A COMFORTABLE ENGLISH CLASS

I would like my classes to be comfortable for my students, though by that I don’t mean easy. The word “comfortable” derives from the Latin words meaning “with power”, and easy assignments certainly don’t promote the feeling of being with power. Only by setting arduous tasks and challenging obstacles before the students can I encourage them to feel their own power. Only by driving them up steep literary trails and through thorny writing projects can I enable them to be truly comfortable – truly able, quite literally, to be with power. Of course, I always try to be there to comfort the students as they wrestle with my weighty assignments, but to comfort them is simply to remind them that they are already “with the power” they need. When I comfort students, I don’t pity, feel sorry for, commiserate with, or grieve for them; on the contrary, I simply remind them that they already have all the power necessary to do the task at hand. I remind them that they can be comfortable, in the true sense of that word, with the assignment.

IF NOT PLEASED, CONTENTED

         Reading a bit of “The Prelude” this morning, I came across the passage where Wordsworth describes the village people in France as being “pleased with [their] daily task[s], or, if not pleased/ Contented…”, and I quickly realized that that is exactly what I hope for my students. Realistically, I can’t hope that they will be pleased with every English class, or even with any English class. We climb some rugged literary mountains in class, and the writing the students are required to do is more like constructing a solid house from scratch than throwing up an umbrella on the beach. English class is an arduous workout rather than a walk in the park, and what teenager would feel genuinely pleased while doing demanding mental calisthenics? I do hope, however, that my students, like Wordsworth’s French villagers, can feel contented during my class – contented because they know they are doing what they should be doing, and what will probably bring some benefits -- at least down the road. Some of us feel contented at the gym even as we force ourselves to go harder on the treadmill, because we know we need the exercise, and I hope my students, at least occasionally, feel contented in a similar way. If someone asked them if they were happy to come to English class each day, truthfully I imagine most would say no, but I would hope they might say they were “okay” with it. Perhaps they would say, “I hate the hard work, but I can accept it.” That kind of attitude would make a perfect atmosphere for class -- a full awareness of the wearying labor involved in reading great works of literature and writing weighty essays, and yet a peaceful acceptance of it because it’s simply what must be done for 48 minutes each day, and because, just maybe, there might be some compensation involved. Maybe they’ll reach the “summit” of Macbeth and enjoy the startling view, or maybe they’ll build an essay that’s as sturdy and stylish as a palace.

PLAYING A PRIZED ROLE

As a boy, I always enjoyed dressing up in costumes (not just at Halloween, but anytime) and I actually still do. In fact, you might say I wear a costume every day in my classroom, and I don’t just mean my bow tie and sweater: I put on a sort of inner costume when I’m teaching. I think of myself as playing a role – that of a senior citizen middle school English teacher – and so, as I’m preparing for school in the morning, I don an interior “set of clothes” – a mindset, a way of thinking – that’s appropriate for the role. Since I take this role seriously, I want to be fully prepared when the curtain of my classroom goes up every day. To some, this may sound odd, even irreverent, as though I’m not taking my profession seriously, as though it’s merely a trivial pastime. Quite to the contrary, teaching is an enterprise of great significance to me, just as a prized role is of great significance to an actor. I want to play this teaching “part” with sincerity and enthusiasm, since it’s a role I longed for as far back as my high school days. If an Oscar were given for “best dramatic or comedic performance as a teacher”, my unvarying goal would be to win one. Yes, I do take my role as a teacher seriously, but it is just that – a role, a part I play, a character I portray, a performance I put on each day. It’s not so strange, really, to think of it this way. I’m simply doing what the universe does. Each day, it plays different roles, puts on different costumes – clouds one day, sparkling light the next, train wreck one day, widespread happiness the next. The universe moves from mornings to noons to nights with perfect aplomb, and I try to move through my roles in a similar way, easily taking off one inner costume and putting on another – quiet reader, writer, washer of dishes, grateful grandfather, peculiar old English teacher.

