SITTING UP, WRITING UP

I require my students to sit up fairly straight in class, as a way of encouraging a dignified approach to their English studies, and I expect them to write with a similar kind of poise. It has to do, I think, with self-esteem. If the students sit in my class, day after day, in a dignified manner, there’s a reasonable chance that they will slowly start to think of themselves as dignified people – as young adults blessed with the gift of graciousness, maybe even gallantry. To me, slouching in class looks too much like diffidence and faint-heartedness, two traits my students can use less of, and perhaps sitting tall (like standing tall) will show them the way to a stronger sense of confidence and self-assurance. Not surpisingly, I make them write the way they sit, with strength and orderliness and dignity. The essays they compose in my class must read, in the end, like the disciplined, carefully-crafted thoughts of people who are proud of their disciplined, carefully-crafted thoughts. No ranting or rambling or wandering is allowed in the essays my students write; they sit up in class, and they have to “write up” as well – write sentences that stand on the page like the announcements of ideas that mean business. Does this leave no room for suppleness or whimsy or just plain joy, either in sitting or writing? On the contrary, students who sit in English class with a sense of honor and self-assurance, and write essays in the same spirit, are more likely to have flights of boldness and beauty in their writing than those who slump down in their seats and in their writing. It takes poise and bravery to write with strength, and I’d like visitors to my room to see poised and brave kids who care enough about their education to sit up in class.

Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot

This is a wonderful collection of stories. I just finished "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" and was deeply touched by the lovely sentences and the smoothly described emotions of the story. If it had been a longer story, in novel form, it might be considered one of her finest writings. I especially loved Eliot's use of dialect when the various characters, especially the simple country folk, are speaking.

ON THEIR OWN

When I ask students to write an essay during a single class period, I usually say something like, “You’re on your own on this one” – but actually, the truth is they’re always on their own. Whatever assignments they’re working on, whatever poems or passages from novels they’re thinking their way through, they’re doing it on their own – shining their own mental lights as they look for the truth. Of course, they occasionally receive assistance from classmates and from me, but essentially the students stand separately on their own personal mental planets, probing the words of the books we read the way astronomers probe the widespread stars. This, one might say, is a disheartening way to think of young English students -- as lonesome readers struggling in solitude -- but in one sense it’s a cheering and inspiring picture. I see in my mind my students, each standing separate and somewhat awestruck while the words of great writers shoot and soar around them like countless stars. There’s something to be said for just plain awe, even – maybe especially -- when you’re totally on your own.

THEY'RE BREATHING!

When I complain about my students’ spells of weariness and lassitude, a colleague sometimes consoles me by saying that, well, at least they’re breathing – and lately I’ve been rather appreciative of that fact. After all, it is a major miracle, this breathing thing – this steady rising and falling of lungs as I’m teaching about Blake’s poems or the uses of prepositions. No matter how helpless my students seem in trying to understand a Shakespeare sonnet, their young bodies are performing soundless miracles moment by moment during class. They may be far-gone on daydreams while I’m droning on about Emily Dickinson’s dry humor, but their lungs are lightly and easily doing their astonishing work. I might remember this when my students’ thoughts seem as flimsy as far off clouds – remember that miracles are always happening in Room 2, no matter how low down my lesson falls.

Here are some photos of our latest storm. This morning we awoke to probably 15 more inches of snow, on top of the several feet already on the ground. The top photo shows the patio, with snow piled on the table, and a green Adirondack chair just showing its tip above the snow. The middle photo is the walk to the kitchen door, and the bottom photo is my car covered with new snow in this wildest of winters. 

TRUSTING THE FURNACE

"Snow on the Barn", oil, by Chris Greco

Every so often, when I start struggling with worries about my teaching – usually about whether wonderful ideas will ever come again to my students and me – I think of the furnace in my cellar, and how I’ve discovered that I can simply trust it. On ice-covered winter days, when the temperature steadily stays close to zero, it’s reassuring to hear the big furnace come on beneath me with a soft, comforting explosion. Within seconds, I hear the hot water humming through the baseboard pipes, and I’m once again reassured that reasonable warmth will be with me. Even when the forecast calls for days of downright blizzard conditions, I know I can trust the affable furnace to fashion a perfect kind of comfort for me. Likewise, I’ve learned to trust the “furnace” of our minds – my students’ and mine – as we go about the toil of teaching and learning. I know that I don’t have to make my own heat in my house, because the furnace does it for me, and I know, too, that my students and I don’t have to fret about where ideas will come from, for there’s a furnace inside us that’s always working, whether we’re aware of its work or not. This is a furnace that fashions ideas faster than we can keep up with them, and all we need is the confidence that comes from trusting its work. We simply have to believe in the brainpower inside us, just as I must trust that massive maker of warmth in my cellar.

