HAVING A SLOW READER FOR A TEACHER

This morning I fell in behind a very slow driver on my way to school, and within seconds I was fuming, much the way my students probably seethe when I make them read a book like To Kill a Mockingbird little by little, paragraph-by-paragraph, sometimes sentence-by-sentence. This morning, as a dilly-dallied behind this unhurried driver, I impatiently wanted to get on with the business of the day, and my students, I feel sure, would like to get on with the plot of Lee’s novel as quickly as possible and then dash on to the next book. I wanted to get to school quickly so I could quickly get to my next goal, and then my next, and on and on, and I fear the students think of reading in the same way. They read a book to get to the end, and then they start another book to get to its end, and on and on. Things are very different in my English class, and I’m surprised I didn’t make the connection this morning. This languid driver ahead of me was like old Mr. Salsich, the infamously slow reader. The driver made me slow way down so I had nothing better to do than admire the unblemished morning landscape, and I make my students slow down as they travel through the pages of Lee’s beautiful novel. Sometimes we even come to a momentary standstill among some splendid sentences, perhaps even park by the side of a paragraph for a full period. “Yikes!” my students must be thinking, just as I was thinking this morning as I meandered along behind a leisurely, perfectly satisfied driver.

PRICING A POEM

   
A talk I often have with my students throughout the year is about the difference between liking a work of literature and appreciating it. I use various analogies to try to make this clear. For instance, I don’t particularly like the game of lacrosse, but by studying the rules and talking to aficionados, I’m gaining an appreciation for it. Likewise, I wouldn’t choose to spend an afternoon watching skateboarders perform, but, by occasionally listening as students discuss the subtleties of the sport, I’m beginning to appreciate its complexities and nuances. Actually, the word “appreciate” has a monetary connection, as in “the house appreciated in value”, and I often discuss that aspect of the word with the students. In a way, their job as serious readers is to assess the value of a poem or story, and then, you might say, set a price on it. If they owned a skateboard store, they might not especially like a certain board, but they would surely try to understand its value in order to decide on a price and do appropriate advertising -- and they’re involved in an oddly similar process in my English class. Whether my students like a Mary Oliver poem or not is beside the point; what counts is whether they appreciate its value as a work of art. What counts is not whether they like the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge (most teenagers are not huge Wordsworth fans), but whether they can understand why it’s been so highly prized by so many for so long. I’ll take “I understand the worth of this poem” over “I like it” any day.

DISINTERESTED TEACHING

As a teacher, I hope I’m not uninterested or uninteresting, but I've striven over the years to be more and more disinterested. In fact, it’s been one of my major goals as a teacher – to not be influenced by considerations of personal advantage (one dictionary’s definition). One of the great temptations for a teacher (at least this one) is to think of the work as a personal mission, an opportunity to use special, individual talents to help the students –- a temptation I’ve been fighting for 40+ years. For me, the problem with that personal approach to teaching is that I can easily end up thinking as much about my success as a teacher as about the kids’ success as students. At the end of a day, I can find myself admiring the feats of my teaching more than the achievements of my students. I want my teaching to be as impersonal as possible – as impersonal as a summer breeze that cools us and then passes by. I want to be disinterested in the sense of not caring whether I made a brilliant lesson plan, or whether the students might think I was a good teacher, or even whether I was a better teacher today than yesterday. Notice all the ‘I’s in that sentence – and that’s where the danger lies. Truly disinterested teachers have lost the ‘I’ in their teaching. They are like the sunlight in the classroom – invisible, in a sense, but universally supportive and reassuring. They know that education is like the great air around us, and they are but small winds and currents passing among the students for a few months and then disappearing.