STEPPING OFF THE STAGE

More and more, I feel the need to observe myself as I go about my teaching duties. I need to occasionally step to the side of the stage, in my mind, and simply watch this 68-year-old teacher perform in his classroom. If could do this now and then, I would see that everything, in a way, is just fine – that no matter what I do in the classroom, including no matter what mistakes I make, the show turns out to be fairly satisfactory. Stepping back and observing myself would settle me down, make me see that teaching, in fact, is nothing personal. Education is not about some center-stage, powerhouse teacher leading his students to the heights of wisdom. English class is not a drama with a protagonist called Mr. Salsich. It’s just another of a zillion enthralling pageants the universe puts on for entertainment’s sake, and getting down off the stage now and then, at least in my mind, would help me appreciate it. “Wow,” I might say, “look at me up there trying to teach. Whether I succeed or fail, I seem to do both pretty well. I seem to be excellent at both winning and losing in the classroom.”

THOUGHTS LIKE SEEDS

        There will be some serious “planting” done in Room 2 today. My young students will be with me for roughly four hours, during which time we will create, among us, maybe 500,000 thoughts. We actually have no say in the matter. Whether we want them to or not, our minds are constantly manufacturing ideas, sending out thoughts like seed-spreaders. It’s as if there’s a factory inside us that works nonstop to produce a ceaseless stream of thoughts.  What’s interesting to me is that these thoughts – all of them -- take root in our minds and sprout and send out shoots of other thoughts, minute by minute as my classes proceed.  My students and I are not aware of this process, of course, but it’s happening nonetheless – a silent, incessant explosion and proliferation and dispersion of ideas inside us. I suppose many of our thoughts during my English classes simply fall into the soil of our lives and lie dormant for periods of time, perhaps even years – but I believe they never just disappear. Our teenage and senior-citizen minds are like vast meadows where thoughts beyond count rest beneath the surface, waiting for the right time to spring up and offer assistance. Some of these sleeping ideas were brought forth in English class, born during some bookish discussion or perhaps during one of the many daydreaming expeditions my students surely engage in while I’m teaching. It gives me satisfaction to know that no thought generated during my classes (or anyone’s classes) goes to waste, that every wandering, wayfaring idea inside our minds will be productive and helpful at some point. Years from now, a former student might be speaking with a friend, when suddenly, unbeknownst to her, old thoughts from 9^th grade English might rise up in secret and show her the words to use. Or perhaps a former student might be suffering a great sorrow years from now, when somehow an idea born back in my class might come into blossom and bring light and relief.

PLAIN OLD FEAR

It was plain old fear.

It had followed me for years,

and yet I had never seen it

as it really is,

but yesterday it yelled in pain

as it prepared to die.

It didn’t actually die,

but simply disappeared

like subsiding haze,

or a wordless summer evening.

It was dressed in scraps,

its bones twisted,

its face like dusk

as it disappears

among the limitless stars.

QUIVERING PEALS AND LONG HALLOOS IN ROOM 2

In a famous passage from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”, the poet writes of a boy who, when “the earliest stars” began to shine, “blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,/ That they might answer him”, and I must confess to often feeling like that lonely lad when I’m teaching 9th graders. In an odd way, my classroom often feels like friendless and rough backcountry, perhaps not too different from Wordsworth’s “cliffs/ And islands of Winander”, and there I am, day after day, sending out “hootings” to my students, hoping they will respond. Like the boy in the poem, I try different kinds of signals to the kids – hopefully a well-planned lesson, maybe a raised voice, perhaps stares, gimmicks, stunts, devices, attention-grabbers, even dead silence – anything to get even a faint response. It’s as if I’m high on a cliff, alone, with the students somewhere out in the pathless forest, and my voice goes forth like a solitary searcher: Is anyone out there? There are many days when my teenage “owls” stay as concealed and silent as Wordsworth’s sometimes were, but there are also days when they do respond – days when, for some mysterious reason, the call of my lesson plan stirs up untamed and enlightened replies. On those days, my classroom is a wilderness in a most beautiful way – a place where unspoiled adolescence and innocent old age team up to make some fairly raucous but graceful intellectual “music”. On those days, I sometimes read, in the evening with some Merlot accompaniment, the rest of the passage from “The Prelude”:

“… and they would shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call,--with quivering peals,

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of jocund din!”

I wouldn’t want to have “quivering peals” in my classroom every day, just as I wouldn’t want to hike in a wilderness every day, but coming every now and then, those “jocund” days serve to remind me of the wonderful folly and wildness that seems to lie hidden in the heart of good teaching.

