DUMBFOUNDED, STUPIFIED, DAZED

I’ve often thought (and written) about the role surprises play in good teaching and learning, and this morning I started wondering whether my students and I could purposely search for surprises. Could we set out, at the start of each class, to discover as many surprises as possible?  Could it be a sort of magical quest each day: Who can find the most interesting surprise in this poem or story? If we did this, maybe we would find ourselves using words related to “surprise”. We might say that a sentence in a story came as a shock to us, or that the final paragraph in an essay was a total bombshell. Someone might say he was staggered to discover a totally new meaning in a line of poetry, and a girl might tell us she is thoroughly flabbergasted by the current writing assignment. Maybe a chapter in a novel will take us by surprise or catch us off guard or catch us red-handed. Who knows, we might spend an entire class period in utter bewilderment as we try to find our way through some Emily Dickinson poems.  We might have rude awakenings day after day as we explore The Tempest. In the play, Ariel says he “flamed amazement” around the ship carrying Prospero’s enemies, and perhaps I need to send my students (and myself) on a search for some of those flames in every English class. We could search our books and writings for surprises that leave us open-mouthed, dumbfounded, stupefied, dazed, taken aback, shaken up, and floored.

 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

HARMONY NOT UNDERSTOOD

“All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood.”
 --Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”

     I’ve been teaching for many years, but sometimes, even now, I get the peculiar feeling that I understand almost nothing about my work – which is why I was especially struck this morning by this quote from Pope. Even after four decades in the classroom, in spite of everything I’ve supposedly learned about my profession, I often feel that teaching is an “Art unknown” to me. It seems, at times, so chancy and haphazard, as if there’s no direction to it, or at least none that I can see. Despite all my carefully designed lesson plans, I occasionally feel like I’m in the dark with a thoroughly insignificant flashlight, just hoping I might occasionally search out a truth about teaching. Strangely, though, this doesn’t discourage me. In fact, it’s actually quite exciting to realize, more and more clearly, that the art and science of teaching is far too immense and obscure for any one person to fully understand. I’m gradually taking in the fact that that this enterprise I’ve been involved in all these years is as vast and incomprehensible as the Grand Canyon, and who wouldn’t be happy to spend 40+ years surrounded by such splendor? Places like the Grand Canyon are majestic because of their mystery, and since nothing in my experience is more mysterious than the teaching of teenagers, there must be majesty in the work I’m lucky to be doing. Going back to Pope, if there seems to be discord in my teaching now and then, maybe that’s only because I can’t make out the hidden harmony that’s behind it all. If there appears to be disarray and confusion, perhaps it’s because I can’t detect the suitable and steady direction in which my students and I are moving. Were I hiking through the Grand Canyon, I wouldn’t be worried because I couldn’t fully (or even partially) comprehend the mysteries of its grandeur. In a way, my ignorance would be my bliss – and so it should be in teaching.
© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

COMING HOME, IN BASEBALL AND ENGLISH CLASS

 

         Now that baseball season is approaching, I’ve been wondering where “home” is in English class. In baseball, home is the place the players try to get to, the ultimate destination, the goal that means a team is closer to winning the game. It’s interesting that home is also the place where a batter starts from, so coming home means he has been successful mainly because he is back where he began. In a sense, he’s made absolutely no progress, and because of that, he has accomplished precisely what he desired. As I’ve been thinking about it, it’s occurred to me that, in English class, the students sometimes succeed in a similar way – by, you might say, making no progress and ending exactly where they began.  In writing, as they approach the final words, they try to find their way back to the beginning of the piece in order to remind the reader of the overall point.  At the very end of the writing, they come home again to the main idea, which is exactly where they started. (Perhaps they hear in their minds their teacher cheering as they make it home.) In daily lessons, too, I try to lead the students home again at the end of class, bringing them back to where we started, rounding the lesson into a finished circle. In May and June, the yearly curriculum also, I hope, leads the kids home as we review the year, going back to topics we started in the fall and winter. We journey far each year in our exploration of English topics, but it’s important that we come back home at the end, just to take a breath and admire the distance we traveled. Of course, in one sense, we do make progress through the year, the students and I, but perhaps it’s the kind of progress the hero makes in the fairy tale about the man who journeys far and wide in search of a treasure, only to return home and find it in his own backyard. We discover new talents and insights as the months pass, but maybe, in an odd sort of way, the talents and insights have been with us all along, and we uncover them in English class by simply coming home, again and again, to our best selves. Perhaps my students and I score more runs in a school year than a baseball player could ever dream of.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

