THE LIGHT IS ALL

“From within or from behind, a light shines through us and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”

The fact that I am nothing is not to be overlooked as I look ahead to the start of another school year. Mind you, I am neither a masochist nor a particularly self-denigrating person, but I know, in my heart, that I am the best teacher I can be when I fully understand that “the light is all” and little me is mighty far back in the background. As I stand before my students next week, I will be as small as a single star in a universe of trillions of stars – just one of the immeasurable influences that will flow past my students in their young lives. Somehow they will learn and grow, but to attribute any of that to someone named Hamilton Salsich is like saying the sunlight on one stone made the sunlight on the stone next to it. As Emerson knew, “the light is all”. I receive the light of learning from somewhere, and so do my students, and somehow it all blends and breaks out into new knowledge for all of us. Teachers, myself included, all too often get into giving themselves center-stage in a process where there is actually no stage and no center. Learning happens like wind happens, and where it comes from and what caused it will stay a secret forever. I am part of the wind – or light – of learning, but so is absolutely everything else in this beyond-belief universe, including my students, the sunshine on their desks, the people they passed in the hall, and the songs they may hear in their hearts while I’m standing before them in Room 2.

SHELLEY AND TEACHING: Food for Thought as I Start Another School Year

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

(with commentary by me)

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

(“Intellectual beauty” could be translated as “inspiration”, “imagination”, or even “God”. I think of it as all three, and it plays a major part in my teaching. Notice the repetition of “inconstant” in this stanza. For me, teaching is new each moment, constantly changing. This is what makes it both exciting and exasperating. I like the idea that “inspiration” is “dearer for its mystery.” Teaching grows more mysterious each year for me.)

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

(This stanza reminds me that, in the classroom, inspiration is often totally absent, both for me and my students. English class can sometimes seem “vacant and desolate”, just as the sky can seem dreary after “rainbows .. fail and fade”. It’s just the everlasting pattern of life: day-night, sun-rain, birth-death, joy-sadness. My scholars and I simply have to learn to be patient. The light always returns.)

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given:
Therefore the names of God and ghosts and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour:
Frail spells whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability.
Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

(Continuing from the previous stanza, I realize in this stanza that “doubt, chance, and mutability” will play huge roles in my life as a teacher this year, as they always do. Things – including my feelings and thoughts – will be endlessly changing (like “moonlight on a midnight stream”), and all I can do is patiently look for inspiration’s “light alone”.)

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame,
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not--lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

(I especially like the first two lines of this stanza. The beautiful things in life – like “Love, Hope, and Self-esteem” – will visit the students and me only occasionally this year. They will be “for some uncertain moments lent” to us, and then will disappear for awhile, and then return again. It’s the recurrent theme of the poem: thought, or inspiration, constantly alters, comes and goes, lives and dies, is bright and dark. We have to learn to accept, and even enjoy, the changing patterns of our minds as the year progresses.)

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard; I saw them not;
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of buds and blossoming,
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

(Young people are always “[searching] for ghosts”, which I translate as “looking for the truth”. I’m lucky enough to be teaching them at a time in their lives when the search often pays off, when the “shadow” of inspiration could fall on them at any time, causing them to figuratively “clasp[] [their] hands in ecstasy”. I think the scholars and I do a lot of this kind of metaphoric ‘hand-clapping’ during the year. Lucky me!)

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

(The poet uses the word “dedicate” in the first line of this stanza, and, of course, dedication is a big part of any teacher’s life. Like Shelley, I want to dedicate this year not to any personal goals, but, as he says, to “thee and thine”, which I take to mean intellectual beauty, or inspiration, or imagination, or God, or the Universe (take your pick). Good teaching doesn’t depend on a personal teacher called “Mr. Salsich”. It relies solely on the inspiration of wonderful ideas from some mysterious source that I can’t even begin to understand. I’m going to simply relax, accept the ideas that come, and be grateful.)