DISABILITIES, OR DIFFERENT ABILITIES? (Part 3)

         I’ve said in my two earlier posts on this subject that different learning abilities (sometimes called “disabilities”) might be considered gifts rather than shortcomings, but I didn’t mean to imply that no pain is coupled with those gifts. It seems to me that sorrow and happiness are two sides of the same coin – that you can’t have one without a fair share of the other – and so it seems natural that our gifts will probably produce an equal amount of pleasure and pain. Of all the gifts I have received, none has produced more pleasure than my body, but neither has any gift brought me more pain. Over the long years of my life, my body has often caused me severe pain, but it has also brought me indescribable pleasure, which is why it remains the greatest of gifts. The fact that the pleasure rotates fairly evenly with pain in no way diminishes the happy rewards I’ve received from this gift of a human body. The same is true of the other amazing gift, my mind. I have suffered greatly because of this magnificent instrument – runaway thoughts, utter confusion, ever-revolving fears and worries, even downright dejection and depression – but all of this misery has been beautifully balanced by the numberless mental miracles all of us experience. Does the suffering my mind has caused me mean that it’s not a magnificent gift – that it’s a “disability”? The answer is obvious – and I wonder if we could replace the word “mind” in the previous sentence with “dyslexia”, “ADHD”, or any of the countless atypical, uncommon, out-of-the-ordinary learning abilities science has discovered. Yes, ADHD does cause serious problems for people, but so, sometimes, do their internal organs, their arms and legs, their loved ones, their houses, their cars, and every other wonderful gift life has given them. Being human – in any way, shape, form, or condition – is often a troublesome and painful enterprise, but it is still an astonishing gift to be cherished. A colleague of mine has recently learned this lesson. After living for years with his own reckless temper tantrums, mood swings, inability to focus, and colossal unpredictability, he was finally diagnosed this past summer with ADHD. I vividly recall the day he told me about the diagnosis. He was, I think, overjoyed that he now realized what had been going on inside him all those years. He didn’t say he realized what was wrong with him – just that he understood himself a lot better. After giving the diagnosis, the doctor asked him what his profession was, and when my friend told him he was an 8^th grade English teacher, the doctor smiled. “I’ll bet you love your work,” the doctor said, “and I’ll bet you’re damn good at it.” My friend was surprised, and said, “Yes, I do love teaching, and I guess I am fairly good at it. How did you know?” The doctor told him he knew simply because, in his wide experience, he’s learned that ADHD can be a genuine asset to a teacher, especially one who works with teenagers.  He told my friend that ADHD will continue to cause all kinds of problems for him, but that he should always keep in mind the strengths and talents – the gifts – it also gives him. He said he wouldn’t be nearly as good a teacher without it.  I will end with a quote from a graduation speech by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., given at Eagle Hill (a school for students who learn in unusual ways) in 2008:

“The secret is that Eagle Hill is a covert operation, code name, Eagle Hill. The true mission of Eagle Hill is to find and train the most interesting, talented, gifted, unusual, tenacious, humorous, creative, hard-working, out-of-the-box future innovators and leaders that can be found among kids of or near high school age. Believing that it might cause these students to develop a swelled head were they told of the true mission of the school, it was decided years ago to disguise what happens here as the treatment of learning disabilities. This would encourage you all to work all the harder, not that you need all that much of such encouragement, and it would also help in fund-raising, as donors prefer to give to people in need. But now, I can let you in on the secret. Having both ADD and dyslexia myself, I am a member of the secret society you all belong to, the society of the

magnificently-minded.”

LEANING

Lean on me,

her hand said to her chin.

So she did,

while the wind outside

leaned against the houses

and the houses leaned over

to let the trees speak

and the trees leaned

with their leaves

and the leaves leaned

on each other like friends

and friends in Asia

and America leaned

into each other’s lives.   

DISABILITIES, OR DIFFERENT ABILITIES? (Part 2)

