CALM GRANDEUR

<< Click here for audio

“In the calm grandeur of a sober line,
We see the waving of the mountain pine.”
-- John Keats, “I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill”

When I read these lines this morning, I thought of thoughtful and ingenious writing, the kind I hope my young students can produce fairly steadily. I want their writing to definitely be “sober”, in the sense of serious and sensible, but I also expect their sentences to have some spirit in them, some liveliness and pizzazz, perhaps like “the waving of the mountain pine”. It’s well and good to give a reader paragraphs that present organized arguments, but it’s also essential to show some flares and explosions of stylishness. It’s fine to unfold sentences that are “calm” with clarity and good sense, but let there also be, I tell the students, some “grandeur” befitting the writing of enlightened and openhearted teenagers.

CALM GRANDEUR

RIGOROUS AND ORIGINAL

“As [Edgar Degas] relentlessly copied the nudes of the Old Masters and drew from live models, he developed a desire to be rigorous, but also rigorously original.”
-- Richard Friswell, in ARTES Magazine, December 21, 2011

I admire Degas and his desire to be “rigorous, but also rigorously original”, and it is precisely the desire I wish to instill in the students in my English classes. Degas obviously saw a curious and essential connection between being rigorous and being original, and I hope the students can eventually see it also. The artist gave his unreserved concentration to copying the Old Masters’ nudes over and over again, but the eventual result was a series of unprecedented paintings. He labored, you might say, like a perfectionist, but also like a pioneer. This seems to run contrary to the contention that meticulousness and inventiveness cannot cooperate – that you can’t be precise and ingenious at the same time – but Degas proved it is possible, and I hope the same for my students. I hope to show them that careful attention to precision and correctness can work well with a wildness of spirit and a willingness to test new trails in their writing. I want them to see the good sense in combining exactness with inspiration, mixing strictness with pizzazz and elegance. When I recently saw Degas’ elegant finished paintings at Boston's MFA exhibit, and realized they were the result of scrupulous devotion to detail, I couldn’t wait to work with my young writers to help them be both staunchly rigorous and bigheartedly original.


(audio version below)

SOME WONDROUS THING

… like a gentle whispering
Of all the secrets of some wondrous thing
That breathes about us in the vacant air.
-- John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry”

I almost always feel “some wondrous thing” surrounding my students and me in the classroom, but it by no means implies that I am being a wondrous, or even tolerable, teacher. Even when I am stumbling through a totally bewildering and lackluster lesson, I can still sense something special working its way among us. Even if students are sitting like dazed prisoners, I can always feel the flowing of some shadowy force in our midst. This is no fanciful or surreal force, nothing that makes my classroom some kind of loftier place of learning than others, but simply the same shifting of thoughts and feelings that is found wherever there are people. It’s as if my students and I, in any English class, are standing or sitting on invisible tectonic plates made of endlessly active ideas and emotions, which are constantly sliding and colliding and sometimes crashing. What’s wondrous about this is that I have no reasonable idea where any of these ideas or emotions come from, or what patterns their shiftings and changings will follow. They’re like the weather -- always something disparate and surprising as the moments pass, always a fresh creation. It actually seems to have little to do with what the students or I choose to think or feel during class. It’s like the lift and pushing of plates beneath the earth’s surface – just something we live with and learn to better understand and appreciate, these wondrous movements of our inner lives in my little classroom.

(audio version below)

BLESSINGS IN ROOM 2

(print version below)

Thumbing through a dictionary this morning, I came upon this definition for blessing – “a beneficial thing for which one is grateful; something that brings well-being” – and I instantly wished that my English classes could be a blessing for my students. I even wished, as wistful as it sounds, that my students might some day say, as they leave my classroom, “This class was a real blessing, Mr. Salsich” – meaning, maybe, that this class brought some gifts they were sincerely grateful for  -- brought some true light for their lives. I can picture it, the modest teacher suddenly made glad by the goodwill of students who have seen some wisdom softly shining in his small classroom.  The dictionary I was using said the word could also mean “a person’s sanction or approval”, as in “Mr. Salsich gave the students’ work his blessing”, and I thought, no, not always their work, but always their lives. All my students are made of the finest materials the universe has to offer – far-traveling thoughts, feelings that go anywhere with daring, and hearts that hold more than anyone knows.  These are young people with boundless powers, students whose future is as immeasurable as the sky that spreads above them – and so, yes, I give them my blessing, liberally and for as long as I will teach. 

LEARNING LESSONS

BIANCA:
“Gentlemen, you do me double wrong
To strive for that which resteth in my choice.
I am no breeching scholar in the schools,
I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself.”
-- Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

These words of Bianca’s could easily have been spoken by my youthful students as they struggle with my “’pointed times” and painstaking, fussy lessons. Perhaps it occasionally (or always) seems strange to the students that something as magnificent as learning should be squeezed into 48-minute classes and step-by-step exercises. Perhaps it seems as silly as striving to stuff a breeze into a suitcase, or saying the word “sky” and thinking you’ve seized the truth about the measureless spaces above us. Bianca was scolding her tutors for thinking knowledge comes in convenient containers, and not in always rolling rivers of learning that we can take pleasure in as we please. She knows she’s not simply a name and number in a teacher’s class, but a participant in an everlasting process that pushes out past all finicky academic boundaries. Her tutors taught like automatons, but she knew she wasn’t “tied” to that kind of learning. The world looked wide and wonderful to young Bianca, just as I imagine it sometimes does to my restless, aspiring students as they sit in my 48-minute-classes trying to untangle the significance of lessons that may seem senseless when likened to the boundless wisdom always awaiting them in their unlimited lives.