MORE LIKE A VOYAGE THAN AN OCCUPATION

“I wish I could have died when I was fifteen. It seemed so easy to give things up then; it is so hard now.”
-- Maggie, in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

Maggie Tulliver is speaking here of far more important issues than the teaching of English to teenagers, and yet something in what she says starts me thinking about my work in the classroom. In a way, it is hard for me to “give things up” now, at my well-seasoned age of 68. When I was fifteen, I could give up one shirt style for another with hardly a thought, but now I’m into my 40th year with button down oxfords. As a teenager, I was an Elvis junkie one week and a Platters disciple the next, but nowadays I’m approaching my golden anniversary as a thoroughly faithful fan of Mozart and Beethoven. Fortunately, however, the opposite seems to be true in my teaching. In the last fifteen years, I have found it increasingly easy to abandon old teaching methods. I’ve cast off lackluster, cumbersome classroom techniques as easily as a ship’s crew tosses out ballast to make the vessel lighter and faster. In a way, I am a totally new teacher. My students from the ‘70’s would not recognize this gentle, tech-savvy, quietly adventuresome teacher. I say this not to brag, because I have no true idea whether I’m a better teacher now than I was when I was ranting and gyrating in front of a blackboard thirty years ago. I just know that, unlike Maggie, I can give up old ways of teaching as effortlessly as I give up one bow tie pattern for another, or one all-time favorite poem for a new one. I feel lucky to have reached a point in life where I can do so. It makes teaching English more like a voyage of exploration than an occupation.

ABOVE SUCCESS OR FAILURE

“… even the coming pain could not seem bitter,—she was ready to welcome it as a part of life, for life at this moment seemed a keen, vibrating consciousness poised above pleasure or pain. This one, this last night, she might expand unrestrainedly in the warmth of the present, without those chill, eating thoughts of the past and the future.”
-- from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (my italics)

    My teenage English scholars are probably too young to be able to do this, but my hope for them is that, like Maggie Tulliver, they can stay “poised above pleasure or pain” in my class (high grades or low grades, success or failure), and simply enjoy “the warmth of the present.” I have the distressing feeling, as I look out on the students during class, that few of them are enjoying the present. I fear they have already become members of the obsessed-with-the-past-and-future club that most adults belong to. I fear their minds are not on the matter at hand (which, like any present moment, glows with an inner light to those who are enough in attendance to notice it) but on the D or A that might await them on this week’s essay assignment. They are often as far away from my lesson as if they sat in a darkened room fretting about the darkness while a lowly but loyal lamp gave some light in the next room. My hope for them is that they can, at least occasionally, be struck with the understanding that pain and pleasure, success and failure, are eternal partners in the dance of life. C’s and A’s go unavoidably together like tails and heads. Trying to escape from pain or failure is like trying to run away from your feet. Perhaps now and then, my restive students can stop worrying about the past and future and just open their eyes and ears to the lesson of the day, be it about participles or a poem of Wordsworth. If they can simply be what they are – sensitive young people with always “vibrating” minds – they might be able to receive the blessings of English class, as modest and diverse as those blessings might be. Young as the students are, they might see that even failure has a flame of insight flickering inside it.

GRAVITY, KINDNESS, AND A PROMISE

“[Maggie] saw it was Dr. Kenn’s face that was looking at her; that plain, middle-aged face, with a grave, penetrating kindness in it, seeming to tell of a human being who had reached a firm, safe strand, but was looking with helpful pity toward the strugglers still tossed by the waves, had an effect on Maggie at this moment which was afterward remembered by her as if it had been a promise. The middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair.”
-- from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss(my italics)

    I have often been accused of excessive idealism (I happily embrace the description), so my appreciation of this passage will not surprise my friends: I entirely agree with what Eliot suggests about the role older people, including older teachers, can play.  For instance, I take pleasure in the fact that, at the age of 68, I can show “a grave, penetrating kindness” toward my students. At this point in my life, it’s not a silly, irresponsible kindness, one that simply wants to win over the students and become their “friend”, but rather a kindness that has some weightiness behind it and can penetrate into the heart of a situation. It’s a kindness, I might say, that wears work gloves rather than kid gloves, a kindness that delivers itself to the students more like strong medicine than a sugary soft drink. In Eliot’s words, I feel like I have, in some sense, “reached a firm, safe strand”, from where I can, indeed, offer a helping hand to the “strugglers”, my scatterbrained, befuddled, and brave teenage students. Having lived 54 more years than they, I’ve been there, done that so often that I can, to some degree, show the way to these nomadic souls in my classes. Perhaps, as the author suggests, older teachers like me can stand before our students like a “promise” – a guarantee that the darkness can eventually become a little lighter.  She uses the words “natural priesthood”, which might smack of egotism and false pride, but there may be some truth in the idea that a senior teacher can fulfill the role of a “priest”, who, to use the original Greek definition, could be thought of as simply an “elder”, someone who’s been through the wars, survived, and returned to offer instructions and warnings. And after all, don’t these young people in our classrooms need that? Don’t they need, in the midst of the pandemonium and dread of these times, to hear words from the enduring veterans of life’s wars, words that carry gravity, kindness, and a promise?

