Shutting Up

This week, thanks to my courageous grandson, I’m going to work on shutting up in the classroom. Noah, who is just seven and striving earnestly as a novice reader, was reading to me this afternoon, and I had to seriously struggle to stop myself from helping him. Whenever he paused over a word, I was right there with my bossy sense of helpfulness, ready with a handy hint to keep him going. Always the officious teacher, I was trying way too hard to teach this lad who, I soon realized, just wanted to work this out by himself. Luckily, I learned my lesson within a few minutes, and was soon sitting back and watching my grandson’s straining face as he made his brave way to the end of the story. By shutting myself up, I made it possible for him to have a small triumph, and I intend to take that approach with my students this week. A teacher needs to know when to shut up, watch, and be amazed.

Bravery with a Book

As I was listening to my 7-year-old grandson read aloud to me this evening, the earnestness and intensity in his voice as he sounded out the words was a reminder of what a brave and audacious process reading really is. Those of us who have been reading rather easily for years may have lost sight of the thrill and fear involved in setting out for a trek through a book when you’re just a beginner. I could almost feel Noah’s nervous wholeheartedness as he stared at each word and worked out its meaning, almost as if he was hiking up a severe but spectacular mountain trail. When he was finished with the story, his smile and soft exclamations of pleasure told of a boy who had been on a brave adventure and come through. Later, as I was doing some reading myself, I sensed some of the exhilaration I saw in my grandson. I realized, once again, that reading words is as astonishing an act as anything a person can do. Each word was a door to somewhere strange, each sentence a set of wondrous signals. Just by understanding marks on a page I was wandering into other worlds, thinking surprising thoughts, feeling life getting fuller, sort of like Noah a few hours ago.

October Fun

Sacredness

“Sunday bells were a mere accident of the day, and not part of its sacredness.”
--George Eliot, in Silas Marner

When I read this sentence this morning, it occurred to me that just about everything that happens in my classroom seems more like a casual accident than a sacred event. Truth is, I don’t often see any type of sacredness or blessedness or holiness or purity in my work as a high school English teacher. What I mostly see is a seemingly haphazard, hit-or-miss assortment of activities which appear to arrive out of nowhere at the start of class and disappear without delay at the end. I plan my lessons rigorously each day, but still, I have a strong sense that uncertainty and arbitrariness are concealed beneath it all. Even when I’m operating with the most carefully polished and foolproof lesson plan, everything seems to be perilously close to confusion and chaos just below the surface. So, no, I don’t often see the sacredness Eliot speaks of, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know it’s there. One dictionary gives this as a definition for “sacred” – “regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular group or individual” – and, by that definition, everything that happens in my classroom is sacred, for all of it is, to me, as special as a church service or a momentous ceremony. Yes, it’s just a bunch of kids and a senior-citizen teacher talking about poems or paragraphs or faulty punctuation or the power of iambic pentameter, but to me it might as well be high mass at St. Peter’s. We don’t do anything spectacular – no fancy words or sentences, no world-shattering statements, no suddenly reshaped lives – but just the same, there’s something singular and wondrous about what happens. After all, young-at-heart human beings (myself included) are thinking and speaking with all the freshness of their youthfulness, and new ideas are being born faster than we can follow them. Pages of books sometimes break open for us like shells with pearls, and we’ve all felt -- my students and I, every so often during class -- the flight of surprising and unforgettable thoughts inside us. It’s true that most of my minutes in English class are nothing like sacred – just the routines of a teacher and kids carrying out the duties of academia – but occasionally I spring awake, for some reason, and see the wonder of what we’re doing in my little classroom on a quiet country road in Connecticut.

