The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  When I asked Warren whether these are dynamics she worries about, she answered with an emphatic no: “Nobody wants to be talked down to—nobody. That’s true whether we’re talking about big national audiences or law students or fifth-graders or little tiny kids.” But, she said, this is not at all at odds with the work she has done as an educator, because “that’s not what teaching, good teaching, is about.”

  Instead, she said, “good teaching is about starting where you are and the teacher having the confidence in you to know that if you had a little bit more information, a little bit more time on this, if you thought about this from a little different perspective, you might move a little bit.”

  * * *

  It should probably go without saying that, as a child growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, Warren, then called Betsy Herring, loved school. It was an era in which not many paths were open to ambitious young women. But her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lee, “of ample bosom and many hugs,” Warren said, took her aside and said, “ ‘You know, Miss Betsy, you could be a teacher.’ And bam! I was sold. It changed my whole vision of myself.”

  Mrs. Lee put the eight-year-old in charge of a less advanced reading group. The experience of helping struggling readers string letters together into words was intoxicating. Speaking to me in Cambridge, wearing an oversize button-down and baggy chino shorts, her hair bobby-pinned out of her eyes, Warren recalled the process of breaking words into their parts until “that flash, that spark, that I went from not knowing to knowing. It happens in their face, and it happens then in my heart, instantly. My brain. It’s enormously intimate.”

  After that day with the reading group, Warren has written, “I harassed the neighborhood children to read out loud so I could play teacher, and when I couldn’t get any takers,” that’s when she began to map out that rigorous curriculum for her dolls.

  But just because Warren’s ambitions had been electrified didn’t mean her path was clear. “My mother wanted me to get married to a good provider and have babies and be safe; she didn’t want me to do anything else,” Warren said. Her three older brothers joined the military, worked in construction, started a business. “But me? My fortunes would be tied to the man I married.”

  By the time Warren was in high school, whenever her mother heard her discussing a teaching career, she would, as Warren tells it, “break into the conversation and explain to whomever I was talking to, ‘But she doesn’t want to be an old-maid schoolteacher … Right, Betsy?’ ” The mother-daughter battle was so intense that one night, after interrogating Betsy about why she thought she was so special that she should go to college, her mother hit Betsy in the face.

  Warren won a full-ride debate scholarship to George Washington University, where she majored in speech pathology and audiology so she could teach students with speech and hearing impairments. But her mother’s dire view of the world for unmarried women had a deep enough impact on Warren that when her old high-school boyfriend proposed to her just before her junior year, she promptly said yes, dropping out of school and giving up that scholarship. “For nineteen years I had absorbed the lesson that the best and most important thing any girl could do was ‘marry well,’ ” Warren has written. “And for nineteen years I had also absorbed the message that I was a pretty iffy case—not very pretty, not very flirty, and definitely not very good at making boys feel like they were smarter than I was.”

  Warren and her husband settled in Texas, where she finished her undergraduate degree, then moved to New Jersey, where she found a job as a special-needs teacher for public-school students with speech and learning disabilities. But at the end of one term, she was visibly pregnant with her first child, Amelia; the principal did not ask her back. She enrolled at Rutgers University Law School in Newark, then one of the most diverse and progressive law schools in the nation.

  Warren graduated nine months pregnant with her son, Alex, and there were no firms eager to hire a new mom of two. That’s when one of her Rutgers professors suggested she might teach a night class at the school. That first year of teaching law school, she has recalled, was the second-grade reading group all over again: “I watched faces, and it felt like a victory every time I saw the click! as a student grasped a really hard idea.”

  From Rutgers, Warren secured a tenure-track job at the law school at the University of Houston and taught Sunday school. She divorced her husband and later married Bruce Mann, a law professor and historian whom she had met at a law conference. Warren proposed to Mann in a classroom after watching him teach a class in property law. “It was the thing I needed to know,” she explained to me. “I couldn’t be married to another teacher if I didn’t respect his teaching. And watching him teach, he was good and engaged, and he cared and he was cute and I was already pretty crazy about him. But it was really important for me to know that.” What Warren especially appreciated while watching Mann teach was his clear belief in his students. “That’s the heart of really great teaching,” she said. “It’s that I believe in you. I don’t get up and teach to show how smart I am. I get up and teach to show how smart you are, to help you have the power and the tools so that you can build what you want to build.”

  The pair’s struggle to find double teaching appointments led them from Houston to the University of Texas at Austin to Penn and finally to Harvard, where she was hired in 1995 and where Mann came on as a professor of law and history in 2006. By the time she arrived, Harvard Law School was in the midst of a controversy over diversity in hiring; Professor Derrick Bell had taken an unpaid leave in protest of the fact that none of the school’s sixty tenured professors were women of color (in 1990, only five were women, all of them white). And while much attention has been paid to the question of whether Warren’s self-identification as Native American on a variety of forms during her career had any impact on her hiring trajectory, it is quite likely that, as a white female law professor in a massively male-dominated sphere in the 1980s and ’90s, she did benefit from affirmative-action policies. White women have been affirmative action’s disproportionate beneficiaries.