A GAME OF UNCERTAINTY

After four decades in the classroom, teaching English has become more and more like a dicey game to me. There’s considerable uncertainty, day by day. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose; sometimes there’s steadiness and peace, sometimes there’s disarray and struggle. On any day, my lessons could come together into enlightenment or fall apart into failure. Uncertainty is at the center of all satisfying games, and in the midst of a given English class, uncertainty reigns. I never know: Are the students learning anything? Will this lesson crack into bits and pieces in the next few minutes? Will the sleepy kids sigh with relief when the period ends? Or … will this become one of my finest teaching moments? Will the principal pass by and praise the learning that’s radiating from my room? Truly, when I’m teaching, I sometimes feel like I did when I played high school football, flinging my self around the field in happy abandon. I don’t do any flinging in Room 2, but there’s a certain amount of abandon and inhibition in my teaching, just as there was in my football days. If you’re going to play a game – football or teaching – you have to accept, and love, the rowdy uncertainty of it all. 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

WINTER PATIENCE

As nature and my English students swing around toward spring, they both may reap some rewards for their patience. All during the winter months, seeds and animals have patiently passed the time, waiting for the return of warmth, and my students have been just as persevering as they’ve sat through day after day of sometimes sleepy English classes.  Nature often seems to be dozing outside in the frozen months, and my teenage students surely slipped away on daydreams occasionally between November and March. Many of the lessons I’ve taught them are probably slumbering somewhere deep in their minds -- perhaps, like some seeds, never to waken again. However, now that sunshine and gentle temperatures are returning, countless seeds will be stirring and rousing up into sprouts, and perhaps some of my lessons, after months of slumber inside my students, will revive and bring the kids back to some kind of academic liveliness.  Maybe my autumn lessons on organizing essays will suddenly sprout into respectable papers in April, and possibly my lectures back in September on leaving out unnecessary words will take root and result in some tight and tidy sentences in May. Who knows, maybe the classroom sleepiness I noticed all winter was just the kids' way of imitating nature. Like seeds, perhaps English lessons have to sleep before sprouting.

 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

RECEIVING AND GIVING

I spend much of my classroom time giving ideas to my students, and I try to be a glad and generous giver. Why not, since the ideas were generously given to me? Why shouldn’t I turn right around and happily bestow on my students the ideas that were freely bestowed on me? I didn’t work for my ideas, or discover them, or unearth them, or spend precious time laboring to construct them, so why should I hoard them as though they are mine? The ideas I give to my students are no more mine than the wind and sky is. They come to me the way days come casually along, and I, in turn, pass them along to my students. I find it odd that I sometimes fall under the spell of believing that I personally make, and therefore own, ideas – as though there’s a small idea-generating factory in my head that I personally supervise. When I fall into this dazed and foolish mindset, it’s usually not long before I come to my senses and remember that all the ideas I call “mine” actually first came to me as visitors. In their endless history, these rootless, roving ideas (which is what all ideas are) had previously visited, in one set of clothes or another, zillions of other thinkers, and now they came to me – out of nowhere, you might say. If I welcome the ideas and invite them to stay awhile (and often I don’t), they mix and socialize with other visiting ideas inside me, and thus are transformed somewhat before they pass along to other people (perhaps students) with whom I cone in contact. It’s an everlasting procession of mental visitors – ideas of all shapes and sizes strolling through the world and rapping on the doors of our lives. I just happen to be lucky enough to bestow, in my turn, a few of them on some ready and receptive teenagers each day.