As I suggested in yesterday’s post, I heartily support the work our learning specialists do in helping out-of-the-ordinary (sometimes called “disabled”) learners develop new skills that will help them find success in our highly standardized system of education. This doesn’t mean these unique learners should be ashamed of their in-born ways of learning (one of these ways is called dyslexia, another is known as ADHD), or that they should try to totally replace them (which is probably impossible anyway.) On the contrary, they should accept the way they naturally learn as a rare and useful gift they were born with. The fact that these gifts are not generally recognized as such, but are more commonly thought of as defects, deficiencies, weaknesses, or flaws, should not discourage these unusual learners from accepting, and even celebrating, their extraordinary (literally “outside of the ordinary”) learning styles. Lest that sound like a facetious remark, it’s now widely known that an unusual percentage of people with atypical learning styles (like dyslexia, ADD, etc.) have exceptionally high IQs. For some reason that science does not yet understand, one of the endowments that often come with advanced intelligence is some type of odd and uncommon way of learning, like ADHD. In fact, innumerable successful people have had the distinction of having one of these learning dissimilarities, and it may be that their success stemmed, in part, from the quirky and eccentric way in which they learned. This, of course, is nothing new. Over the past 20 years, many articles and books have been published advocating the idea that what we call disabilities should rightly be called gifts. Not surprisingly, there is a large group on Facebook called “The Gift of Invisible Disability”, on which I found this quote: “I am only different because I do not see, hear, focus, or connect the way you do - because I have a different way of learning. Yes I am different but only because I have a gift that you do not.” The point is that conditions like dyslexia do not have to be thought of as weaknesses, disadvantages, or drawbacks, just as being 6’10” doesn’t. Dyslexia and tallness (or being 68 and bald) are just the way things are for some of us. Whether we decide it’s a disability or a gift is entirely up to us.

DAREDEVIL

He’s a daredevil
when he drives to school.
He dares to do the speed limit
precisely as it’s posted.
He’s brave enough to
take his time turning corners,
to come to a total stop
at stop signs. He even smiles
and waves to strangers in crosswalks,
a gutsy act for a guy.
See if you can spot him.
He’s the slowest car
on the street, the one
with the chutzpah
to choose giving way
over getting ahead,
the one
with the daring driver.

DISABILITIES, OR DIFFERENT ABILITIES?

Over the years, my school, like most, has gotten increasingly into cataloging the various disabilities of the students, but, as much as I appreciate the work of our learning specialists, I wish they would replace the term “disability” with “different ability”. The prefix “dis” is strictly a negation, implying, as one dictionary puts it, “the absence or opposite of something positive”, and I hate to place that kind of label on a student. If a student, for instance, learns very slowly, couldn’t we say she has a different way of learning, instead of suggesting that some positive skill is missing in her? There are a thousand roads to Mecca, and there are way more than a thousand ways a person can learn. Who are we to suggest that certain ways of learning are more positive or correct than others? Of course, some methods of learning lead to more “success” in our highly standardized school programs, which is why it’s important for specialists to help these “different” learners become skilled at new ways of learning – ways that will enable them to more easily keep up with our fairly uniform curriculums. I just don’t like the notion that there are only a few constructive ways to learn, and that anyone who learns in other ways is somehow deficient. There’s the negative prefix again: “de” suggests the absence of or the opposite of, implying that our unusual, atypical, out-of-the-ordinary learners are somehow incapacitated or (to use a no-no, politically incorrect word) crippled. I prefer to see them as simply different. For me, it’s as simple as this: most kids learn one way, these unique kids learn in other ways. That doesn’t mean they have a disability. Who knows, by observing them carefully instead of labeling them as disabled, we might begin to understand – and maybe appreciate -- their different, weird, even wonderful ways of learning.

CLOUDS

They can help

when you need a heart-filled

fall of rain, or a stretch of shady days,

or a little coolness

to care for your troubles.

They can cry with you,

and can float above you

like life preservers,

and can cover your day

like a quilt. Light

and soft like you,

they are still strong

like you.

SIMPLICITY

I realize more and more how important simplicity is to good teaching, but I also realize that it’s not easy to be a simple teacher and run a simple classroom. One of the trickiest skills I’ve had to learn, and am still learning, is how to be completely straightforward, direct, and down-to-earth in my work with students. It sounds odd to say that being simple is a “tricky” skill, but that’s part of the irony – that simplicity is one of the most complex qualities a teacher has to acquire. As the song reminds us, it’s a gift to be simple, but it’s also a talent I can consciously develop and refine. I can, for instance, practice distilling my lesson plans down to the point where both the goals and the procedures are utterly clear – no frills, trimmings, or add-ons. I can also simplify what I say in class: less shooting from the hip, more silent pauses, more thinking before I speak, fewer words but more carefully laden. This in no way means my teaching should be dull. Simplicity is not lifelessness. One of my favorite definitions for “simple” is “humble and unpretentious”, qualities I admire in a teacher – but they don’t imply dullness. A river, to me, is one of the simplest marvels in nature, but it’s loaded with the opposite of dullness. It basically does what rivers must do, simply flows where all rivers must flow, but does so with indescribable liveliness and force. I guess I’d like to teach in a strong but simple way, the way a river flows.

