Sometimes I think Mr. Beitelman gets tired of listening to us me. He is such a reserved man (in the most writerly way imaginable), and while I think it baffles everyone, it baffles me especially. I think I myself am a lot more reserved than I like to admit, and being in such close proximity for such an extended time (this is my fourth semester with him) has made me especially wary of what little annoyance he does allow to peek through. And I'm one of those closet overachievers that really cares what teachers think about them.

But he is such a beautiful man. And I don't mean that I think he's dreamy or that I stare lovingly at him from across the conference table. He is just the kind of teacher that consumes you and certain aspects of your life. Carolyn and I search for him and his writing on the web (G: "He looks so weird in that picture..." C: "Yeah. Like a sick and frightened deer or something"). During class we giggle over his vocabulary -- he is so verbose. He is fond of words like "synergy," "egalitarian," and "dichotomy." He uses phrases like "wax poetical" when giving writing assignments. With any given class, delicious jewels of quotes fall out of him like mere particles of air. Things like "Writing's hard."

Today he passed out a packet of poems to read by Thursday -- Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. We're starting with American poetry's "founding father's" and working our way through each decade. He asked who'd read "Mending Wall" by Frost and a few people raised their hands. Then he added, "One of his more 'Freebird'/greatest hits poems." Every ounce of paper I have in that class is scribbled with Beitelmanisms. Carolyn and I write them down in the middle of lectures on whatever sheet of paper is between us. We only ever have one pen out, and a lot of times we reach for it at the same time, just as he's finishing one of his golden sentences.

"So a 41/50 written critique is 'When little Bobby fell out of the train, I felt sad.' But a 47/50 is 'When little Bobby fell out of the train, I immediately thought of the struggle of humankind.' A 50/50 is 'When little Bobby fell out of the train, I immediately thought of the struggle of humankind, and I think that Bobby's injury really contributes to the project of this poem' -- especially when no one else in the room has considered this." -- Beitelman, today, talking about his grading system.

Mr. Beitelman is the one who showed The Beatles First U.S. Visit, Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense, and Koyaanisqatsi as part of our America class.

He is disgustingly organized (to an endearing extent), and has neat handwriting that is just scraggly enough to admire its spontaneity. His syllabi contain the usual "materials" and "what will be expected of you" headers, but also a section labeled "philosophy." In a list of things we should not do during poetry semester, "Make someone cry" made the list (I think, perhaps, in reference to an incident with Natalie Sargeant in which she called me pretentious and I cried and didn't say anything in workshop for week). He writes on the dry erase boards in different colors. Today when we came in, we discussed Poetry. He divided it into two categories and we made lists of pros and cons ("risks," he decided later) on the board: "poems that make sense" and "poems that don't make sense." A division, he said, which he made only recently.

He does things like label a pile of poetry submissions "POMS" with a dash over the O for the long "oh" sound in big, yellow sharpie. His shyness is rivaled by the bachelor we all know he is. He plays NFL video games with Mr. Flynn, our other male creative writing teacher, and Dr. Harwell, a fat, ripe English teacher. They were all in the same MFA program. Mr. Beitelman was playing frisbee golf with Flynn when Flynn sprained his ankle on a rock and had to wear one loafer and one flip-flop for a week in the middle of winter. When we drove through Tuscaloosa on a field trip, Mr. Beitelman took us to the second state capitol -- a grassy field with some ruins in it -- and showed us where he and Flynn had played bocce as graduate students.

The beginning of every semester marks the beginning of new Creative Writing classes. This semester, instead of "Writing America" and Creative Nonfiction Survey, I'm in poetry workshop and a publishing/editing class. All four have been with T.J. I'm so excited about both classes (surprise, surprise). The reading load is a lot lighter this semester (you'll recall last semester's: In Short, Darkroom, "Song of Myself," Huckleberry Finn, Confederates in the Attic, Tender Buttons, Interpreter of Maladies, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, The Last American Man. All in addition to my other classes -- Beowulf, Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Bonjour Tristesse, among other things). We're reading Open House by Beth Ann Fennelly, and Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions in poetry workshop (and I'm pleased to say that I've met both poets in person). And in publishing class, we're reading A Student's Guide to Getting Published by Susan Swartwout and Jim Elledge and The PC Is Not a Typewriter by Robin Williams (no...not the Robin Williams).

Last semester during the second nine-weeks, Creative Nonfiction Survey became a rampant display of the junior creative writers' obnoxiousness -- things on par with sibling rivalry, childish arguing (frequently a contest of wit), and enough "your mom" jokes to make anyone sick to their stomach. None of us are wild about doing work in class. I, myself, have always been one for working at home, late at night when my parents have gone to bed and aren't starving for attention. Sometimes I make the mistake of trying to work just after dinner, and they follow me upstairs and turn on the TV, mute it, and then one of them will ask me to repeat a whole conversation I had with the other in the car. They've already told each other about it, of course, but something about a live reenactment is a lot more exciting for them.

The only advantage to working during class is being able to ask questions like "Who were those kids that wore their clothes backwards?" or "What's that writer's name that wrote that moon story?" or "You know that guy in that story we read in ninth grade about that ménage à trois? Was his name Mr. Bernardo?" and have someone actually know what you're talking about. They don't even ask why after answering. So during nonfiction, which was the last class period of the day, we ended up just heckling each other all period. A lot of our sentences went up at the end, as if they had question marks, and our voices would get shrill and kind of piercing. Especially when Sarah Black was around. And a lot of our witty comments and jokes were in this vein of sexual humour we've developed as immature highschool students. Things that we use so much they don't seem inappropriate to us any more. To quote Sarah Black, "He says wow a lot when he doesn't know how to respond. At the end of last semester he spent a lot of time in his corner listening to our conversations thinking what dumbasses we are."

We do things like peer at his computer screen when he's not looking, and gossip about how we saw him using Blogger. Carolyn and I came home and frantically searched Google for the blog he'd been working on. Now all of us read it. It's related to the literary magazine that we're editing/publishing this semester -- The Red Mountain Review, which is what I was originally going to talk about, I think. I've lost everything I was going to say in my character development of Mr. Beitelman. Please forgive me for my prolixity. At least now when I say "Mr. Beitelman" you'll have some frame of reference.

Having one of "those" teachers isn't like you'd expect it to be. Dead Poet's Society and Mona Lisa Smile come to mind. And that episode, "The Substitute" from My So-Called Life. They don't bombard you as you come in the door every day. Sure, sometimes you go on walks through the park down the street. Sometimes you do exercises like sit outside with a partner, and look them in the eye for fifteen minutes without laughing -- "to really see them." Sometimes when you go places as a class, you realize how little he gets out (or how little he cares about things like television or IMAX movies). But you're not accosted. The way that "those" teachers change your life is such a gradual process. They continue to creep in years after you've graduated their class. T.J. is just starting to hit me.