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

(A wonderful final stanza! It’s fitting that he refers to the “harmony in autumn”, that season in which we begin our teaching and learning once again. This year, my 42nd as a teacher, my hope is that the Universe (what Shelley calls “intellectual beauty”) will “let [its] power […] supply its calm” to my life. For me, calmness is the best measure of excellent teaching. The calmer I feel, the more in touch I am with the infinite Universe, and the better my teaching will be.)

WISDOM AND STATURE

I find it interesting that the word “stature” derives from the Latin word meaning “stand”, which perfectly links it to wisdom, since wisdom only works its magic when a person stands up straight and strong among ideas. It’s strange to me that some of my students seem to wish to slouch their way through their school days – strange because no real learning will happen when the learners are letting their bodies and minds slumber. Drooping shoulders mean drooping thoughts, drooping self-assurance, and drooping desire. I want my students to grow wise in various small but essential ways, but I also want them to grow in stature – to feel how fine it is to stand proud inside yourself as you do your best with the best ideas available. They must think generously and deeply, and they must also sit up straight at their places – I insist on it -- if they wish wisdom to slowly stand up inside them.

ATHLETIC READERS

“Books are to be called for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-trained, intuitive …”

-- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

Since I have long thought of literary reading as an arduous form of exercise, it was inspiring to come across this quote this morning as I prepare to start another year’s worth of strenuous “exercises” with my teenage students. I’m afraid that some of the students who will come to my class next week consider reading a novel to be a sort of “half sleep” process, as Whitman puts it – a way of escaping from all mental labor by drifting off on an entrancing story -- but the reading they will do in my class is more like ascending a sheer mountain than falling into a soothing sleep. In fact, I often use the mountain analogy, reminding the young readers that reaching the vistas at the summit of both great books and great mountains requires punishing work -- the kind of labor set aside only for earnest readers and climbers. They would expect to pay such dues on a mountain ascent, so why not on a climb through the chapters of a Dickens or Morrison novel? I sometimes remind the scholars that they should feel utterly exhausted after reading a chapter in A Tale of Two Cities, just as they should after a serious lacrosse practice. If they feel well rested after either form of exercise, they’re only pretending to be readers and athletes.

BENEVOLENT SENTENCES

“But the end of Mr. Brooke's pen was a thinking organ, evolving sentences, especially of a benevolent kind, before the rest of his mind could well overtake them.”
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

This quote so completely captures, for me, what often happens when I’m writing, and, I imagine, when my students are writing. In the novel, Mr. Brooke sometimes sets out to write something simple and straightforward, but the writing often swerves off into generous side-sentences that weren’t part of his plan, and a similar thing seems to happen, at least occasionally, when my students and I are writing. My paragraphs have been known, now and then, to throw themselves far off my planned approach and take wing for wherever they wish. I'll start with a straightforward topic sentence, but before long some strange sentences show up and lead the words off course, something I've seen more than a few times in student essays. Often the students make a fine start, with words steering easily into sentences and then into a few fine phrases, but lo, here comes a quiet, fresh, and benevolent thought, and the essay is off on an evolutionary road of its own. What’s so fascinating (and it seems to have been so for Eliot) is that much of this meandering kind of writing has some mystery and magic in it, the kind that is frequently missing in more orderly essays. Mr. Brooke’s pen, it seems, showed the way to surprising and kindly sentences, and every so often a similar wonder works its way into the writing my students and I do.

A DAY IN AUGUST

"Boston Bikes", oil, by Susan Cox

They went to Boston,

and Boston behaved

the same as ever –

seas of people

with the power of living

inside them, a little love

in each painting

in the museum, the millions

of smiles made

in just the few hours

they were there --

this pair,

privileged to be friends

for two brief weeks
in a world

with its arms wide open.  

SITTING, READING, AND WRITING -- WITH DIGNITY

"One Room Schoolhouse, Wyoming", oil, by George Coll

I require my students to sit up fairly straight during class, and it occurred to me this morning that this is somewhat similar to my requirements for reading and writing. Sitting up in class, to me, is an act of dignity, and I also expect a certain kind of dignity in the students' reading and writing. Sitting up is the opposite of slouching and lounging, just as writing and reading with single-mindedness and precision is the opposite of throwing yourself heedlessly through assignments. Living with dignity means living in a thoughtful and respectful manner, something I expect of my students in both their posture and their school work. In reading, this means reading written words with the kind of deliberation and care with which they were written. In writing, it means making each sentence shine with as much precision as possible, as though all the words are proudly sitting up straight in their assigned places, like my industrious and dignified students during class.