CLOUDS

They can help

when you need a heart-filled

fall of rain, or a stretch of shady days,

or a little coolness

to care for your troubles.

They can cry with you,

and can float above you

like life preservers,

and can cover your day

like a quilt. Light

and soft like you,

they are still strong

like you.

THE WIND

The wind blew,
but not just by his house.
He knew it was blowing
in Nebraska, and near
an old broken man in Maine,
and through the life of someone
whose family has forgotten her,
someone who lives in this world
like a wind herself,
a gust that goes by you
and you keep going
to the store to get groceries,
and she blows out
across a sea with no shores.
He sat with his book
and listened to the wind,
the words calling out
like lost friends.

REVISING AND POLISHING AN INTERPRETATION

As I was talking with a colleague yesterday about literature circles, he mentioned that a small-group discussion can actually be a form of revision, not of students’ writing but of their thinking – and I found it an intriguing notion. He said when students engage in conversation about a book, they can actually take part in a process very similar to amending and modifying a piece of writing. Assuming they are open to new ways of thinking about the book, their thoughts can alter in intricate and subtle ways as the discussion proceeds. You might say they come to the discussion with a ‘first draft” of interpretations, but by the end of the discussion they are closer, perhaps, to a second and maybe more polished way of looking at the book. I spend a lot of time revising my own writing (it’s actually the most cheerful part of the process for me) and I require my students to do the same, but I hadn’t considered the notion of “revising” our thoughts about a book. If dusting off, rearranging, reshuffling, fiddling with, and polishing a piece of writing seems to get me closer to creating something like a modest work of art, perhaps participating in a book discussion can do the same for my students and me. Perhaps, when the last discussion is finished, we can each be proud that we have created a revised, refined, even somewhat sophisticated, maybe even “beautiful” interpretation.

CONVERSING AND DISCUSSING

Exploring in the dictionary this morning, I discovered that both ballets and storms take place in my English classes. The word “conversation” derives from the Latin word for “turn with”, which is what ballet dancers do together on stage and what my students and I do when we talk with each other about literature. When we share ideas across the classroom, we try to turn toward each other in earnest partnership, and we often turn with each other as we adjust our thoughts and come to gracious agreements. It’s satisfying to think of our conversations as a kind of dance – sometimes litigious and free-wheeling, to be sure, but perhaps always stylish in a coarse and youthful way. Of course, classroom conversations can also be called discussions, and the dictionary tells me that these might be better compared to storms than dances. When I read that the word “discuss” comes, to my surprise, from the Latin words for “shake apart’ or “dashed to pieces”, I immediately thought of the many occasions when ideas were flying around my classroom in the blustery weather of adolescent disagreements. Usually the students have maintained a modicum of civility during these tempestuous discussions, but still, a visitor walking into the room might decide to take cover. When young, impassioned people discuss in a sincere and liberated way, ideas will, in fact, be shaken apart, and a few cherished thoughts might be dashed to pieces. It’s as far from a ballet as you can get, but perhaps, in its way, just as beautiful.

CREATION

It starts in commonplace things,
in a glance, in a voice.
It can start as we're standing
in the supermarket
with loaves of refreshing bread
in our basket.
Hands moving stylishly
as they tie the laces on shoes
could be the beginning.
A piece of perfect toast
could start a procession of thoughts
that never stops.

ONE WINDOW

He had only one window

but it brought what he needed --

the night with its modest secrecy,

the morning making its light,

two trees standing just

as they’ve always wanted to stand.

Say he lived in paradise,

would it be any better

than his single small window

with wonders smiling in

at him?

PROJECTS AND PROJECTING

Since some of my students are currently engaged in a complicated long-term activity, the kind we often call a  “project”, I’ve been pondering some various meanings of that word. It derives from the Latin “to throw forward”, as in “seeds are projected from the tree”, and lately I’ve been picturing my students doing just that – using this project to hurl themselves out into the academic world, hoping someone (including me) might catch sight of them speeding across the sky of learning like so many blazing arrows.  Indeed, their gazes in class sometimes seem extra intense these days, as if, inside themselves, they are speeding here and there across the literary landscape, searching for exotic landmarks, perhaps some rare ironies or a stretch of striking metaphors.  Who knows where they will eventually land when the project comes to a close, but I’m sure they’re hoping it’s someplace soft, hospitable, and satisfying, where they’ll be welcomed, conceivably, by appreciative supporters. Perhaps the students are also interested in using this project to project an image of themselves. Maybe they imagine a small instrument inside them that is able to shine an image on the front screen of their appearance, and they’re hoping my daunting long-term assignment will enable that image to be luminous with wisdom and self-assurance.  Possibly they see themselves, when they finally receive their good grade for the project, walking down the halls at school with the soft light of their own talents flashing out from some secret projector inside them.