  Warren was an odd duck at Harvard, not just because she was one of only a handful of female professors; she was also among the only faculty whose degree had been issued by a public university. She began to speak to the masses in more direct ways, about the research she was doing on why families were going into bankruptcy, on television programs like Dr. Phil and The Daily Show. She didn’t publish academic books but ones about bankruptcy and personal finance coauthored with her daughter Amelia.

  Warren believed that the law and its remedies should not be simply the domain of the already powerful, and her approach to communicating with her students—and later, as a more public figure, with a wider audience—came back to her drive to make seemingly complicated concepts available to those who didn’t already have an expertise, specifically by decluttering the language she feels is meant to drive people away from engagement with the policies that shape their lives, rather than drawing them in and making them full participants.

  A perfect example, she told me, was the lead-up to the financial crash in 2008, “where the smart boys, as the economy is tumbling over the edge, only wanted to talk in terms of reverse double-half-nelson derivatives and said, in effect, ‘The rest of you aren’t smart enough to understand this. We the elite will take care of this.’ And they were wrong.”

  In the wake of that crash, Warren stepped into her role as America’s teacher, defying those “smart boys” by explaining to big audiences what had happened with a clarity that felt as comforting to some as Mrs. Lee’s hugs had felt to Warren back in the second grade. In 2010, Bill Maher told her, “I just want you to hold me,” before putting his head in her lap and embracing her. The same year, Jon Stewart took a hot-for-teacher route, telling her, “I wanna make out with you.” In fact, for all the reasonable concern about how men especially may rear back from schoolteachers, the reception Warren has sometimes earned offers plenty of evidence that some of them take deep
solace, in perilous times, in the plainspoken educator who can tell a straight story about how we got here and where we need to go next. After her second debate performance last week, CNN commentator Van Jones told Warren, “You make me feel like help is on the way … You make me feel good.” What she’s offering is belief—in her students, the audience, voters.

  It’s the same, in Warren’s view, as nudging people to understand that they can read: “We can all understand this, and we can all demand some oversight and accountability and then make some real changes so it doesn’t happen again.” Conveying information; inviting in people who feel shut out; making stories, syllables, letters clear and legible—this is precisely, Warren says, “what a good teacher does.”

  * * *

  Chrystin Ondersma was a second-year transfer student at Harvard Law School in the fall of 2005 and did not feel at home. The working-class daughter of a waitress and a father who filled vending machines, she had grown up in the conservative Dutch Christian Reformed community in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended Calvin College (alma mater of Betsy DeVos), and taken her first year of law classes at Arizona State. Ondersma had come to Harvard to take classes in constitutional law and civil rights, with an eye to becoming a gender-studies professor. She’d also hoped to study with the civil-rights theorist Lani Guinier, who in 1998 had become the first woman of color appointed a tenured professor at Harvard Law and, in the 1990s, had levied a critique of how law-school classes were taught. Guinier particularly took issue with the Socratic method—whereby professors cold-called students in large lecture halls, asking them to cough up information about case law in front of their peers—as being fundamentally unfriendly to the least-privileged students in a classroom.

  Ondersma agreed with Guinier about the limitations of the Socratic method, and when, during her first semester at Harvard, she saw a notice about a lunchtime lecture on the Socratic method offered by Elizabeth Warren, a professor she’d never heard of, she decided she’d go and argue her case. By phone, Ondersma remembered how, in a small conference room packed with students, Warren had laid out a case “for how, if you really care about equality in the classroom, if you care about racial justice, gender justice, and you just rely on voluntary discussion in classrooms, you’re only going to hear from the two white guys that love to talk.” For Warren, the Socratic method did not further inequities; it was a tool to mitigate them.

  Warren reiterates this argument today, suggesting that “what Lani was criticizing was the Socratic method done really badly.” She said to me, “The reason I never took volunteers is when you take volunteers, you’re going to hear mostly from men. ’Cause they have a lot more confidence, and they’ll get those hands up.”

  Several of her students mentioned the rumor that she targeted only guys with the assumpsit query because Warren was determined not to kick off her class by putting her more vulnerable students on the spot. (It was, perhaps, not accidental that Joseph Kennedy III found himself her prey.)

  Troy Schuler, a tutor now working on an education start-up, took Warren’s contracts class the last semester she taught it, in 2011. He remembered another way she obsessed about equal access: In the run-up to exams, when people came to her office with questions, “she made everyone write up those questions and send them to her, then she wrote up her answers and sent them back out to the entire class. Because if one person has a question, it probably means that a lot of people had the same question, and it was very important to her that people were not going to have any structural advantage because they were the kind of person who knew to come to talk to a professor in office hours.”

  Warren’s argument about her commitment to inclusion was so persuasive that Ondersma put aside her plans to challenge her on the Socratic method and, as soon as the lunchtime session was over, wrote Warren an e-mail that began, “I went to your lecture and feel like a convert.” Warren responded right away, asking her to come to office hours and noting, “I always love to talk to students interested in commercial law.”

