A Letter to my Daughter from a Former Student

Three years ago, not long after Heloise’s thirteenth birthday, a kind friend and former student wrote a letter to my daughter. I had lamented on my Facebook page that my first born had googled herself — and in the process, read a lot of very unpleasant things about her father. In response, Robin Click* — who took two of my classes during the 1997-98 academic year wrote what follows to my daughter.

At Ms. Click’s suggestion, and with my daughter’s permission, I reposted the letter on Facebook in its entirety without further comment - except to say that Heloise declared at the time, “This helps a lot.” As I am contemplating leaving Facebook, and the permissions of both young Miss Schwyzer and Ms. Click endure, I am sharing it here.

As the poet wrote:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion…

My Dear Heloise!

I wanted to write to you to tell you a few things about your dad that you might not find when you Google him, but that are far more important that anything any search engine will tell you.

I first met your dad when I was a college freshman. Unlike some of the students you’ve read about online, I never went to his office hours, never spoke to him after class, never even asked a question during class. I just sat there and listened to his truly remarkable lectures … and then I went home. One of my friends stayed though, and went to see him any chance she got.

Now this next part is very important to understand – all of us thought your then-30 year-old father was very handsome. But not all of us followed up on that observation. And the difference was definitely not your dad since he was obviously the same one person. The difference was us. All that happened all those years ago had little to do with who your dad was, and a lot to do with who we were.

Let me give you an example … cats and dogs.

Dogs tend to chase cats, such is their nature. When cats walk by, most dogs will bolt right after them! Some dogs will never catch a cat. Some (like my dog) will catch the cat just fine, but once there, they’ll just sniff the cat and want to play with it. And then some dogs will catch the cat and tear it to pieces. But none of that has anything to do with the cat. It is only the nature of the dog that determines how an encounter with a feline will unravel.

Your dad is the cat in this story.

At the end of the day, your father ended up being the one to pay the price for everyone’s choices, not because that’s fair, but because that’s easy – and our society, especially our social media, likes things that are easy and cares little for fairness or reality. The general public loves to see dogs mangle cats. Too many people find joy in other people's suffering. Makes them feel better about their lives I suppose. Just look at how well Squid Games did.

But enough about that, let me tell you something about your dad that you unfortunately will not find online.

I only spent a year at the college where your dad taught. I doubled up my course load and transferred to UCLA after one year. After graduating from UCLA, I went to law school at USC for two years and Berkeley for one. Then, many years later, I decided to become a teacher. Since I had a law degree, I didn’t have to go back to school to get a teaching degree. All I had to do was take a test, which was nice and easy, but when I showed up to teach my first class, I realized I had no idea how to actually do that. And guess who I thought of all those years later – your dad! After seven years of higher education at three fancy universities, Professor Schwyzer was still the best lecturer I ever had the pleasure of learning from. And you know what I did that morning when the bell rang and a bunch of high schoolers shuffled in? I grabbed an Expo marker and started fidgeting with it the same way your dad used to fidget with a pencil while lecturing, and I started pacing up and down just like he did. I basically copied your father because that’s the type of teacher I wanted to be. This may never make the news, education cannot compete with sex in our trending society. But I promise you, by imitating your dad, I changed more kids’ lives than all of those articles did by writing about him.

Please know that I am fully aware of your dad’s dark moments, so I am definitely not idolizing him as this perfect professor on a pedestal. After I became a teacher, I ended up reaching out to your dad to tell him the impact he had on my professional life. At that time, both he and I were in a bad place in our lives, and when we are in a bad place, it’s hard to do good things. But still, as we shoveled through all the bad stuff, I started to see the man behind the professor with greater, be it gradual, clarity. And then! As a result of that! I started to see all men and women with that same greater, though still gradual, clarity. So once again, your dad taught me something that mattered. Your dad was, is, and always will be a great teacher.

These days, both he and I are in a much, much better frame of mind. He is still the best teacher I ever had. And now he is also my cherished friend, one I am always happy to sit with and talk about life over a cup of coffee. Today, I cannot even remember the bad times well enough to care about them. But I still remember his lectures! One specifically comes to mind now – the history of Easter.

Easter was a pagan goddess, worshiped by Germanic tribes before Christianity started to take over Western Europe. Her patron animal was a bunny and, on account of being the goddess of sex and fertility, she found clothing to be rather unnecessary. All was well and she was honorably celebrated during the first harvest in early spring. Then Christians came with their swords and asked those Germans to please convert. Insead of bloodshed, they compromised, “We’ll keep the name, the date, and the bunny,” the Christians said, “but the sex, fertility, and certainly the naked female have to go!” What does that have to do with the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus? Absolutely nothing. And nobody cares because, again, we’re looking for the easy story, not the real one.

But why am I retelling you this random history lecture? Because history is precisely what exonerates your father of all the “bad” things he did in this Christian world. If you really think about what your dad was guilty of, it’s worshiping Easter! Just about 2000 years too late. Christianity made sex a sin. Pagans worshiped Easter and Priapus, in Olympus sat Aphrodite and Eros, and in Greece Socrates got pretty close to his students. But good and evil did not change. They cannot change. Because they are what they are by definition. The only thing that did change is our opinion of them. And unfortunately, opinions can make or break anything.

Another example you might want to look into one day when you’re older are the stories of Prometheus and Lucifer. Prometheus is a pagan titan who gave us fire. Lucifer is an angel whose name literally means the “bearer of light.” They both gave people something that their respective God did not want them to have – enlightenment. Pagans made Prometheus a hero. Christians made Lucifer a villain. Same character, same motivations, same actions, but two very different perceptions by two very different societies.

Especially during these Covid days, reality takes second place to perception all around us. We label things good or bad, healthy or sick, safe or dangerous, not because they are any of those things, but because enough of us have collectively agreed to see them as such. It's a terrible human quality.

How do we fix that? By looking! Looking very closely. And if you look very closely, you are going to see your dad, who is human, who is there, who will always accept you, who will always do his best to understand you and himself, and who, at the end of the day, simply loves you. That’s the reality. The rest is just perception.

With lots and lots of love to you and your brother,

Robin

*She asked me to use her full name. (“People will suspect you wrote this yourself otherwise.”)