ENGLISH CLASS GOGGLES

         I sometimes wish I had a pair of special goggles that I could wear during those occasional times when I’m a thoroughly unperceptive teacher. With the magic goggles, I could perhaps see what’s been directly in front of my eyes, but which I’ve missed because of a strange kind of sporadic loss of discernment. During those myopic periods of teaching, what I see in front of me in the classroom seems to be nothing more than a group of mildly interesting but essentially similar teenagers, kids who do my assignments with some degree of success and are somewhat obedient and dutiful. If you notice a lack of excitement in that description, it’s due to my periodic partial blindness: I simply don’t see the major miracles that are my students. I might even offhandedly say, “Hey, they’re just a bunch of typical kids,” which is exactly why I could use the magic goggles – so I could see that “typical” is the opposite of what they are. If I put on the goggles, perhaps I would see the incomparable creations of the universe sitting before me. Maybe I would notice their uniqueness, their gifts and flairs, their untried and unpolished magnificence. Of course, if I were a truly wise man, I wouldn’t need miraculous goggles, for I would know that no group of people is only “mildly interesting” or “essentially similar”, least of all a group of freshly blossoming adolescents.  I would feel fortunate, indeed privileged, to be in the same classroom with my students, lucky to be considered worthy of being one of their teachers, blessed to be lending a hand in bringing these up-and-coming citizens to the doors of their future. 

OUTWARD AND UPWARD

In my work as a middle school English teacher, I often find myself looking inward and downward, when I probably should be looking outward and upward. On those days when I’m looking inward, I’m almost obsessively focused on how I am feeling, how I am doing as a teacher, what I should be doing next – and when I’m looking downward, I’m seeing only the comparatively minuscule lesson I’m trying to teach. If I were a cartoonist, I would draw myself, on those narrow, introverted days, with my head turned completely down toward my chest, as if I were trying to see inside myself.  The students and the grand, far-reaching world are somewhere in front of me, but I’m seeing only the constricted confines of a tiny self and a single modest lesson plan. Sadly, because I see only a very small picture on those days, I miss another picture that’s actually immeasurable in scope. If I could look a little more outward, I might actually see my full-of-life students in all their inimitability, and if I turned my gaze upward, I could perhaps catch sight of the immense overall landscape of this educational process we’re all engaged in. It would be like climbing a tree to the top to see the unbroken countryside, instead of sitting at the bottom with my head in my arms. This reminds me, actually, of my tree-climbing days as a kid -- days when I was never satisfied with a slim, limited view of things. As a 12-year-old, turning inward and downward would have seemed utterly foolish, because, for me, the vast, unrolling prairie of my young life required going outside and getting up high. I was nearly always heading out and climbing skyward, nestled in tree branches or on high hills, seeing the vistas. Unfortunately, there are no trees in my classroom, but there are other ways to turn away from my skimpy self and see what the wide world in Room 2 looks like.

A CHILDLIKE TEACHER

My goal, as I move through my fifth decade as a teacher of teenagers, is to gradually become more like a child in the classroom. We adults progressively become very different people from what we were as children, but different doesn’t necessarily mean better. We know more, earn more, own more,  and can do more than children, but that doesn’t mean we are happier or more successful than children. I certainly don’t want to regress back to my silly, childish days, but I wouldn’t mind recapturing some of the spontaneous and guileless ways of childhood, for I feel it would make me a better teacher. I wouldn’t even mind being known as a naïve teacher, if by that is meant natural and unaffected. Children are naïve, in part, because they haven’t yet learned the ways of artifice and disingenuousness. They’re sincere and bright, not slick and clever like so many of us adults. A little childlike naïveté might make me a more unbiased and instinctive teacher, with less posing and masquerading and more old-fashioned genuineness. Perhaps, if I regained some of my 6-year-old-ness, I might be somewhat less suspicious in the classroom. Instead of wondering what the kids are doing behind my back or what anti-teacher thoughts they’re thinking, I might start noticing the best of their qualities more often than the worst. I might consistently expect goodness in Room 2 rather than always snooping around for possible duplicity and disruption. It wouldn’t be bad to be like a kid as I stand at the front of the room – uninhibited, without airs, and trusting. I have no hair on my head and only folds and rumples on my face, but in my heart it could be always early spring. I could even whistle, or do a hop and skip now and then.

