ABSTRACT
School Memories and Pleasure Nancy: Although I learned a lot from the Dominican nuns in grades 1-12, ideas about pleasure in teaching and learning were not among them. I came to believe that a good education involved hard work. Teaching meant cajoling, pushing, monitoring, and disciplining students to meet those expectations. Fun might be a fringe activity sneaked in by an especially humorous or compassionate sister, like a “casual Friday” reprieve from the school uniform. Pleasure was in the effort-my long Sunday afternoons at the dark mahogany dining room table with math problems-alternating between the momentary triumph of completing one and making stabs at solving the next one. Learning has been a puzzle-finding a question and then figuring out “the solution,” which could be a social analysis of violence or an interdisciplinary methodology. Solving the puzzles of teaching has also been pleasurable, and new curricular puzzles are easy to think up.
