SWAYING IN ENGLISH CLASS

Watching a tree’s limbs sway in a breeze this morning made me think of an important quality I’ve tried to develop as a teacher. Breezes of a different kind – breezes born of teenage thoughts and feelings – are always blowing here and there in my classroom, and I need to be bendable enough to sway with them. The stiff, obstinate tree limbs are the ones that sometimes snap in good winds, and something similar holds true for teachers. My students bring their serendipitous, blustery minds to class each day, and I must be loose enough to deal with whatever mental weather develops during class. It heartens me to look at several enormous old trees near my house, because they remind me, as their elderly limbs effortlessly lift and fall in various winds, that certain kinds of suppleness can actually increase as the years pass. I’ve been teaching for four decades, and, in these senior years, my body doesn’t bend with the ease of the old days, but my mind and heart, surprisingly, seem looser than ever. The old beech tree down the street sways its branches with grace and style, and I’m finding, as the years pass, that my thoughts and feelings sway better than ever in the classroom. Whatever winds the kids let loose in the room, my mind seems to know what to do – not stiffen and grow stubborn, but simply lean and swing, lean and swing.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

PATIENCE FLOWING

     An old hymn speaks of “patience flowing from a fountain”, and I often wish I had a few of those fountains in my classroom. No quality is more important in teaching teenagers than patience, but it sometimes seems like my patience dribbles from a dried out creek bed instead of pouring from a fountain.  I seem to run out of patience as repeatedly as rivers run out of water in the parched places of the earth. I sometimes feel like I have a far too shallow supply of this calming classroom medicine that has made miracles for me on those occasions when I’ve put it to use. When lessons have looked like they might explode in my face, I’ve sometimes been able to diminish the tightness and pressure of things with a balanced flow of patience, just quietly letting the lesson work itself out in its best way. When the temptation has come to hurry the students through an activity, a stream of patience has occasionally softened my edginess and enabled me to be a quiet coach for the kids instead of an uptight dictator. Strangely enough, I often think that, if I could ever understand it correctly, I would see that patience is actually a bottomless, shoreless sea to which I always have access. It’s always there, inside me, waiting to smooth out a rough situation or dampen the dried out areas of a typical day of classes. I don’t seem to have enough patience because I don’t understand what it is – not a material substance that can be measured and lost, but a substance of the heart that has no bounds. It’s an unlimited lake I’m lucky to always have access to, no matter how badly lessons bomb or goals get lost in disorder.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

THE LABYRINTH IN ROOM 2

I’ve occasionally written about the fact that teaching English often reminds me, oddly enough, of walking in a labyrinth. I purposely didn’t use the word “maze”, because long ago a friend explained to me that a labyrinth and a maze are very different things. A maze, he said, has paths that lead nowhere and can cause utter bewilderment, whereas a labyrinth always leads, eventually, to the center and then back out.  In a labyrinth, you actually can’t get lost; with patience and perseverance, you always reach the goal, one way or another. I often think of this analogy when the students are studying a literary work – a poem, for instance.  Sometimes they become disheartened by the idea that the poem is simply too puzzling, too obscure, but I try to encourage them to just keep “walking” through the poem the way they would walk in a labyrinth, trusting that all paths lead to the center.  In a labyrinth, they wouldn’t walk in an anxious and dispirited way, because they know they will eventually reach the heart of it, somehow or other, and, likewise, a composed and steadfast reader will sooner or later reach the heart of any poem. In a labyrinth, the secret is to simply keep walking and watching, and the secret of understanding a literary work is to simply keep reading and thinking. With a poem, the students may have to read some lines over and over, walking this way and that with the  words, turning left and right as the sense of the lines leads them on. Similar to a labyrinth, the students may very nearly reach the heart of the poem, and then slowly find themselves back at the start, back on the outside of the lines, looking in at the web of words and wondering what it’s all about. However, even then, I remind them to simply start walking good-naturedly through the poem once again, taking pleasure in the power of the words and waiting unwearyingly for the lines to lead them to the heart of it all. For an enduring reader, it always, in due course, happens. 
 
© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

THE FOG MACHINE IN ROOM 2

 

        

“… his negative mind was as diffusive as fog, clinging to all objects, and spoiling all contact.”