LIGHT-HEARTED TEACHING

I sometimes think of balloons when I consider the kind of teacher I’d like to be. Teaching adolescents is serious business, but still, shouldn’t there be something blithe and bouncy about it, something as light-hearted as balloons?  I often walk around school like I’m bearing an enormous burden of some sort, as if the entire weight of my students’ academic lives is sitting squarely on my shoulders, but in reality (if only I could remember it), that weight is as buoyant as a balloon. All I need is for a group of friendly, free-and-easy students to sprint past me to the playing fields to remind me of how wispy and insubstantial my responsibilities actually are. I’d be a better teacher if, instead of presenting myself to my students as a slumped over carrier of grave duties and liabilities, I raised myself up and showed some of the grace and frothiness that lucky people should display. Of all the working people in the world, I am among the most fortunate, having only to share my love of language, literature, and life itself with blossoming, rousing teenagers in order to earn a paycheck. What’s weighty about that? What kind of cumbersome burden is that? If the students don’t master the use of gerunds at the age of 14, will that threaten their futures? If they finish my course with just a slender understanding of symbolism in The Tempest, will they slip backwards in the only significant race, the one to satisfaction and self-possession? As a teacher, I hope to be more like a balloon than a battering ram, more light-hearted than heavy-handed. The students don’t need my nagging and badgering as much as they need my help in rising above the tangles of novels and the frustrations of essay writing – rising up and getting freer and freer. 

A WALK ON THE MILLBURY TRAIL

Yesterday, I drove up to Millbury for a walk on a beautiful trail that winds through the woods in the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor. Little Josh, Luke, and I rambled along in a peaceful, happy way, watching the many walkers and bike-riders (and a few skaters) pass by.
Check out the short video.

ANOTHER CAUSE FOR HUMILITY

         Today I misinterpreted something I saw, a mistake that happens to me way too often in my classroom. I was driving on the highway in the bright sunshine, when I saw, far ahead, what looked like cars coming straight for me. For a few seconds I was concerned, but I quickly saw that the sun was simply glancing off the backs of cars, making the light look like headlights heading my way. In reality, the stream of cars was proceeding precisely as it should. I wondered, as I continued driving, how often I have totally misconstrued events in the classroom. When I thought a boy seemed bored with the book we were discussing, was interest and enthusiasm, in fact, slowly spreading inside him? When I thought I had been a fairly effective teacher in a class, were the kids, in fact, riding miles away on daydreams?  As I’ve known in my heart for years, and re-learned today, I very often have no accurate idea what’s happening right in front of my eyes. It’s another cause for humility. All I can do is look again, and then again, and hope the truth will somehow slip past my hasty and flawed judgments.

TRAFFIC AND TEACHING

      

         For my morning workout today, I walked the hilly streets near my house, and the relentless rush-hour traffic reminded me of the mayhem I sometimes make for myself in my work as an English teacher.  The cars were rushing past me in a noisy hubbub, as if each driver was desperate to reach some special destination, and I occasionally see some of that desperation in my teaching. The cars were speeding up and down the hill the way I tear through topics in a lesson plan every now and then, as though just touching a topic is the same as teaching it. Like breakneck driving, that kind of hasty teaching makes no sense to me. This morning I felt for the drivers as they dashed who knows where, because I know what it’s like to get awestruck by speed: how fast can I do this lesson, how many stories can we read this semester, how many literary terms can we look at today, how many pages of this novel can I read tonight? Thankfully, I’m usually a reasonably undisturbed teacher, preferring purposefulness to haste and hurry, so the speediness trap doesn’t catch me too often. Unlike the cars this morning, I’d rather linger and hang back with my students. Reading and writing, after all, are chores of thoughtfulness and attention, not speed and tumult.

Yesterday spring came a little early. It was like the forward guard of the season, the initial advance, the pilot showing the way for the warm, upcoming days. I sat in the park for awhile, next to this self-assertive tree, while many families enjoyed the park in this trial-run of spring.