BEAUTIFUL AND SIMPLE

“We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanor is made up of artificial airs until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness.” (my italics)
-- from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

    When I read these words over breakfast this morning, I suddenly understood what I’ve been looking for in my students’ writing all these years: simplicity and beauty. I was taken aback by the clarity of the insight: all the students need to do to create successful academic papers is make their writing clear-cut and at least somewhat beautiful. When I talk with the kids about writing, I often get over-involved in unnecessarily complex guideline, rules, and requirements, forgetting how simple it is to describe good writing: it’s direct and well-dressed. Of course, it’s not always easy to do this kind of writing, but it might be easier, now, to explain what makes it good. Of course, I must remember that both qualities are necessary. As Eliot suggests, anything that has simplicity without beauty, including writing, can verge on clumsiness and dullness, and beauty without simplicity is often nothing more than flamboyance.  I want my writing students to find the lucky combination – the blending of straightforwardness and style. It’s really as simple as that.

SWEET CONVERSE

“…the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d.”

--Keats, in the sonnet “O Solitude”


I love these lines for many reasons, one of which is that they remind me of some of my English classes. Without doubt, many of my classes over the years have been neither sweet nor “refin’d”, but some of them do bring back memories of gracious discussions and classy ideas. When my students engage in discussions, they try their best to be “innocent”, to use the poet’s word, which, according to its etymology, originally meant “not hurtful”. I encourage the students to be frank and free in their comments, but never insensitive. Their minds are sharpening in these teenage years, but their words in my class must always be rounded with the smoothness of good will. Actually, many of their words spoken during class discussions are, as Keats put it, “images of thoughts refin’d”, simply because the thoughts which produced the words have been tumbling around in their minds for a time, the way stones tumble in a polishing machine. True, sometimes their words come from thoughts born out of the blue, but often they arise from ideas that have been quietly buffed up in the back-room laboratories of their minds. Even students who blurt are often blurting thoughts that subconscious processes have carefully filtered and purified, sometimes over a long period of time. It pleases me to think that Keats (a favorite poet of mine) might have enjoyed some of my classes, because they have, occasionally, involved “sweet converse”. Thinking of the origins of the word, when the students conversed in those good classes, they figuratively “turned around” – away from their self-absorbed preoccupations and toward each other, to better appreciate the “thoughts refin’d” – the surprisingly sophisticated ideas – of their classmates.

AN UNMAPPED RIVER

“Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know that the river is full and rapid ….”
--from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

I make careful plans for my course each summer, and I make detailed lesson plans each day, and yet, underneath it all, I know the “destiny” of my teaching is strictly, in Eliot’s phrase, “an unmapped river”. To stay with the analogy, making plans for classes is like a river traveler sketching an outline of what he hopes might happen in the next unknown stretch of an unexplored river. It’s comforting, and in some ways helpful, for the traveler to do this, but he has to realize that a large amount of pretending and air-castle-building is involved. In truth, he is totally ignorant of the countless possible scenarios (good and bad) that could lie ahead, just as I am as I make my rosy teaching plans. Of course, there’s some good news in all this, because it brings the quirky and adventurous element of teaching to the forefront. My work as a teacher of teenagers is oddly similar to traveling a nameless river, but that’s part of the pleasure of it. Each day I enter my classroom as I might enter one of Joseph Conrad’s steamers on a jungle river, fearful for the bumbling and failure that might lie ahead but keyed up at the prospect of surprising sights and discoveries.

