Transcript: Dr. Boehnen on Writing, Mentorship, and Emotional Intelligence

Good morning and welcome back to Late Start Show. We are here today with Assistant Director of College Counseling, English teacher and college counselor at schools across the world during his career and member of the US faculty since 2012, Dr. Scott Boehnen. How are you doing today, Dr.

Boehnen? Great. Thanks for having me. It's great to finally have you on the show.

We always like to start at the beginning. So can you take us back to kind of what your childhood was like, what your home felt like? Sure. Yeah.

I was born in Fairview Park, Ohio, on the west side. I feel like I had an idyllic childhood. One of the greatest memories would be the snow days that we had. Obviously, kids universally, if they only live in snowy climates, love snow days, but it seemed like we had more back in the day.

And my older brothers and I would go from house to house on the tree lawns on these enormous piles of snow and then come in and mom would have hot chocolate. But it was a great place to grow up. And I had good parents, but we didn't really have to be supervised very much as well. We lived on a kind of cul-de-sac, and there was a retaining wall behind part of the street.

Awesome. You could go along the wall, and you could see all the backyards. And there was always a beagle that would bark at us. Any case, I had a great childhood there.

I went to college at Notre Dame. Do you want me to take it further? Yeah, I mean, honestly, even in high school, a lot of teachers here that we've had on the podcast like to talk about that one either high school, middle school, even lower school teacher that just imprinted onto them teaching as a whole and that this is something you went to. What was your favorite class throughout high school or what was that teacher that kind of gave you that first spark?

Sure, I guess it won't surprise you, but it was an English teacher I had both for sophomore year and senior year, Mrs. Elric. and she just she had a very humorous style in class but also I just found her her course to be so intellectually engaging that I kind of felt even though I wouldn't have said at the time like this is something not only that I could do but I would want to do and she was also quite sarcastic I mean perhaps more sarcastic than we would be nowadays since I'm a college counselor I'll just had the detail that when I first submitted my college essay to her a couple days later I saw her in the corridor and I just said oh what did you think and she said oh it made me want to vomit and she was right it uh you know it was like the wrong approach I had a I had a kind of good idea but it just it came off um as somebody other than me and she helped me find myself through that writing. And I think I'll always, always appreciate that because it opened up so many opportunities for me subsequently. And your college essay must have been decent because you ended up landing at Notre Dame.

Was Notre Dame always the dream? Did it come out of nowhere? Walk us through that, what that decision was like for you. Yeah, I can remember the first, first sentence of my college essay was, I am a beagle.

And I had, I had a beagle puppy at the time. And so I drew this analogy between the puppy that I was trying to train and tend to and my own personality. And it began with the true story of this dog tearing apart books, including like a family Bible. As it turns out, very old books, like an old family Bible, sometimes have glue in the binding that has been created by horses.

And the dog must have smelled that to tear it all apart. And so then I moved on to the sort of books that I like to devour. Notre Dame. Yeah, it was, I guess it was the dream.

My father was a salesman and he had a territory for selling industrial equipment that included Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. So he was always driving by Notre Dame and there's a golden dome that you can see from the freeway. So he suggested I take a look and I guess it was one of those experiences where I was on campus for the first time. Neither of my parents went to college and so this was my very first experience and I just couldn't imagine anything else.

What did you end up studying at Notre Dame and how do you think that kind of impacted some of the work that you did later in your life? Obviously, you know, we've had so many people get in here and say that their life has changed in so many ways and so many people say that it's just went on some sort of straight path. What did that look like for you throughout college? Yeah, I think like many students, because my father was a businessman, I thought I would major in business.

And I still vividly remember the way that they did scheduling at Notre Dame at the time, which was pre-technology. All the freshmen, all the, you know, the 2000 freshmen had to show up in enormous arena. It's called arena scheduling. And, you know, somehow you like took a hard copy notebook from one department to another and you asked for a certain course.