         - George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         I hope it doesn’t happen often, but there are definitely days when I am probably little more than a fog machine in my classroom. These are days when, for murky reasons, I bring a “negative mind” to class, much like Grandcourt in Eliot’s novel carries his clouds of unconstructive and pessimistic thoughts wherever he goes. I’m sure I’m usually unaware of the force of my occasionally unenthusiastic and depressing thoughts, and so they spread their fog through the classroom room unobtrusively, while I go unsuspectingly on with my lesson. On those gloomy days of mine, I may see myself as playing my usual role as a well-prepared teacher, but the students probably see fog flowing out from my overcast face – the fog of down-in-the-dumps moodiness. It’s always astounding to me to realize how powerful a teacher’s presence is to students – how easy it is for his peacefulness or discontent to surround and infuse the students. Whatever a teacher is feeling flows out to the students, sometimes like agreeable and uplifting light, but sometimes, unfortunately, like stifling fog. There’s more than enough light in my life to carry some to the classroom each day; I just need to leave the fog machine at home.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

MAKING DAYLIGHT

 

“…a pretty articulateness of speech that seemed to make daylight in her hearer’s understanding.”

-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         As a teacher, I hope I can occasionally do what Eliot’s Mrs. Meyrick could do. I picture her children and friends listening to her words, when suddenly something like a sun rises inside their minds and previously concealed truths become clear. Darkness and disorder becomes brightness and clearness when they listen to her.  Her words seem to carry lights inside them that switch on when someone listens. This would be a first-rate trick for a teacher to perform, and perhaps it happens more often than I realize. Perhaps a few small sunrises happen in some of my classes, thanks to something I say. It could be that, as the students listen to me, thoughts occasionally spring up in their minds like faint stars.  Maybe, every now and then, I’m able to dispel a bit of my students’ mental darkness just by speaking sincerely and straightforwardly, sharing my thoughts about a sonnet or a story. Of course, it’s no doubt true that some of my students spend much of their time in English class sojourning in daydream land, but perhaps a few others are thrown under a clear inner light by a classmate’s comment or a passing observation from Mr. Salsich. I’m sure on many occasions there’s ample darkness and fog in the minds of my students during class, but hopefully there are also some occasional rays of sunshine inside their minds. Hopefully, now and then, something old Mr. Salsich says makes a bright day in the inner life of a confused kid or two.          

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

A COLOSSAL RIDDLE

“…a sort of mystery which he was rather proud to think lay outside the sphere of light which enclosed his own understanding.”
-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Ch. 46

I love this quote, because it rather exactly describes a feeling I get nearly every day in the classroom. Teaching teenagers, a vocation I have been lucky enough to call mine for over 40 years now, has gradually become an ever more profound mystery to me. Instead of slowly building an understanding of how to perform this delicate and essential work, the passing years seemed to have slowly stripped away the pretense that I actually know what I’m doing. Little by little, I have been humbled. I now know there’s probably no greater mystery than the art of teaching young people, and at present, at the age of 68, I humbly knock on the door of this mystery before every class. I don’t mean that I’ consider myself a failure as a teacher. For sure, I have learned countless techniques, tools, methods, systems, and procedures, and these do appear to have moved my hundreds (thousands?) of students fairly smoothly along the track of formal education – but none of that really touches the mysteries involved in teaching kids. For the most part, formal school curricula run only across the surface of students’ lives, while their true verve and vivacity goes on blossoming and exploding far beneath. I’ve been playing a fairly good game of English teaching over the years, but all the while the mysteries involved in educating human beings have grown gradually larger and foggier. Actually, though, in a strange sort of way, I feel proud that I’m involved in such a mystifying profession – proud that a vast body of knowledge still lies “outside the sphere of light which encloses [my] own understanding”. It makes me feel honored to know that I’m at the center, each day in Room 2, of an immeasurable enigma, a colossal riddle – honored, I guess, that I’ve been allowed to be part of it day after day, year after year.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

