Mr. Sabatini? I think that was his name. It’s hard to remember.
At that particular stage in my life, however, Mr. Sabatini?’s irregular presence did not distress me. It was the 10th grade, and I too was irregular. I was rounding out my last growth spurt, going from being one of the shortest kids in the class to the tall side of average, at least by New York City standards, where the average male is, well, very average. It’s certainly not Minnesota. There were also the requisite signs of a burgeoning adolescence: pimples, a deeper voice, mysterious frustrations about girls. Or were they now women?
Adding to the irregularity, it was also my first year in high school. Our junior high school had gone through ninth grade. Here I was, amid 6,000 students who circulated through a massive building in a new neighborhood. So to have an irregularly appearing teacher? Sure. It seemed perfectly reasonable at that point. Why ask why?
For whatever reason, Mr. Sabatini? was scarcely seen. Instead, we had a student teacher. Our student teacher was the kind of person you wish you could invent if he didn’t really exist, though you probably couldn’t. Soft-spoken, mid-twenties, and already balding, he had a boyish charm, ready smile, quiet joy, and inner calm that I would later come to associate with the Midwest. He was also a marine (or was it the army?) who specialized in skiing. Down the slopes with a machine gun, like James Bond. And he was also given to wearing pink shirts. This was 1982. Not a lot of men were wearing pink shirts. Especially not ex-Marines.
I always liked History, and he took a bit of a shine to me. He called me “Wiz Kid” because I could 
When the super spy ski guy’s semester was over, it was onto a different teacher, Mrs. Jacobs. Unbelievably, she too had a student teacher to run the class. But I remember her name, because unlike Mr. Sabatini?, Mrs. Jacobs was a presence. She was in the class almost every day, observing from the back row, and boy did she run herd her student teacher.
I don’t remember his name, but he was tall and had a large Adam’s apple. He was gangly and wore glasses. If memory serves, he’d studied at Columbia, or at least some school that sounded really fancy to a fifteen year old kid from the Bronx. He didn’t make it through the whole semester. Mrs. Jacobs actually dressed him down while we were all still milling about one day. It’s a bit hazy all these years later, but she more or less let him have it because she felt he was consistently teaching above our heads. Essentially, she attacked his pedagogy and told him to go find another line of work.
Shortly thereafter, he disappeared forever, and Mrs. Jacobs taught the course for the remainder of the semester.
But before he left, the tall, skinny man with the large Adam’s apple made a bit of an impression. At least he did on me, anyway. Though not terribly charismatic or boasting other worldly quirks like his predecessor, he was nonetheless one of those idealistic young teachers who seeks to elevate the students instead of talking down to them. Not content to work on their level, he wanted to raise them up.
That’s an admirable goal, but it does require a certain baseline cognizance. Mrs. Jacobs might have been right about him, at least to a degree. For example, being dumbfounded, as he once was, that a bunch of 10th graders in a Bronx public high school didn’t read The New York Times Book Review does betray a profound naivete that suggests he might have had trouble reaching those students he wanted to raise up. But then again, his lack of mooring was countered by a good disposition and a clear set of expectations. He was throwing us in the deep end because he believed we had what it took to swim.
Maybe he would have been better off starting with an A.P. class.
All these years later, the only lesson he ever taught that I distinctly remember was the day he began by writing a list of ten sentences on the board. I recognized a few of them at the time. Today, I only recall one of them.
Call me Ishmael.
All of the sentences on the board, he told us, had two things in common. First, they were the opening lines of famous works, and we should know them. Second, they were all short, declarative sentences, and we should emulate them in our own writing.
A short, declarative sentence, he taught us, is clear. It’s to the point. It lets the reader know what’s going on. It keeps the pace flowing. It moves you forward.
I thought about the Micky Spillane novel my mother had given me.
I had enjoyed I, The Jury immensely. Indeed, I would be a devoted fan when Stacey Keach revived the gun-toting, hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking, bed-hopping private eye Mike Hammer for a TV series a year later, even though I knew early on that the show's anachronistic approach signaled its doom. Come to think of it, I might have learned the word “anachronistic” from the tall guy with the big Adam’s apple. Either way, Keach’s arrest for cocaine possession in England didn’t help, and indeed, the show was done after a year. But to be fair, my love of Spillane’s macho noir probably had more to do with the sex and violence than it did with the machine gun staccato of his short, declarative sentences.