And if it wasn't film, you know, they'd write a signature on your forum. But in any case, I remember, you know, starting that process that day and thinking, OK, I'm going to be a business major. And and this was 1989. Japan at the time was thought to be far surpassing us in business acumen and performance.

And so the thought was and major in Japanese. And so I went to the foreign languages desk and the person there said, you know, the Japanese course is closed. I'll see what I can do. Professor Minamiki is over here and let's see what happens.

So I waited 15 or 20 minutes. Again, that's what she did for this kind of pre-technology scheduling. And then she came back and said, you know, Professor Minamiki will take one more student in the course. And so do you want that spot?

And funny, within 20 minutes, I'd already decided I didn't want that spot. And so I guess it was a gradual kind of revelation to myself that there other opportunities for me and since i always loved reading and and writing and was finding again my english course in literature courses so engaging at Notre Dame eventually after i you know had a full freshman year behind me i was ready to declare that major uh sophomore year spent a semester in london then subsequently and that just kind of sealed the deal when it came to my studying british literature which is my specialization and then after obviously Notre Dame, well I believe you were valedictorian. 35 years ago. Still a big deal, but you went to Stanford, I believe for your PhD program. What can you take us through kind of like what a PhD program a day in the life looks like how you decide on what you really want to focus in on study for that Yeah good question it feels differently on a daily basis based on whether you in the first couple years or you in the last three years or so first couple years it feels like college as well because you're doing you're doing coursework every day and the people in your class though are people who've already majored in literature or in english and so it's a like a higher level of discourse super engaging all of them are seminar style courses at Stanford and most PhD programs for that matter but after you finish a couple years of coursework you've got a you've got to write a book-length study at least in English so that's the dissertation that's when I got another dog and spent a lot of time outdoors with that dog another beagle and that actually helped me write the dissertation because there's just so much thinking that you have to go through for a book-length project, so many pieces you have to kind of put together and fit together properly.

So at the time, I thought it was enormously demanding and stressful, and I suppose to some extent it was, but I still found a way every Friday to take the full Friday off and take the dog up to the Palo Alto foothills, and we'd go hiking for maybe two or three hours. And I thought that is my my decompressing time but all the time actually i was fitting things together and so i would not recommend this for anyone but i wrote that dissertation in one summer but mainly because i had just i'd finally fit it all together and this has never happened to me before and it never has happened to me since but i i actually came back to ohio i didn't want to necessarily be paying the high cost of rent in palo alto california but i would get up in the morning that summer and i would be maybe six in the morning i'd be so eager to get the computer and start writing and i would want to write all day and um sometimes my mother would come over and she said i brought dinner or dinner's ready i want to keep writing i want to keep writing so yeah 350 pages over the course of the summer and god bless him my advisor at stanford uh said yeah i can do this it was pre-email so he said fedex me the chapters as you write them and i would fedex And he'd get them back. At one point, he had a health scare. He had kind of a lesion on his arm that might have been skin cancer.

He was hospitalized for a time. He didn't tell me any of that until it was all over. Just kept reading, kept coming, kept pushing me forward. So I'm always very grateful.

He's now deceased, but he's always got this large, spacious room in my pagoda of gratitude. Take us to that moment you finished, whether or not that looks like, obviously, turning the last page, the file signature, maybe the defense of your paper as a whole, whatever your end to the whole process is, how did you celebrate and how is it to be finally Dr. Boehnen? Well, again, I hesitate to share this, but I wasn't finished writing it.

And yet I knew I needed to get to California because there is a very specific way you had to print out this document on a certain specific paper that was acid-free that could be archived and so forth and so on. You needed signatures from your dissertation advisor and two other professors who had read it. I still had like another 10,000 words to write. So I was writing those the night before.

And what did it feel like to be done? I actually, I went to Kinko's Copies, which was a commercial copying, photocopying place in Palo Alto. I had a floppy disk. I had the last 10,000 words.