LARGENESS OF HEART

"WINTER BEACH STROLL", oil, by DEBBIE MILLER

Somewhere, years ago, I heard a person described as having “largeness of heart, like the sand on the seashore”, a description that returns to me off-and-on when I’m teaching. Like any teacher, I need a heart large enough to find room for all the wonderful and foolish events that unfold during any class. A small heart in a teacher means doors are closed to all but the expressly described “goals and objectives” of the lesson, a situation that can sometimes result in devastating tediousness and even disgust, whereas a teacher’s heart that’s as vast as “the sand on the seashore” can happily hold whatever happens, and thus, perhaps, produce a feeling of lighthearted interest among the students. When I’m teaching, I’m often fortunate enough to see, in my mind, an immeasurable seashore (me) with waves of countless varieties (the thoughts, feelings, and events that occur during class) washing up on the sand. If the shore (the teacher’s inner spirit) has neither end nor beginning nor boundaries of any kind, it can conveniently welcome whatever the sea (a class) sends it. This is largeness of heart, the kind of heart I only rarely feel spreading out inside me, but the kind that’s always there, nonetheless, just waiting for me to welcome it into my work.

SURPRISE MIND

I once heard someone refer to the mind of a certain writer as a “surprise mind”, and since then I’ve often used the phrase in thinking of my students and me as we make our way through the capricious ups-and-downs of English class. In a full forty-eight minute class, who can tell how many thoughts run through our minds and out into the conversation, and who can say that these thoughts are anything but surprising, even sometimes startling? We can’t plan our thoughts, any more than the wind plans its swirls and puffs. We like to pretend that we know what our next thought will be and where it comes from, but the truth is that our thoughts are as unforeseen as the next drifting breeze. I sometimes think of Cervantes’ hero, Don Quixote, who let his horse lead the way and surprise him, just as our weird and wonderful thoughts lead the way during English class. They’re like horses, these thoughts of ours, and if we trust them enough, they’ll take us to sudden and sometimes astounding places.

AT AN OUTDOOR CAFE IN PUTNAM, CT

Her wrist was resting

on the table, and the table

was tenderly holding it,

just as the earth

was carrying the table

with care,

just as he

was holding her

in his sight

and sunlight

was warmly holding them both.

A CLOWN COSTUME AND A SPOONFUL OF WATER

"Hat and Plume", oil, by Cecil Irving

A colleague told me, years ago, that when she was teaching, she imagined herself wearing a clown’s costume and carrying a spoonful of water, and slowly but increasingly the significance of her statement has become clear to me. She never fully explained what she meant, but over the years I’ve begun to see it as an assertion about the importance of both humility and precision, both ingenuousness and absolute attentiveness to the task at hand. Perhaps, as she stood before her students, the imaginary clown costume served to remind her how relatively inconsequential she was in the vast design of the universe, sort of like a silly clown carrying on in its insignificant ways. When I become too puffed up with my own supposed importance, like a clown claiming center stage in a circus, I picture myself in a clown costume, which helps me remember how silly it is to consider myself any more special than a single star among the zillions in the sky. As a teacher, yes, I’m important, but so are all the sights and sounds sent to my students by this ever-unfolding universe. On the other hand, while I’m teaching, I also try to see myself holding – carefully balancing – a spoonful of water. This is the other side of the story of teaching – seeing myself as a totally serious and focused professional. Through all the swervings and tossings and submergings of a typical English class, I must hold the spoonful of water – the goal of my lesson -- delicately and firmly in hand. I may be no more special than a foolish clown, but I’m a clown carrying a singular responsibility. In this way, I can good-naturedly laugh at myself and, at the same time, make any specific lesson an absolute success.

