Brian Platzer on the Complex Ties Between Teachers and Students

Novelist, essayist, and educator Brian Platzer joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, The Optimists, which follows private school teacher Mr. Keating over three decades. Platzer reflects on the real-life inspiration for the book, his own mentor, Rod Keating, and the fleeting intensity of teacher-student relationships that nevertheless turn out to be formative. He explains how he came to decide that the fictional Keating, struggling to tell the story of his own life, would narrate the story of a remarkable student, Clara, alongside his own. Platzer also talks about the novel’s other central relationships, including Keating’s marriage to his wife, Caroline, and his connection to his ex’s son, Jacob. Platzer, himself a private school teacher, considers the novel’s private school setting, as well as the high cost of elite education and small classroom sizes in New York City, the competitive pressures placed on young people, and the broader impact of the gap between private institutions and public schools. Platzer reads from The Optimists. 

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Brian Platzer

The Optimists • The Body Politic • Bed-Stuy Is Burning

Other Books

Ulysses by James Joyce • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • “Letter to Olivia (1869)” by Mark Twain

Other Links

Rushmore • Dead Poets Society • Mr. Holland’s Opus  • Grace Church School • Dalton School

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH BRIAN PLATZER

V.V. Ganeshananthan: This book is not just about how Mr. Keating remembers his students, it’s also about how his students remember him. Often, teachers don’t necessarily know what impact they have. One of my memories of one of my favorite teachers was the moment that she scolded me for not raising my hand, and also, she’s still one of my favorite teachers. But she probably didn’t remember that. As you were thinking about writing this character, how did you think about the uncertainty in that as teachers think about their students? You came back to Mr. Keating but so many students don’t return in the way that you did. The teacher doesn’t know how they’re remembered, and they don’t only want that public success, but they also want maybe the student to look back and be like “That teacher was transformative.”

Brian Platzer: Absolutely. I put this thought briefly in Mr. Keating’s voice in the novel, but I feel it so profoundly. I’ve been teaching eighth grade now for almost 20 years, and the moments when the students come back to visit, or when I see them in the street, I just dread those moments. I hate it. I see the older version of the child to whom I meant so much when they were in eighth grade and who meant so much to me, and now we’re just people standing there next to each other, shaking hands, and asking “Do you still play volleyball?” Or “how’s your sister doing?” What we both want to say at that moment is “Remember how much we meant to each other? Like, remember what we had and how fun it was, and—the word special is sort of cringy— but how special it felt in that moment?”

And it doesn’t exist anymore. And the student has had 100 other teachers, and I’ve had 1,000 other students. There’s something about holding on to the memory of of those intense months that one spends with a student or one spends with a teacher when it really does matter, those conversations pointing someone in a direction, to love literature, to think of oneself as capable, or to speak up more often in class, or to find the way that language can come together and form an essay, or, articulate a vision of the world. It’s the disconnect between the intensity of that moment and then 10 years later, when you’re awkwardly shuffling your weight with your hands in your pockets. Seeing somebody again is painful in some way, but reminds both teacher and student of how important those relationships were when they occurred. That’s something that Mr. Keating in this book is dealing with in a variety of ways, in Jacob whom he keeps closer, and Clara, whom he watches from afar and memories of everyone else in these formative years of his life.

Whitney Terrell: The other interesting social force in the book is the educational system. St George’s is the fictional private school where your fictional Mr. Keating teaches, but you teach at Grace Church school in New York whose notable alumni include, according to Wikipedia, David Duchovny, David Brooks, Matthew Yglesias, and, now or maybe always, you. I’m assuming that Grace Church—I don’t know that school—is an exclusive, expensive school like St George’s in the novel. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the whole New York private school scene and the effect it has on students like Clara, who aren’t as wealthy as the others, not to mention students who never have a chance to attend a school like that.

BP: It’s a deeply complicated question that I’ve spent a whole lot of time thinking about, and that I probably won’t be able to do justice to in a sound bite, but the problem with these schools is that they’re just too expensive. And except for Avenues, these aren’t for profit organizations. It’s not like there’s some fat cat on top reaping the benefits of the finances of all of this. But to have small classes in New York City real estate where you have insurance and fancy lunches, these things cost a comically absurd amount of money.

When I attended them, they were absurd, but maybe not comically absurd. My father was a kind of unsuccessful lawyer, and there were dentists and magazine editors who sent their kids there. It was a big sacrifice, but we were the children of professionals in New York City, essentially. Now to afford the $70,000+ a year in tuition—this is after tax money, of course, plus a couple kids—means that you need to be able to have an extra $150,000-180,000 sitting around each year to pay for that. That means that the people who can afford to attend these schools come from a small cadre of society, and the schools do their best, they really sincerely do their best, to try to provide as much financial aid as possible, and to bring in a variety of students.

It’s not pure tokenism, but there is an anxiety that everybody feels in these schools where, to say that this product is worth $70,000+ a year means that you’re changing what education looks like, and parents become consumers, as much as just parents. Schools are trying to promise not only entrance into colleges, but life changing experiences that are really hard to guarantee to an eighth grader in math class who’s struggling with what a parabola is. It’s gotten priorities all out of whack. So to answer your question, what does it mean to show up and to be a kid like Clara who doesn’t come from the same you know means that your classmates do?

WT: It warps her a little bit, right?

BP: It makes you lonely, it makes you competitive, it makes you feel like you need to define yourself at far too young of an age. A seventh or eighth grader shouldn’t feel the need to define oneself but there’s the idea that like, “I’m with the kings and queens of the world, and I want to show that I belong,” or “I feel like I don’t, or I want to prove that I’m better.” And there’s competition built in early. There’s “Do I belong here?” built in early. And there’s the other side of it where families who can afford to pay, kids and parents are feeling like, “What are you, school, what are you, teacher, giving me that’s worth $73,000 a year? It’s an unanswerable question from all these perspectives. So it makes the experience fraught in a way that I don’t think anybody knows how to deal with.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Brian Platzer by Bill Hayes.