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The Kind, Optimistic Red Ink of Donna Fasano
This article was first published in the Spring 2018 issue of Views from the Hill.
above: A candid of Donna Fasano in her English classroom in the DPH building, from the 1980 yearbook
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above: A candid of Donna Fasano in her English classroom in the DPH building, from the 1980 yearbook
Donna Falcone Fasano, a 1968 graduate of Day Prospect Hill and English teacher at Hopkins School since 1976, will retire June 2018. She and her husband Roland Fasano are parents to Michael ’98, Matthew ’01, Timothy ’06, and Christopher Fasano.
Back in 1979, when Donna Fasano became my teacher for the Writing Semester of my junior year at Hopkins, standing before us in rolled-up cardigan sleeves was one seriously motivated professional. Around campus, at a distance, Mrs. Fasano had been a face from a De Sica film, the radiant teacher. But now, in close-up, she was Marcus Aurelius, the wise and stoic leader, and what she radiated was only her cause; the focused minute-to-minute mission of teaching us all to become better writers. Her rigor organized ours. Every week, we were required to prepare as many as three original papers—a heavy, heavy workload.
That Mrs. Fasano was demanding soon became beside the point, because the intense experience produced such a yield. There was creative stimulation in writing so often, the opportunity to take chances, to experiment, to work up an imitation of Henry Fielding’s bawdy novel Tom Jones, or to try out an extended meditation on pickles and cheese. The papers came back varnished in red ink. But kind red ink! Optimistic red ink! That class was the intimate opportunity to work closely with a teacher who was showing you that writing well was all about a commitment to deliberate improvement. I’d never been the most confident student or person; most of the time, the only thing that was high on me was my voice. Now, as I could feel Mrs. Fasano’s steady confidence in me, I began to feel it in me. I changed that semester, became my best student self.
In addition to all the writing, there was also assigned reading. After all, young writers need models. Among the books that Mrs. Fasano taught us was Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, which is a sharply critical picture of New York upper class society life in the 1870s. Wharton describes a conformist culture that’s descended into rigid, well-mannered convention. Gone is the imagination that built the country. Gone are the courageous expressions of personality that reveal someone to be capable of higher feeling. Teachers are, for high school students, as human and worthy of scrutiny as the literary characters Mrs. Fasano was helping us to understand. It was easy to see in our teacher qualities of the clear-minded, independent heroine Countess Ellen Olenska, so much more of a realized person than the inhibited lawyer Newland Archer who proves unworthy of her love.
What distinguishes truly gifted teachers are the elusive, subtler ways they find to educate. Mrs. Fasano was an inspiring teacher who made such a difference in my school days. She was also something beyond that. The next year, Mrs. Fasano taught me something that, in the moment, was very painful, but, looking back, has meant far more to me than the time she spent championing my writing.
During the second semester of my senior year, she offered a course on Russian literature and I took it. Ours was a class filled with senior boys, many of whom did not lack for personality. It was likewise a provocative syllabus—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pasternak—strong voices preoccupied with the tragic sweep of life in a tormented civilization.
In my own life, my voice had finally changed, it was spring, I’d been accepted into college. The world outside the classroom seemed to beckon with fresh and thrilling possibilities. I still have the paperback copy of Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago we used for Mrs. Fasano’s class. The paperback’s cover art consists of alluring images of the book’s two seductive protagonists, Lara in a soft fur hat, and Zhivago, bareheaded with a potent moustache. On my book cover, someone, clearly female, has supplemented these portraits with the addition of two white thought bubbles that have written inside them: “Forget Zhivy… give me Nicky…”; and “Forget Lara… give me Nicky…” Such little daily intoxications had never happened to me before.
Works like The Brothers Karamazov and The Death of Ivan Ilych were sober and challenging, and I remember how much respect Mrs. Fasano had for those masterpieces. My ample underlining in them makes it clear to me that I wasn’t quite coasting, wasn’t exactly off on an early summer vacation, that I was doing the work. But not with the conviction of the previous year. Well, there was more to it. I was trying out a new way of being that somebody like Nikolai Gogol would have identified right away as the petty arrogance of a provincial Russian landowner. In that classroom, the confidence I’d gained the year before had become misplaced. I had an attitude.