I printed it out. It was the right papers, the right margins, it was the right font. And I rushed off to campus. If I had missed this deadline, it just meant that I would not have graduated that term.

And I would have graduated the next academic term, which was trimesters. I went to the registrar's office. There's a window there, gave the hard copy, got a receipt. That's what it felt like to be done.

Yeah. To be Dr. Boehnen, it just seems strange when people would call me that, but eventually you get used to it. Well, then you went to, did you go straight to teaching in high school?

And if you did, what was kind of that first week like where you're the one in charge and no one is really coming to save you? Yeah, I did go straight to teaching. I actually had taken a full-time job as a teacher in London. And the summer in which I completed the dissertation was the summer after that first year of teaching.

And that's actually significant because I did find that the pressure and the joy and the discovery that comes with being in a classroom with students, Even if you're talking about texts that have nothing to do with what you're writing, that's what pushed me towards the end, figuring out this book length study that I could pull off. And it was, yeah, it was enormously time consuming. I remember getting very little sleep that year, but being super energized by the experience of being the students. And so I think that's, maybe I went into that job thinking I'll do it for a year. and then when the dissertation is done, I'll go in the job market to become a college professor.

But as it was, once I was done with that year, I knew that I wanted to teach at this level. There's no question. You know, at some point, you obviously taught more than one school at U.S., but a lot of teachers who have gone through that process take up lessons from each of the schools that they teach at. What were some of those lessons, especially as you were a new teacher at that point, that you picked up at each of your stops?

Yeah, at the first school, the one in London, my first year there, I actually had the student who has, she has excelled in the academic realm in a way that still boggles the mind. And I've had many students who have excelled in other realms in ways that boggle the mind. But she now has a lifetime appointment at Oxford University in philosophy and social thoughts. and it's the chair that sir isaiah berlin a famous 20th century philosopher previously held and she happens to be the the youngest person ever to have this lifetime appointment the only person of color and the only woman and the only american so uh she's just an extraordinary person but why why i mention that is that my experience looking back at that first school where i talked for about six years in london was the experience of having i think we had six courses together uh with a young young woman her name is Professor Mia Srinivasan and she just came to literature with a different set of assumptions than I did which was awesome And it did more for me sort of intellectually than any course I had done in graduate school or any mentoring I had in graduate school Because, you know, I'd always be looking for patterns. I'm good at recognizing patterns and kind of creating an argument.

And maybe when I'd be planning out my teaching, I'd want to have an end point where we could understand whatever this novel or this poem or whatever. with that end point in mind. But she would always be thinking about, like, the data, the moment, the scene, the character, the dialogue that doesn't fit, you know, the outlier. And it was just enormously important to me to start thinking about those outliers. And I think that that's how she has actually created her career. and she even at the time she showed that like you could be you could be in a state of ambivalence which is to say that you can see the pattern but you can also see the outlier and that doesn't mean you're contradicting yourself it means you're you're finding a fuller understanding of this text and that was that's been super important to me it just so happens that she was lecturing in this country a couple years ago and um dr daughtry who was the head of the division at the time very graciously said i could take a day off and connect it to a weekend and i could go to her lecture and i'll spend the day with her and we had this one moment where i i just wanted to tell her like you know you were you were right like that was like that was so important for me to take on this possibility and almost at the same time she said you were right i always appreciated that you were coming from a different angle and i think it's right so So we had a great conversation.

That kind of characterizes the first school for me. The second school, which was in Westchester County, right outside of New York City, what characterized it and what characterizes it still is the dedication to writing. And they still have a very 1950s way of kind of expressing that dedication, something called comp, in which the whole school shuts down at 2.15. It used to be every Friday, now it might be every other Friday.

And the entire school population actually writes a composition in a blue book. And it's a way of saying, like, this is a core skill, and we stop everything to do it. It has some disadvantages, too, because if you're an English teacher, then you have, you know, like, oh, 64 of your students, these blue books, all at once, great. But it really shows their value.