Rhythm

This morning as I drove to school and gratefully found the sunlight once again spreading across the countryside, as it has each morning for many billions of years, I got to thinking about the rhythms of all things, including the rhythms of English class. There’s night, morning, and then night again, and in English class there’s confusion, understanding, and then confusion again. Like the rising and falling and rising of my lungs, or the silence of the wind and then its shrieking and then its silence again, my lessons soar and stagger and, sooner or later, soar again. All comes round in a rhythm – seasons, beats of hearts, the attentiveness and carelessness of students, the success and collapse of my teaching. I even realized, as I drove toward school this morning, that rhythm is behind the beauty of the literature I love. The reason certain sentences stay in my thoughts is because of the musical movements of the words – the way sounds shift and flow in graceful patterns. Aspiring writers, I often think, should foster a love for the music of words, because their best writing has to work like melodies work, making ideas and feelings flow with force and stylishness. I’m going to talk more with my students about this idea of rhythm – about looking for rhythms of all kinds in the books we read, and about bringing some easy rhythms into their essays. They could do something as simple as repeat some ‘s’ sounds in a few sentences, or set up a reverberating pattern among phrases in a paragraph. They could look for the rise and fall of successive subordinate clauses in Dickens, or the straightforward but long-celebrated repetitions of iambic pentameter in Shakespeare. They could do this – or they could look out the classroom window at the rhythms of birds’ wings as they flutter back and forth from the feeder. Rhythm is rhythm – and beautiful – wherever it’s found.

Snapping Out of It

When he saw me sinking into one of my listless, lazy moods, my dad used to say, “Snap out of it”, and it has often seemed to me that my students and I do some of that kind of snapping in English class. There’s a kind of sleep-inducing dreaminess that occasionally comes over my classroom, almost like a soft cloud of slowness has descended on us, and it’s lucky for all of us that something usually happens to snap us out of it. It might be a sentence from To Kill a Mockingbird, or a few phrases from an Emerson essay, or some spoken words sprung on us by one of the students, or even a sudden sweep of wind in the trees outside – something usually cracks open the sleepiness so it drains away and leaves some fresh attentiveness in its place. Now and then it’s my brusque words that arouse the students, as happened today when a boy was spellbound by sparrows outside the windows and a few words from me forced him back to our discussion, but usually something more commonplace occurs to carry us back from dreamland. I’ve seen a whole class suddenly sit up and look alert when a student speaks a few forceful words about a story or poem. It’s like an alarm sounded, or sunshine suddenly fell on us after a few overcast days, or lights came on in a dark stadium. It happens every day in English class, sometimes over and over, this rising up from the slumber of tedium, this graceful snapping out of it.

Bright Lights

Driving to school today in the morning darkness, I appreciated the usefulness of the car’s bright lights as I flashed them up occasionally, and it started me thinking about the kind of lights I shine for my students on certain obscure passages in the books we read together. Admittedly, much of A Tale of Two Cities remains in darkness as my students read the pages, just as the countryside is covered in darkness as I pass along the back roads on my way to school. It’s a veiled and baffling book, in many ways, and the best I can do for my students is shine the bright lights of my reading wisdom, as much as I have, on certain murky sections. They have possibly another 70 years in which to explore the great novel; what I want to do is drive them through it for the first time in a slow and exploratory way, appreciating the strange darkness and using the bright lights to occasionally shine some understanding on the road ahead.

Gone Fishing

I don’t fish in lakes and rivers, but I do try my luck at my desk when I’m designing plans for my classes. It’s a cheerful process for me, simply tossing a line into the never-ending stream of ideas that flows through this universe, and then, like an unflappable fisherman, waiting for nibbles. I’m not hard to please when I’m fishing for ideas. Like most fishermen, I bring in whatever bites, whatever suggestion rises from the depths, even if it seems utterly lackluster or perilously bizarre. I pull up the idea, and nine times out of ten, after inspecting it with a trusting eye and a welcoming heart, I put it into place in the lesson plan. If that sounds like a naive and reckless approach to teaching, I prefer to think of it as an unrestrained and ingenuous one – a way of teaching that enables me to accept some of the zillions of extraordinary but zany-seeming ideas a more cautious teacher might discard. For there are, indeed, countless ideas available for me to use in class, some of them completely crazy looking, but it is often those outlandish ones that set a lesson off and flying. Does this policy sometimes produce disasters – lessons that limp out the classroom door like duds? Of course, but it also produces, way more often, a sense among the students that something special is happening. I’ll continue to take my chances as I fish for ideas, fully believing that the strangest ones can occasionally call forth the finest learning.

