Mr. Quallon kept a generous house in part because he was wealthy, and I hope that, even in my necessarily tightfisted school, I can keep a generous classroom. To me, that would mean a kind and big-hearted classroom, one that benevolently welcomes all kinds of kids and ideas. It would mean a charitable classroom, where the students and teacher are as interested in giving as in getting, as willing to distribute as to receive. It would mean, too, an abundant classroom, containing more than enough support and payoffs for everyone, enough honors for one and all to make students and teacher perhaps actually take sincere pleasure in their stay there, perhaps even think of it as a satisfying place for a stopover each day.
“ … her pliancy had ended in her sometimes taking shapes of surprising definiteness.”
-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
As the years have passed, I’ve tried, with some success, to become more pliable in my teaching, which is why I was particularly struck when I read the above words today. In the novel, Mrs. Gascoigne’s pliancy is not always constructive, but for a teacher it can be a useful and rewarding attribute. I guess I’ve gradually learned to be more elastic, bending and bowing with the students as we do our work. I’ve become better at adjusting and fine-tuning myself during a 48-minute class. When I’m teaching, I often think of trees and sailors – trees for their unfailing flexibility in winds of all kinds, and sailors for their judicious management of sails in shifting weathers. I picture myself as an old but limber beech tree – limbs grown long and large over the years, but still as flexible as ever, bending stylishly in breezes or storms. Teaching English to teenagers can be an unsettled, even tempestuous, enterprise, and suppleness is a necessity. I’ve noticed that old trees sometimes bend the best, and I’m hoping that might be true for old teachers, too. I also see myself, on certain days, as a sailor in a small ship with my students. Whatever the “weather” of the classroom throws at us – rowdy ideas, , unmanageable lesson plans, and assorted other surprises– the old teacher-captain has to be pliant enough to change plans, alter course, shift sails, and work with, instead of against, the conditions present in the classroom. I think of myself, sometimes, as a kind of “Elastic-man”, able to change shape and style at will, always ready to coil and curl and change directions as the students and I work through a lesson plan. Perhaps I should do mental aerobics before class, just to prepare my mind to be extra-flexible in the face of my fanciful and capricious teenager thinkers.
Sometimes it seems clear to me that my students and I are like-minded. That may seem strange to say, since I am a 68-year-old, wizened, old-world teacher and they are newly blossoming adolescents, but still, a strange similarity seems to exist among our thoughts. We seem to think a similar mixture of apprehensive, anxious, promising, and optimistic thoughts. They sometimes feel afraid, as I do, and they occasionally feel full of assurance and security, as I do. I often wonder if thinking is a kind of ocean, and my students and I are simply waves and swells in that single ocean. It’s easy to get spellbound by the notion that we’re all separate thinkers doing our own unique kind of thinking, but to me, that seems far from the truth. It’s also easy to look out at the ocean from the beach and pretend that each wave is a separate entity, but in that case we know it’s a pretense, because we know the ocean is a single vast force, of which waves are simply phases. Thinking, it seems to me, is also a single force, of which my students and I are phases, parts, and stages. The fears and hopefulness I feel are the same fears and hopefulness they feel, but just in different parts of the measureless sea of thoughts. We’re like-minded because we live in the same ocean called thinking.
The other day, after a student had shared her interpretation of a poem in class, I replied, “That’s a really surprising idea” – but it occurred to me later that all ideas are surprising. Because we grow so accustomed to ideas, their inimitability and lushness often go unnoticed, but the fact is that each idea is a pristine marvel. It seems clear to me that every idea is totally new, never been thought in just that way in the history of thinking. A thought may be similar to other thoughts, but in certain, sometimes secret ways, it has its own matchless style and substance. Every thought is like every moment – fresh, unblemished, and ready to do its irreplaceable work. Luckily for me, I spend my days in the classroom surrounded by the steady streaming of these new ideas – hundreds and thousands of them. In a 48-minute English class, my students and I together might produce 37,000 ideas, a figurative Mississippi River of spanking new thoughts surging through the classroom and our lives. If I thought about it as I was teaching, I might feel utterly overwhelmed by the reality of so much newness and brightness of thinking.