STONE-BLIND ALL THE WHILE

“I thought I saw everything, and was stone-blind all the while.”

-- George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

This aching cry -- by a self-important patrician who has lost a loved one and seen the truth about himself -- reminds me of roughly the first half of my teaching career. Like Sir Christopher in Eliot’s story, “I thought I saw everything” – knew all about kids and books and writing and teaching. For my first many years in the classroom, I considered myself the savior of any student who came to me. In my mind, I was just what every student needed -- a wise and witty and sometimes half crazy and always in-your-face tough but lovable teacher. With this haughty, puffed-up attitude, I was euphorically floating through my career from day to day and year to year. I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point in mid-career I suddenly understood, like a blaze of sunshine, how ignorant I really was. I had thought I was brilliant, but in the brightness of this new understanding, I saw that I was little more than just plain dense. I saw that I knew next to nothing about these inscrutable adolescent people I was supposed to be teaching. I saw that all my bravado and bluster was no more substantial than the costumes of a clown. This realization was an epiphany of the first order, and it forced me to, in effect, start all over as a fresh and unschooled novice teacher – in my early 50’s. I’m still finding my way now, at 69, still seeing, moment by moment, what I never saw before – the sheer mysteriousness of this indispensable work I’ve been trying to do.

SO much snow, and such frozen weather! Lows the last few days in the single numbers, maybe even below zero this morning. I've been staying with my daily exercise of splitting wood, but it's been tough these days to dig the logs out from the iced-over foot of snow. Below is a photograph of Jaimie's beautiful woods in their winter dress. The other photo is of Ava in the backseat coming home from the YMCA, thoroughly into an iPod presentation of Bill Cosby's "Little Bill".

Noah and Ava had a fine weekend with Josh, swimming and playing at the YMCA yesterday, and then more playing today at Jaimie's. It was fun to hang out with Luke and Jan, too, as we all did out best to brave our way through one of the coldest and snowiest stretches I can recall.

MOMENTS OF STILLNESS

“All earthly things have their lull: even on nights when the most unappeasable wind is raging, there will be a moment of stillness before it crashes among the boughs again...”

-- George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

This sentence suggests important counsel for anyone teaching teenagers: be long-suffering, and look for the lulls, the moments of stillness when a certain kind of wisdom works its wizardry. There are sometimes long stretches in my classes when “the most unappeasable wind” of puzzlement is blowing among the students. These are times when poems make no sense, novels never seemed more secretive, and simple essay assignments take days to understand. It’s as if confusion itself is blustering and gusting around the classroom, sending the students brains spinning off in all directions. It could also be a time of unrest for the teacher (“Will they ever understand this story?”), unless he understands what Eliot understood – that “lull[s]” will always unfold with reliability, sometimes in the precise center of a storm, and that even-tempered patience is essential. I’ve seen it happen on countless occasions – when a wild wind outside suddenly gives way to motionlessness and silence, and when a class of confused students recognizes, out of the blue, a deep meaning in a poem. In class, it’s like sunshine and stillness suddenly showing up in the heart of hurricane.

MICROWAVING IN ENGLISH CLASS

"Lighthouse Sun after Storm", pastel, by Nancy Poucher

As an English teacher, I’m not especially interested in things related to speed – how fast the students can write, how swiftly we can complete a lesson, how rapidly they can reach the heart of a poem – but, in some ways, speed actually does play its interesting part in our work. There are countless times, for instance, when a student suddenly, within seconds, goes from complete bafflement to a kind of astonishing wisdom about a passage we are studying. One moment the student says “Huh?” to every question about the passage, and the next moment his face sends forth a shine that says, “Aha!” When this happens, I sometimes think of a microwave: one moment my coffee is completely cold, and not many moments later it makes its special steam as I hold it. Instant heat, and, for the student, instant understanding. It happens sometimes in writing, too. A student can be bent in bewilderment over a paragraph, finding nothing respectable in the sentences, when suddenly, by replacing a single word or reshuffling one phrase, the whole piece seems proper and even stylish. It’s the microwave effect: total transformation with the swiftness of sunshine breaking through after a day of darkness

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On an icy morning, my drive to school was still peaceful and restorative. I've been using the hour drive to do some quiet thinking (I might even call it meditating), and this morning the thoughts came quietly and easily. I took this photo of a slim line of sunrise over some fields just before arriving at school for a fulfilling day of teaching teenagers. Home now, savoring the warmth of my rooms. Pizza Palace veggie pizza for dinner, preceded by merlot with whole wheat crackers and feta cheese spread.