  Ondersma was slightly embarrassed—she had zero interest in commercial law—but was so grateful that a professor who didn’t know her would take time to meet her that she went anyway. She explained herself to Warren. “I didn’t care about how corporations were structured, and I didn’t care about financial intricacies between creditors and debtors,” she related to me recently. “I didn’t think that was crucial to the mission of social justice.”

  Warren listened for a long time, Ondersma remembered. “And then she said, ‘If you really care about social justice, you should think about focusing on commercial law and bankruptcy.’ ”

  The professor told her it was a shame that so many of those who were committed to fighting injustice went into public law, leaving private, commercial practice dominated by more-conservative young lawyers. (Warren had herself been a conservative and moved to the left through her research into how Americans were going bankrupt.) “ ‘Economic law has a huge impact on women and folks of color,’ ” Ondersma remembered Warren telling her. Ondersma ended up taking every class Warren offered and became her teaching assistant in the first-year contracts class.

  In this position, Ondersma remembered, she had one job: to make sure everyone got called on equally. “The whole idea was that she wanted everybody in the classroom to participate.” Ondersma would sit with the class list and check off every student who’d gotten a cold-call question. Then, in the last ten minutes of the class, “I’d hand her a notecard with the names of all the students she’d not yet called on,” and Warren would try to get to them all.

  Jed Shugerman, now a law professor at Fordham, recalled coming to Harvard as a brand-new hire in 2005. He had been advised to attend other teachers’ classes to get a feel for how things were done. Observing Warren, he said, was a little scary: “She knew every one of eighty students by name. She used no notes. She had the day’s material memorized in her head as she walked around the room and asked detailed questions about the cases.”

  It sounds impossible, Shugerman said, to call on more than two dozen people during a class. “Calling on more than fifty people sounds absurd, and like the questions and answers must have been superficial,” he said. “But she was so responsive and such a good listener that she could build on the last person’s answer with someone else afterward so it would build up to more complicated and sophisticated points that would go deeper.”

  After class, Warren asked Shugerman to lunch. When he told her that watching her had intimidated him, Warren asked him, “Do you think I could do that when I was your age? I had no clue. It takes years to find your own teaching style.” But she explained to him the thinking behind hers: ninety minutes, she said, is a long time to sit and be talked to. The Socratic classroom as she handled it forced everyone in it to pay close attention not only to what she was saying but also to what their fellow students were saying. She was not the leader of conversation; she was facilitating it, prompting the students to do the work of building to the analysis.

  It’s a pedagogical approach that Warren sees as linking all of her experiences of teaching. “It’s fundamentally about figuring out where the student is and how far can I bring them from where they are.” Her biggest lesson in this, she said, came not in a law school but in teaching Sunday school to fifth-graders in Texas. Asked by her Methodist preacher to take over a group of unruly kids, she thought it would be simple: “You teach them a little lesson, you do a little art project, you give them cookies and juice, you say, ‘Thank you, Lord,’ and then the hour’s over.” But for weeks, things were bad: “They cut each other’s hair, they cut each other’s clothes; the boys climbed out the window.” So she thought to herself, Okay, you know how to teach. Teach them like you teach them in law school. She brought in a kids’ version of the story of Noah and told them to read it, because she was going to ask them some questions.

  Her first question was “How do you think Noah felt when he heard this voice?” They giggled. “ ‘He thought he
was going crazy. He had a worm in his ear.’ But they actually got interested in the question: What would it be like to be somebody who had a job, who had a family, and hears God talking to him? Does he know it’s God? Would you really sell your stuff? Before you knew it, it was time for juice and cookies and then everybody went home,” she said. “I thought, Dang , that worked. I loved my fifth-graders. They showed me, in all my cases of teaching, it’s about figuring out where they are, adding a little to it.”

  Ondersma sees Warren’s Socratic approach at work on the campaign trail: “There’s a lot of listening happening. I saw that in classrooms, and it happens in town halls, too. She’s telling them her ideas, but I bet she gets ideas from them, too.” Among other things, Warren has vowed, if elected president, to appoint a public-school teacher to be secretary of education, an idea she said she first heard from a voter—a public-school teacher—at a town hall.

  Of course, presidential debates aren’t a forum that lend themselves to the Socratic approach—she doesn’t get to tussle at length with moderators or opponents (let alone the audience) to really break down ideas or build a case. But you can see her applying it around the edges, and watch her expertly poke holes in bad arguments. After the second debate, Warren was pressed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to say that her health-care plan would raise taxes. Warren refused again and again to cede to Matthews’s frame, which takes as its basis a right-wing obsession with taxes as the only measure of costs to voters.

  Warren has not enjoyed a warm relationship with the political press. She has too often been clipped, defensive, uneasy—the experienced teacher who cannot for the life of her figure out how to get a room full of fifth-graders to listen to her. She is perhaps coming closer to finding her footing, in part by engaging reporters with more assuredness, honed via her Socratic training: Her ability to wrestle through an argument with Matthews made her seem authoritative and in control.