“…Till the whole cave, so late a senseless mass, Busies the eye with images and forms Boldly assembled…” -- Wordsworth, Book VIII, “The Prelude”
I sometimes feel like I’m entering a dark cave when I walk into my classroom. It’s not an especially dark room, but a strange kind of figurative darkness exists when I think of the inscrutability of both my students and the subject I teach. After all these years of teaching, teenagers are still as obscure to me as the darkest cave, and nothing, to me, seems more impenetrable than some of our greatest literature -- a Hopkins poem, for instance, or a story by Faulkner. In spite of all I’ve learned about teaching English over the years, I’m as much “in the dark” as I was when I started back in 1965, the only difference being that now I know I’m in the dark. It often reminds me of the above passage, in which Wordsworth speaks of “curious travelers” who enter a cave and, as their eyes slowly grow accustomed to the darkness, gradually see astonishing “images and forms” along the walls. As a teacher, I have definitely been a “curious traveler”, a wanderer in the wilds of English education, and much of my time, it seems, has been spent slowly adjusting to the darkness of my own ignorance. Even with the most carefully planned lesson, I almost always feel like I’m tiptoeing through a shadowy cave, watching and hoping for pathways and truths to slowly reveal themselves. It sometimes reminds me of a time near the start of my career when a veteran spelunker led my students and me into a cave in Missouri. When we entered a section of almost total darkness, we could see nothing at all, which is often the way I feel about ten minutes into a lesson. However, as we patiently waited for our eyes to adjust, we slowly began to see strange “images and forms” along the walls of the cave, fantastic shapes that had been hidden from us. “See?” our guide said. “All you have do is wait” – and I’ve tried to heed his advice all these years. Literature and teenagers are as murky as ever, but if I good-naturedly wait, wonders usually reveal themselves.
My work as an English teacher takes place in a small, nondescript classroom on a commonplace country road, and yet I often (almost every day) feel like I’m laboring in “vast regions”, to quote from Wordsworth’s lines above. He’s talking about solitary shepherds among the hills and valleys of England, but I might as well be a shepherd as I attempt to herd, persuade, guide, and sometimes simply drive my young students toward the goals I set for them. It’s often a solitary feeling, too – the sense that it’s just the students and I alone in a wilderness of spoken and written words. We wander here and there in our discussions as we try to find meaning in poems and stories, with me circling, prodding, containing, rousing, and stimulating. As the students write their weekly essays, they, too, probably feel like shepherds – or border collies – as they attempt to push their unruly words into reasonably recognizable paragraphs. However – though I’m not sure the students feel this way – I feel like a total “freeman” as I go about this sometimes lonely, hit-and-miss work of teaching. There’s “hazard” in the job, of course (wilting lessons, inscrutable students, parents on the prowl), but there’s more than enough “hope” (lessons like missiles, kids with grins to give away) to balance things out. I put in a great amount of “hard labour”, but I always find, to my amazement, a feeling of “majestic indolence” floating through me at odd moments during class. I often pause in the midst of a class and take a few seconds, privately, to express my thanks for my good life as a classroom shepherd. While kids in my care are sharing thoughts about a topic, I sometimes sit smiling in the classroom rocking chair -- a fortunate, privileged, prosperous 68-year-old guide and guardian.
“People who share a cell in the Bastille or are thrown together on an uninhabited island, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and humours so as to know where they must go warily and where they may lean their whole weight.” -- Robert Louis Stevenson, “Virginibus Puerisque”
Happily, my classroom is not much like a prison cell or an isolated island. There’s usually a fair amount of sparkle and merriment in my classes, and I don’t think my students feel much like inmates (even though the hard labor I force upon them may often seem punishing). There’s usually a spirit of comfortableness in my classes that would be hard to find on a deserted island. Yet, in a very real way, my students and I are strangers when we meet each day, strangers in the sense that what we show to each other, what we say and how we act, is just the slight surface of our vast and baffling lives. We actually know no more about each other than we know about the reaches of outer space. It’s as if we all stumble into Room 2 and greet each other afresh each day, washed up and stunned on an empty island. However, as Stevenson suggests, we usually “find some possible ground of compromise.” I’m a well-weathered senior citizen and they are unsullied, up-and-coming children, but we slowly “learn each other’s ways”, make concessions, and find the middle ground. I learn to “go warily” in certain areas with the students, and they learn, I’m sure when to tiptoe around me. Of course, I also steadily discover where and when I can “lean [my] whole weight” on the young people – let the influence of 68 years of learning and living gently but relentlessly urge them onward. We’re way different from each other – teenage children and a weathered old guy, restless kids and a stress-free granddad. We’re basically strangers sitting together in a small classroom each day, but we usually find Stevenson’s “possible ground” where sitting sometimes becomes sharing.