Here's a photo of some of the gigantic iciles we have hanging from the eaves in this icy time, and also two photos of Noah and his Christmas castle.

THE WEATHER OF ENGLISH CLASS

"After the Ice Storm", oil, by Elizabeth Fraser

Today in northeast Connecticut we had snow, then icy rain, then sleet, then a steady, slanting rain, and now simply a somber sky and seemingly universal ice, and, sitting at home watching the varying weather, I thought often of my work as an English teacher. I find it strange that I can easily accept the shifting circumstances the weather sends me, but have a devil of a time taking in stride the ever-altering state of affairs in English class. Today, as the conditions changed outside, I didn’t fret or find reasons for dismay or dread, but simply sat down with my iMac and iPad and prepared myself for some pleasant hours ahead. I guess I knew that no dramatics on my part would do much to change sleet to sunshine, so why not sit back and bring some buoyant thoughts to the situation? I’m certainly not suggesting that I should sit back in my classroom and let storms of silly behavior bring chaos to my lesson plans. Far from it -- but as I’m making my best efforts to teach topics of importance in a professional manner to suitably behaved students, I can also remember that weather patterns will inescapably shift, both outside on an unsettled day and in a 9th grade classroom. As I’m working with the students in a well-managed and composed way, I can still feel, inside, perfectly open to whatever surprising and beneficial conditions might come our way.

photo © 2004 Shawn | more info (via: Wylio)
Yet another winter storm struck northeast Connecticut today -- this time sleet and snow and ice. I tried my best to drive to school this morning, but many cars were spinning out and the interstate was more ice than snow, so I turned around after an hour of slow and worrisome driving. Jaimie was home with the kids when I arrived (a snow day off from school for all), and we began an indoor day of great fun. Noah and I laughed and laughed as we fought in friendship at the chessboard, and Ava and I played "baby" on the rug in the studio. Jaimie, as usual, was a wonderful dad -- baking cookies with Ava, playing "castle" endlessly with Noah, and generally being an attentive and doting father. Outside, the ice kept forming from the frozen rain, and the small birds brought their good appetites to the bird feeder.

THE LEAST CLAMOR

“He would have been content with very little, being one of those men who pass through life without making the least clamor about themselves.”
-- George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

I keep this quote close by during the school year, for it reminds me to make teaching as selfless an activity as possible. It’s not an easy task, since an attractive renown can sometimes come a teacher’s way and whisk him off to reveries about becoming his students’ “favorite teacher” or some such nonsense. If praise starts to find him, it’s all too easy to turn aside from the true work of the teacher and start seeking applause rather than the satisfaction that comes from old-fashioned fidelity to the needs of the students. The “clamor” should always be about the students, never the teacher. In fact, I might measure my success in the classroom by how far I fade into the background behind my students. I guess I want to be “content with very little”, if by that is meant the small, steady victories of my students

The patio through a screen

The wood-splitting place

The buried house 

Ah, the blizzards of this winter! Already we have had two whoppers, the last one at least 19 inches worth.  Jaimie and I and the kids kicked up our heels a bit as we braved the cold winds and went sledding down the fast backyard slope. We also spent some good times indoors with puzzles and games and make-believe adventures with dolls and dragons. Today was a quiet day, though, with just Jaimie and I enjoying the silence surrounding the little stone house in the woods. (I did, as I usually do, about 30 minutes of wood splitting for our trustworthy stove.) 