SOME WORDS

Some words were selected

for him on this day,

some words made of

currents of air and

quiet ideas

that didn’t show off,

but sat still in his life,

like he sits still

in this universe

that spins itself

in happiness, but

doesn’t do it

to show off.

THE KINGDOM OF ENGLISH CLASS

"Old Medieval Castle", oil, by Ledent Pol

I recall reading old stories about vast and splendid kingdoms – places that seemed, in my imagination, to stretch out to the farthest boundaries – and it pleases me that I now find myself working in a similar kind of kingdom – the kingdom of English class. I’m sure not many teachers, as stressed as most of us are, would compare their classroom to a fanciful kingdom, but nonetheless, no metaphor makes more sense to me. When we start each English class, we are entering a land that lets us see, if we choose to, the outermost limits of life – the land of great literature, and of our own immense but unrealized promise as writers. English class is about ideas, and all ideas, no matter how seemingly mundane, are vast kingdoms in themselves, immeasurable mind-nations that know no border lines. English class is also about words, and what word can be kept in a small container and not released into the untold kingdom where all words dwell? Yes, yes, I have to deal with the everyday, finite fundamentals of English – comma rules, the writing of correct sentences, the place of symbolism in a story, etc. -- but those are like little winds wandering across the great kingdom of ideas and words, a kingdom I’m lucky to come to each morning in Room 2.

NEVER LOST

"Black Pond Forest, Adirondacks", oil, by Laurel Daniel

When a friend was saying the other day that she recently thought she was lost in a forest but soon realized that she would have reached a road by walking in any direction, it brought to mind the many times my students and I have made a similar discovery in the classroom. We have often felt lost together in a chapter of a novel or the lines of a poem, but it’s interesting how frequently we found our way to the center and back out again just by continuing to reread with attentiveness and share our thoughts with sincerity. Strangely, it never matters, really, whether we walk this way or that way in a work of literature, whether we go down this literary trail or that one, as long as we do it with a firm focus and an honest interest in the thoughts of others. Whichever approach we take, in the end we will find ourselves, presto, in the very soul of all the words on the page. Someone might say, well, your soul of The Tempest is not my soul, and of course that’s correct. There are a thousand souls at the heart of a great book. All we have to do is dare to keep reading, rereading, and sharing – and soon, like a sun in the mist, we’ll see one of the exceptional truths in the words. It makes being lost in literature hopelessly impossible.

A LIMITLESS PARADISE

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed thinking of teaching and reading literature as being a process of searching, but gradually I have come to see that there’s never an end to the search – that the seeking and exploring and rummaging among facts and ideas doesn’t make things clearer and simpler, but mistier and weirder and more wonderful and more endless. In my younger days, I guess I believed that the best ideas about a book or a poem would eventually be revealed to anyone who spent enough time searching for them. Knowledge, for me, was a finite entity that could be searched and brought under control with enough steady, watchful work. Any work of literature, even the longest and deepest, could be dealt with the way you would deal with a piece of land that needed to be mapped and made plain. Now, though, it’s clear to me that words set down on paper don’t have boundaries to their meanings. The thousands of words in a Dickens novel know no end to what they can say and signify to us. When my students and I set off on an expedition through A Tale of Two Cities, we must understand that one truth will lead to 10 more truths which will lead to 100 more truths, all in strange and distant directions, with never a finish in sight. Reading good literature is like landing on a planet with no prepared maps. You can search and search, but instead of hoping to reach a destination of some sort, better to simply appreciate what it’s like to be lost in a limitless paradise.

AFFECTIONATE ATTENTION

Since we teachers are accustomed to asking our students to give us their attention, this year I’m going to make a major effort to give my classes my more complete attention – my affectionate attention, in fact. I say “affectionate” because I want to put some genuine friendship in my attentiveness – not so much the friendship between people, but the friendship between a teacher and whatever takes the stage in his classroom life. To me, each of my English classes seems like a stage where, over and over, surprising words are spoken and perplexing episodes take place. I often feel like I’m in a theater audience looking on, puzzling over the thoughts the students share and the paths their conversations take. I plan my lessons with care, but always some off-course wanderings carry us away for a few moments, and that’s when I wink to myself and smile, because I know it’s all okay. It has slowly come to me, over the decades, that affectionately attending to whatever comes up in class is a better way than beating my head against it. It doesn’t mean I like every off-course digression – just that I’ve learned to look for the secret strokes of luck in each of them. By paying attention, with real affection, to whatever happens to occur during class, I’m able, surprisingly, to set free the usefulness of just about everything.