HYDROSTATIC BALANCE IN ROOM 2

When a friend was telling me recently about hydrostatic balance – the state of equilibrium in the atmosphere when the forces of gravity and air pressure are balanced -- I couldn’t help but think about the atmosphere and forces in my classroom. My friend explained that in our atmosphere we are constantly under intense pressure, from both gravity and the air, but because the pressures are usually well balanced against each other, we generally live our lives fairly unaware of them. There’re just there, always pushing and pulling us in different directions with considerable force. As I listened to my friend, I realized that I hope the academic atmosphere in my classroom produces similarly balanced pressures. There’s nothing wrong with having students labor under powerful pressures – the pressure to complete demanding assignments, the pressure to unravel the truths in elaborate literary works, the pressure of their own desire to achieve, and, yes, the pressure their sometimes insistent parents place upon them. In addition (and this relates to the counter-balancing pressures in our physical atmosphere), there’s no doubt that my teenage students also work beneath reverse pressures – the pressure to be liked by friends, the pressure to occasionally put one’s head in the clouds, and the pressure, sometimes, to just be purposely foolish and irresponsible. When all these various and contradictory pressures are perfectly balanced in my classroom, a fine kind of peaceful intensity can come into being -- passion and concentration nicely balanced by lightheartedness and looseness.  In this ambiance, the kids work hard but also smile and laugh hard. They grit their teeth to understand a sentence in Joyce, but they also lift their eyes to take pleasure in the sight of birds at the feeder outside the classroom. This is hydrostatic balance, Room 2 style.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

AMBIGUITIES AND OBSCURITIES

  This morning a colleague was saying, with dismay, that she can teach the same lesson to consecutive, fairly similar classes, and have one lesson soar and the other stumble and fall to pieces, to which another colleague added, “And there seems to be no discernible reason for the difference.” It is, indeed, a mystery, how the same plans, words, even gestures of a teacher can stir up eagerness in one class and only bewilderment in another. It makes no apparent sense. I’m the same teacher at 10:30 and 11:20, and the students are of more or less comparable abilities, and yet wisdom blossoms in one class but only lassitude in the other. It’s even more mystifying than the weather. After all, a good meteorologist can rather easily explain even the most screwball weather patterns, but who can make clear why the same lesson triumphs in 9A and quietly expires in 9B? I’m assuming, of course, that the two classes are of similar abilities and behavior patterns. We all know how one group of kids can seem eminently teachable while another group appears consistently inaccessible, but what if the classes are fairly similar – and still we see the same lesson rise on wings in one class and smash into a stone wall in another?  I challenge anyone to find a scientist of any kind who can explain this phenomenon (a regular one for most teachers) with passable accuracy. It speaks of the essential mystery involved in teaching other human beings. The riddles of the weather are second-rate compared to the ambiguities and obscurities that arise when a teacher and students come together. 
 
© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

STUDYING BLOSSOMS AND SHAKESPEARE

In between classes this morning, I took a close look at some crimson blossoms on a handsome tree near my room, and it reminded me, instantly, of some of the times when I’ve paused in reading and taken a close look at the text. Of course, more often than not I don’t pause, don’t take a close look, don’t carefully examine either what I’m reading or the blossoms on a tree. Like many of us, I’m often in a somewhat scatter-brained mode when I’m reading or passing picturesque trees, so I seldom take time to look closely. Words in books usually hurry into and out of my mind as fast as the pages turn, and I’m afraid that pretty trees come and go in my life merely like blurs or shadows.  However, this morning, I bent close to a few blossoms and actually saw them. I studied them for a few seconds, and sure enough, the fullness of their beauty became clear. It was just a fleeting moment of study, but it was enough to show me a small kind of magnificence just outside my classroom. It reassured me, in an odd kind of way, that I’m doing the right thing by requiring my students to read The Tempest little by little and with great care. We regularly stop and study lines and words, similar to the way I stopped beside the spring tree this morning.  You might say we stroll through Shakespeare instead of dashing. We pause and use the magnifying glasses of our minds to inspect the small treasures concealed in his words – the blossoms of language that hasty readers surely miss. 