The Big Bang and Me

When I get confused and downcast about my teaching, it sometimes helps to remember that all the atoms in my body were brought into being by the “big bang” many billions of years in the past. Fantastic as it seems, scientists say that all matter was made those many eons ago, and that I am composed of atoms that have made a magnificent journey from that original explosion, circulating through countless material forms and eventually finding the form called “Hamilton Salsich”. Inside me, while I’m fussing about whether I taught the use of prepositions properly enough, atoms from the unimaginable past are performing their tasks with inconceivable precision. It’s as if I have a universe inside me, one that’s as old as the oldest star, and one that’s been dancing, in one form or another, for around fifteen billion years. When a lesson breaks down almost before it starts, or when the students seem miles away in daydreams during a Shakespeare discussion, it helps to remember what’s really happening – that right here in the midst of my tedious lesson, immeasurable numbers of atoms are staging an unseen but astonishing show. My seemingly wearisome words, the students’ lassitude, the featureless fluorescent lighting, all are part of a performance the universe has been masterminding for what might as well be forever. It’s not about me and some kids and prepositions and Shakespeare; it’s about atoms as old as stars spinning ceaselessly and flawlessly around in a place in the limitless universe called a classroom.

A Grateful Heart

A respected colleague has often told me the most important quality in a good teacher is an open mind, and several others believe it’s a caring heart – but my vote goes to a grateful heart. When I become befuddled and filled with unease in my work with middle school students, the only assured remedy for me is turn to gratitude and its gifts. I have so much to be grateful for that it would take me many hours after school to list it all, but just a few minutes usually succeeds in lessening my concerns. After an exasperating day in the classroom, by 3:30, after some serious assistance from gratitude, I’m usually smiling with a kind of humble satisfaction. After all, with all the gifts I’ve been given – my faithful and affectionate family, the teaching I’m privileged to do each day, the food that fills my refrigerator week after week, the lungs that let life renew itself inside me, the sun that unfailingly rises for me each morning – why shouldn’t I absolutely shout with gratitude? Why shouldn’t I constantly smile in the classroom, since I’m one of the luckiest people on earth – a person who not only was born on third base, but gets constantly reborn there every second, all set to easily score. I don’t have much money in the bank, but better than that, I have a limitless supply of inspiring thoughts and generous feelings, fostered in me over the years by the inspiring and generous people I’ve been fortunate to know. Dollars can disappear, but thankful thoughts and feelings flow from far off, ceaselessly, and I feel their force day after day without end. For allergies I go to my doctor; for unease about my teaching, I go to a grateful heart.

A Perfect Class

It often occurs to me, right in the middle of a class, that everything is happening exactly as it should – that it’s a perfect class, another words. Of course, this doesn’t happen when I’m mired in a small-minded view of things – when I’m seeing the class and my lesson as a piece of complicated machinery that depends on only me for its efficient operation. When that’s my line of thought, nothing is ever perfect – not the lesson, not the kids, not the distracting sounds in the hall, not even the songs of birds outside. When I’m looking at my life in the classroom with a shortsighted, always-disparaging lens, defects bordering on disarray seem to be everywhere. There are times, though, when I feel the strange sense of being far, far above the classroom and quietly looking down on the comings and goings of the seasoned teacher and his students. With that distant, wide-angle view -- one that takes in not only the small classroom in the Connecticut countryside, but the fields and cities of the state, the spreading earth itself with its endless abundance, as well as the continuous stars -- all seems right in Mr. Salsich’s Room 2, just as all seems right with any sunset or wave in the sea or wind in the trees. Small-minded views pass judgments; big-picture views sit back and appreciate.

