MosesWrites

Richard Schade

Field and forest, vale and meadow—humming, a small glass vase in hand with fresh flowers, we later learned, surreptitiously trimmed from the Rectory garden, placed with care at the center of a circle of a dozen students’ desks and then quietly, mysteriously, enticingly, “welcome to The Quest.” 

The summer of 2005, enroute from Reed to Princeton, I began to learn, to the extent I have learned, the experience of great teaching—of a teacher as guide, inspiration, keen listener and quiet observer; the experience of a teacher as energetic, enthusiastic, curious and kind facilitator of discovery.

Richard Schade, then Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati, developed The Quest as his own course for the Advanced Studies Program, five weeks of intellectual nirvana for rising New Hampshire public high school seniors, held in Millville, the good and gorgeous campus of St Paul’s School.

Richard, a member of the Form of 1962, grew up at the School as his father taught German. A tall and wiry man, he knew joy and he knew horror, the joy of creation and the horror of war. He served with distinction in Vietnam and earned a PhD in literature at Yale. Formidable, goofy, sincere and elusive, as with another of my great mentors, John Murrin, I never really knew what Richard made of me other than knowing he extended a warmth and kindness that helped me to grow.

I’m reminded of Richard today having seen online a post from the School about the passing of Robert S Mueller III, another of his Form. Along with Senator John F Kerry, who survives them both, they came of age at a time of war, at a time when graduates of elite boarding schools still served with regularity in the military.

While Richard lived for many years in Cincinnati, his heart always remained in the woods and along the mountain peaks of New Hampshire. 

That first summer at the ASP, I worked as one of Richard’s two interns, and he took me down notch after notch of anxiously intellectual pretension. He took me down to the wonderful world of honest instruction, of ideas accessible to children who could take them up in their own brilliance and create something new.

Richard shared what, to this day, it the only pedagogical truth I’ve known: students will always meet you with the energy you yourself bring into the classroom. They’ll be drawn to you, he said. No matter how energetic they might be, if you arrive in exhaustion, they will slow to a crawl. Even if they’ve hardly an ounce of energy, though, they’ll also be drawn to your passion.

I’ve found the same in most other aspects of life: people reflect back, in the best of moments, what we ourselves share with the world. Bitterness, suspicion, contempt, these challenge the bearing of even the kindest souls. Yet love too invites love.

With Richard, in The Quest, I read for the first time Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kerouac’s On The Road. We also read Virgil’s Aeneid and excerpts from Don Quixote. Richard believed in students’ ability to tackle even the most demanding texts, and they did fantastically well despite rather uneven preparation.

We read, and one morning we all jumped into the Lower School Pond together, mostly fully clothed, spur of the moment.

Richard told stories. He had a wonderful wit. He had pride in his German roots yet also understood and lived fully with the evils that had been perpetrated by the Third Reich. He worked to support Holocaust survivors. He studied the writings of, and had the chance to engage with, the great Günter Grass.

I realize I never had a proper chance to say goodbye to Richard, though we kept in on-and-off touch even after 2011 when I stopped teaching at the ASP.

His beloved wife Hieke had begun to show signs of dementia, and it pained Richard so tremendously to see her decline. He loved her so much.

I remember speaking with him, it must have been the summer of 2012, and he said, simply: Heike. You understand.

Indeed Richard had been amazingly kind to me during those summers when my mother still lived, and in those summers after she had died from Alzheimer’s. 

Richard’s example allowed me from 2007 to take on the role of Master Teacher in Forbidden Fictions, which I inherited but made my own, and far less brilliantly, though I hope with increasing skill, to mentor college students who worked as my interns.

At the ASP, classes meet for between three and four and a half hours a morning, six mornings a week, for five weeks. If you can’t figure out how to bring dynamism to learning, you won’t survive more than a few days.

I continually aspire to match the power of those ASP summers, to create and share what’s otherwise only available to students in New Hampshire.

Richard embodied St Paul’s in a way few could, including with ambivalence about having been a faculty child and thus never quite equal to those boys who came from worlds he would only know as an outsider. He had a quiet pride in the School, though, and believed in the ASP as the best thing it did, having, literally, grown up with the Program: “the world’s oldest intern,” he often joked.

Richard received the School’s Alumni Association Award in 2007, the highest of recognitions, to “honor those members of the association who have been a credit to the School and its teachings.”  Mueller received it three years before, in 2004, and Kerry five years later, in 2012.

Yet reading other tributes and more staid obituaries, I’m sorry not to see as much of that good humor and playfulness. Yes, Richard had a dead serious, black-turtle-necked professor persona when he needed it, and he took academia and scholarship very seriously. Still Richard, as the very best of teachers, most loved a little irreverence, a little subversion—as with jumping in the pond—a little sly walk through the Rectory garden to snag for class a bloom of light and life.

Über Sternen muß er wohnen.