I spent this morning up in the Brooklyn (CT) area, enjoying the warm weather with Ava and Noah. The best fun was at a playground near Jaimie's house, where the kids ran and jumped and swung and laughed. Later, back home, I sat in the park for awhile, reading George Eliot and feeling very fortunate to be alive.

LISTEN AWHILE

“These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum 

Of mighty workings? —————
Listen awhile, ye [teacher], and be dumb.”

-- John Keats (in a sonnet addressed to his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon)


      I took the liberty of replacing “nations” with “teacher” in the above lines, because as a teacher of teenagers, I do have to learn to “listen awhile”, and perhaps “be dumb”, meaning silent and fascinated, a little more often. I think of my students when I read the first line – “these” meaning the feisty, foolhardy, wise, and cunning kids I am fortunate to spend some time with each day. They may frustrate me with their stretches of impassive silence and bewildering craziness, but I have no doubt that, as the years pass, they will indeed “give the world another heart.” I may be in charge of my students now, but in the future, it is they who will provide the “pulses” for the life of humankind. I need to simply shut up more often during class and listen for the early “hum” of those pulses. It’s sadly true that I get so busy with my ten-thousand school day tasks and responsibilities that I miss many chances to catch the interesting buzzings of my students’ thoughts. There are “mighty workings” going on in the minds of each of my students (to doubt that would be the height of either smugness or blindness), and I need to stand back and stay silent more often, listening respectfully to the youth of our world. “They’re just kids”, someone may say, and I would say, “Yes, and a sunrise is just a sunrise.” A new day dawns for humanity tomorrow and ten years from now, and these restless and perceptive kids in my classroom will help lift whatever kind of sun rises.

WANTED: DISPOSABLE DIAPERS FOR ENGLISH CLASS

After a hard day’s labor in the classroom, I sometimes wonder how long it will take for my carefully planned lessons to utterly vanish from my students’ minds. Will some of them disappear from their lives as fast as short-lived spring breezes? Will some last only as long as the shapes of clouds, which fade away almost as fast as they form? Or, if I’m lucky, will some lessons be as enduring as banana peels, which experts tell us take up to five weeks to decompose? It’s an honest question to ask when you’re teaching teenagers, whose lives transform as swiftly as weather patterns. I spend many hours each week painstakingly preparing what I believe are significant lesson plans, but, in my more skeptical moments, I think I may as well be preparing significant bubbles to blow into the breeze. As Emily Dickinson would know, my students’ brains are “wider than the sky”, providing plenty of room for my diminutive lesson plans to drift away in the distance, pop, and pass away. However, there may be hope. Scanning the Internet this morning, I came upon the fact that disposable diapers take upwards of 500 years to decompose. If diapers can withstand the years, why not lessons on symbolism and semicolons? Perhaps, without my realizing it, the lessons I share with my students each day settle inside them like diapers at the dump, silently persisting, refusing to go away. Perhaps years from, even generations from now, the remnants of a lesson on using participles may give off steam enough to set some future life in a fresh direction.

TRUSTING TOTS AND TEENS

“Those who trust us educate us.”

         -- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         I imagine teenage students are somewhat stunned whenever they come upon a teacher who actually trusts them. In their shaky relations with teachers (and all adults), real trust is probably seldom offered to them by their skeptical caretakers. Adolescent students are probably more often thought of as prospective offenders than promising scholars, which is why many of us teachers tie them securely to rules and regulations rather than releasing them to their innate sense of responsibility and correctness. We don’t trust the students because we fear what might come to pass if we did.  I’m no different than most, being usually a little leery of adolescent craziness blossoming in the classroom when my back is turned. However, I’m slowly learning to care for my students the way I cared for my four children when they were learning to walk – by trusting that they can and will do what’s required of them. When they were ready to unsteadily try their first steps, I had to trust that they could and would do it. I had to stand aside and consent to their right to be their own little best selves or fail gallantly in the attempt. There were many failures, of course, just as there are occasional failures when I trust my students. They sometimes collapse into youthful madness and disregard, for which they receive just consequences, and from which they learn of the sting that comes from mistreating a teacher’s trust. Like my children, however, the students continue to receive my trust, for how else can they continue striding – or staggering – toward trustworthy adulthood?