Birds in the Bush

I try to focus on getting “a bird in the hand” in my daily English classes – a specific and detailed lesson taught with thoroughness – but I must also confess to enjoying the sense that there are multitudes of “birds in the bush” somewhere out there in the distances beyond my little lessons. While I’m teaching a lesson on metaphors in A Tale of Two Cities, I hope the students come to an understanding of what a metaphor is and how Dickens distinctively uses them in the novel, but I also hope they gain at least a hazy awareness of the multifarious extended meanings of these metaphors – meanings that reach far out beyond the words on the pages. I want them to be able to deal successfully with my assignments and tests involving metaphors, but, more significantly, I want them to get a glimpse of the limitless “birds in the bush”, those furtive truths that surround any great literary work and extend out beyond reckoning. We’ll never truly take hold of and fully understand most of those truths, but perhaps that’s precisely what makes them special – their remoteness, their inaccessibility, their dimness and secrecy, like far-off mountains we can admire only from a distance. Sometimes a simple question like “Why does it matter?” can start students thinking about these misty, distant truths, as in “Why does it matter that Dickens compares wine spilled in the streets to blood? Why does it matter for our lives – teenagers and an old teacher – right here and now, in October of 2010? Why does it matter that we even read this strange, inscrutable book?” These are questions that can’t ever be definitely answered, like mountains that can’t ever be reached and climbed. All we can do is ask them and wonder, hoping to get a hint, at least, of the birds in the bush beyond counting.

A Tiny Fly on The Tempest

Yesterday, as I was rereading parts of The Tempest outside, I noticed a tiny insect making its way across some lines of Prospero, and I couldn’t help but think of my students and me in English class. As I watched the little creature crawling among the words on the page, turning to the right and left and looking over the edges of the book, I thought of all of us in class as we work our way through Shakespeare or Dickens, sometimes moving slowly, struggling to see some sense in the words. I include myself in this, for after 46 years in the classroom, I still occasionally get as lost among Dickens’ sentences as the small fly that was wandering around on my Shakespeare page yesterday. Like the fly, I sometimes seem to be staring out from the edge of a page in absolute bewilderment. As I watched the insect, I also thought of the transient nature of his life, and of all things, including our understandings of the words we read. Soon the insect will be simply a wisp of the dust of the measureless universe, and so, to be honest, will the ideas my students and I dream up about a Browning poem or Prospero’s statements. We ourselves are comparatively small specks of life in this limitless universe, and, like everything, we will go where the universe carries us and leave our lives behind when the universe is still as fresh as an infant. The ideas we share in English class are like spanking new lights in the shadows, but soon our lights will flicker and fall away and new lights will take their places in the everlasting procession of ideas. As Prospero says, “our little life is rounded with a sleep” -- the insect’s little life in the midst of the majestic words of Shakespeare, as well as the lives of my students and me as we shine the fearless lamps of our thoughts onto the sometimes mystifying words we read.

On Not Knowing What Will Happen

On many mornings, as I drive to school I think about an astounding fact – that I have no idea what will happen at any given moment in my classes. Sure, I have my lesson plans, usually fairly tidy and comprehensive, but that’s simply a wise kind of guesswork, sort of like a meteorologist saying how the winds of a storm will swirl on a particular street. The truth is that countless varieties of events await my students and me at every second – situations, spoken words, wild ideas from far off, interruptions of the most far-fetched kinds – and my precious plans are no more to those events than a sieve is to rain drops. Emerson wrote that we should “mount to paradise/ By the stairway of surprise”, which tells me he would be happy with my English classes, where, in a sense, surprises happen every passing second. How, for instance, can my students and I possibly predict what thoughts will materialize in our minds in a 48 minute class? And how can we foretell what feelings we will have, or what words will pass among us like haphazard puffs of our minds? Perhaps, in fact, we do have a sort of paradise in my classroom, a place where surprise parties happen every day.

Joyful Teaching

A friend once told me that his definition of joy is simply “the expectation of good”, which, if he’s accurate, means that I have a joyful class every day. I fully look forward to good things happening in each of my classes – spanking new ideas, subtle transformations in students, surprising shifts and new understandings in discussions. Why shouldn’t I expect good, when I’m blessed with the presence of kids whose lives are unfurling with fresh thoughts each moment? Why shouldn’t good give us its gifts each day, when all of us in the classroom carry immeasurable goodness inside us? There are, for sure, times when I don’t feel this joy – when I seem certain that more problems than pleasures will arise in a class – and I must confess to not understanding why this attitude occasionally comes over me. It seems as silly as visiting the Grand Canyon and expecting more unsightliness than magnificence, or being given a thousand dollars and droning on about why it’s not a thousand and five. My students and I aren’t perfect, but neither, I guess, are sunsets and snowfalls, but they stir up some joy in me, sure enough, and so does every English class.