THE FAERIE QUEENE

I've been reading parts of Spenser's great poem today, and came across these very musical lines:

As gentle Shepheard in sweete euen-tide,
    When ruddy Phoebus gins to welke in west,
    High on an hill, his flocke to vewen wide,
    Markes which do byte their hasty supper best;
    A cloud of combrous gnattes do him molest,
    All striuing to infixe their feeble stings,
    That from their noyance he no where can rest,
    But with his clownish hands their tender wings
He brusheth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings.

And here's another lovely stanza::

At length they chaunst to meet vpon the way
    An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad,
    His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray,
    And by his belt his booke he hanging had;
    Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad,
    And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent,
    Simple in shew, and voyde of malice bad,
    And all the way he prayed, as he went,
And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent. 


...and another ...

A little lowly Hermitage it was,
    Downe in a dale, hard by a forests side,
    Far from resort of people, that did pas
    In trauell to and froe: a little wyde
    There was an holy Chappell edifyde,
    Wherein the Hermite dewly wont to say
    His holy things each morne and euentyde:
    Thereby a Christall streame did gently play,
Which from a sacred fountaine welled forth alway.

No poet writing in English has ever written more musically!  

WORDSWORTH, "THE PRELUDE"

I've been enjoying "The Prelude" again, that long, graceful, and profound poem -- among the best I've ever read. I just started Book 4, and it promises to be a beaufiul one as the poet recalls his summer escapades after the first year at Cambridge. As usual, I especially love the graceful iambic rhythms. It's what I love best in all poetry -- the enchanting music the words make.

IF ONE OF US SUCCEEDS

Not long ago I felt the meaning of the old saying that “if one of us succeeds, we all do”. After a somewhat discouraging week of teaching (I felt like I had completely blown several lessons on writing), I was grading essays one morning, and growing even more dispirited. One after another of them seemed disorganized and bland, and, as I often do, I began blaming myself. I’ve always felt that if my students aren’t learning how to write, the buck stops at the my desk, so I started beating myself up yesterday morning: Geez, Salsich, don’t you know anything about teaching writing?? Fortuitously, however, in the midst of my gloominess I came upon a perfectly
graceful and perceptive essay by an 8^th grade girl. I was enthralled as I read it. She had obviously followed my instructions meticulously, and she used almost all the techniques I had recently taught the class. The writing charmed me with its orderly elegance. When I finished reading it, I set it down, took a deep breath of reassurance, and smiled. Perhaps I wasn’t such a feeble writing teacher after all. My student had succeeded, and therefore, to some degree, so had I. Perhaps if one of us succeeds, we all do.

A TIME TO START AND A TIME TO STOP

The other day, a fine teacher at my school made a simple but instructive suggestion concerning calming student restlessness during class: give a definite stopping time for each activity. As I thought about her suggestion later, it occurred to me that some of my students’ restiveness might stem from their sense that English class has no definable boundary lines – that it’s a sort of a formless ocean of grammar rules and essay topics and novels and poems, a 48-minute period where nothing ever really starts or ends, but activities sort of swirl around in an incessant and fairly directionless manner. I do try very hard to present an orderly lesson plan each day, but I wonder if my plans sometimes appear to my students to be more like blurred overviews than precise, step-by-step diagrams. I wonder if they feel lost in a haze of general English goings-on, rather than clear-headed and fully alert on a marked path to a specific goal. My colleague’s suggestion makes some sense. If I tell the students, for instance, that we will discuss a certain poem for precisely 14 minutes, ending at 10:22, at which time we will have a 2-minute summary of the discussion and a 2-minute period for silent reflection and note-taking, perhaps this would help them feel more oriented, more purposeful. If they knew, in other words, that there was a specific moment when an activity would stop, they might possibly give themselves more heartily to the activity. Of course, I have to remain flexible in my work as a teacher, but flexibility can too easily dwindle away into mere sluggishness and puzzlement, where an activity doesn’t really end but just sort of drifts off into side streams and disappears (as often happens, to my frustration, in our faculty meetings). Instead of allowing the discussion to be extended and then possibly fade away among the worn-out students, a better way to employ flexibility might be to say, at 10:22, “We clearly need more time to discuss this poem. Let’s continue with our discussion tomorrow. Now let’s do our 2-minute summary, as scheduled.” Perhaps giving my fidgety students specific stopping points would make school seem less like an endless ocean of perplexity and disorder, and more like a series of informative journeys to precise targets: e.g., 20 minutes to review the story, 14 minutes to practice using appositives, 2 minutes to breathe deeply and daydream.

