NONSTOP OPPORTUNITIES

Snowed in by a bizarre October storm on Saturday, I spent some time looking around in the dictionary, and when the word “opportune” appeared before me, I soon realized that the crazy storm was, in fact, an opportune one for me as a teacher, for it helped me understand that opportunities parade before my students and me with the steadiness of the snowflakes that were falling around the house. Actually, according to the dictionary, everything offers an opportunity, for everything provides a path home to some harbor or other. The dictionary says that “opportune” derives from the Latin word for “port”, and that originally, an opportune moment was simply a moment that made it easier for a ship to steer its way toward its port. In English class, we care about only one port – learning -- and letting the moments of my classes take my students and me home to that port is my only proper task. What I remembered on Saturday, through my dictionary work, is that every moment of class can carry us a little closer to the docks where wisdom waits. Just as a seaworthy sailor knows that all winds, one way or another, can be used to steer the ship in the chosen course, I should know that whatever works its way into my classes can carry us to some type of fruitful learning. Teachable moments, to tell the truth, are every moment – or should be. If a boy brings his own boredom into the room, I can, perhaps, discreetly use it to help him see how boredom breaks apart a character’s life in some short story, or how boredom suddenly becomes passion in a certain poem. Similarly, if we turn off the track of my carefully considered lesson plan, which sometimes happens, maybe the new path can provide learning I had never looked for. This screwy and astonishing snowstorm before Halloween holed me up in the house on Saturday, helping me get some past-due writing done, so it actually was a sudden and opportune gift from the gods of the weather, and my task as a teacher is to be forever ready for the opportunities given by the gods of Room 2 – the continuous gifts that get my students and me closer to any one of the limitless harbors in the land of learning.

POWER THAN CAN'T BE LOST

We’re presently in the midst of a strange autumn snowstorm, and there’s much TV talk of losing power, which simply makes me think, once again, of the finest kind of power, the kind that can’t ever be lost. If we lose electrical power, my family and I may be making our way through dark and frosty rooms for the next few days, but we’ll always have access to the power that doesn’t depend on transformers and wires and wonderful weather. When it comes to qualities like patience and peacefulness and compassion for others, no storm can stop their powers, and no downed trees can triumph over their ability to bring the best of life to all of us. A home in disagreeably cold darkness is still a home, provided the people in it remember that real power is inside them and thoroughly ready to go to work, with or without electrical power. My hope, over the next few days, is for my family to feel, maybe more fully than usual, the forces of kindness and endurance and even serenity within the dark but warm-hearted rooms of our home.

STEADINESS

"Pocket Watch", oil, by Hall Groat II

He's noticed
the second-hand of his watch
moving unfailingly
in the midst of a storm.
He's  seen it stay its course
when his days
were collapsing like sticks,
and when his whole life
seemed to be slowing to a stop.
The second-hand
keeps in control of itself.
On his bedside table at night,
it does its quiet work
while his heart is doing its
and the steady stars
are doing theirs.

STILL, AT 69

I still think the world
wakes up each moment.
I still want
to toil in the fields of books,
to rest in the green grass of thoughts,
to see dawn
shake out its hair over the sea,
to help myself
to whole hours of happiness.
I still want to feel the freedom
of walks on far-away trails,
of words waving their arms on pages,
of poems sailing somewhere like ships.

PERFECT CLOUDS, PERFECT KIDS

"Clouds", oil, by Becky Joy

Since no one would ever consider calling a certain set of clouds second-rate or deficient, why, I wonder, do so many teachers think of some of their students that way? When we look at the sky, the clouds are just clouds – not ‘A’ clouds and ‘C’ clouds and ‘F’ clouds. All clouds are first-rate just as they are, whether bright and brimful, or grayish and stretched out, or shadowy and unsettled. We don’t say that a certain cloud “doesn’t have the skills” to be a perfect cloud, or that another cloud isn’t “up to speed” with the “more advanced” clouds, or that a particular cloud needs an IEP (Individual Education Program) in order to be a better cloud. They’re all simply clouds, and each one, in its own distinctive and extraordinary way, is special and satisfactory - and I feel precisely that way about my students. Each one --and I couldn’t be more serious -- is perfect, flawless, as good as new, the best, and beyond compare. True, they are each different, but their differences do not set them apart as better or worse - - just different. Their individual differences, you might say, are perfect differences. A student who reads at a very slow pace is a perfectly slow reader, in the sense that the slowness is what sets him part as a distinctive, one-of-a-kind student. He is good at being slow, just as any cloud in the sky is good at being unerringly the kind of cloud it is. Granted, I realize that kids are not clouds, and that this analogy loses power at certain places, but still, it’s interesting to notice how willing we are to rank and rate students with all kinds of scores and labels and grades, and yet how preposterous it would be to place something like clouds – or sunsets or dawns or sheets of stars across the sky -- in similar categories. To me, all the stars I saw this morning on my dark drive to school were consistently startling, in their special ways, and so are all my students.