Blowing Leaves or Smooth Machine

Watching the fall leaves taking flight and scattering across the streets of my New England village today helped me understand something about myself – that I’d like to teach more like blustering leaves than a steady machine. I loved seeing the spirited movements of the leaves in today’s winds, as though they were full of honest and spontaneous get-up-and-go and were simply expressing their instinctive leafyness. I know they’re just dead leaves drifting around in a purposeless way, but they brought an important truth to mind about my work with students – that throwing aside carefulness occasionally and just moving freely through lessons like leaves on the streets would tell the students that their teacher takes looseness and spontaneity seriously. I don’t want the students to see a machine called a teacher in the front of the room, faking it as a bona fide person and being merely a mechanism that moves through lessons like a lifeless apparatus. Of course, I do have to have detailed plans prepared for each class, but there have to be times, too, when the plans are put aside in favor of a little liberty and even foolishness for a few minutes. There’s something reassuring about a teacher taking off his formality for a time and treating himself and his students to some short-term fun. It seems, once again, that the teacher is one of us, simply a person sharing, with pleasure, the honest-to-goodness spirit of his life.

Making Fun of a Teacher

I would definitely dislike it if anyone made fun of my teaching, but over the years, I have learned to enjoy making cheerful and heartfelt fun of myself. After school, I sometimes sit in my classroom laughing to myself at all the foolishness I had put on display during my classes – all the self-important posturing, all the posing as a distinguished, higher-than-thou individual, all the pretending and play-acting, as though I am actually an unusually talented teacher. Occasionally I even break into gentle laughter as I picture myself striding around the room, cross-examining my students about the subtleties of Dickens’ prose, lecturing about the light that can lift up from fine sentences, sometimes leading the class in cheers for themselves. I see myself, then, in those insightful after-school moments, as a devoted and moderately capable actor playing a sometimes momentous but always slightly amusing role. I think what I find so funny is the seriousness with which I take myself, as though a greater weight rests on my shoulders than on most other people’s. My teaching wouldn’t be quite so amusing if I wasn’t so unreservedly earnest about it, so thoroughly convinced, it seems, that I am a kind of knight in shining armor for my young pupils. I seem to be saying, “Let other folks find their way in menial occupations; I labor in an honored and hallowed calling.” Yes, I get some good laughs as I drive to school in the morning and recall this histrionic classroom performer named Mr. Salsich. My almost-daily laughter before school is good for me, because it always slows me down and lets me see, again, the simple truth – that I’m no better or greater than anyone else trying to do a decent job, be it controlling pests, building bridges, or creating English lessons for kids. All of us are, in a very good sense, actors playing roles the universe bestows on us, and all the roles are of equal value. While I’m on stage in my classroom, the maintenance guys are on another stage down the hall, and the bus drivers have their own special stage to strut their very necessary stuff on. What I have to do is keep playing my role with heartiness and fidelity, while always remembering that it’s simply one of a zillion parts played across the cosmos -- and that it deserves a light-hearted laugh every so often.

Led by Nature

On the long drive to school this morning, I fell in behind a truck bearing the logo, “Led by Nature,” and fairly quickly I thought, “ That’s what I should be in the classroom.” I’m all too often led by my personal and usually small-minded ideas about how to do this and why to do that, and all I get out of that leadership is what seems to me to be pretty superficial results. On the surface, I guess I accomplish a fair amount in my classes, but underneath, where soul-shaking learning occurs, my personal kind of management doesn’t have much of an effect. While I’m pursuing my individual goals on the outside, on the inside the students’ lives probably continue to move along on their unchanged paths. I long ago realized that I do my best teaching when I get myself out of the way – when I’m rather modestly following the lead of what I might call inspirations, or flashes, or revelations. Old-time poets spoke of listening to the Muse while they were writing, and perhaps that’s what I’m experiencing when my teaching is on-target – the sway and influence of ideas that simply don’t seem to have come from inside me. Maybe it’s nature, or the universe, or even what some people call “God”, but whatever label we choose to place on it, it’s a forceful presence beside me when my teaching is going well. It’s like there’s no Mr. Salsich anymore – just teaching and learning. It’s like the teacher had disappeared into the wind, and only the wind is blowing.