I could see that my behavior was not impressing Mrs. Fasano. It’s never second semester senior year for a teacher; she wasn’t graduating, her cardigan sleeves were still rolled up. At times, the class could be rowdy and, in those moments, I knew that for someone who’d given so much to me, the least I could have done was lost the little smirk and really engaged. But I felt torn, drawn to the experience of, for once, not pleasing someone. It felt safe not to please her.
And then it didn’t. Nineteenth century Russian literature is the story of a suffering people written down by brilliant, haunted men who sought to prevent a looming national catastrophe with their books. I was the grandson of an exiled Russian. My grandfather had believed that Dr. Zhivago was an elegy to his lost country, the Easter Sunday of Russian literature. What was I thinking, slipping joking notes to my classmates when Mrs. Fasano was talking about longing, loneliness, doom, and resurrection? Was I becoming a Newland Archer, a diminished American whose “whole future seemed to be suddenly unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”? It was all at once terrifying to understand how in-play your own moral compass was, how fast you could lose yourself.
Mrs. Fasano never spoke to me about any of this. But, of course, she’d seen it all before, and from how she taught us, I can guess at what she felt. She considered the final high school semester to be a time of transition when, with the pressure of getting admitted to college removed, there was the freedom to learn for learning’s sake—to develop your own insight into the world through the prism of difficult books. She was offering an intellectual experience as opposed to an academic exercise. That meant discretion, autonomy, reckoning with yourself, rather than waiting for someone else to offer you bright red instructions. It was what college was supposed to be like. It was also the way she thought a person might gain ongoing personal and professional fulfillment through life, and the way you could avoid becoming a Newland Archer. In other words, how you wanted to be was up to you and on you.
For all the American legends of adversity triumphantly overcome, writers like Wharton, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky all knew that, for most of us, shame and regret are life’s signal trials. To disregard a teacher who wanted her students to use classic Russian fiction as a guide for probing more carefully into the soul of the world surrounding them, that was foolish. New Haven was a troubled place then, as now, a dark, unequal Russian place, and it would have been much better for the now to have understood that then.
Fortunately, the best teachers are still there for you, even when they have to let you go a little. And they are always returning to you, educating you across your life. This is why, when I open again a great book like The Age of Innocence, and read, “The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing,” the printed letters organize on the page in such a way that it’s my old teacher’s face I see looking out at me.
About the Author:
Back in 1979, when Donna Fasano became my teacher for the Writing Semester of my junior year at Hopkins, standing before us in rolled-up cardigan sleeves was one seriously motivated professional. Around campus, at a distance, Mrs. Fasano had been a face from a De Sica film, the radiant teacher. But now, in close-up, she was Marcus Aurelius, the wise and stoic leader, and what she radiated was only her cause; the focused minute-to-minute mission of teaching us all to become better writers. Her rigor organized ours. Every week, we were required to prepare as many as three original papers—a heavy, heavy workload.
That Mrs. Fasano was demanding soon became beside the point, because the intense experience produced such a yield. There was creative stimulation in writing so often, the opportunity to take chances, to experiment, to work up an imitation of Henry Fielding’s bawdy novel Tom Jones, or to try out an extended meditation on pickles and cheese. The papers came back varnished in red ink. But kind red ink! Optimistic red ink! That class was the intimate opportunity to work closely with a teacher who was showing you that writing well was all about a commitment to deliberate improvement. I’d never been the most confident student or person; most of the time, the only thing that was high on me was my voice. Now, as I could feel Mrs. Fasano’s steady confidence in me, I began to feel it in me. I changed that semester, became my best student self.
In addition to all the writing, there was also assigned reading. After all, young writers need models. Among the books that Mrs. Fasano taught us was Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, which is a sharply critical picture of New York upper class society life in the 1870s. Wharton describes a conformist culture that’s descended into rigid, well-mannered convention. Gone is the imagination that built the country. Gone are the courageous expressions of personality that reveal someone to be capable of higher feeling. Teachers are, for high school students, as human and worthy of scrutiny as the literary characters Mrs. Fasano was helping us to understand. It was easy to see in our teacher qualities of the clear-minded, independent heroine Countess Ellen Olenska, so much more of a realized person than the inhibited lawyer Newland Archer who proves unworthy of her love.
What distinguishes truly gifted teachers are the elusive, subtler ways they find to educate. Mrs. Fasano was an inspiring teacher who made such a difference in my school days. She was also something beyond that. The next year, Mrs. Fasano taught me something that, in the moment, was very painful, but, looking back, has meant far more to me than the time she spent championing my writing.