“…Who rides his sure and even trot While the world now rides by, now lags behind.” -- George Herbert, “Constancy”
Of all the virtues I admire in good teachers, none is more special to me than constancy. One definition is “the quality of being faithful and dependable”, which is exactly the way I hope my students would describe me. I don’t especially care if I’m an exciting or funny or creative or even “excellent” teacher (whatever that means) – but I very much want to be a faithful and dependable one. Amid the young scholars’ sometime muddled and mixed-up lives, I want their English teacher to ride his “sure and even trot” day after day. If some things fall apart around them, well, at least Mr. Salsich will be the same. Of course, “being the same” could mean being boring, but it doesn’t have to. It could simply mean being dependable – being a sort of solid rock in a fairly tumultuous world, a strong tree in the blustery lives of the students. Actually, “strong” may be exactly the right synonym for constancy in this regard. A teacher with constancy is a strong teacher – one who stays faithful to his principles in the midst of distress and distractions, one whom students can depend upon to be basically the same today and tomorrow as yesterday. Since there is more than enough caprice in my students’ lives, I don’t need to add any more by changing my behaviors and routines every other week. I guess I’m more interested in being a sound and steady teacher than an “exciting” one – more like a well-built building than the whimsical weather. “While the world now rides by, now lags behind,” may Mr. Salsich stay the same, a constant and true old teacher who has a few simple things to share with young scholars of English.
Is the recess, the circumambient world Magnificent, by which they are embraced: They move about upon the soft green turf: How little they, they and their doings, seem, And all that they can further or obstruct! 60 Through utter weakness pitiably dear, As tender infants are: and yet how great! For all things serve them: them the morning light Loves, as it glistens on the silent rocks; And them the silent rocks, which now from high Look down upon them; the reposing clouds; The wild brooks prattling from invisible haunts; And old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir Which animates this day their calm abode."
The little hedgerow birds, That peck along the roads, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step, His gait, is one expression: every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought. — He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten ; one to whom Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which He hath no need. He is by nature led To peace so perfect that the young behold With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels.
I have loved this poem for many years, and have always secretly harbored the hope that I could someday be like Wordsworth’s “Old Man”, especially in my work as a teacher. As a senior citizen, I am already an officially old man, and I’d like to learn how to do oldness with the “patience” and “mild composure” of this man. I’m not quite sure why, but I’m quite happy to be an old teacher, perhaps for some of the same reasons that this man seems happy. As the years have passed, I have found more “settled quiet” in my teaching, more opportunity to “move[]/ With thought” rather than with stress and strain and pain. Teaching seems more like the capricious breezes of spring than the somewhat stormy seasons of my earlier years in the classroom. In a way, it’s even rather nice that my students, like the “hedgerow birds” in the poem, sometimes seem to not even notice me in the classroom. I don’t mean that they’re more disrespectful or unruly than in earlier years; in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Like the poet’s old man, perhaps I don’t “stand out” in my classroom precisely because I “fit in” more now than in the early days of my career. I’m no longer a jarring, strident, and strange outsider to the kids, but simply an old teacher who quietly shares his wisdom with them. They “peck along the roads” of education, and I’m right beside them. Perhaps they’re even a little comforted by the “long patience” I’ve gained over the years. I work hard, but I don’t do much rushing or dashing or stressing anymore. Teaching has become such a gentle process for me that, indeed, it sometimes feels like “[a]ll effort seems forgotten”.
Read just a page or two this morning as I enjoyed a spinach and asparagus omelet. Here's a quote from p. 12 about the idiotic debates in Parliament (the satirical Dickens at his best):
"Mr Ralph Nickleby seconded the resolution and another gentleman having moved that it be amended by the insertion of the words and crumpet after the word muffin whenever it occurred it was carried triumphantly only one man in the crowd cried No and he was promptly taken into custody and straightway borne off."