Raking Leaves and Words

I still persist in rounding up fallen leaves the old-fashioned way, with a rake, mostly because it’s a soft and hushing kind of activity, much like writing often is for me – as I hope it sometimes is for my students. These last few days I’ve loved the silence of the yard as I’ve swept the rake back and forth, finding a strange kind of serenity with almost every stroke. As the leaves let themselves be brought together in piles, so do my feelings seem to fall into their proper and peaceful places inside me. The noise of stressful thoughts subsides into softness very much like the sounds made by my moving rake. I try to write a paragraph each day, and I often find a similar smoothness in the process of setting words and sentences down in a disciplined fashion. There’s sometimes a sense of almost flawless synchronization in the writing, as if the words can do nothing else but be just where they are on the page. A miserable day can become as soft as piles of leaves once a paragraph’s words are put down. Is it ever the same with my students? Perhaps not often, but I do hope they can occasionally feel the fullness of peace that placing words carefully together can bring. Perhaps, in the privacy of their rooms at home, they can sometimes see their words become as one on the computer screen as easily and softly as leaves assemble on lawns these days.

Trusting Simplicity

“The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner's face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that defenceless, deer-like gaze …”

-- George Eliot, in Silas Marner

I guess the “trusting simplicity” I sometimes see in my students’ faces is what I love almost best about teaching – and I wish I could reclaim more of it for myself. I love the ease with which the students seem to think – the way thoughts apparently pop up inside them like bubbles in a brook, and the way the kids often have full faith in them. My so-called “mature” mind is so conditioned to pass judgment on every thought, that I’m almost powerless to welcome ideas as they display themselves by the thousands inside me, but my students share the trusting assurance of Silas Marner. They seem to sense that thoughts – any thoughts – have unusual powers and should at least be received and appreciated, if not listened to and worshipped. Marner’s strength, perhaps, was the “absence of special observation”, and I see the same quality in my young scholars. They often come to class with “deer-like gaze[s]”, seemingly seeing English class as an utter mystery, like a light in their eyes in darkness – but there’s an adolescent acceptance in those eyes that can make for a large measure of learning. Because they’re not looking for anything in particular, it may be that they can see the surprising and special truths that sometimes start up in class like the smallest froths in a stream – truths that I, with my constantly critical mind, might miss.

Vagueness and Mystery

“To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery.”

-- George Eliot, in Silas Marner

When I read this sentence today, it came to me that my students and I are little different from Eliot’s “peasants of old times”, but at least we’re luckier, because books can bring us out from the little prisons of our “direct experience”. Like many of us, the students and I exist, for the most part, in the undersized universe that we encounter moment by moment – the sights and sounds and words of our rather restricted lives -- but the books we study in English class can help our worlds, at least to some extent, unwrap and widen. Without books, we are fixed firmly in our personal lives, but fortunately, my students and I share the boundless universe of written words. However, that doesn’t mean the sense of vagueness and mystery is absent. The world of literature presents no clearness or straightforwardness for us – just inscrutability of a new and occasionally astonishing kind. A book like A Tale of Two Cities confronts my young readers with mental mountains and mazes, but at least they’re mountains and mazes that can show the students the way out from their limited adolescent lives. Great books bring great worlds into my classroom, a modest space on a quiet Connecticut road where vagueness and mystery sometimes make larger lives for us.

AT THE MYSTIC Y WITH NOAH, AVA, JAIMIE, AND MATT (2009)

SUMMER FUN, 2010

Thanksgiving, 2009

Just Be a Light

“What in me is dark

Illumine...”