The Mill on the Floss

I'm now in Book 6, Chapter 8, and I'm beginning to think I'm not going to like the way this book ends. (There are still a good 200 pages left.) Maggie, such a good person, seems to be falling in love with the foolish Stephen Guest, who is already engaged to Maggie's best friend, Lucy. I know these things happen in real life, and I know a novelist's job is to portray life as it really is -- but still, I don't want this to happen. I don't want Lucy to be hurt, just as I wouldn't want someone like her in real life to be hurt. I guess I'm too much of an idealist for a book like this. Oh well ... let's wait and see what happens.

GIVING IN ENGLISH CLASS

As we enter the annual season of giving, I’m reminded of the noteworthy role that giving plays in English class. When I think about it, each class is really an uninterrupted process of giving – a process that happens whether or not my students and I want it to, and no matter what kind of learning (or anti-learning) mood we’re in. In fact, what we most obviously give is our moods. As soon as my students and I enter the classroom, we share our moods with each other, giving our facial expressions, postures, and words as surely as we give gifts during the holiday season. If we’re in a bitter mood, then the gift we give each other will be bitter – but it’s still a gift, one we give by simply being with other people. Hopefully we usually give our expressions of happiness, our postures of interest and attention, and our words of friendship and decorum. My favorite kind of giving in the classroom is simply the giving of ideas. My students and I give countless ideas to each other during a 48-minute English class. If ideas were physical objects, you would see us constantly presenting each other with packages of special thoughts – some brightly wrapped, some informal and unwrapped, even some with scarred and scary appearances (but still gifts). Usually, of course, these gifts of ideas come enclosed in words. From the start of class to the end, there’s a stream of words passing among the students and me like a constant sharing of presents. Each word we speak is filled with special surprises – the exclusive feelings and thoughts that only we could have created – and they’re wrapped in the distinctive sound of our voices. They’re not always given with tenderness and good cheer, but they are given, because that’s what words do: they give themselves, by the thousands, in every English class.

STUDENTS AS TEACHERS

For thousands of years, human beings believed the earth was in charge of the universe and the sun merely one its satellites, and for thousands of years we have believed that the adult is the only teacher in the classroom and the children the only students -- but what if the second belief is as flawed as the first? I actually ponder this occasionally. What if, someday in the future, it becomes indisputably clear that we were wrong in our assessment of how education works? What if it turns out that the young students were actually the best teachers all along, and the certified adult educator was actually as much a pupil as a teacher? Strange is it sounds, is it any stranger than thinking, back in the Middle Ages, that the sun might actually be the center of the universe and the earth merely a minor satellite? Surely that would have been considered a crazy notion, but perhaps not much crazier than the idea that the students might be the finest teachers in the classroom. I’ve seen hints of this countless times. My students regularly teach me (and each other) new truths about the literature we read. I recall, for instance, being in class discussions about poems I thought I thoroughly understood –poems I had loved for decades – and listening quietly as the 8th grade scholars turned the light of their young thoughts on the lines and showed me unsuspected doors into the poem. I recall listening with a strange kind of respect and astonishment as 13-year-olds explained a sentence in To Kill a Mockingbird that had always perplexed me -- listening to teenagers unveil for me the meaning of a metaphor in The Tempest -- listening to young scholars explain to their senior-citizen teacher Pip’s adolescent sadness in Dickens' Great Expectations. Of course, I am the professional educator in my classroom, so I hope I do a considerable amount of teaching, but I wonder who is really the center of the teaching. Is it me with all my years of pedagogic experience and degrees and weighty how-to-teach books and cumbersome theories, or is it the spirited and almost-brand-new people sitting before me in class? Am I the central source of light in my classes, or does the brightest light perhaps come from the youngest people in the room – my teenage students, who have nothing but new ideas rising like suns inside them. I recall a famous person saying something about the kingdom of God being found where children are. I sometimes think the kingdom is in Room 2.