THE SETTLING OF A STREAM AND A LIFE

"Creekside Morning", oil, by Don Gray

This week has worked some small currents of disarray into my life, and it’s been fortunate for me that I’ve remembered how it was, years ago, when I watched a stream near my house settle after I had stirred it up with a stick. I recall being astonished, again and again, when I waited beside the stream and watched it slowly settle and become clear again. Even at seven, I saw that there was some sort of law at work – that the stream always sorted itself out and re-established a kind of peaceful transparency. No matter how many times or how vigorously I swirled the water and the sand, the stream – a small, shiny one I considered mine alone – always went back to its basic clearness and composure. What was most wonderful was that I didn’t have to do anything. The settling happened by itself, while I did nothing but sit silently by and notice sand and water quietly clearing itself up. These memories made this fairly confused week a little quieter, and thus somewhat easier to accept. Somewhere around midweek, I decided to give up getting frustrated and full of unease, and just began to be still and watch the waters of my life slowly settle -- as they did, over and over again. Something would happen to stir things up, but always, if I stood aside and simply observed, all would soon enough come back to quietness. Once, in fact, after I messed up a 9th grade English class fairly completely, I stood outside and simply waited. I saw myself beside my special stream as a boy, and soon I saw the waters, and my seemingly disordered teaching, settling into their inborn and beautiful stillness.

What He Saw at 5:09 AM

He saw the darkness outside,
And the small lamp on his desk,
And the signs of happiness
In his hands, and the holiness
Of the simple things of his life --
The students he studies with,
His family that enfolds him
In their arms,
The woman who washes his days
So they sparkle,
The days that don't stop smiling
And sailing.

DOING NOTHING IN ENGLISH CLASS

"Meditative Mood", oil, by Robin Cheers

I try to meditate for a few minutes most mornings – just a way of taking a break to do nothing at all but breathe and be grateful for my life – and I sometimes, surprisingly enough, do a kind of meditating in English class. Occasionally, in the midst of the pleasant maelstrom that is teaching teenagers, I simply turn silent and stand still for a moment or two. Thirty or forty seconds might pass while I stand in silence in the classroom, just following my breaths as they bring in and take out air. I’m sure the students are still somewhat bewildered by this behavior, but I think they are slowly becoming comfortable with these occasional moments of meditation by their peculiar, old-world teacher. I can sense their thoughts of surprise and perhaps astonishment as I silently stand among them for my minute or so of refreshing idleness. It’s as if some of the tautness and seriousness in the room is softly escaping, as from an enormous pressurized system called school, and what’s left when I start talking and teaching again is a more supple and easy-going atmsophere, full of the free-wheeling thoughts of a teacher and students who simply wish to understand more of the miraculous world they live in.

SCHUBERT AND ENGLISH CLASS

(First posted in 2008):
Yesterday, I was listening to a Schubert quintet in the early morning before class, and I began focusing on the wonderful harmony in the music. One definition of harmony is “a pleasing combination of elements in a whole”, and I certainly heard that in this piece of music. I especially noticed the contrast between the deep-sounding, unhurried cello and the sprightly, fast-paced violin. There were moments of soft, slow sounds interspersed with periods of almost skittish sounds – times of near silence balanced with periods of practically riotous sounds. This was true harmony – a pleasing combination of the most varied and opposite elements. It started me thinking about my teaching. I have an infinite variety of students – quiet, loud, shy, noisy, diffident, self-assured, and so on – and my job as their teacher is to, like Schubert, blend them together in a “pleasing combination”. I’m sometimes tempted to over-emphasize the work of the confident, voluble students – to gauge the success of a class by how well the “smart”, talkative kids take charge -- but to do that would ignore the natural harmony of the class. Who wants to listen to a piece of music in which only fast-paced, high-pitched violins are heard? A conductor needs the voices of the languid cellos and basses every bit as much as those of the elevated and lively violins and clarinets, and a teacher needs the silent, pensive students as much as the vociferous ones. Diversity, not uniformity, is the necessary ingredient for harmony -- in music as well as in teaching.

STANDING AND WAITING

“Thousands […] speed, /

[…] o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also [live] who only stand and wait.”

-- John Milton, “On His Blindness”

     As the years have passed, I have become far more interested in standing and waiting than in speeding and dashing and rushing hither and yon. All my speeding around over the first many years of my life yielded little more than partially busted plans, headaches from hell, and a slowly disappearing sense of success. I lived in a relentless and insistent way, working ferociously against any and all obstacles to pursue my private goals, giving little heed to the need for some silence and peace every so often. I was a rusher and dasher of the first order, flinging myself along the roads of my life “without rest”, as Milton puts it. In my late 40’s, however, something happened that slowed me down and spoke to me about the importance of sometimes simply waiting and watching. I grew weary and bored with the high-speed pace of my life, and, instead of always racing around, I began to occasionally allow the wide world to work on me in its gracious ways. “Allow” is the special word there, for my life did, in fact, begin to be more about allowing -- or letting -- than doing and getting. I began to take pleasure in simply standing and observing the surprises that happened around me -- and now,  more and more, all things seem to me to be surprises. Waiting has become a sort of way of life for me – just waiting to see what wonders will happen next. I guess, now, I’m rather finished with speeding around. It brought me no blessings that I know of, and standing and waiting, at least now and then, has become a worthwhile way to live.