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

Like most teachers, I occasionally fuss and upset myself over what exactly I’m supposed to be doing – just what this bewildering line of work is actually all about – but every so often these wonderful words come back to me: “Just be a light.” Years ago, when I was adrift and far off-course as a novice teacher, someone gave me this advice, and it sometimes reappears in my mind, often just when the darkness is greatest – when I have no clear idea what I’m doing in the classroom (which, after 40+ years, still happens to me on a regular basis). It reminds me that being a teacher is really an astonishingly simple task. All it involves, as Milton seemed to understand, is shining a light on what’s already there, inside the students. Yes, there’s a lot of darkness in the students – the darkness of ignorance, perplexity, and miscalculation – but all darkness of any kind disappears instantly when a light shines on it. In a sense, I don’t have to add anything to my students’ inner lives, but rather just shine a light so they can see the wisdom they’ve been harboring inside them all their young lives. Of course, I teach them new concepts and skills, but these, I think, are simply more lights to shine on and dispel the darkness of ignorance so the astuteness of the students can shine like it should. I don’t have to change the students, or help them grow, or insert new ideas in their minds. Teaching is simply a question of lighting up their world to some extent -- essentially a rather simple task, like switching on a lamp to let a good light show what’s always been there.

What Will They Remember?

This morning I found myself remembering the wonderful stories of Sherwood Anderson, and it soon started me wondering what my students will remember about my classes. I must confess that the words “very little” were the first that came to mind, but then I realized, to my surprise, that I actually remember very little about the Anderson stories. What I remember is the atmosphere of those stories, or what I might call the aura. Thinking back, I feel again the simplicity and sincerity I felt when I first read the stories – the sense of everyday lives described in a skillfully straightforward and seemingly effortless way. I honestly can’t recall a single scene or character from the stories – just the aura, the atmosphere, the soft and earnest shine that seemed to rise from the sentences. I guess I wouldn’t be disappointed if the students recalled my classes that way -- not because they learned how to read Robert Frost or use commas correctly, but because a certain impression of kindness and openness and slowly-increasing understanding seemed to suffuse the classes. I hope the students gain some specific knowledge that will help them in their future school years, but more importantly, I hope they gain a certain new impression about books and words and writing – a fresh feeling for their possibilities, an awareness of the wisdom available inside them. Years from now, when former students are asked what they recall about Mr. Salsich’s class, I would hope they might respond with words like “quiet” or “peaceful” or “fulfilling”. Whether they remember writing with participles or the poetry of Frost fades away in comparison.

Wide Knowledge

“He was not of the material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in narrow tracks.”

-- George Eliot, in Daniel Deronda

When I read this passage this morning, I was first struck by the phrase “narrow tracks”, I guess because it started me thinking about my 8th and 9th grade students and the strictly regulated roads I make them travel in English class. Young Daniel Deronda, the subject of the above quote, would not have fared well in my class, with its fairly inflexible assignments and meticulous rules and regulations. Something “had sprung up in him” as a boy, sort of a desire to stretch and reach for far-off realms of learning, and my modest but almost fussy essay assignments would surely not have satisfied that desire. He wanted the kind of “wide knowledge” that quite honestly, is probably seldom discovered in my little and limited classroom, but is best searched for in the liberty of the world around us. I must say, though, that I’m a bit like Daniel in that I sincerely wish my students and I could stumble upon this “wide knowledge” more frequently. I wish more poems could propel us past the borders of the usual literary analysis and out into the territories of free-range feeling and thinking. I wish more sentences in stories could send rockets across our minds and make a few lights flash and signal inside us. Maybe it happens more than I think. Maybe the young people in my classroom occasionally come to Daniel Deronda’s longed-for “wide knowledge” as they’re working on a formal essay, or perhaps remembering my voice as I spoke the lines of a poem, or maybe just thinking of a classmate’s simple thought shared with sincerity during class. I hope so.

Winds and Thoughts

Today the wind is working hard among the trees outside my classroom, as though it’s performing some special deeds out there, but the ideas passing through my life seem soft and easygoing. No great ideas have been stirring today -- no inspiring brainstorms about teaching, no unused and rousing ways to present lessons, no refreshing wisdom. All day I have been living with thoroughly unruffled mental weather – a wonderful situation for daydreams and castles in the sky, but not so good for a teacher who waits for ideas the way sailors wait for the wind. As I watch the trees tumbling in the wind outside, I wish a little of that rough and ready liveliness would let itself loose in my mind, but I know, at the same time, that weathers in the mind, like weathers among trees, must constantly change and rejuvenate themselves. Tomorrow the trees might be stock-still and soundless, and a great idea about teaching might break open and blow through my mind. Next week, no winds whatsoever might make their way among the trees, while inside my life good gusts of ideas for class might constantly start up. It takes patience, I guess – watching the weather and thoughts. I have to wait and watch and, before long, I’ll see that both winds and thoughts work the way they must, moment by moment and day by day.