GETTING TO KNOW HOW I TEACH

You would think a guy who’s been teaching since 1965 would know exactly how he teaches, and why, but such is not the case with me. In fact, more and more I realize that I have almost no precise idea why I do what I do in the classroom. Yes, I make careful plans for the year and for each class, but the ideas for those plans, to be honest, sort of just spring up in me like grasshoppers in fields, and I catch a few and find a place for them in my lessons. I sincerely try my best to select the best ideas, the ones that might inspire my students and send their English skills up a step or two, but still, I don’t have a clear picture of the way I think as I plan. I rarely stand back and just watch my pedagogical thinking to see where it goes, and how, and why. In a way, it’s as if my teaching mind is a stranger to me – as if it’s a mystifying leader whom I deferentially follow. I guess what I’d like to do is get to know this mind of mine that makes these thoughts that makes these English lessons – study it a bit, bring it closer and just sit back and observe. I often think of the analogy of a play, where my thoughts about teaching are the actors and I’m sitting studiously in the audience, scrutinizing their every move, understanding them little by little, letting them show me how I teach and why.

WELCOME TO ENGLISH CLASS

photo © 2008 Stav | more info (via: Wylio)
For years I’ve  wanted a “welcome” mat outside my classroom, or at least a sign to that effect, and lately I’ve recognized new reasons for it. It’s occurred to me now and then that being welcoming is a way more important precondition for high-quality teaching than I had thought. Here I’m thinking, of course, of being welcoming to the students – giving them the feeling that they’ll always find an atmosphere of conviviality in my classroom – but I’m also interested in being welcoming to just about anything – any idea, circumstance, person, or problem. I want the door of my teaching to be wide open. I want to always remember and thoroughly understand that the universe of my classroom is spacious enough to effortlessly house whatever enters it, be it a sane or silly idea, a happy or sad student, a successful or failed lesson. The world we live in easily accommodates countless forms of weather (storms one day, sunshine the next, mist the next, drought, winds, stillness), and my classroom can just as easily hold whatever happens to arise. If students seem to be sleeping inside themselves through most of a class, I can say to myself, “Welcome, sleepiness”. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t work to awaken the students; in fact, accepting the sleepiness is the best way to do that, for it reminds me that my classroom can just as easily say welcome to wide-awakeness and wonderment. Like the weather, one moment the students can be daydreaming, the next moment mindfully discussing a dense passage in A Tale of Two Cities. I’m learning to welcome it all.

A CERTAIN KIND OF KINDNESS

“…the ascendancy always belonging to kindness that never melts into caresses, and is severely but uniformly beneficent.”

-- George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, Book 2, Ch. 4

Kindness is important to me as a teacher, but only a certain kind of kindness -- perhaps George Eliot’s kind. This, you might say, is a disciplined kindness, a way of teaching that makes consideration for others a constant, steady, but not demonstrative presence. For some of my colleagues – superb teachers, I should add -- kindness sometimes “melts into caresses” and other physical expressions (pats on the back, high-5s, etc.), but that’s not my way. Over my years in the classroom, a more closely controlled kind of kindness has evolved in my teaching – a kindness that enables me to shed some genial influence on the students but in an unobtrusive and perhaps even unnoticeable way. Sometimes I think of myself as a sort of lamp set off to the side of the classroom – a lamp that glows with a kindly light so the students feel more content and cared for than they might otherwise. I’m thinking of a modest lamp, one that spreads its friendly light evenly to everyone in a “uniformly beneficent” manner. I hope that just by entering my classroom the students feel the presence of kindness the way they might sense the reassuring presence of lamplight at home.

SNOW MOMENTS IN ENGLISH CLASS

Today I’m home for a snow day, snowed into our house in the woods and surrounded by little more than silence and the loveliness of the scene outside, and I’m wondering whether I could call some kind of snow day now and then in English class. Today is a day for me to do nothing that’s necessary, pressing, or crucial, and couldn’t my students occasionally use this kind of day (or at least a few moments) in the midst of earnestly studying Dickens and the procedures for writing scholarly essays? I’m just now settling into a refreshing state of stillness as I watch the snowstorm sweeping around the house, and don’t my often-frantic students need this sort of respite now and then? I’m sure they have plenty of restful times outside of school, but what’s wrong with calling an occasional English class snow day, or snow moment, right in the center of a lesson? Emerson described a blizzard as “a tumultuous privacy of storm”, and in the often-stormy school lives of the students, perhaps I can set aside a few moments for that kind of time alone right in my small classroom. I can picture myself saying, as we’re traipsing through some symbolism in a Wallace Stevens poem, “Stop! Our minds are too stormy. I’m calling a snow moment”, at which point we all sit silently around the reassuring wood stoves in our minds, settling ourselves, doing nothing necessary for sixty undisturbed seconds.