 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

NOT WHO I AM BUT WHAT I DO

 

I wonder if I might learn something about teaching by studying the procedures of sailors on a ship. Some Navy friends told me recently that, when they are carrying out their various nautical responsibilities, they don’t use personal names to address each other, but rather the specific duties of each person. As one woman told me, it’s not who you are that’s important, but what you do.  Hence, someone named Jim Smith might be referred to as HM2 (his job), as in, “Hey, HM2, can you give me a hand?” My friends explained that this serves to downplay the independence and separateness of each person, and instead reminds the sailors that togetherness is more important than individuality, that the team is more crucial than any single player. Of course, my English classes are not closely akin to military units, and I am certainly not suggesting that the individuality of my students is not of critical importance, but still, there’s something to be learned from the team approach used by the Navy. The senior-citizen person named “Hamilton Salsich” – an individual with innumerable likes and dislikes and a 68-year history of ups and downs and sorrows and triumphs – is not nearly as important in Room 2 as “the teacher of literature and writing”. That’s my job – “what I do” – and all that’s important, really, is that the job gets done, day after day, with as much excellence as possible. Never mind who my parents were or what happened at home last night or what personal burdens I may be carrying; what counts is the job  -- teaching English to the teenagers who come to my classroom each day.  Does this mean that I should be a frosty and aloof kind of teacher? On the contrary, leaving my personal life at the door might actually mean that I can to do my important job with a greater sense of allegiance, loyalty, and therefore exuberance.  After all, teaching is, above all, about being dedicated to others – the students – and that kind of dedication should lead to an intense passion for the work. When there’s a higher goal than mere individual, personal pleasure – as there is in the military and should be in teaching – there exists the prospect of seriously ardent and grand endeavors.

 © 2010 Hamilton Salsich

A WEALTHY TEACHER

There are days – like today – when I feel like a wealthy man as I move among my teenage students. Leading the class through a lesson, I feel like I’m wearing a thousand-dollar suit and swinging a priceless watch on a chain. I feel richer than a king, and bighearted enough to give a good deal of my wealth away. I picture myself tossing out coins with each smile and word. Where does this feeling come from? Simply put, I know that I have unlimited resources at my disposal, primarily in the form of an infinite supply of good ideas. In the bank of my mind, my account of thoughts is bottomless. It can never be overdrawn. I don’t have much real money, and I rent a modest apartment and drive a low-cost car, but in my classroom, I have a limitless amount of ideas to “spend”. Not all of my ideas are dazzling or clever or even interesting, but they’re all potentially helpful and even transformative – all umpteen zillion of them. I spend my ideas freely and cheerily during each class – dealing them out to the kids like cold cash. Of course, they aren’t actually “my” ideas. I don’t “make” them like the mint makes dollars. As far as I can tell, ideas just arrive at my life, by the dozens and thousands -- constantly, surprisingly and sometimes enchantingly – and from me they flow out into words for my students. Since a rich river of ideas is available for me (and for all of us, if we only knew it), I ramble around my classroom like an openhanded millionaire.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

BLOSSOMS AND TEACHERS

 

This morning, a lovely one, I started wishing I could teach the way blossom-filled branches behave. There’s a tree outside my classroom that’s laden with purple blossoms these days, and I admire the way it sways with even the softest breezes. The tree doesn’t appear to exert any effort; it simply lets the spring winds shift and shake its blossoms.  It seems to feel the slightest influence of even the mildest breezes – seems to slightly transform itself with every passing gust. I wonder if I could teach that way. I wonder if I could I put aside some of my useless fussing and distressing, and just focus on being a sturdy, sensitive teacher for my students. They bring their breezy ideas and words to class, and, like the blossoming tree outside, perhaps I could simply let the ideas and words stir me in their various ways.  What’s interesting is that the tree’s limbs rustle with even the gentlest puff of wind, and maybe I could be that kind of teacher – a truly responsive one, a teacher whose thoughts are genuinely influenced by the students’ thoughts that waft and float around him in class. 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