CHERISHING THE WATERHOLES

         Yesterday there were, as usual, some brief periods during my classes when some students had nothing to do. This happens, for instance, when students are copying information from the board and the faster writers have perhaps thirty seconds to kill as they wait for classmates to finish. Generally these might be considered wasted moments to be avoided, but I like to think of them as refreshing pauses to be enjoyed. Most of my students rush around in their young lives in a frantic fashion, doing ten tasks and then ten more and then ten more. I disagree with teachers who say that students live relatively lighthearted lives, because what I see in my school could best be described as a madcap tumult of activity: class after class after class with a two-minute break, then sports, then homework, homework, homework. Yes, the young people do find time to twitter, text, email, and otherwise entertain themselves, but, even so, they are pretty much caught up in our modern maelstrom of non-stop doing. I doubt if they have many thirty-second periods in their days when they do absolutely nothing, so I consider it their good fortune that they occasionally come upon these small waterholes of silence and serenity in English class.  When a student has finished writing down an assignment, or when a break occurs between activities, perhaps there’s a moment or two when nothing’s happening for a few students save the faithful rising and falling of their lungs. Surely this is a gift to be cherished. This is not time to kill but to savor, like a little waterhole in the students’ anxious and hasty lives.

LEBRON JAMES AND STRUCTURED WRITING

I require my students to write many highly structured essays, and I often remind them that it’s a LeBron James-like endeavor. James, after all, is required to work within a very structured set of guidelines. There are dozens of clear-cut rules he must abide by as he goes about producing his astounding feats in a basketball game, to say nothing of the relatively small dimensions of the court upon which he must perform. In addition, he has a coach and teammates who expect him to follow a game plan that, at his level of play, is no doubt detailed and convoluted. It might seem to be a miracle that he is able to be so creative within all this structure, but I see it differently: his creativity, I believe, is enhanced by the structure. Imagine if he had to follow no rules, no game plan, and there were no boundaries to the court. Imagine if he could do whatever he pleased with the ball, including double-dribbling, running while carrying the ball, and even dashing up into the stands with the ball, or outside the building and down the street. It sounds ridiculous, mostly because we know he wouldn’t be fun to watch anymore. We know, when we think about it, that it’s precisely the rules and boundaries that make his creativity so noteworthy. Working within the rigid structure of the game, LeBron James is a maker of marvels because of the structure. I sometimes remind my students of this when I give an essay assignment -- tell them again that all the rules and guidelines I set up for their essay assignments are actually designed to help them set their ingenuity free. I tell them I would be doing them a disservice if I simply said, “Write whatever you want however you want to”, because who is impressed by a writer – or basketball player – who isn’t pushing against or bouncing off or stretching or manipulating or dancing with (as James does) a structure and a set of rules? To put it another way, who is impressed by a writer or athlete (or any type of artist, for that matter) who faces no challenges or obstacles? Where is the creativity in that? My final reminder to the students is that perhaps the most creative writer in our language, Shakespeare, wrote all his plays and poems within very strict guidelines, including the fairly inflexible formula of iambic pentameter. He discovered that the most exciting creativity lies hidden inside structures and rules, and so, I think, has LeBron James – and so, I hope, will my students.