LESSONS IN SUSPENDERS

I usually wear suspenders (simply to save myself from constantly hoisting up my pants), and today, as I was comfortably striding among my students with my pants perfectly positioned above my waist, I was reminded of the comfort, maybe even coziness, I sometimes feel when my lesson is perfectly planned. I enjoy the frivolity that can come from occasional spontaneity and impulsiveness in teaching, but my favorite classes, I must admit, are the ones that proceed precisely according to my meticulous plans. In those classes, as when I wear suspenders, there’s little or no fine-tuning, tweaking, hoisting, or adjusting. Like me in my helpful suspenders, the lesson paces along with poise and buoyancy. It may not be the most exotic lesson, nor am I an especially striking teacher in my almost chest-high pants, but we both get the task accomplished in a confident and comfortable manner.

 We had a wonderful winter day in Brooklyn, CT, culminating in some fine sledding in back of Jaimie's house in the woods. Here's a picture of Noah and Ava and, in the distance, Jaimie, as the late sun glows among the trees. 

WATCHING A COMFORTABLE CLASSROOM

"The Letter" (oil) by Liza Hirst

We had a modest snowstorm last night, and this morning, as I was sitting before a comfortable fire watching the flames waver and sparks shoot up now and then, I couldn’t help but think of the comfort I find in occasionally sitting back and observing the quiet workings of one of my English classes. Like the fire, my classes often carry on quite well without me. As the students share ideas about the books we read, their earnestly spoken thoughts often bring a kind of soft warmth to the room, a feeling as comforting as the one I felt this morning sitting by the fire. Like the glowing coals at the bottom, the spirited intelligence of the students is substantial enough to easily fuel a 48-minute class, and now and then, like a log in the fireplace that flares up for a few minutes, a student will suddenly feel inspired enough to carry the conversation awhile. I especially enjoy the sparks that burst up now and then, both from the fire and from students whose thoughts come in flares and flashes.

A HOLY CLASSROOM

I’ve always liked the idea that the word “holy” derives from the old German word meaning “whole” -- partly, I suppose, because it gives me a chance to think of my classroom as a holy place. I long ago gave up going to church, but still, I have an unshakable interest in the sacred aspects of life, and who knows, perhaps I can consider my fairly unexceptional classroom to be holy, in the sense of whole and together. After all, we work in one room, study one subject, see one set of windows and one wide space outside where birds coast past our classroom. Also, we share the same air for our lungs and the same thoughts, swapped back and forth among us, for our minds. Even feelings float in the midst of us, not owned solely by anyone but moving fluidly from one to another, and thus, you could say, fastening us together. Just this morning a girl shared a thought about Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and three of us quickly said her comment caused us to change our minds about him. Her thought had become our thought. She was us and we were her -- together, for those moments, in a blessed place.

WHILE I WAS WORRYING

The other day, as I was fussing to myself because one of my lessons seemed to be falling flat before my eyes, I suddenly caught sight of some birds fluttering around the feeder outside my classroom, and it caused me, for a moment, to wonder just how much was happening while I was worrying about my little English lesson. Surely, as I was beating myself up for failing to teach appositives properly, birds by the hundreds of millions were whisking in wondrous ways around the world as they lived their wild lives. And surely the breeze passing through their feathers was part of an enormous system of winds that was doing its steadfast duties throughout the atmosphere. While I was fretting about Step Three in my lesson plan, people all over the earth were thinking thoughts of sorrow and exultation, dismay and downright ecstasy. Millions of babies were being brought into life like new, and just as many people were passing away from their families and friends, while I was wandering around Room 2 trying to see where I went wrong in Step Six.