During the second semester of my senior year, she offered a course on Russian literature and I took it. Ours was a class filled with senior boys, many of whom did not lack for personality. It was likewise a provocative syllabus—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pasternak—strong voices preoccupied with the tragic sweep of life in a tormented civilization.
In my own life, my voice had finally changed, it was spring, I’d been accepted into college. The world outside the classroom seemed to beckon with fresh and thrilling possibilities. I still have the paperback copy of Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago we used for Mrs. Fasano’s class. The paperback’s cover art consists of alluring images of the book’s two seductive protagonists, Lara in a soft fur hat, and Zhivago, bareheaded with a potent moustache. On my book cover, someone, clearly female, has supplemented these portraits with the addition of two white thought bubbles that have written inside them: “Forget Zhivy… give me Nicky…”; and “Forget Lara… give me Nicky…” Such little daily intoxications had never happened to me before.
Works like The Brothers Karamazov and The Death of Ivan Ilych were sober and challenging, and I remember how much respect Mrs. Fasano had for those masterpieces. My ample underlining in them makes it clear to me that I wasn’t quite coasting, wasn’t exactly off on an early summer vacation, that I was doing the work. But not with the conviction of the previous year. Well, there was more to it. I was trying out a new way of being that somebody like Nikolai Gogol would have identified right away as the petty arrogance of a provincial Russian landowner. In that classroom, the confidence I’d gained the year before had become misplaced. I had an attitude.
I could see that my behavior was not impressing Mrs. Fasano. It’s never second semester senior year for a teacher; she wasn’t graduating, her cardigan sleeves were still rolled up. At times, the class could be rowdy and, in those moments, I knew that for someone who’d given so much to me, the least I could have done was lost the little smirk and really engaged. But I felt torn, drawn to the experience of, for once, not pleasing someone. It felt safe not to please her.
And then it didn’t. Nineteenth century Russian literature is the story of a suffering people written down by brilliant, haunted men who sought to prevent a looming national catastrophe with their books. I was the grandson of an exiled Russian. My grandfather had believed that Dr. Zhivago was an elegy to his lost country, the Easter Sunday of Russian literature. What was I thinking, slipping joking notes to my classmates when Mrs. Fasano was talking about longing, loneliness, doom, and resurrection? Was I becoming a Newland Archer, a diminished American whose “whole future seemed to be suddenly unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”? It was all at once terrifying to understand how in-play your own moral compass was, how fast you could lose yourself.
Mrs. Fasano never spoke to me about any of this. But, of course, she’d seen it all before, and from how she taught us, I can guess at what she felt. She considered the final high school semester to be a time of transition when, with the pressure of getting admitted to college removed, there was the freedom to learn for learning’s sake—to develop your own insight into the world through the prism of difficult books. She was offering an intellectual experience as opposed to an academic exercise. That meant discretion, autonomy, reckoning with yourself, rather than waiting for someone else to offer you bright red instructions. It was what college was supposed to be like. It was also the way she thought a person might gain ongoing personal and professional fulfillment through life, and the way you could avoid becoming a Newland Archer. In other words, how you wanted to be was up to you and on you.
For all the American legends of adversity triumphantly overcome, writers like Wharton, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky all knew that, for most of us, shame and regret are life’s signal trials. To disregard a teacher who wanted her students to use classic Russian fiction as a guide for probing more carefully into the soul of the world surrounding them, that was foolish. New Haven was a troubled place then, as now, a dark, unequal Russian place, and it would have been much better for the now to have understood that then.
Fortunately, the best teachers are still there for you, even when they have to let you go a little. And they are always returning to you, educating you across your life. This is why, when I open again a great book like The Age of Innocence, and read, “The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing,” the printed letters organize on the page in such a way that it’s my old teacher’s face I see looking out at me.
About the Author:
Nicholas Dawidoff ’81 is a writer and book author. His first book, The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, was a national bestseller. The Fly Swatter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and In the Country of Country was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Condé Nast Traveler. Dawidoff’s 2013 book Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football was a finalist for a PEN American literary award. He is also the author of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball and he is the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology. A graduate of Hopkins School and Harvard University, Dawidoff has been a Guggenheim, a Civitella Ranieri, and a Berlin Prize fellow. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and the American Scholar.
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