A VERY OLD STUDENT

Every so often, the thought comes to mind that my teenage students know more than I do. Of course, being about four times older than they are, I’m more knowledgeable in certain areas (thought not by much, I sometimes fear), but in other areas, they are the professors and I’m the humble pupil. Today, for instance, I was supposedly leading the children in a discussion of how to use an online research tool. Fairly quickly, however, I began to have the feeling all of us educators occasionally have, that the canoe of my teaching was rapidly moving into wild waters. I realized, to put it more simply, that I had very little idea what I was talking about. I realized that not only couldn’t I answer the students’ questions about the technology at hand, but I didn’t even understand their questions. Quickly, though, some handy honesty came to my rescue. I simply asked the students, “Can anyone help me figure out how this works?” Quickly a girl threw out a lifeline: “Sure, Mr. Salsich. First you do this …. and then you do this ...” and she proceeded to lead the class (and me) through a speedy lesson on how to make this digital tool useful. As I watched and listened, I noticed that many of the other students joined her in demonstrating its usefulness, and soon I began to feel like I was the only student in a roomful of teachers. I’m not quite sure why, but I felt lucky. I sat back in the chair, relaxed, and took pleasure in the experience – a grandfather being taught by a class of accommodating and erudite teenagers.

INVESTITURE AND DIVESTITURE IN ENGLISH CLASS

Since I discovered recently that the etymology of the word “invest” suggests a putting on of clothes (L. vestis, clothing), I’ve been thinking about my classes as a type of investment for the students. If we think of thoughts as the clothing our minds put on, I hope the students can leave each class wearing a brand new outfit of ideas. Hopefully every time they come to my class they can take off an old belief or two and dress themselves in a fresh and stylish one. We might even think of English class as a ritual of divestiture and investiture, in which old ways of thinking are officially taken off and set aside, and new robes of advanced thinking are ceremoniously donned. In this way, the students have a chance to feel special in each class, like they might feel when they put on a startling new shirt.

Not long ago, I overheard someone say they were hiking in a forest and soon found themselves in the middle of nowhere, and it reminded me of one of my more atypical goals for my 9th grade students. I would like them to feel somewhat lost in each class. I hope they occasionally feel befuddled, bewildered, dumbfounded, maybe even a little frightened by what I ask them to do. If, when we’re working on a new writing technique or exploring a new work of literature, they feel like they’re “in the middle of nowhere”, I say good for them, for now they can have the stirring experience of finding their way to somewhere. We often forget that in order to experience enlightenment we have to first be in darkness – that the pleasure of knowledge can only come after the discontent of ignorance. If my students are never “in the middle of nowhere” when they’re reading a poem, how will they feel the thrill of finding the somewhere of the poem’s heart and soul? In a sense, teaching English, for me, is about creating darkness so the students can better appreciate light. We don’t read “easy” books in my class – books that are totally filled with light – because then no finding, sighting, unearthing, uncovering, or stumbling upon is possible, and aren’t these what learning is all about? I force my students to read indistinct and shadowy books and work their way through foggy essay assignments, because there’s always the possibility of some sudden light ahead.

A FOUNDATION-LESS CLASSROOM

Like most of us, I was trained to conduct each class on a firm foundation – a rock-hard lesson plan with specific goals and objectives -- but over the years I have gradually come to realize that, in fact, there’s never any solid foundation under my teaching, no matter how much I may pretend otherwise. Of course, in the small picture, the one that shows me in my little classroom with my handful of students, it does seem possible to construct a sure foundation, an unshakable base that will make it possible to reach specific and detailed goals. If, in this small picture, I think of myself as an engineer and my students as malleable materials that can be manipulated to reach certain ends, then yes, I should be able, with my engineering mind, to set up a foundation for each class that will make these manipulations possible. If architects can construct enormous buildings by laying down sure underpinnings, then I should be able to build a successful lesson each day with the same approach. There’s one hitch, however: teaching is all about a much bigger picture, one that involves human beings, and human beings are not buildings. My young students are more like cyclones or skies or shoreless seas than buildings. Thinking I can lay a dependable foundation for a class with living, breathing teenagers is like thinking I can capture a cyclone or organize the sky or measure the sea. It’s a foolish kind of confidence. Yes, I continue to design careful lesson plans, but it’s like the sailor who sets out to cross the Atlantic solo in his meticulously designed boat: He really has no idea what will happen. I pretend that I know what’s going to occur in each class, and why and when, but the truth is that I’m setting out to fly in a shaky single engine plane, with breath held and fingers crossed. The lessons I painstakingly plan are like carefully fashioned good luck charms, and no more. Once class starts, all bets are off, the anchors are up, the winds are rising, and who knows where this spacious universe of learning will take us.