And I think that that's what I've discovered. I'm a writing teacher, even more so than a literature teacher. That's what the second school taught me. And then take us to your journey to university school.

When did it come under your radar, and how did that transition happen? I knew I wanted to return to Cleveland, but I'm kind of embarrassed because I didn't know university school. Growing up on the west side, I don't know if that's an excuse or not, but I did my research. and one of the head of school at this school in London. I remember him telling me, oh, you're from Cleveland.

Well, you should, you know, at some point you should observe at my friend, you know, my friendmaster friend's school. It's the best school in Cleveland, Hawkins School. I was thinking, what's Hawkins School? But I did my homework and realized, actually, the university school is the best school in Cleveland.

And so that's when I knew I wanted to be here. I did interview here, but they didn't have a job. And the head of school at the time, head of the vision, Dr. Bill O'Neill, said, come back.

Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere. Come back next year. Let's see if we can find something for you.

And I guess the rest is history. You know, you've been at U.S. for well over a decade now. And so let's think back to the first couple of your weeks. What were your first impressions when you walked into this campus with the house system and there's new kids coming in?

What classes did you teach at the beginning? Do you remember maybe even your first day and kind of the craziness of it? Yeah, it's kind of hard to reconstruct, but of course it is unusual to come in a building with all boys once you was taught at a co-educational institution. So I remember that.

And I also remember I always want to know my students' names straight off when we first have our first class session. I'd rather not just fumble around for weeks feeling embarrassed. So it was the first time I realized how difficult it is to remember names if it's all one gender, because usually you can figure out the Tom from the Sally, you know, they're sitting in your class, but all boys' names. So ever since then, I've tried to study the database before the first day of school so that I could actually address my students by name.

But I think even when I first was teaching, you know, that first week or first month, I could tell that what distinguishes this school is the brotherhood that you students have with each other. Essentially, as you said in your speech today, the love that you have for one another. And that comes through, I think, in some of the openness and the vulnerability and the emotional honesty that comes out in a class, especially when things are going well. You know, one of the emerging things in our world, honestly, is the fact that a lot of people have had to rethink teaching.

And now that every student has AI kind of in their pocket, what do you think gets lost when a boy lets machine handle their first draft versus actually doing that writing, doing that comp, as you said, at 215? Yeah, great question. I have to admit, the reason I'm no longer teaching English or teaching it only in the context of college counseling is that I actually don't know how to answer that question, Charlie. I know it was affecting me.

I can only speak from my personal experience. but let me back up one step i just read in the econos magazine that an academic has done analysis of the language that members of the house of representatives in washington dc use when they're speaking on the house floor so there it is you know the people's house in the greatest deliberative body of the most powerful nation on the globe 15 is from chat gpt 15 of that language so i if i were a journalist for instance i know that part of my my own broadband would be trying to figure out what's the 15 and can you believe that our elected representatives had ceded that kind of authority to chat gpt coming back to teaching english and teaching writing specifically i i found that 15 of my own kind of uh broadband was was thinking about what what chat and what the you know what the authentic language of my student I couldn figure out how to get that question out of my mind because it disrupts the relationship the mentoring relationship with the student. And also I couldn't figure out how to preserve the essay. I still remember essays that both of you have written. And I love the genre.

I love all the constructive work and all the questions that an essay raises and that you ultimately have to answer for yourself. I remember yours, first one from sophomore year, Jesus Loves Me, This I Know. I remember your one comparing the biblical account of creation with the Potawatomi story of Turtle Island. Your gold medal winning essay on the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and inequality there.

And that's what I love. And I love it because of the relationship that evolves through the mentoring as well. I could figure out how to preserve the essay. So that's why I decided to step back from English.