And so, just as the American TV viewing public quickly and foolishly rejected Keach’s interpretation of Mike Hammer, I knee-jerked my student teacher’s interpretation of the English language. I shunned his lesson on short, declarative sentences.
But beyond my rebellious and sophomoric hubris, there was a deeper reason why I rejected the lesson: because it didn’t speak to me.
I was not a straight A student. The two subjects I consistently excelled in, however, were History and English. I was struggling in math and floundering about in science, but I took writing very seriously and enjoyed it immensely. Within that context, I was put off. His dedication to short declarative sentences seemed dogmatic, simplistic, authoritarian, and alarmingly repressive. It rankled the sensibilities of freedom and creativity that did and still do imbue my understanding of what it means to write.
A nice way to round out this article would be to discuss how, as a confident, intelligent adult, a pivotal moment in my education and maturation came when I read Moby Dick, and through my deep relationship with that seminal American novel, I rediscovered the wisdom of the tall man with the large Adam’s apple. But there are two problems with that. First, much like the eponymous character in Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig, I have never read Moby Dick. Allen’s literary joke was that Zelig’s metaphorical Moby Dick was literally the novel Moby Dick. Not having read the book is not the source of shame and regret for me that it was for Zelig, though I should like to read it one day. If nothing else, my mother the former high school English teacher recommends it highly, though she says it’s perfectly okay to skip the chapter on cetology.
The other problem is that even a cursory reading of Moby Dick shows that, despite its famous opening line, Herman Melville was hardly a devotee of the short, declarative sentence. Indeed, the very next sentence reads:
Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
A couple of sentences later, he rambles on for eighty-seven words, using no less than three semi-colons. Indeed, this is not Ernest Hemingway. It turns out Melville really was a 19th century writer after all.
I also appreciate that this is, to a large extent, a matter of personal taste. While in graduate school, I read Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, and I actually liked it. I don’t mean I liked it the way so many libertarians do, as a matter of ideology. No, I actually liked the writing, the seemingly endless sentences that were not a tangled mess, but rather were carefully woven in a manner that was quite complex yet completely coherent. They were a joy to follow. At one point, I was so amazed that I counted. Locke had at least one sentence with over 160 words. It was beautiful. It’s also not for everyone.
Meanwhile, I always thought Ernest Hemingway’s style was overwrought, precisely because of his stubborn dedication to short, declarative sentences. It can be very compelling, but his particular brand of minimalism is also highly stylized, to the point of being unnatural at times, making it ripe for mockery.
Why did Hemingway’s chicken cross the road?
To die. Alone. In the rain.
So if I never read Moby Dick, and I never became a champion of the short, declarative sentence, then does this article pivot on the irony that, as a college professor in the humanities, I have spent more than a decade beset upon by the tortured, tangled, misconstructed, and maddeningly long sentences of my dear students, and that I will be so for the rest of my professional life?
No.
What it comes down to is this. Though I have a deep affection for long sentences, the passive voice, and split infinitives, what the tall man with the large Adam’s apple tried to teach us that day actually stuck. Even if that young man, probably 20 years younger than I am now, had yet to fully master the English language himself, and even if I, now sitting upon half a lifetime of English, still do not subscribe to his economical approach, then I am still grateful that he taught me, and I am forever in his debt, because he did raise me up that day, even if I did not know it, and he did make me smarter, even if the seed he planted needed many years to grow, and even if it did not blossom into the exact flower he thought it would, and even if he was perhaps banished from the garden for tending to his borrowed plot in ways that did not always bear fruit and were not looked upon kindly by his landlord.
His idea is still with me. Sometimes it mocks me. Sometimes it bolsters me. Sometimes it ignores me. Sometimes it is what it is what it is. And here on a web site, who am I, if not these words?
So after all the flourishes and the bombast have run their course, and when every last foliage-laden 
Thank you.