My favorite professor at the University of New Hampshire was an intimidating man. He had gold teeth and he ruled the classroom with an iron fist.
    During my first class with him, I learned he locked the classroom door at exactly 8 a.m. and arriving late meant certain embarrassment. If you had two absences, he asked why and if you had three, you received a failing grade.
    At the beginning of the semester, he would tell his students there was no room for the personal in the classroom. He repeatedly told us he wasn’t going to be our buddy, our friend. On the other hand, if we needed to reach him outside of the classroom, he demanded we go to his office and speak with him face to face, even if it was only to set up an appointment for a conference. We didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, as he didn’t have an email address and I would be surprised if he ever answered his office telephone.
    My first class with this professor, “The Beats, Bops and the Blues” or the “3 B’s” was what I had hoped all college English classes would be: unconventional and challenging. We read Kerouac’s On the Road, but we also read Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. We read Allen Ginsberg’s giant poem, Howl, aloud in class, each student taking a deep breath in order to read their passage in one breath. If you’ve ever read Howl, you can imagine there were some red faces in the room.   
    To accompany our reading, we listened to musical selections in every class. We heard Billie Holiday, Lester Young with the Count Basie Orchestra, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. He sat at the front of the classroom, head down and toes tapping.
    We were charged with writing three papers throughout the semester on a topic of our choosing. I was incredibly frustrated at first, staring at a blank page on my computer screen, trying to find all encompassing themes to pull the reading together. I discovered, however, that he did not want us to simply recycle the ideas presented in class as other professors were happy to have their students do. Instead, he wanted us to develop our own ideas, ask our own questions and come to our own conclusions.
    By the end of the semester, he had broken down and shared stories about his childhood, his early teaching days, his wife and his children. On the last day of class, he told us the only thing that mattered in life were relationships and sent us out of the classroom with a song by Rahsaan Roland Kirk.