And one thing that Charlie and I have both taken your class and one of the things I really love is that you focus so much on the process. Can you talk a little bit more about what the process, what you get out of the process versus the product? Because anyone can put forth a paper using ChanceVT, but the process and taking that time to meet with you and mentor and go through work through those ideas is really the important part. So why is the process so important to you?

Well, I think you answered the question for me this morning in your own speech. what do we have with each other and so for me the process means entering into a relationship with my student with the writer and it's you know it's a rebel an intellectual relationship which is you know it's rare it's so rare and such a such a you know generosity that our school provides certain working conditions for its faculty so that that can happen and it may never happen again that you you have that kind of mentoring one-on-one. So what do I get from it? I would say it's the relationship. You get so much insight into another human being, and as I mentioned with my earlier examples, so much of my own thinking gets influenced through that process.

I just can never give it up. You know, after Notre Dame, Stanford, all these years in the classrooms, has your definition of what it means to be smart changed over this time? What do you think intelligence looks like for you now, especially as you've now moved over from the English side to that college counseling side as the assistant director? Yes, I think I'm much more aware of emotional intelligence and not just the book learning or even, you know, students who are particularly adept in my area, which is, you know, verbal intelligence.

To give you an example, a few years back, there was a presenter in assembly who's part of the US community, but kind of tangentially, not the everyday work of our school. But in any case, his presentation, to my perspective, was a bit demeaning towards members of our community. Visible, you know, a minority of our experience, not a racial minority, but a minority of our community. And I think that the steam was coming out of my ears and I had to leave.

And someone was actually standing near the door towards the exit and I think I said too loudly, excuse me, excuse me, I have to leave. And it was tough for me to kind to process that presentation. It had gone off the rails. But in any case, speaking of emotional intelligence, one of the US boys whose name I didn't even know, I never taught him, saw me afterwards.

And specifically, he wanted to speak to me. And he said, I think I know why you're angry. I just wanted to ask you, you don't think that's us, do you? Like, you don't think that's US.

And I don't know what I said to him at the time, but I really had to think about that. Because I realized in retrospect that I was engaged in a certain kind of thinking, and it's synecdoche, which you might remember from class, which is taking a part to represent the whole. Yeah. It's like metaphorical thinking.

We do it all the time without actually examining it. And this kid, I'll never, I actually looked, looked on the poster, figured out his name, and he actually came back to me at the end of the school day and said, like, how are you feeling now? And I realized that he had such a greater insight into this because he was also a part of a minority group and probably had felt what I had felt but over and over again, you know, in different contexts. And he was able to guide me and help me understand.

Actually, I said, no, that actually isn't who we are. I can let it go. That is emotional intelligence and what courage. I mean, and just, you know, leaning into something that he knew would be difficult for me and not even knowing me, but wanting to give that to me.

So that's what US means to me. That's what emotional intelligence means to me. You know, Dr. Boehnen, this is a question that we always end on.

You went from Notre Dame to Stanford PhD, and instead of taking the path that most people go down, you spent years and years in classrooms helping out so many high school students just like us. Every one of those moves puts you next to a boy at a real turning point in their life, whether it's his first real essay or it's his final decision letter from colleges. So when the alarm goes off in October and the stack of applications is taller than any stack of essays ever was, what is your why? What gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going day after day?

I think it is that just enormous privilege and that kind of aperture I have into a boy's life at these critical moments. And with the college counseling, you know, it's a wider aperture because it's such a long period from start to finish. and just to be invited into that experience and to feel like at some critical stages I can guide a student in the right way or help him ask the question that he's not asking for himself. I just find that A, enormously rewarding, but B, privilege sort of well beyond my imagination before I ever took on this sort of work. Well, Dr.

Boehnen, it's been great having you on the show today. Thank you so much for taking the time. to share your insights and stories and experiences with us and to our listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll hope you'll join us next Wednesday for another episode of Late Start Show. Thank you, Dr.

Boehnen. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Jack.