DANIEL DERONDA and THE FAERIE QUEENE

Ah, I'm a lucky reader these days, alternating between the harmonies and descriptions of Spenser and the profound philosophical sentences of George Eliot. I do believe that The Fairie Queene is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read, bar none, and I find myself highlighting a sentence or two on each page of Eliot's novel. The story is deepening, growing more intense and revelatory. Gwendolyn is entirely ashamed of what she's done with her life, and it seems like Deronda may become her "teacher" and show her a new way to live.

A MEAGER LITTLE MIND

 “Will was his guide … “

         -- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

         Like Spenser’s Red Cross Knight, who gets into trouble when he lets his will guide him, it’s obvious to me that using my headstrong, badly informed will as a teaching guide has usually led me down dead-end, and sometimes ruinous, streets.  I’ve often been on my high horse as a teacher, galloping wherever my stubborn resolve sends me, usually ignoring any greater wisdom than my own undersized knowledge of how things should be. More often than not, I let the reins on my will go slack and it careers wherever it wishes through lessons and curriculums. You might ask what else there is for a teacher to follow than his own personal will- power and determination, his own good thinking, and I would answer by quoting a sign often seen at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings: My best thinking got me here.  To be honest, I’ve learned from experience that my best personal thinking is about as impressive as a small pile of soil beside the mountains of the West.  All the scrapes and troubles of my life have been caused by following the leadership of my finest thoughts. They’ve led me with bold words and bright signals, and usually I’ve ended up in a morass that seemed strangely similar to where I started. So no, I don’t trust my own thinking or my own supposedly sensible free will, and yes, there is a better way. There’s an extensive and good-natured spirit of wisdom always around us, and I’ve been trying to stay open to it, instead of to my closed-off and insufficient personal thoughts. Clouds follow the weather patterns wherever they lead, and I guess I’m trying to follow the movements of a larger wisdom instead of my fairly meager little mind.

READING, WRITING, WAVING

         It occurred to me this afternoon that waving is what my students and I should be doing more of in English class. I was sitting in a friend’s house, watching some tall trees waving in the wind, and I was impressed with how stress-free they seemed as they swayed and slanted this way and that.  They were waving the way waves in the ocean do – with total spontaneity and ease. Of course, sometimes, as the wind strayed away, they came to rest for a few moments, and their rest also seemed simple and trouble-free. Watching from the window, I realized that my students and I could learn a lesson from these compliant trees. We are all faced with the inconstant winds of responsibilities, assignments, schedules, successes, and disillusionments, and our best approach is to adjust ourselves to their quirks and foibles. We need to bend and bow, not diffidently but daringly, like the trees that lean almost, but not quite, to cracking.  When we’re reading, we must flow with the waving of the words, getting lost sometimes in the movements of phrases and paragraphs. When we’re writing, our thoughts blow strong and soft, blustery and easygoing, and our best bet is to tag along behind, doing what they do, writing the words they say.  It’s interesting, too, to think of another meaning for “wave” – that motion of our arms and hands that signals hello or goodbye. Sometimes I wave to my students as they leave the classroom, a small gesture to show, perhaps, that I like to live like trees do. My arm waves back and forth like life moves in waves all day long, in English class and out.

SEIZURES IN ROOM 2

         Here’s one of the best compliments my students could offer me: “That was a surprising class, Mr. Salsich.” Surprises have always had magical power for me, the way they can suddenly blow apart a lackluster moment into something stunning. I’ll be floating along the supposedly tedious river of my life when, out of the blue, a surprise alters everything. It might be true for most of us: surprises (at least the good ones) can transform dullness into delight. Since my English class constantly leans dangerously close to dreariness, I’m always hopeful that surprises will occasionally seize the young students. Interestingly, the word “surprise” derives from the Latin word for “seize”, as in “The enemy forces surprised (i.e., seized) the castle.” I like to picture my students sitting impassively in Room 2 when, with great suddenness, a line in a poem or a phrase in a story takes unexpected hold of them. I picture them looking at me in stunned surprise, as if to say, “Help, Mr. Salsich! Something has seized me!” Certainly I would rush to their aid (in my best senior citizen manner) if a human intruder tried to get hold of them, but a literary prowler is more than welcome - -the kind that pounces on and  reshuffles minds and hearts.  