WORDS WITH POWER

I sometimes tell my students they are lucky to be taking my class, because our subject matter – spoken and written language – is the most powerful force on earth. After always seeing some shrugs and sighs and looks of puzzlement, I explain that without words being said and/or written, no war would have started, no marriage would have been made or unmade, no plans for anything would have been laid, and not even the littlest shared deed would have been done. It all starts with words, those smallest and most transient of our creations, those short-lived inventions we make with our mouths and place on computer screens or paper. They’re like significant explosions, each of them -- little lights let loose in the world to enlighten or bewilder, pacify or sting. They carry immense forces in their small containers, and my students and I are lucky to be learning of their powers each day in English class.

WHERE DOES THE WIND COME FROM?

"Bending in the Wind", acrylic, by Fawn McNeil

As strange as it may sound, I sometimes think of the wind when I’m teaching. I’ve always loved listening to the wind and watching it and wondering where it comes from and where it goes, and I find myself wondering something similar about the thoughts and words that waft or rush through one of my English classes. My students and I produce countless thoughts and spoken words in a 48-minute class, all coming from some source that’s always remained a mystery to me. It’s far too facile to say, well, they just come from our brains, which is like saying the wind coming through my yard simply came from the yard next door. All the world’s winds have origins lost in the boundlessness of the universe, and something similar, I think, can be said for the thoughts and words we make in English class. Somehow they arrive in our lives, just as the wind somehow arrives at our doorsteps some mornings, and I love to think of the mystery of where these fresh thoughts and words might have been before they brought their refreshing lights to our classroom.

SCRATCHES AND A CANDLE

"Candles in the Wind", oil, by Karen Winters

“Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

In this passage, Eliot could just as well be speaking of my English classes, since they often appear to be little more than words and actions “going everywhere impartially” but occasionally “produce[ing] the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement.” The word “scratches” seems fitting, because sometimes that’s what my teaching seems to be – just a scattering of scratches on the surfaces of the students’ minds. After many a class, I have marveled at how little seemed to have been accomplished – how random and roving my instruction seemed to have been, and how slight the students’ progress was. I may as well have been placing random scratches on “surface[s] of polished steel” as teaching English to human beings. However, there are also those days when, at the end of class, everything does seem to slide together in a sensible display of understanding and progress. Eliot says a candle can do this to haphazard scratches, and perhaps, on those days of conquest in the classroom, I could be said to be the candle, shining among our seemingly cluttered activities and producing what appears to be a prize-winning “concentric arrangement.” Perhaps I shouldn’t struggle against the seeming chaos of some of my lessons as we work through them, but simply wait with patience for the “candle” of good teaching to hopefully do its assigned task and turn our chaos into something like a handsome presentation of new knowledge.

OLD PATIENCE?

"Green Socks", oil, by Linda Apple

Every so often the thought comes to me that I am too old to be teaching teenagers, but then, thankfully, I usually remember that the really essential qualities in teaching, like patience, simply can’t grow old. Teachers -- like me with my folds and furrows and shining baldness -- definitely grow old, but can a quality like patience get gray-haired and weary as the years pass? Can you picture patience, in its old skin-and-bones, bemoaning the fact that it can’t do its job anymore? Old teachers moan and groan, but patience, being of the heart and spirit, is as ageless as the sky. At the end of another year, I personally may feel weary and worn down, but surely I wouldn’t look at the sky and feel sorry that it’s grown so old. The sky in my 69th year is as fresh and youthful-looking as it was when I was six, and likewise, the patience that is available to me is as alert and perky as ever. I could be wheeled into my classroom on a cart, coughing and wheezing in my elderly way, but still my patience could be as strong as a stallion and as endless as the sky above our school.