Someone once told me that a teacher should be like an umbrella for his students, and I’ve been thinking about that analogy recently. An umbrella basically protects a person, gives a person a safe shelter, guards a person in unsettled situations – and that’s also what a teacher does. The world my teen-age students are growing up in is a turbulent one, and it is the responsibility of the school and its teachers to offer a safe haven for the students, a place where they can learn and grow in security. When they enter my classroom, my students need to know that there’s order and safekeeping here – that they can accomplish much because the “umbrella” of Mr. Salsich's teaching is always there for shelter. Part of that sense of shelter comes from the fact that my classes are orderly affairs. Insecurity arises in young people when things are chaotic and unruly – when they literally don’t know where they're going or what will happen next. In my classroom, I need to provide an umbrella for my students’ sometimes stormy lives. I need to create an atmosphere of stability and consistency, a setting where they know exactly what the procedures are and exactly what they need to do. Indeed, even my hardest assignments can be a sort of umbrella. If my students are given clear (though perhaps complex) guidelines, and if the goals of the assignment are totally obvious and the necessary resources are available to them, then they will feel, surprisingly enough, secure. They will know precisely what needs to be done and how to do it. The umbrella of the well-designed assignment is there to keep out any confusion or uncertainty. A final point to make is that sometimes umbrellas are not needed. On sunny days, we can leave it at home, and in certain situations in the classroom, the students can be free to work without the specific guidance (protection) of the teacher (umbrella). That’s a good feeling for them and for me. They’re on their own, using their own resources and providing their own guidance, and I can put the umbrella away and simply watch.
"... There was a great bustle in Bishopsgate Street Within as they drew up and (it being a windy day) half a dozen men were tacking across the road under a press of paper bearing gigantic announcements that a Public Meeting would be holden at one o clock ..." (p. 11)
I read a few pages this morning at the breakfast table. Dickens goes well with hard boiled eggs, spinach, and fine coffee. I especially like the sailing metaphor in this passage.
I wonder if my students ever feel like flopping down in utter exhaustion after English class. When they walk out of the classroom, are their minds ever, so to speak, gasping for breath because of the intense brain workout they’ve experienced during my class? Do they ever feel like the class they just left was one of the most demanding ordeals they’ve ever been through? I actually hope so. In a way, I wouldn’t mind if my classes had some similarities to the women’s Olympic10K cross-country ski race I watched this afternoon. As the competitors crossed the finish line, they collapsed with fatigue, leaning on their poles and struggling for breath. They had given all of their strength to doing their best, and all they could do at the end was stagger and slump in weariness. Why shouldn’t my students feel a kind of breathless fatigue at the end of English class? If I’m doing my job as their English teacher (or coach, as I often think of myself), shouldn’t I demand their absolute best at all times? Shouldn’t I expect them to drive their brains with the same intensity that the Swedish gold medal winner drove her body today? The ski race was a grueling test for the competitors, and maybe I should think of a 48-minute 9th grade English class that way. Maybe I’d like to see the kids come to class with severe and single-minded faces, the way they might approach the starting line of a punishing race. At the end of class, I could offer, perhaps, cups of ice water to refresh their worn out minds as they drag themselves out the door.
Here's a wonderful poem by George Herbert. I especially like the last two words.
PRAYER
The Churches banquet, Angels age, Gods breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth ;
Engine against the Almightie, sinner's towre, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six daies world-transposing in an houre, A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse, Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best, Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest, The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the souls blood, The land of spices, something understood.
Lately I've been reading some of Shelley's poems, going back over ground I first covered some 40 years ago. Yesterday I read "Mutability" again, and was again inspired. Many critics find a lot of skepticism and pessimism in the poem, but I don't. This poem, to me, speaks of the humble (and maybe joyful) acceptance of the impermanent nature of the universe. Impermanence can be thought of as a blessing as well as a curse.
Mutability
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest. -A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. -One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same! -For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutablilty.
When I picture myself (which I occasionally do) as a heavily burdened, harried teacher laboring away like a self-sacrificing hero of some sort, that line of thinking is usually brought to a stop fairly quickly by the realization that, while I’m admiring my self-styled valiant efforts, other kinds of labor of more astonishing proportions are continually happening. For instance, while I’m carrying the supposedly grave weight of teaching teenagers, my heart is carrying a truly amazing responsibility – that of keeping me alive. In a typical 48-period English class, my loyal heart beats about 3,000 times, always in perfect rhythm, always pushing precisely the right amount of blood out to my cells. Not only that, my lungs faithfully rise and fall hundreds of times while I go about my allegedly prodigious task of teaching writing and reading. All I’m doing is trying to get some kids to stay alert and learn a few skills; my heart and lungs are giving me the gift of life, over and over again. And then I look outside at the breezes and the clouds and the sky vanishing in the distance, and I wonder at the ceaseless work of nature. While I’m mentally commiserating with myself for the “wearisome” work I have to do for a few hours each day, the sun and wind and weather continue to do their truly epic work. When I’m slumped over my desk at lunch, wondering how I can possibly make it through my last two challenging classes, the earth, as it has done for about fifteen billion years, keeps working its way through space, dutifully carrying me and mountains and seas and a few billion other riders.