SINGING, ENGLISH SOCCER, AND ENGLISH CLASS

I was watching a soccer match on television yesterday, and the constant and stalwart singing by the spectators (a European tradition) started me wondering if music and English class would be as fitting a match up as music and English soccer. Most of my students worship music like some kind of supernatural force, so perhaps it would be smart of me to make use of that force in the classroom. Like the singing in soccer stadiums, the students’ beloved songs could form part of the surroundings of our efforts and struggles in class. Perhaps the kids could connect the underlying harmonies and lyrics of the music to whatever it is we’re attempting to do in class, or possibly the spirit of the songs would simply lift their hearts a bit during an especially tedious class. It makes me think of the background music spring birds make as I sit in the park with a book. Does their music interfere with my reading, or make my thoughts less focused and fervent? On the contrary, it might be that the birdsongs bring just enough beauty to my ears to rouse me more fully to the significance of the sentences I’m reading. What if I played a mix of songs on Pandora during class, at a very soft volume, sort of like the songs of birds in spring trees? Each day, a different student could choose a band or artist to make the mix with (with the proviso that the music must be of a smooth and levelheaded kind), and we could then carry on our literary pursuits while the songs make a laid-back milieu for us. Occasionally, I could turn up the volume for a few seconds, just to have a listen, and we could try to connect the words we hear to whatever we’ve been discussing. For instance, while I’ve been writing this, I’ve been listening, on very low volume, to a Pandora mix of Norah Jones-type songs, and I just turned up the volume to these words by Jones herself: “I’m looking for the break of day”. In class, I could ask, “How do those words relate to writing a blog post?” -- and some enlightened young scholar might answer, “Easy. Each and every sentence, you hope, is like the break of day for the reader.” Who knows? The singing in stadiums may inspire soccer players, and perhaps my students might mentally rise and shine if Alicia Keys or Owl City is singing in the background in Room 2.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

BLASTING OUT POETRY

  Yesterday, while I was out for a walk, a car passed by with music blaring at a preposterously high volume, and I was suddenly inspired: maybe I should blast poetry from my car. Think of it: a wan and well-aged English teacher driving around town with Wordsworth exploding from the windows. I could cruise the streets with a fine British actor’s rendition of “Lines Written in Early Spring” soaring out of the car at the highest possible decibel level. Late on a Saturday night, I could drive among the bars and bistros and amuse the revelers with Richard Burton reciting “Daffodils” at a volume that reverberates and booms for blocks around.  I assume that a lot of young male drivers blast their music out to the streets in the hopes of getting wandering young women to glance their way, and perhaps I could have some kind of similar luck. Being a long-ago divorced guy in my weathered years, maybe I could convince some worn but fine-looking woman to look my way if she hears lines from Paradise Lost pouring out of my car.  Maybe a gorgeous lady in her late 60’s might swing a wave my way when she hears Hopkins’ words soar up from my windows with a deafening kind of charm: “Nothing is so beautiful as spring – when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush”. Alas, surely I’m deceiving myself with these foolish daydreams, but at least I’m fairly certain I could impress (well, maybe) my young students if, when I pulled up to school on a Friday night to chaperone a dance, the voice of Will Smith was booming a Langston Hughes be-bop poem from my CD player.  Maybe the students would gather around my car and say things like, “Hey Mr. S, that’s a cool poem. Can you turn up the volume?” Or maybe (more like it), they’d just smile politely at their odd and antiquated English teacher and turn back to the sounds of Slipknot thundering out from the gym.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

BOTH BOLD AND MEEK

         I’m hoping to continue to develop both boldness and meekness in my teaching, and I hope my students do the same in their schoolwork. I want to be ever more fearless but still humble – always ready to risk failure by following an unproven path in a lesson, but also ready to recognize that my meager efforts are no more special than a puff of air in the immeasurable weather system of the earth.  Likewise, my students should be audacious but unassuming in their approach to English class.  They need to take the necessary gambles as they get fresh sentences together for an essay, but they must also keep in mind how modest their understanding is in the face of the far reaches of wisdom in this world.  In our small countryside classroom, my students and I need to be stalwart but self-effacing explorers – looking for glory but also for the grandness of the world of which we’re an infinitesimal part.  It’s not easy to be both bold and meek. It’s not a simple thing, for instance, to send students off on a stressful assignment and still stay humble enough to realize that you really have no sure idea whether the assignment will be successful or second-rate.  Likewise, it takes some effort on a student’s part to stand firm in an opinion about a poem and yet be completely open to other interpretations. I often think of mountains in this regard. A mountain is a bold presence as it stands sturdily among the clouds, but you might say it’s also modest enough to submit to the machinations of rain, snow, wind, and countless other powerful influences. It knows its brave but unprivileged place in the universe, and so should my students and me. 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

NOBLE HEARTS

“The noble Heart, that harbours vertuous Thought,
And is with child of glorious great Intent,
Can ne'er rest, until it forth have brought
Th' eternal Brood of Glory excellent.”
-- Edmund Spenser, “The Faerie Queene”, Book 1, Canto V