March 14, 2010

         Yesterday, late in the afternoon, I realized with a shock that I had spent almost the entire day thinking about myself. Whether it was worrying about my health, wondering what I was going to have for lunch, planning my afternoon, or scolding myself for past mistakes, it was all about little, isolated, fearful me. It was an appalling thing to realize, because it made me see clearly, once again, how much I miss in a given day. While I was fretting over my supposed isolation and vulnerability, the grand universe was performing its astonishing tricks, as usual. Stars and planets were rolling right along, winds were free and full of life as usual, and life in all its immensity and grandeur was giving its gifts to all of us – and I was fussing about dozens of harmless and inconsequential matters.

"Rain", oil on board, by Rene PleinAir

March 14, 2010

         Yesterday, the first of my spring vacation, was a rainy and roaring one. All day the rain sped across the town, blown by strong spring winds. I sat inside with candles burning, watching the weather do its March tricks and reading comfortably in my pleasant apartment. In the evening I drove the rainy streets to have dinner with good friends in the brightness and friendliness of their home.

SILENT SPEAKING

         As a teacher, I have to remember that speech doesn’t always have to be spoken. There are times during class when, though my students are silent and seemingly impassive, the expression on their faces speaks a clear message of quiet interest. It’s like sunlight shining behind a motionless screen of trees: you know it’s there, silent but staying strong in the background. At times, a visitor might think my students are thoroughly uninterested  (and at times they definitely are), but I can sometimes almost hear the concealed voice of curiosity in their soundless faces. Many teenage students, when they’re in class, are like trees on windless days. The limbs and leaves move only slightly and almost indiscernibly, and the students’ voices are hushed, as if both trees and kids are sleeping – but all the while immeasurable forces are flowing underneath. Sometimes I walk among the taciturn scholars like I’m strolling in the park. I enjoy the company of quiet, beautiful trees and wise, silent children – and I listen for what both of them are saying.

QUIETISM IN ROOM 2

         I am not a Christian or a church-going person of any type, but I might still be called a “quietist”, at least in my teaching. “Quietism” was a 17^th century Christian movement that encouraged the abandonment of personal will and the quiet acceptance of the way things are, which fairly accurately describes my approach to teaching. As my 40+ years in the classroom have passed, my individual will has continued to slip more and more to the wayside, leaving mostly just an inquisitive interest in what’s going to happen next. I guess I’ve slowly come to realize that, even after all these years, my pocket-sized personal wisdom tells me very little about the real truths of teaching. I’ve learned, too, that there’s another kind of wisdom, an immense kind, that knows everything about teaching, and that I may as well put my little “self” aside and let that wisdom do its good work.  I’m not talking here about “God” or some mysterious supernatural power – just about opening myself up to the wisdom that awaits people who, like the Quietists, finally get their private egos, or wills, out of the way. The education of a human being is a bizarre and bottomless task, and to pretend that I can manipulate it with my own fierce but measly will is the height of craziness. To resist any pedagogical methods except those that I personally like, and to accept only results that I privately sketch out, is mind-boggling foolishness. Instead, these days I quietly listen for understanding as I work through the daily lessons. I try to be more accepting of the countless educational miracles that happen in my classes, most of which I didn’t (and couldn’t possibly) plan for. I hope to gradually understand that being humbly attentive to what’s actually happening is sometimes better than being confidently single-minded about what I want to happen.   

TEACHING BY WAFTING

“… [as] unobtrusive as the wafted odor of roses.”