The other day, as I was pondering the old maxim “it’s only a game”, I was reminded that teaching is better pictured that way. In fact, I think the surest way to achieve true contentment is to view my classroom work not just as a game, but as a friendly, pleasant spectator sport, where I am both an active player and a bemused fan. Instead of seeing myself as part of an intensely serious contest, the results of which carry life-or-death implications, I need to occasionally step back and be an observer of the light-hearted game called education. I need to see my little “self” down there in the playing field of my classroom, dashing here and there, performing weird and wonderful feats, or just temporarily convalescing on the “bench” (my chair at my desk). I should cheer, boo, sigh, scream, or applaud for my “self” and the other players (my students), all the while remaining at ease and satisfied because, after all, it’s only a game. With that kind of a distant eyewitness viewpoint, I would, perhaps, eventually come to realize that all my daily doings and goings-on as a teacher, all my earnest endeavors and pursuits in the classroom, all my seemingly serious thoughts and aspirations about being the best teacher I can possibly be, are, in fact, merely part of a highly entertaining game – a game in which there are no losers. (The inventor and referee of the game is the Universe, and it only allows winning. Unfortunately, many of the contestants don’t realize that.) If something “bad” happens to my "self "– a boring class, an irate parent, a principal gone haywire — oh well, it’s just a game, and anyway, eventually I’ll see my self (and all my teammates and competitors) holding up the cup of victory, as usual. Sooner or later I’ll see, once more, that winning is the only possible outcome for the game of education, and that even failure, oddly enough, is a victory for learning. I’ll sit back, get out my binoculars, and continue watching Hamilton Salsich – so distant, small, and beautiful in this measureless arena owned by the Universe – playing the game of teaching in his intense, comfortable, and buoyant way.
It came to me today that teaching is somewhat like tossing pebbles from a boat into a lake. During each 48-minute class period, I sit in my tiny teacher-boat and throw stone after stone into the vast lake of my students’ lives. I toss in steps in the lesson, suggestions, statements, questions, reminders, reprimands, commands, and demands – one after the other, dozens and hundreds, maybe more than a thousand pebbles in each class. What’s interesting to realize is that every one of these pebbles has an effect on the students, just as every pebble sends out ripples in a lake. All the hundreds of words I speak, gestures I make, smiles and frowns I show, are small rocks that splash inside the students’ minds and hearts and instantly send small waves rippling out. It’s impossible to say what kind of effect these ripples will ultimately have on my students, but that they will have an effect is beyond question. Every ripple in a lake alters the lake, if only in the tiniest ways, and every pebble I flip out to my students modifies their young, sensitive lives, if just in minuscule and marginal ways. As I thought about this today, the unpredictability and uncertainty of it all was slightly unsettling. The truth is that most of the words, gestures, and expressions I use during class are casual, haphazard events. I plan a careful lesson each day, but once class starts, I begin tossing pebbles just about as fast as I can think. It’s a wonder my figurative teacher-boat doesn’t swamp and sink each day, what with all my arbitrary and incessant pebble-tossing. Maybe I can change. Maybe I can slow down enough to at least periodically use some care in selecting a pebble, and maybe I can occasionally pause, just for a second or two, to see how the ripples shape themselves and start rolling out to some distant shore.
Every now and then, I remember to use silence to bring some intensity to the atmosphere in my classroom. I've always felt that, in teaching, silence has at least as much power as sound, and sometimes considerably more. Since the students hear teachers and each other talking almost nonstop throughout the day, any moment of silence can be a refreshing, almost shocking, break in the routine. In the students' noisy world, a little silence can be like sunshine after hours of rain. Not many days ago, I read a poem aloud to a 9th grade class, and when I came to the end I simply stood in silence at the front of the room. I remained silent for only about twenty seconds, but I suspect it had a surprising effect on the kids. In their often strident and raucous lives, twenty seconds of silence can seem like time without end. As they were sitting silently and listening to the ticking of my classroom timer, they might have been thinking, "This is really strange", and I'm okay with that. After all, 'strange' can also mean surprising, extraordinary, even astonishing -- three adjectives any teacher would be proud to be associated with.
“Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”
--Thoreau, in Walden, “Conclusion”
There is one sense in which my students have total freedom in English class: they can think as they want without hindrance or restraint. They can’t always act or speak exactly as they want, but there are no restrictions on their thinking. Their minds are as free as the boundless air. They can think, ponder, reflect, imagine, and ruminate as unreservedly as breezes blow. Perhaps I should occasionally remind my students of this grand fact, for nothing is more precious to young people than their freedom, and a feeling of complete mental liberty might make English class seem more brisk and bracing than it ordinarily is. If I remind my students, every now and then, that their thoughts are free to fly wherever they wish during my class, perhaps they’ll feel that rush of looseness and openness we all feel when we’re set free. You may worry that this could create distracted and day-dreamy students, but I would say, rather, that it would simply create free-thinking students – kids who take pleasure in their minds’ ability to roam the universe of ideas. English class is concerned, above all, with words, and words are made of thoughts, so anything I can do to liberate the thoughts of my students will give a lift to my classes. Sure, there’s a chance their thoughts will float far away from the matter under discussion in class, but that’s a chance I’m happy to take. Give me -- any day -- uninhibited young thinkers who occasionally drift away from the lesson, over limited and locked-up thinkers who always follow the teacher’s line of thought like prisoners follow a guard.
I’ve been repeatedly told, over the years, that I must keep in mind the many differences among all of my students, and I definitely agree, but I must also remember that, in one sense, there are actually no differences whatsoever. One of the definitions for different is “separate”, and it is easy to drift into seeing my students as separate, distinct entities, each one an individual with unique skills and weaknesses. That, in fact, is the perception upon which our entire educational system, and our whole culture, seems to be based – that all of us, my students included, are separate, isolated individuals struggling to turn on our independent and inimitable lamps. Of course, in order to participate dutifully and effectively in our educational system, I occasionally do have to think this way – that each student is different and distinct, and that I must help each of them go his or her own exclusive way in the world. It’s convenient to accept this approach – to play this game – because it helps the students find success in our artificial educational structures -- success meaning simply high grades and excellent test scores. It’s somewhat like a mariner pretending that there are specific, separate “things” called currents in the ocean. This pretense definitely helps him navigate across an ocean, but at the same time he stays fully aware that there are, in reality, no such “things” as isolated currents – just a vast, unified ocean that seems to move in fairly consistent patterns. I guess I try to see each of my classes as a sort of human sea (an immense one, I should add), in which the students together (not separately) make up the currents. For the sake of grades, tests, conferences, records, and so on, it’s convenient to think of the students as separate learners in their own separate seas of learning, but it’s just a bit of make-believe, a useful game. The reality is that my classes are uncharted teenage oceans, complete with storms and surf and doldrums and crazy currents. Morgan and Asia and Joseph are no more separate from each other than one current in the ocean is separate from another, or one wave from another. The students are part of life, and life, as science is revealing more and more clearly, is as interconnected as drops of water in a stream. It would be silly to give a grade to a single drop of water, and it seems silly to me to give grades to individual students. However, I do it, because that’s the game I have to play as I stand on the shore of a 9th grade class and admire the unsearchable sea in front on me.
“But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year, And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry: I'll not deny you make A very pretty squirrel track; Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.”
--A squirrel talking to a mountain,
in Emerson’s “Fable”
When I read this poem, I often picture one of my students speaking, instead of a squirrel, and I, the supposedly imposing English teacher, am the mountain being addressed. Sadly, my students may actually feel like squirrels as they scamper around trying to accomplish my obscure and troublesome tasks, and they may see me, their silvery, age-old teacher, as a somewhat bizarre mountain looming in their midst for 48 minutes each day. Students probably often feel like lesser creatures when they’re laboring in the shadow of a teacher, especially one who’s old enough to be their grandfather. I can imagine that my students would empathize with the squirrel in Emerson’s poem, who is unabashed enough to speak his mind to the lordly mountain. I can imagine the students reminding me that, yes,
“all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year”,
including impish, obstreperous, seriously talented teenagers. They might remind me that, though they don’t have as many degrees as I have, neither do I have as much spryness as they have. “Talents differ”, they would tell me. Yes, I can analyze a Wordsworth sonnet with dispatch, enjoy Shakespeare in a hurricane, and recite all the 10,000 grammar rules, but I can’t skateboard, dance for sixty straight minutes, laugh at just about anything, daydream castles and spaceships, do stupid stunts for laughs, or feel youthfulness flowing through my veins like an almighty river. They can’t diagram a 70-word sentence, but neither can I feel 70 free-handed years unfurling ahead of me.