THE KINDEST NIGHT

It's Christmas Eve, the kindest night
he's ever known, a night
that never stops shining,
even with no stars
and silence all around.
He's with the wonder of his life,
a lady come from the far kingdom
called Kindness, or sometimes
just Love. Look out,
he wants to say to the world,
look out for love,
because it's always
right beside you,
always as sparkling
as this special night
of silent brightness.

BACK-AND-FORTHING

A friend sometimes speaks disparagingly of those who fairly frequently change their minds -- what she calls “back-and-forthing” -- and while I agree that it can create confusion in lives, I also have seen its usefulness, even when it’s done quixotically and suddenly. I see this impetuous tendency in nature, the way winds work one way and then another, the way the weather does its raining one day and then dries things out with some waterless days – and if it’s a good way for nature, then it might make sense for me. After all, when I make a decision, it’s based on the smallest evidence conceivable – the slight ideas in my very slight mind – so why shouldn’t I change my mind when new ideas materialize? The weather works that way, shifting smoothly when conditions change, so why shouldn’t I? Truth is, our minds are continuously changing, whether we realize it or not. Like leaves in the fall, thoughts are everlastingly falling through us, transforming our minds as comprehensively as autumn leaves transform the countryside. Our minds naturally participate in “back-and-forthing” from moment to moment, and so do winds and weather, and so do I, fairly intuitively and (lucky for me) cheerfully.
 

HE SAT AT A TABLE

He sat at a table
talking with a friend.
The faraway stars were sending
their signals to other stars,
the silence of the night
was like the silence
inside their words,
the words that went
from their hearts
to their tongues
to the sweetest air
in Holliston, Mass.
It was Christmas, but they
were somewhere else,
inside a world where
words were made of lights
like the stars make
above us all.

POOR OR LUCKY?

My mother often used to say, speaking about people who were suffering in some way, that they were “poor things”, but I’ve slowly come to see them as lucky things. I don’t mean to suggest that suffering is some kind of satisfying or innocuous experience, just that it can bring the gift of greater resilience and wisdom to a person. When we suffer, it is possible to see, if we’re fortunate enough, the farther distances of kindness, the vast spaciousness of friendship, the open wonders of tenderness. Through suffering, we can sometimes be shown how breathtaking our bravery really is. I once knew a man who seemed almost pleased that he was given the sickness called rheumatoid arthritis. He seemed to celebrate his illness, as if it was a bestowal from the universe that gave him great powers of kindness and courage. He made merry in his ability to be stronger than his sickness. When we visited him, he smiled from his sickbed as though his suffering was simply an excuse to praise the surprises that life offers. In no way was he “poor Mr. Euler”, for his illness had made him, in his mind, the luckiest man alive. Does this mean we should praise suffering, or give it a warm welcome? Of course not, but it might mean that we should make room for the miracles it brings – for the courage it can carry in its gnarled arms, for the sweetness it sometimes brings in its hands as hard as swollen bones.

IN THE PRESENCE

Every so often, as I’m standing before my young students of English, it comes to me that I’m in the presence of several kinds of magnificence. It may seem strange to use the word “magnificence” when speaking about a simple 9th grade English class in an unexceptional classroom out in the Connecticut countryside, but I do see magnificence on all sides as I’m instructing the students. I’m simply standing in front of often forlorn and disheveled teens, but sometimes they seem surrounded by halos of brilliance. They often think in unmanageable ways, but occasionally their thoughts throw out a luster like lights. Of course, I’m also in the presence of just plain presence – the astonishing sparkle of each present moment. No matter how wearisome my lessons might be or how tedious my teaching becomes or how lackluster the students might seem, there’s always the present moment making its unspoiled miracles. There’s always new breath bringing life to each of our lives, always the marvel of feelings flowing through all of us, always some sort of sunlight outside to show us the splendor of the outdoors. Indeed, it’s impossible to not be in the presence of irrepressible power, because that’s what each present moment is – pure, newfangled, and everlasting power – and it’s always in the classroom with my rosy, refreshing students and their wholehearted senior-citizen teacher.
.