            -- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I’m against pushing of almost any kind, including the kind I used to do as a teacher. In the early years of my career, I was very much into pushing kids into becoming successful English students. I guess I pictured myself as something like a heavy equipment operator, my job being to figuratively move, shove, pull, thrust, and impel my students to achieve the goals of the syllabus. I was a “pusher” of the first order. Everything I did in the classroom resembled snowplowing more than genuine teaching. A teacher who constantly pushes his students (as I did) is an obtrusive teacher – one who  encroaches upon the students instead of earnestly and unpretentiously teaching them.  I was an insolent, bad-mannered teacher, in the sense that I didn’t much care what the kids were feeling or thinking; I had a syllabus to teach, and everything else be damned.  I was an intruder^nd year of teaching, I guess I try to teach by wafting rather than pushing. I think more good things happen in the universe by rather than a teacher. Luckily, it’s different nowadays. I was struck this morning by the passage from Eliot above, because now, in my 42drifting, floating, gliding, or hovering, than by goading and ramming – and so I try to teach like the universe acts. The lessons I want to teach will have a far greater effect if they sort of inconspicuously float into the students’ lives instead of battering and pummeling them. I’d like them to come to understand a poem the way they might slowly but surely come to take pleasure in the ambiance of a forest, almost without knowing they’re doing it. I’d like the teacher in Room 2 to be as unobtrusive as a breeze that, while it goes largely unnoticed, unassumingly does exactly what it’s designed to do.           

MEETING

     Having just come from a faculty meeting, I’m now sitting in my empty classroom thinking about the whole idea of meetings. When I “meet” people, or with people, I come into their presence – and the word “presence” seems significant there.  Truly being in the presence of a group of people means being totally there with them -- in their company, in their circle or set. You might say I “belong” with them. The word “presence” derives from the Latin word for “being”, which suggests that if I wish to be truly present with a group, I should actually be there with them – body, mind, and heart – not miles away on the flights of daydream and reverie. Instead of going over innumerable mental tasks in my head during a meeting – to-do’s, wants, regrets, shoulda’s, woulda’s, coulda’s -- I should actually be present ­ at the meeting – totally, ardently, actively.  Unfortunately, I was far from present at today’s faculty meeting. I might as well have been on a mountain peak in Peru. My body was there in its pink shirt and blue bow tie, but my mind and heart were drifting around the universe somewhere. I wasted my time and slighted my colleagues. It makes me wonder how often I’ve met with students in class but actually been far-gone on desires and dreams. Maybe somebody should get their money back.

STAYING

         As the weeks of a school year pass, there are many classroom situations both my students and I would like to escape from, including ramshackle lesson plans, stifling air, and – more often than I like to admit – overpowering weariness. Occasionally in Room 2, we’re faced with conditions which seem to call for instant flight -- times when we’d all like to be anywhere but my classroom. Strangely enough, however, it’s times like those when my students and I, if we’re watchful, can catch sight of an important purpose of education - – learning how to stay instead of run.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, for running away from difficult conditions is a widespread custom among humans, but in my small classroom in the country, perhaps I can offer some encouragement to my students – and myself – to stand and fight rather than run and hide. There are many situations in class that my students might surely call insufferable – going over grammar guidelines for the zillionth time, listening to Mr. Salsich explain yet again how to write a good closing paragraph, examining the crowded infrastructure of a James Joyce short story. If I can demonstrate a quiet endurance and open-mindedness when classroom conditions seem oppressive to me, perhaps my students will be able to learn something about calmly “staying” when things seem tiresome and everlasting to them. Staying is a vital skill for an English student and teacher – staying with a sentence you're writing until it’s transparent and graceful, staying with a page in a novel until nothing’s left but the wisdom of it, staying with a lesson plan until it rises above all the others you’ve ever made. It takes serenity and persistence, two of the major qualities of a flourishing adult, but this staying ability can be learned and loved, including during English class.

DANIEL DERONDA, THE LADY OF THE LAKE

The story has turned sad again, with Gwendolyn falling into despair because of her family's financial troubles. At this point, she is acting like a spoiled brat. I find nothing in her character to admire, but I'm hoping that will change.

I'm also reading Sir Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake", a dreamy but musical narrative poem from the hills of Scotland.