…that pathless coast,-- The desert and illimitable air,-- Lone wandering, but not lost.
-- William Cullen Bryant, “To a Waterfowl”
In the above quote, the poet is talking about a bird, not a 9th grade English teacher, but I often go back to this poem as I try to find my way along the “pathless coast” of teaching teenagers. Of course, a visitor to my classroom might see me as the opposite of a “lone wandering” soul. I dress quite formally and try to present myself to the students as an erudite and skilled educator, one who knows precisely where he’s going and how to get there. I come to class equipped with a comprehensive lesson plan, and I do my best to march the scholars through the steps with a reasonable amount of coolness and clout. However, the fact is that I usually feel more like a bird gone astray in a “desert of illimitable air” than a self-assured, proficient educator. There’s actually a lot of make-believe in my teaching: making believe I understand these kids, making believe I know what I’m doing, making believe I’m poised and self-assured, when in fact I’m just a befuddled rover in the great labyrinth of learning. After 40+ years in the classroom, the “coast” of teaching, as I journey along it, seems more pathless, more incomprehensible than ever. Yes, I’ve learned a thousand tricks, techniques, tools, strategies, and tactics, but the grand mystery of it all remains. Indeed, it’s a fabulous enterprise we teachers are involved in – fabulous meaning literally like a fable or a legend. I often feel like I’m laboring in the old storybook world of Theseus as I find my way through the labyrinth of English teaching. I know there are holy grails hidden in this work we do, and I’m still loyally seeking them, but sometimes, the closer I get, the farther away I feel. The task of teaching kids how to read deeply and write stylishly sometimes seems as “boundless” as the sky in Bryant’s poem, through which the waterfowl flies toward the sunset. However, amidst the vague and unsure vastness of the world, the bird’s flight still seems strangely “certain” to the poet. That word is prominent in the poem – certain, like no doubt about it, assured, definite. The bird will get where it needs to go, and so – if I’m patient and keep making those detailed lesson plans – will I.
As my years in the classroom have passed, I have increasingly enjoyed a feeling of gratitude at the end of a school day. I often compare it to a feeling at the end of a hike in the Grand Canyon. Sure, things might not have gone exactly the way I had planned (perhaps a fall on the trail, or only half of a lesson covered), but how can I complain when I’m surrounded by a canyon of the gods or a group of children born to be brave and wise? If you’re in paradise, shouldn’t you feel grateful at the end of the day, no matter what happened? It takes no effort to complain (many of us teachers would get straight A’s for our griping and grumbling), but it sometimes– surprisingly – takes concentrated effort to see the miracles right in front of our eyes. When I hear teachers complain about their work with young people, I picture people sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon with blindfolds on. How did they come to forget how fortunate they are? When I think of the millions of people who have no job, and the millions who labor in physically wearying work, and the millions who see zero positive results from their toil, it’s hard to feel sympathy for teachers who grouse about their work with the youth of our world. Is it easy work? No, and neither is hiking a high trail in the Grand Canyon, but the rewards are inestimable. At the end of most days, I sit in my empty classroom and feel utterly grateful. I wonder, over and over, how I got so lucky. How did the universe happen to set me down in this clean, well-lighted place where dozens of emergent human beings come to me each day for guidance, support, and companionship? Maybe it was a rough day, but, like a difficult day in the Grand Canyon, the roughness is smoothed out and softened, always, by the shear substance and magnificence of the work I am damn lucky to be doing.
There is no such word as “impersonalness”, but it helps me say what I want to say – that teaching should be as impersonal as possible. Helping students realize their potential should in no way be influenced by, or hinge on, my personality, my ego, or my sense of self. In fact, my sense of myself as a separate person who needs to “succeed” as a teacher can only hinder my work in the classroom. Only by seeing teaching and learning as something way beyond individual personalities – something much bigger than egos and self-images – can I hope to feel the full force of the learning process. It has always seemed to me that breaking through the sense of separateness and isolation is the fastest way to open the door to learning. When my students struggle with the educational process, it’s often because they are seeing themselves as disconnected, cut-off individuals fighting to gather knowledge as though it were rare flakes of gold. They struggle because they see the learning process as being very personal – their small, frail, limited personal talents pitted against the vast universe of facts and data. What I hope to do is help the students see the process in a very different way – not as a personal struggle but as a kind of harmonious swirl of ideas. By “harmonious” I don’t mean that no work is involved in the learning process – just that the work can be pleasant rather than painful. By getting our egos out of the way (as much as is possible in this ego-obsessed era) both the students and I could perhaps relax and truly enjoy our education. We could, perhaps, look upon our education “[as] from a distance” – as a curious adventure we are part of, but one that we can also dispassionately observe and appreciate. We could teach and learn “with no intimate concern” – no worries about our self-esteem or reputation, but with a simple sense of gratitude for the wonder of it all.
