Max, or Learning from Your Student

In this chapter, Ruhl celebrates the life of her student Max Ritvo.

He began as her student but, in time, he became a dear friend as well as her teacher. She writes that his “empathy was wide and wise enough” to become friends with many of his teachers. Through letter writing and conversation, Ruhl discovered Max’s open heart, his humor, his poetic talent, and his natural tendency to make friends. The letters they exchanged would eventually become a book and then a play. Through these creative expressions of her friendship with Max, Ruhl was able to express her grief after Max’s death. Ultimately, Ruhl concludes that “students sometimes make the best teachers.”

However intense the mutuality of giving and taking with which [the teacher] is bound to the pupil… [t]he teacher experiences the pupil’s being educated but the pupil cannot experience the educating of the educator…. In the moment when the pupil is able to throw himself across and experience from over there, the educative relation would be burst asunder, or change into friendship. We call friendship the third form of the dialogical relation…. It is the true inclusion of one another by human souls.
- Martin Buber

Discussion Questions

How does Ruhl describe Max? What does she admire in him? What aspect of the description draws your attention the most?

How do Ruhl and Max differ as writers? What evidence of this does Ruhl share?

What do you think it means to be embarrassed in exactly the right way?

According to Buber and Ruhl, how does student-teacher relationship transform into a friendship?

Ruhl describes Max as adept at making friendships with teachers and others. Why does she speculate this might be the case?

What sways Ruhl to turn their book into a play? What is her experience of watching actors play Max?

What lessons does Ruhl learn from Max?

What lessons will you carry from this chapter?

Related Resources

Max Ritvo on the Poetry Foundation

The Porous Fabric Between Life and Death: Sarah Ruhl Interviewed

An Introvert’s Guide to Friendship

Max

Write the Book: Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Sarah Ruhl on Letters From Max

Reading: Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship

Letters from Max

Final Voicemails