Secrets and Mysteries

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”

-- Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities

It’s amusing, really, how I sometimes enjoy pretending that I know my students well. It’s as if I’m up on stage playing a role in a play called “The Dedicated Teacher”, and at the same time I’m also in the audience, laughing quietly at the humor of it all. The dedicated teacher walks around the stage with furrowed brow as he struggles to “get to know” his students, while I sit in wonderment in the audience, smiling because nothing is clearer to me than the fact that finding any truth about the inner lives of my students is a hopeless enterprise. While the actor/teacher named Mr. Salsich continually carries forward his mission to make himself into a teacher who “understands” his students, the Mr. Salsich in the front row can’t help but find the funny side of the performance, mainly because of the “wonderful fact” that Dickens understood. I can pretend – and I do it day after day – that I understand people, but that’s as foolish, and funny, as pretending to understand why the universe does what it does, or why Niagara Falls falls the way it does at a given moment.  It may sound preposterous to some, but I truly believe that the students in my classroom are as vast and mysterious as a thousand solar systems -- so where’s the honesty in saying I understand them? Do I understand how rivers run? Do I understand where the wind arrives from? Only an actor could carry off such a charade.

Warm Once Again

After spending this morning outside in the chilly air watching my granddaughter’s soccer match, I was comforted to be warm once again inside my car, and it reminded me of the feeling I hope my students have, over and over again, when they gain the comfort of at least a small amount of understanding after being “out in the cold” of a baffling book like a A Tale of Two Cities. Actually, it occurred to me, as I was driving away from the field and finding comfort in the car’s warmth, that I should be grateful to the almost frosty air at the field, because without it, I would not have been able to take pleasure in the comparative coziness of the car. First there was ninety minutes of cold, and, then precisely because of it, there was the pure pleasure of warmth. The truth is that if I was always contentedly warm, day after day and year after year, warmth would be thoroughly unexciting, and I’ve known for a long time that a similar odd truth holds in English class. I purposely put my students in seriously disagreeable literary situations – in the frosty regions, you might say, of bewildering books and poems – specifically so they can enjoy the warmth won by persistent and painstaking reading. Like me this morning, if the students don’t suffer some discomfort, where’s the use and blessing of comfort?

The Largeness of the World

“She wanted the largeness of the world to help her thought.”

         -- George Eliot, in Felix Holt, The Radical

         When Esther Lyon is struggling to make an important decision and stares out at the sky and stars for help, it strikes me as exactly the feeling I often have as I search for help in making the small but special daily decisions about my English classes. More and more as the years pass, I see myself as a minuscule ship in an endless ocean called learning and teaching, with the hesitant captain (me) always on deck calling into the darkness for assistance. I make dozens of decisions each day as I do my classroom work, of which a fair share seem to produce suitable results, but I often have the strong sense of a vast world of ideas out there that could shine down useful lights on the decision-making process. It’s like I’m using a teensy flashlight to make my choices, when all-powerful floodlights are always available. In the novel, George Eliot captures this feeling so well as Esther searches the heavens for inspiration. I’ve done something similar as I’ve driven my 40 miles to and from school each day, seeking ideas for lesson plans in the look of peaceful fields and in the way leaves (these days) lift and fall in their easy ways along the roads. As I speed along in my small car, the wide world seems immeasurable -- without end and uncharted and chock-full of wisdom. It seems impossible, each morning and evening, that this boundless universe I’m moving through wouldn’t wish me well with a few fine ideas for lessons – and, luckily, it sometimes does. There have been days when a thought threw itself into my car as though from the distant stretch of trees or the never-stopping sky. On other days an idea for a lesson seemed to light itself up in the passenger seat beside me, as if to be sure I would notice. I understand Esther as she stands at the dark window and waits for help from “the largeness of the world”, and I also understand her quiet confidence that help will come.