeply. Here's my memory of another who shaped my life.

The second teacher who mattered was Professor Leonard Albert: Hunter College in the Bronx (now Lehman College), fall 1964, age 16, my first college English class, required of all entering freshmen, English Lit 101. I was already widely if eccentrically read for my age, and had been writing - poetry, fiction, political speeches - since starting high school. Much of that I owed to my parents' gifts to me: a love of words and books, a respect for writers generally, the examples of themselves as readers and writers and editors and publishers. But when I stepped into Prof. Albert's classroom he handed out to all of us a clear understanding of the origins and evolution of the very language we spoke and wrote yet in so many ways took for granted, and in doing so changed my life.

He didn't hand this out a mimeographed schematic or cheat sheet. He made us internalize it by forcing us to hear it and feel it coming up out of our own chests, through our own mouths, off our own tongues. Let me interrupt my tale here to note that I use that terminology deliberately. Yes, he made us do this work, and the force, if implicit, was no less real. We were given no choice in the matter, were offered no alternative assignments, did not have our preferences consulted or considered, could not have inquired why we had to learn this stuff whose relevance to our lives was less than apparent. In that theater of education we constituted a captive audience, in every sense of that term, and our only option was to leave it entirely - which, at least for the males of draft age, was no choice at all.

He started us off on "Beowulf," the impenetrable original alongside a respected translation, and then gave us Chaucer. No translation or "modernization." Chaucer in the original Middle English, all that weird spelling and guttural Saxon and vaguely familiar but strangely accented words with the stresses on the most unlikely syllables. He helped us decode its meaning, laid out the basic rules of grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation over a few class sessions, then gave the two dozen or so of us a weekend in which to memorize the first twenty lines of the "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales.

The following Monday morning, in alphabetical order according to last name, we began reciting, and Prof. Albert began patiently correcting. I was up early on, obviously. Some of us got it down better than others, but none of our efforts were less than embarrassing. Our teacher said nothing to shame anyone who'd clearly made the effort to fulfill the assignment. When we weren't reciting, we listened to each other, and to him. The next morning the recitals from memory continued, with the first day's slackers retested. Thursday he put Tuesday's slackers to the test, and we began collectively working our way, in class and out loud, through the "Prologue" and into the tales.

A few people dropped out - pointless, really, except as teacher-shopping, since the course was mandatory and the curriculum fixed by the department. By mid-semester the remaining twenty or so of us could read any passage selected at random in passable if halting Middle English, and explicate what it meant, more or less, without Prof. Albert's help and with only the glossary to guide us. Without realizing it, I'd learned something about how to learn, had even sniffed something about how I learned. And, as a writer and speaker, I'd been given an insight into the DNA of my medium, a gift that, though I can't speak for all my classmates, was received in that room by others as well.

Finally, of course, I had twenty lines of Chaucer engraved in my brain. Over a third of a century later they're still there, and I can launch into them at the drop of a hat, as I've done in tandem with old friends at class reunions and even at conferences with colleagues - yes, photographers and photo teachers and curators and historians - who went through the City University system during the same era. Did none of us any harm, so far as I can tell.

Bear with me, please. I'm not making some E. D. Hirsch or Allan Bloom stand here in favor of DWEM - dead white European males - or a fixed canon or rote learning. I'm just trying to convey something about the context in which I found myself, for the first time I could remember, cheerfully and eagerly setting out to learn something unfamiliar and difficult whose beneficial value to me I had to take on trust.

So I must also tell you something about the setting, and the teacher. By today's standards, the City University of New York (of which Hunter was one division) was appallingly regimented. Jeans and T-shirts were not permitted anywhere on campus. Women who wore slacks instead of skirts or dresses to school on any day the thermometer did not read 30 degrees Fahrenheit or below at 8 a.m. according to the city's official radio station were refused admission to the campus. (My cohort successfully fought for an end to that particular idiocy, I'm proud to say.) Three full absences from class meant an automatic failure; a lateness of ten minutes counted as half an absence. Of course we addressed all our faculty, and the administration and staff, by their titles and last names. We, in turn, were Mr., Miss (this was pre-Ms.), or, infrequently, Mrs.

I couldn't tell you if Prof. Albert was likeable as a person; though I took every course with him the curriculum allowed, we never had a private conversation. Teachers and students then never socialized off-campus, and hardly ever on - no departmental holiday or birthday or farewell parties, no coffee klatches, no bulletin boards with postcards from old grads, no counseling from faculty on your love life, fights with parents, drug usage. I seem to recall there was a school psychiatrist - one - and I never met anyone, no matter how troubled, who visited him or her.

Prof. Albert clearly didn't care whether any of us liked him, and made it just as clear that he wasn't concerned with liking us. He played no favorites, though his pleasure in those who put effort into the class was discernible, along with his irritation with those who did only the bare minimum to get by. He wasn't by any means sour or bitter, but I never heard him laugh and rarely saw him smile; his humor was dry, manifesting itself in occasional puns and oblique references mostly available to those who kept up with the readings.

So far as I could detect in four years of studying with him, he had no hidden agenda in relation to us as individuals or as a group - only the overt, declared intention of helping us achieve an adequate grasp of the material and the broader subject. Some people then - and certainly most people in the academic system today - would probably consider him overly formal, if not cold. I found that enormously liberating. He himself knew the material forward and backward, could recite most of it - all of Othello, forinstance - from memory, knew the critical literature inside and out as well. I saw in him a major resource, and greedily took from him everything I could, which he freely gave to all who asked; like one of Chaucer's characters (I'll translate here), "gladly would he learn, and gladly teach."

I don't say this to wax nostalgic about the old days and the old ways. I'm trying to describe a theater of teaching and learning that had enormous impact on me and in some important ways shaped my own sense of the dramaturgy of the classroom, though I never taught like Prof. Albert did, my own style having turned out much more improvisational and informal. And when I speculate that no English department today would hire this man or his equivalent, I don't mean it accusatorily; he'd simply seem like a superbly trained Edwardian actor plunked down awkwardly in a Living Theater production. My main point is that I internalized that version of the classroom as theater just before a series of major stylistic changes in education began - changes that generated new kinds of teachers and students as well.