CONFORMITY DIVINE

Reading Book XI of Paradise Lost before school this morning, I came across the phrase “conformity divine”, and, thinking about it later, I wondered if that’s what I’m asking from my English students. Conformity, after all, is not always a negative act, one of self-abasement and selling out. In its purest sense, the word simply means fitting into a form – adapting one’s self to a particular method or a specific arrangement. When I dress for school each morning, in a sense I am “conforming”, since I’m fitting myself into forms of clothes that appeal to me – clothes that help me present an appealing “form” both to myself and to the public. If I studied the art of welding, I’m sure I would conform to the methods and strategies of my welding teacher – and I would become a better welder by doing so. Even something as simple as water filling a pot speaks of the naturalness and grace of conformity. As the water flows into the pot, it effortlessly adapts to the shape of the pot, a type of conformity that water has been stylishly performing for eons. I guess I want my students to conform the way water does – naturally and elegantly. When their thoughts flow into an essay, I hope the words fill up the sentences and paragraphs like water fills up a pot, with ease. I hope the students can adjust to the constraints of each writing assignment the way a stream flows easily into narrow channels and then simply spreads out when the banks widen. With water, conformity is always beautiful – “divine”, as Milton has it – and I hope it can be so with my students.

3-D IN THE CLASSROOM

This afternoon, as I was walking in the park, I was struck by the three-dimensional beauty of one particularly massive oak tree and the vista behind it. I stopped and stared for several minutes, appreciating the fact that my vision could see the depth of the scene – the limbs closest to me, then the limbs further and further back, and finally, in the distance, the immaculate meadow and the many distant trees. I was rather dumbstruck by this great gift I had been given – this ability to see our striking world in its depth and solidness. I heard somewhere that a new 3-D movie will be released soon, but I have no interest, for my 3-D movies are all around me -- even in my 9th grade classroom. Unfortunately, I almost never recognize the full beauty of what’s happening before my eyes as I’m teaching. I rarely stop and recall the fact that there is a kind of dazzling depth not only in the physical presence of the students and the classroom, but more importantly, in the lives of the students. If the tree and the park seemed vast to me this afternoon, how might my students’ lives appear to me if I could see them in their unbounded immensity and involvedness? I might feel like I should pay admission to see the astonishing 3-D movies each day in my classroom.

A Tour of My Classroom

ORDERLY FLAIR

I recall hearing about a sailor leaving on a six-month deployment who wore a small clearly visible golden bracelet on his wrist at the official departure ceremony. His uniform was squeaky clean and he stood at strict attention as the ship pulled out to sea, but the out-of-dress-code bracelet, a gift from his girlfriend, shimmered in the sunlight for all to see. That’s what I call orderly flair, and it’s what I try to encourage in my 9th grade writers. The students must conform to the severe requirements of unity and coherence (the qualities which make it easy for a reader to get a writer’s meaning), but I also want them to be unafraid to show some flashes of flair among their sentences. The sailor wore his strict uniform and the bright bracelet, and the students should feel free to dress up a sentence now and then with a showy simile or a string of multicolored adjectives. Panache comes to mind here– the kind of flamboyant confidence that allows a teenage essayist to string together a seventy-word sentence that moves with evenness and grace. Élan might also describe what I’m looking for in my students’ essays. They must write with tidiness and consistency, yes, but also with style and enthusiasm. Their sentences must march to the beat of the assignment, but let there be some clandestine skipping and dancing here and there. Let them write with clarity, but let the clarity be clothed with young-at-heart flamboyance.