THE ENGLISH FACILITATOR

I sometimes think my main responsibility as a teacher is not so much to help students learn as to make sure the learning they’re already involved in carries on. It occurs to me that I’m not so much a teacher as a facilitator – someone who makes it as easy (L. facilis) as possible for the students to continue to flow with the process of learning, a process as pervasive and enduring as the wind. When the students walk into my classroom each day, they are already involved with this process. They are thinking or feeling deeply about some issue, be it a serious personal predicament or simply the look of the light snow falling on the ski trails last weekend. Their minds and hearts are working hard, as usual, and hard work means learning – not the academic kind of learning we’re caught up in as teachers, but the learning that happens constantly because they, like all of us, are continuously thinking or imagining or supposing or pondering or estimating or presuming or wondering. In other words, they are being educated at all times, including the moment they enter my room for English class. If I can keep that in mind, if I can remember that my students, in a sense, are working through their own “lesson plans” as they take their seats in my room, then perhaps my lesson won’t be a complete disruption of their own personal education (as it often is, I’m afraid), but rather a reasonable and fairly enjoyable trip down a branch of the great river of learning they’re always traveling.

AFFINITIES IN ENGLISH CLASS

         Messing around in a dictionary the other day, I came upon the word “affinity”, and began mulling over its connection to my English classes. One definition of the word is “a similarity of characteristics suggesting a relationship”, and as I thought about my classes, a crowd of similarities and relationships came to mind. It occurred to me, for instance, that all of us – my students and I – are similar in a very basic way: our bodies interact with the same air. As we’re discussing a short story or learning about using dependent clauses, the trillions of cells in our bodies are being refreshed by the zillion oxygen atoms pulsating in my classroom, and “used” oxygen atoms, in the form of carbon dioxide, are flowing by the zillions out of all of us and back into the air of the classroom. While I’m explaining the homework assignment, this ocean-like process of oxygen-give-and-take is surging among and through us, teacher and kids alike. In this sense, we all have a fundamental affinity with each other – a relationship as close as breezes in a great wind.  And this is just the start. There are, I realized, countless other affinities among all of us in my English classes. Each word we speak resonates inside each of us as a word we’ve probably heard innumerable times in innumerable contexts. It’s as if we’re all joined in an endless web of words, and each spoken word strikes the web and sends ripples ceaselessly out to the frontiers – or as if we are a fleet of small boats, and far beneath us the words we speak flow in unseen currents, carrying us along in ways beyond our understanding. A final affinity is simply the complex and inscrutable relationship among the works of literature we study. Each work we read could flash endless connections -- if only we could see all of them -- to every other work.  These types of affinities actually seem infinite in number. A poem could relate to any another poem, to any tree swaying outside in a wind, to a student’s grandmother’s illness, to single word on a street sign, to the sweep of stars overhead. In great literature, affinities are everywhere, because great literature (and who knows, maybe English class) stretches out to everywhere – opens all doors, breaks all boundaries, touches dust and stars.

CHORUS AND ENGLISH CLASS

         I often help with crowd control in our school’s chorus class (90 students and one teacher), and this morning I noticed some interesting resemblances between what happens there and what happens during discussions in my English classes. The teacher was teaching the group about the different parts they would be singing in an upcoming program – bass, alto, tenor, soprano – and, as she talked and then led them in rehearsal, I thought about the different parts my students “sing” when we’re holding a discussion. In the chorus, each voice blends its own special range of sounds into the group, and in my class the students try to mingle their unique personalities and ranges of ideas into the discussion. One student’s qualities and ways of thinking are as different from another’s as a bass is from a soprano, and yet both the ideas and voices manage to mix together in unexpectedly agreeable ways. Somehow, all the voices in the teenage chorus – high and low, silvery and squeaky, unspoiled and coarse – make harmonies and tunes together, and somehow a similar surprise occurs, at least occasionally, in English class. Of course, this takes some work – sometimes prodigious work – on the part of the teacher. Our music teacher painstakingly trains her singers to sing their various melodies while at the same time staying aware of the overall movement of the song, and I suppose you could say I train my students to blend their talents together in a discussion. The music teacher wants to take full advantage of each singer’s unique voice and range, and yet still produce a single harmonious musical piece, and, likewise, I want my students to bring their inimitable personalities to the discussion, but to also work together to create a conversation that flows in a rich and mellow way. Watching the chorus class this morning, it occurred to me that training students to take part in an intelligent and graceful discussion might be every bit as tricky as training them to sing in harmony. Perhaps I need to “rehearse” discussion techniques with the students. Perhaps I need to be more specific in showing them, for instance, how a skeptical student’s comment can be blended in smoothly with a classmate’s optimistic ideas, or how some “bass” ideas can finally mix in a nimble way with a few “soprano” insights and produce a sweet finale to a discussion.