TEACHING LIKE UNLEAVENED BREAD

I am not a churchgoer, but when a friend recently told me that in one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians he describes unleavened bread as the bread of sincerity whereas leavened bread is puffed up with nothing but “hot air”, I immediately decided I want to teach like unleavened bread. In Paul’s notion, this is bread that is simple, unfussy, uninterested in being showy, only seeking to share some honest nourishment – and this sounds a little like me in my modest classroom. Unleavened bread, as I understand it, has a fairly flat and uninteresting appearance, unlike the full-to-bursting bread that’s been transformed by yeast, and I’m sure I make a far less dazzling impression on my students than the younger teachers with their unblemished youthfulness and effervescent personalities. I don’t mean to suggest that these younger teachers are insincere, just that I’m not good at teaching by dazzling and astonishing. Like unleavened bread, I simply offer what I have, which is merely an abiding love for writing and reading. No doubt some of my students find my classes boring, just as eating flat, unleavened bread, I would suppose, is a fairly unexciting activity. However, bread, it seems to me, is primarily for the purposes of nourishment, not excitement, and my English classes are meant mostly to teach lessons, not to astonish or startle or stun. True, every so often I feel a little “leaven” inside me and I come to class puffed up and golden with great ideas for fancy, “engaging” activities, but they almost always deflate and flop fairly quickly, and I fall back to just being a simple 69-year-old teacher who loves talking passionately about written words. I’m sure my classes are sometimes as flat as unrisen bread, but still, I guess there’s as much nourishment in simpleness as in showiness.

FAKE FLOWERS AND GOOD BOOKS

At this time of year I usually have some fake flowers on my desk at school, just to send me off on an occasional reverie about springtime, and this morning my life-like magnolias from Pier 1 brought me around to thinking about the literature we read in English class. The best-made artificial flowers, I realized, can do something similar to what good writing does – carry us away from our limited and occasionally mean-spirited lives so we can see the endless universe the imagination makes for us. I was sitting in my cold, unremarkable classroom in snowy Connecticut, but those fake flowers had me miles away somewhere in the sunlit south. I almost felt physically warmer as I stared at the flowers and envisioned myself resting in a summer field full of them. I guess this is the power of what we call the imagination – that strange gift we’ve all been given that enables us to be as big as the widespread universe itself. I see that power in Paradise Lost, which I’m rereading now and once again loving its scenic, musical lines that take me away from winter and into glades and gardens in daydream-land. I see it in A Tale of Two Cities, which every so often sweeps some of my 9th grade class away from their humdrum school lives and into lawless, fiery France in 1792. Even some little lines from a poem – perhaps these by Mary Oliver: “two mockingbirds /in the green field / were spinning and tossing / the white ribbons /of their songs / into the air” – can carry a few kids away from wintry days to a storybook summer paradise. It’s been happening for eons, this spiriting of people off on the wings of imagination (or fake classroom flowers) to worlds at least as real as the day-after-day one.

BECOMING CURIOUS

As an English teacher, I need to become more organized, more able to begin class on time, more polished in my presentation of lessons, more willing to wander off the topic when world-weariness weighs the kids down, but most of all, I need to become more curious. When I’m teaching a class of teenagers, I should be as curious as an astronomer studying the stars – as ready to be amazed by the verve and wisdom of my students as the astronomer is by the swirling life of the universe. Like the astronomer surely does, I should occasionally stand back in astonishment at what I’m witnessing – young people presenting themselves to each other (and me) with unwrapped hearts and minds. Each of my students is a mystery as measureless and multifaceted as the spreading galaxies, and mercifully, I don’t need a telescope to appreciate them – just my eyes and ears and a heart ready to hold whatever is luckily given it each and every day in English class.

LITTLE DAILY WONDERS

As I get ready to go back to school tomorrow after the holiday break, I’m hoping for a little less doing and a lot more observing in my teaching. I often get so caught up in the constant goings-on of English class that I entirely miss the magic of what’s actually sitting in front of me. Some mysteriously wise teenagers come to my room each day and make thoughts that have never been made before, and yet I often fail to notice it because of my obsession with doing this, that, and the other supposedly essential step in my lesson. The students bring their matchless lives to each class, lives full of uncommon feelings and undisclosed dreams, and yet to me, at least sometimes, they might as well be cardboard statues. I’m so busy “doing” that I have no time for taking a good look at the lives I’m entrusted with for 48 minutes each day. Maybe in this new year I can do away with some of my needless doing and open my eyes more often to the little daily wonders that inevitably come with teaching teenagers.

Conrad and Milton

Lately Ive been thoroughly enjoying rereading Paradise Lost and a bit of Joseph Conrad. This morning, a foggy, silent Sunday, I read some lines from the end of Book 2 in Milton's epic, and then finished Conrad's "The Secret Sharer". It was a time of utter serenity for me, sitting in the "great room" before the glowing fire and reading these words written with such music and wisdom. I said to myself, once again, that I could easily spend the rest of my life reading and rereading, over and over, the works of a few great writers -- Milton, Conrad, Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth. In fact, I may just do that -- and they would be joyous, fulfilling years, for sure.