NO EXPECTATIONS
Teachers, including me, often talk about having high expectations for students’ work, but there might also be some benefit in having absolutely no expectations. The word comes from the Latin word for “look”, and when we have expectations of any kind, we are looking for some particular kind of result. We have one specific goal for the students to aim for, and we look for that precise goal and no other. It’s a commendable and often necessary approach to teaching, but we have to realize there’s a certain amount of blindness associated with it. When I’m expecting a specific result from the students, I’m unavoidably blind to the countless other possible results that might arise from their work on an assignment. In an essay, a student’s ideas might parade by me on beautiful sentences, but I might not notice them because of my fixated focus on some other expected result. When I’m looking for a certain flower on a mountain trail, how many unforeseen and startling sights do I miss?

WALKING THROUGH BOOKS

As I was driving hurriedly to meet some friends for a quick lunch today, I began thinking that this is probably the way most of my students read – by hurrying. When they’re reading the popular vampire books, they most likely speed through the pages, restless to get to the next exhilarating point in the story. There’s probably very little lingering or savoring when they’re reading for pure pleasure. Like me rushing to lunch today, my students no doubt rush from chapter to chapter as they’re swept along by the captivating plot. When they come to my English class, however, they have to travel through books in a very different manner. In my classes, we walk through books, sometimes very slowly. I ask the students to think of To Kill a Mockingbird as a beautiful forest that needs to be slowly and carefully explored. Just as we probably wouldn’t drive speedily through a national park and then wave goodbye, I ask the students to walk the trails of Harper Lee’s book the way they might walk the pathways of a scenic woodland -- with watchfulness and inquisitiveness. As I was speeding my way to lunch, I surely missed countless treasures along the way – the flaring autumn trees, the old-world homes, the meadows with their seed-filled bounty – and I wonder how many treasures my students (and all of us) miss when they race through books like they’re simply streets to take them somewhere. Great books are not streets. The pages don’t take us to some destination. Each page – each sentence and word – is the destination, and only by reading with a special kind of love and attention can we enjoy the destination that arises before us in each and every sentence. In my class, we often linger over one sentence, exploring it the way we might explore a small cluster of flowers along a trail. We often stop to examine the usefulness of a single word, and to marvel at the total suitability of that word in that particular place on the page. As we unhurriedly walk through books in my classroom, it’s often a long and exhausting journey, and as a result, we don’t read as many books in a year as other English classes do. However, what’s important to me is not how many books we read, but how well, how deeply, how lovingly – and I’d give my students and me ‘A’s for that.

ON NOT CHOOSING FOR OURSELVES

The right and the ability to choose for oneself has generally been considered a privilege teachers should increasingly bestow on students as they move up through the grades, and I agree – sort of. Certainly I want to help my students develop the ability to sort through options on their own and then make an informed choice. That’s a known requirement for intelligent participation in an adult democratic society. In fact, the journey from childhood to adulthood might be described as the journey from almost never choosing for oneself to doing it regularly. However, there’s a troubling trace of egocentricity hidden in the phrase “choosing for yourself”, for it suggests that we might be closing down our doors and windows and focusing primarily on our own ideas and desires. It implies a possibly narrow-minded approach to choosing, in which our minds are, figuratively speaking, as tapered and constricted as a narrow window, through which we see mostly our own relatively meager knowledge and our own special needs. Rather than choose for themselves, I guess I would like to encourage my students, and myself, to choose for – and with – others. I would like us to always remember that any choice affects not only ourselves, but an infinite number of people and situations. In a sense, choosing for ourselves is not even an option, since we are everlastingly connected to the entire cosmos, and whatever choice we make will ripple out to distant, imperceptible shores. You might say we never choose for ourselves, but always for the whole world. Because this is true, I also want to encourage us (my students and me) to choose with the whole world – that is, with the assistance of all the wise people waiting to help us. The older I get (and I’m 68 now), the more clearly I see that there are countless numbers of learned people who could be of assistance to my students and me in making choices. Since our individual knowledge is downright paltry – not even a drop of water – compared to the bountiful knowledge that flows through the universe, and through the people we meet, my students and I need to be at least as focused on choosing with these people as on choosing by, and for, ourselves. We need to drop the pretense that we can always determine by ourselves exactly what we need to do, and learn to humbly ask for help and direction. In fact, humility may be the key virtue students and teachers need to develop – the ability to see and take advantage of the never-ending knowledge that resides in others. We need to be humble -- and prudent -- enough to put a sign outside our door that says, “Come in. I have a choice to make, and I need your wise help.”