It might seem far-fetched, even preposterous, to compare my capricious 9th grade English scholars to a mythical knight who’s setting out to achieve a “Glory excellent”, but the comparison makes an odd kind of sense to me. I think my students are, in fact, “noble hearts”, simply because I see them every day acting in bold and stalwart ways. They sit up straight in an often tiresome class, plod patiently through my exhausting daily assignments, write taxing essays week after week, and often mask their stress and troubles with a smile for their teacher. They’re not seeking “Glory excellent”, but simply a civilized grade in English, and they’re doing an honorable job of it. Despite their occasional cycles of silliness and lassitude, I persist in believing that the students have a “glorious great intent” in their hearts – that, in their own particular ways, they all want to achieve goals they can honestly call great. In one way or another, they are all knights searching for their own private kind of glory. No doubt many of the kids’ particular glories have little do with my English class, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t recognize and be glad about their aspirations. They are each devoted to something great, and that’s what’s important, whether it’s becoming a champion skateboarder, a trustworthy friend, a daring soccer scorer, or, conceivably, an A+ writer of English essays. They may not all be knights of Mr. Salsich’s roundtable, but they are all faithful knights in their own singular way – and admirable ones, at that.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

TRANSFORMATION IN ROOM 2

 

         When things in my English classes seem fairly monotonous, it helps me to recall that, actually, monotony is an impossibility – in my classroom, and everywhere else. Monotony involves a lack of variety, but the truth is that all of life, all of reality, is filled with the rowdiest kind of variety. Every present moment is utterly unmarked and up-to-the-minute, as different from every other moment as one person is from another. Nothing old, nothing the same, ever happens; only the new-fangled and fresh come into existence each instant. My classroom, filled with its tired-looking teens, is actually

a hot-bed of constant transformation – newness being re-assembled every second. The students’ zillion cells are relentlessly re-shaping themselves – changing, adjusting, modifying, dying, being born. Jimmy in the second row is a brand-new Jimmy every second – new thoughts, new feelings, millions of new cells. A river changes every moment, but no faster than the life in my classroom. Even when the kids seem on the threshold of sleep, when all appears to be tedium and tiredness -- even then, their bodies, the air around them, the world outside, the far-flung stars, are in a state of splendid transformation. It can’t be stopped. No matter how sleepy my classroom seems, it’s actually an extravaganza of makeovers and renovations. I should be in a state of continuous astonishment just to be in the presence of such ceaseless stir and bustle. 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

A PLAY-ACTING TEACHER

Over the years, I have grown ever more pleased to call myself a play-acting teacher. That’s sounds a bit shocking, perhaps, but it’s the plain truth about me. In the classroom, I’m simply an actor. I wear one mask after another, and I’m glad that I’ve gradually come to accept that fact. What I’ve slowly been able to realize is that we all wear masks all the time. The real “us” is somewhere far beneath (or above) all the many roles we play, including husband, friend, worker, mother, or teacher. Each day we frequently change masks, depending on what part we are playing at the time, while the power behind the mask quietly abides in the background. Years ago I would have fervently denied this, thinking of it as pure deceit, but nowadays I accept this ceaseless role-playing as the way things really are – and I’m happy they are. It’s been fun to finally understand that teaching should be regarded more as a pastime than a skirmish, more as a fascinating stage play than a life-or-death endeavor. I take my teaching seriously, but I also take it lightly and humorously. I realize that, in the big picture, what life is all about is not commas and symbolism and Ernest Hemingway short stories, but something far deeper than that, something hidden beneath the mask and costume called “student” and “teacher”. I do my best to play my role as a teacher (just as I do with my many other roles), but I know that the real force behind the role is way bigger and more interesting than a 68-year-old dramatic character called “Mr. Salsich”. The actor playing that character, and all of my countless characters, is life itself. I wear the masks; life (or maybe Life) does the work – or perhaps I should say the playing.


© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

STAYING AWAKE IN ENGLISH CLASS

         I often feel like playing a recording of reveille at the start of English class, just to rouse the students -- and me -- into some kind of wakefulness. I include myself in that statement because I am often just as unconscious as the kids often are – just as robotic, just as programmed, just as far away in my own preoccupied absentmindedness.  I always plan a careful lesson for each class, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be lost in a professional daze of sorts. My thoughts run like a teacher-machine throughout the school day, and I often need to be awakened to the fact that out-of- the-ordinary, mystifying, and relatively untamed teenage human beings are sitting in front of me, and that brilliant pieces of literature are under investigation. I also have to constantly bestir my students and myself to be sure we are staying observant for the messages and signals sent up from stories and poems. Like a sergeant rousing his sleepy soldiers on the front lines, I prowl among the students for the full 48 minutes, keeping them, and me, watchful for flares of new thoughts and bursts of surprising ideas. I verbally poke and prod all of us: stay awake, something’s coming, be ready. 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

TAKING CARE OF MINDS

         As their English teacher, I try to encourage my students to take good care of their minds. I’m sure countless people have advised them to take care of their bodies, but what about protection and provision for their minds? A mind can fall into disorder and shabbiness as easily as a body, and a kind of cancer can grow among thoughts just as surely as among tissues and organs. Like all of us, students should be devoted to the health and wellbeing of their minds, and I try to help them in that endeavor.  For instance, I force them to rigorously exercise their mind, just as their athletic coaches put them through their physical paces on the field and court.  I push them through seemingly inscrutable poems and thorny, tangled stories, making them think themselves, now and then, into exhaustion. I hope they’re gasping for their mental breath when a class period ends.  I also try to feed their minds only the healthiest foods during English class. We read the finest literature I can find – books that will bring stimulation and nourishment to their minds.  No fast-food poems, no take-out stories, no drive-through novels – only the kind of illuminated literature that will let a shaft of healthful light into their young minds. Of course, I also have to help them learn to bar their mental doors to thoughts that can be unwholesome during English class. Like all of us, stray ideas steadily pass through their minds, and during an exhausting class inspection of a Faulkner short story, some of my students are surely tempted to welcome a roving daydream or two, whatever it might bring, as long as it’s something besides Faulkner. My job is to encourage them to be sentries at the doors of their minds, to stand guard at the entrances, permitting only thoughts fitting for the topic. I want them to be free thinkers but also stern coaches and trainers of their brains. I want them to leave each English class feeling like their minds are more hale and hearty than ever. 

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

 

TRANSFORMING LIVES IN ENGLISH CLASS

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, lives are magically transformed, and, in my more idealistic moments, I like to think English class can do the same for my students.  As one example, I hope each poem and story we read will contribute to at least a partial overhaul of the students’ ideas and feelings.  I want the reading and study of literature to be like taking a steaming, soapy shower. It may sound naïve, but I’d like them to emerge from each book as bright, brand new, newly-enlightened learners. Who knows – a student may come to class caught in severe depression, but leave with a light around him after studying a poem by Keats. A girl may get her life up and running after reading Great Expectations, and a boy might lift up his days through an attentive exploration of some Jack London stories. I recall countless times when a poem or a paragraph enabled me to turn my day in a totally new direction, and I hope, optimistically, that the same can happen for my teenage students.  Lord knows my students are not wretched kids who need a complete makeover, but all of us enjoy renovating and reshaping our lives now and then, and literature is one of the greatest transforming agents of all. You can enter a Shakespeare play as a cantankerous quitter, and emerge from Act 5 as a bright and breezy idealist. Just the other day, I thought I noticed a satisfied smile on a girl’s face after reading some poems by William Stafford– this from a girl who usually lives under sinister clouds.  She was transformed, if only for a few moments, not by expensive possessions or a pill, but by a poet she came across in English class.

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

 

THE ART OF LINGERING, Part 2: BASKING IN WRITING

I spent some time basking in the sun this past weekend, and this week in English class I plan to encourage my students to bask in their own writing. Basking in the spring sunshine (especially after weeks of storms) requires no effort, and in a way, neither does basking in sentences and paragraphs. In the warm, late-afternoon light on Sunday, I simply sat in a chair and allowed the sun to do its munificent work, and tomorrow in class I will ask my students to just stay silent in the center of some of their writing, letting its allure linger around them. We can’t rush the enjoyment of sunshine, and neither can we rush the appreciation of written words. The students need to sprawl a little in the middle of their first drafts, feeling the overall motifs and perhaps sensing new forms and directions their sentences might take. They need to luxuriate in their own writing, perhaps loll in it, as I did in the surprising sunshine. Only then can they feel the full force of what they’ve written, and only then can they find new ways to spruce up their writing, like the April sun somewhat refurbished my life this weekend.


© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

THE ART OF LINGERING

 
There are many arts I should be teaching my students – the art of writing paragraphs, the art of punctuating properly, the art of reading with awareness – but I sometimes forget to teach the art of lingering. In our madcap, breakneck world, lingering has long ago become a lost art, and I need to bring its significance and usefulness to the attention of my students. They need to learn that dawdling can be a highly creative act, and that loitering can lead to learning of the highest order. The beautiful truths available to teenagers (or anyone) don’t reveal themselves to hastiness, but only to long-drawn-out attentiveness.  The kids, I’m afraid, are accustomed to rushing through just about every task, but that simply doesn’t work when you’re exploring a Shakespeare sonnet or a writing a weighty and well-designed essay. I must help them learn to linger lovingly over a phrase of Shakespeare’s, and to dawdle among their own sentences in a search for possible fine-tuning and refinement. They must learn to wait quietly in the middle of a poem, reading the words over and over, passing the time until a truth materializes from out of the lines.  I must help them see the delight that can come from dallying in a chapter of a Dickens novel -- doubling back to some favorite sentences, savoring a paragraph for a full fifteen minutes, tarrying on the last page, hoping the chapter will never end. Rushing, I guess, will get us places faster, but faster doesn’t make it in my English class. A book-loving, word-loving tortoise would get a higher grade than any hare.   

© 2010 Hamilton Salsich

COUNTLESS TEACHERS IN ROOM 2

On the surface, it may appear that there is only one teacher in

my 9^th grade English class, but actually the number of teachers  is

incalculable, even infinite. Of course, on days when I’m inattentive

to what’s actually happening, I pretend that I am the only

teacher – that all the English learning depends entirely on my

ability to cause it to happen. I say it’s “my” class and the kids

are “my” students, as though I am solely responsible for the ongoing

expansion of the students’ ability to think, read, and write.  That,

unfortunately, was my attitude for the early part of my

teaching career: I was the sole teacher, and any learning in my class

was primarily my responsibility. Now, with the passage of more than

forty years, I see clearly the folly of such thinking. To consider

myself the only teacher in my English class is about as foolish as

thinking clouds are the only cause of the rain.  Moisture-laden

clouds might be the immediate cause of rain, but the line of linked

causes that created the clouds extends back into the endless past,

and the line of causes that ultimately produce learning in my

classes is just as immeasurable. I might be the most direct cause of

learning, but how many countless causes worked together to create

me, with my particular knowledge and abilities, and then enabled

me to be in Room 2 on a given day at a given hour in the year

2010? And how could we possibly count the forces that worked to

bring the students, with all their distinctive and diverse capabilities,

to my classroom at any given moment in time? Trying to identify the

one and only cause would be as silly as identifying one drop of water

as the sole cause of high waves at sea. As their “official” teacher, in

truth I am only a drop of water in the immense sea of my students’

English education. I cause things to happen the way a drop of water

does—by being a steadfast but modest part of an endless,

unfathomable enterprise.        

RISING AND SURGING RESOURCES

     We’re dealing with some serious flooding in southern New England these days – rivers are “rising and surging”, as one resident put it – and this morning, leafing through a dictionary, I happened to come upon the word “resource”, and was surprised to discover that its origin is the old French resourdre, meaning “rise again”, which is in turn based on the Latin surgere, which means “to rise”. This didn’t suggest to me that our current floods are actually a resource for us, but it did set me thinking about one particular resource my students and I have in our work in English class. It may be a more powerful resource than we have imagined, a resource that actually does rise and surge through our lives in transforming ways. I’m referring, of course, to our ability to think, an ability that, in one sense, is stronger and more forceful than springtime floods. My students and I have far more thoughts available to us than we realize – thoughts that, you might say, are constantly rising like rivers. This resource is available to us instantly and abundantly, flowing through us with an almost reckless lack of restraint. What’s odd is that my students and I sometimes actually don’t see, or believe in, this overflowing mental resource. It’s as if, standing beside the flooded river in my small Rhode Island town and watching the water surge wildly along, we were to calmly say, “Where’s the flood? Where’s the rising, surging river?” It’s in our minds, all the time -- thoughts ceaselessly flowing like the finest resource, but sometimes, I fear, they flood through my classroom largely unnoticed.


© 2010 Hamilton Salsich