When I came across this quote in Wordsworth’s The Prelude today, I started thinking about the “smoothing” that sometimes (I hope) happens in my classes. My students come to class as just what they are – young, fidgety, worked up, and bemused kids, natural products of a boundless and bewildering universe. The words they wrote last night on Facebook and are speaking as they enter my room are purely “tones of nature” – expressions as unfettered as storms or sunshine. They come in like breezes pass through the screen – without restraint and effortlessly – and this is as it should be, and the way I like it. My task, as their English teacher, is not to restrain or alter their natural spiritedness, but simply to enable it to “smoothed by learned Art”. When they read in my class, I hope they read with passion and pleasure, but I also hope their naturally raring-to-go reading habits can be tempered by creative discipline. When they write, I surely hope they pour their native fervor into the sentences and paragraphs, but my mission is to also make available the tools of tidiness and artistry. It’s interesting to me that Wordsworth’s specified that the “Art “ is “learned”, as if he knew from experience that making stylish phrases with words is anything but easy. Perhaps he was suggesting that word-artists are not born, but only made through steady labor and enduring single-mindedness. Perhaps he felt that smoothing out our naturally wild thoughts and words is the most resourceful way to smart and skillful reading and writing. In this regard, I often think of stones in a riverbed. Eons ago, they were naturally rough and sharp, but the patient river has steadily smoothed them until they now seem as polished as precious gems. As their English teacher, I need to show the students the value of coolly rolling some artistry and discipline over their natural ways of reading and writing.
In Book 6 of The Prelude, Wordsworth writes of “a flash that … revealed/ The invisible world”, and it occurs to me that it might be the kind of flash that happens occasionally in any English class. It’s a fact that we English teachers and students sometimes deal with the invisible. There are times when we’re like explorers in the world of the veiled, the unseen. In a way, we’re recreational clairvoyants, using a human being’s uncanny ability to see beyond normal sensory contact – beyond the outer shell of words on a page and into the hidden territory of their meanings. We, of course, are visible as we sit at our desks in the classroom, and our tools are certainly visible – books, paper, pencils and pens, laptops -- but we do most of our labor in the kingdom of thoughts, those ghostly artisans that flit through our lives with spirit and influence. A visitor to my classroom might see a fairly lackluster sight – a group of teens and an old guy talking quietly – but what they wouldn’t see is what’s special. Under the surface of the seemingly commonplace conversations, unseen ideas would be dancing around in their own universe. It’s like science fiction, really – a strange, mysterious, concealed world right under our noses in English class.
In my reading before school this morning, I came across the phrase “without beginning, without end”, and started wondering if perhaps English class could be described that way. I’m sure my students would be thoroughly dismayed to think that English class might be never-ending, but there may be some truth in the notion that learning about the power of words (which is what English class is all about) doesn’t actually start at, say, 10:30 and end at 11:18. I officially begin and end my classes at specific times, of course, but I can’t pretend that my students find out about the stunts and transformations words can perform only within those artificial time frames. Surely my students are attending the universal, omnipresent class on words and their wisdom at almost every waking moment. For instance, most of the kids use words every chance they get, especially in casual conversations, those informal festivals where words are exchanged, back and forth, like friendly or frosty gifts. When they’re sending out and receiving spoken words by the tens of thousands each day, is there any chance they’re not learning a vast amount about the muscle and influence of language? Is this not actually a daylong English class? And then there are the endless amounts of words many of the students employ on Facebook, shooting phrases back and forth like flares, hoping someone out in cyberspace might signal back. As teachers, we can, if we choose, dismiss this unconventional, exploratory use of language as a valueless learning tool, but that would be an unfortunate mistake. Just because a professional teacher is not conducting an official class does not mean learning is not occurring -- maybe, in fact, at a deeper and more genuine level than in an authorized English class. We learn about the charm and vitality of words by using them and watching what happens, which is what my students do online for sometimes dozens of hours each week. Is this not part of the never-starting, never-stopping English class of their lives?