SHUTTING UP

At a meeting last night, I’m glad I had a cold and didn’t feel up to participating in the discussion, because by shutting up and listening, I understood how much wisdom existed in these people sitting around me. Normally, I jump headfirst into a discussion, throwing out ideas almost like punches. To me, group conversations often seem like organized melees, with me right in the middle, throwing my mental and verbal weight around with little restraint. In a typical discussion, I truly don’t think I very often genuinely listen to anyone else, since I’m too busy listening to my own noisy mind. Last night was different. Because I knew I wasn’t going to talk at the meeting, I settled into a complete listening mode, as if the doors of my mental house were wide open, maybe for the first time ever at a meeting. The ideas shared by the people at the meeting entered my mind with great effortlessness, maybe because they felt a welcoming attitude. Instead of reacting to the ideas, I simply accepted them. Instead of glancing quickly and dismissing them, I just opened the door and let the ideas in. What it showed me, as the meeting progressed, was how wise all these people were – how really full of sensible and insightful ideas they were. I sat there in an actual state of amazement. If there was this much wisdom in this meeting, how much have I missed in all the other meetings by continually talking rather than really listening? By not shutting up and seriously paying attention, how much knowledge did I leave waiting outside my life?

I often ask my students to write in a rather formal manner, but I also encourage them to occasionally mix some funkiness with the formality. I want their sentences to be clear and orderly, but also a little jazzy now and then -- a bit of glitz and flashiness in the midst of their neat and methodical paragraphs. I thought about this again the other day when I was reading a student’s very tidy essay and came across these words: “Mr. Radley took his pants, messily fixed them up, and placed them primly on the fence.” The phrase “messily fixed them up” took me by surprise. It had a funky feel to it, a strange and distinctive quality that jumped up from the page. It was as if the voice of this girl -- who, like all students, is one of a kind – had suddenly and unmistakably spoken in the middle of her spick-and-span academic essay. The entire essay was a model of order and clarity, but there were a number of places, like this one, where the inner flashiness of this student could clearly be seen – places where the words, in a sense, broke the dress code. The writing was prim but also peculiar, stylish but also surprising. It’s a good way to write, I think -- sort of like showing up for an interview in a neatly pressed suit and brand new black sneakers.

CUTTING AND CARING

As the years have passed, I have grown increasingly interested in developing a sense of precision in my classroom. I don’t mean a finicky and slavish devotion to nit picking, just a sensible commitment to exactness and accuracy of expression or detail. The word “precise” comes from the Latin word for “cut”, and I would like to encourage all of us (my students and me) to “cut out” the details of each activity with confident meticulousness. As if we are working with high-level artist scissors, each facet of an action should be created with the ultimate kind of attention and regard. It seems to me that nature works this way. The wing of a butterfly is a model of exactitude, as is the landscape of never-ending stars above us, as are the zillion intricate cells within our bodies. Everything in the wide natural world, from a snowflake to a v-shaped string of geese in the sky, is specific, detailed, and explicit, and we try to aim for that in my classroom. Another word to use would be “accurate”, which I like because it comes from the Latin word for care. I want to promote a sense of caring in my students and me – the awareness that all things need to treated with sincere and compassionate care, including English assignments. When the students are accurate in their work on an essay, they are caring for it – watching over the sentences and nurturing the paragraphs until the essay comes to a fulfilling finishing point. When they read with precision, they are caring for the ideas and images contained in the words the way they would care for anything special and precious. It’s a good way to live, this caring for things in a precise and conscientious manner, whether in a small English classroom or in our larger, often loose and imprecise lives.

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