SURGERY AND ENGLISH CLASS

I underwent a minor surgical procedure yesterday, and interestingly, it seemed a lot like English class. No, I don’t put people to sleep in class (well, not completely), and we don’t use scopes and scalpels in my classes, but still, there’s a strange association between what we do in Room 2 at my school and what happened to me at Westerly Hospital yesterday morning. As I lay in the recovery room, I reflected on the similarities between the small assembly of nurses, doctors, and a 70-year-old patient in the surgical ward, and the team of adolescent scholars and a senior citizen teacher who gather together each day in a small classroom in Connecticut. There was tension, distress, kindness, and courage at the hospital, just as there is in all my classes. I felt some fear as I waited for my appointed time with the surgical team, and in a way, my students might see my classes as disquieting and even scary, but I hope they also sense the compassion and bravery that we each bring to the class, just as I felt the full power of simple thoughtfulness as I lay on the stretcher. Yesterday the nurses’ and doctors’ kindness carried me along, from my early morning admission to when I was rolled out in a wheelchair to a friend’s car, and I see the same kind of kindness among my students as they assist each other through the fears and unease that some of my lessons and assignments cause. Surgery, of course, is usually a far more fearsome and awe-inspiring experience than a 9th grade English class, but the comparison still seems reasonable, especially when I think of the selfless compassion and understanding I felt at the hospital, and the sympathy my young students show to each other as they suffer through the sometimes unsettling trials of English class.

STRONG SOFTNESS

Softness is an essential quality in my work as a middle school teacher. Obviously the word has many negative connotations (weakness, indecision, uncertainty), but its positive aspects are useful to me as I carry out my classroom responsibilities. For instance, the word suggests a willingness to yield readily to pressure or weight, a trait I find helpful when it comes to respecting the students’ comments and suggestions. I come to class with my own set of beliefs and ambitions, but I try to always be prepared to submit, if it seems suitable, to new ideas presented by the students. If the pressure of their judicious thoughts builds to a point where their correctness seems incontestable, I try to be ready to respectfully acquiesce. Far from being a sign of weakness in a teacher, I believe it’s a sign of inner forcefulness and influence. It’s an intrepid teacher who can surrender with enthusiasm to a young but truthful idea. 

THE GENTLE SPIRIT

“… the gentle spirit of moving words …”
      -- Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

I love this quote, mostly because it makes me feel like I’m doing something significant when I speak to my students with quietness and kindness. I rarely raise my voice in class, not because I don’t sometimes dislike my students’ behavior, but because soft, expressive words spoken with seriousness and purpose can present much more power than words raised up in displeasure. “The gentle spirit” of peaceful and unobtrusive words can work calm wonders, whereas words hurled like lances usually simply light the fires of misunderstanding and resentment. Especially if I can speak “moving words” – those that move the thoughts and feelings of my students the way soft, steady rains move rivers – I find that I can softly force the students to adjust their behaviors. In fact, I often picture myself as either a soothing sunrise or an easygoing fall of rain in the classroom, both of which can calm any of us as we work our way through a life or an English lesson.

NEVER-ENDING CURRENTS

When I’m steering my students through a new lesson, I sometimes sense the flow and influence of many kinds of currents, as if we’re on a ship and sailing across tricky tidal waters. In a way, it’s a wonder we all don’t drown in English class, what with the crazy currents of ideas and feelings flowing around us. They’re not seen by visitors, but these streams of thoughts and emotions can make my class more like a rowdy journey than a well-reasoned presentation of an English lesson. It’s just under the surface, the steady movement of tides of ideas and streams of feelings, so that even when the students seem to be snoozing through a lesson, their thoughts are always functioning and influential, following and interweaving with each other in a never-ending stream. In some ways, I guess I could be a good teacher simply by settling in and sailing easily on these currents that are always there -- these tidal forces of feelings and ideas that don’t ever stop moving in my classroom.

INEFFABLENESS IN ROOM 2

“Ineffable (adj): too great or extreme to be expressed in words”


     I’ll admit that I haven’t often thought of my students as being ineffable, but when I heard the word used this morning, I made the connection immediately. A friend was saying there was an ineffable loveliness in a landscape he saw at a museum on Saturday – a loveliness which simply couldn’t be expressed in words – and I instantly thought of my students’ essays, as well as their often profound but baffling comments during discussions. When the students write, they work out their thoughts as they construct their sentences, which sometimes makes for essays that are both majestic and mysterious. When I’m reading 9th grade papers, I sometimes have the sense that I’m in the presence of both ancient, shining ideas and universal confusion. The sentences occasionally skip along with a friskiness that any writing teacher would adore, but they can also spread out before me like an obscure and pathless forest. This somewhat charming situation becomes a problem when I have to evaluate and grade my students’ work. Their kind of mystifying, almost otherworldly abilities with written words is nearly impossible to categorize. It’s like placing a breeze in a box, or saying what a starry might looks like in six words. It’s the kind of ineffability I’m faced with when listening to a Lizst piano piece, or working with my inscrutable scholars in Room 2.

CHEERFULLY CONTENT

“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.”
-- Walt Whitman

As a teacher, I often force my students to be busily ambitious, always bringing new and more serious assignments their way, but I also try to temper that with the knowledge that satisfaction and patience plays a powerful role in learning. In their often furiously busy lives, my young students need to know that I treasure those times in English class when we can all “sit content” for a couple of moments, just welcoming what knowledge we’ve already gained, and giving thanks for all our thoughts, both the wee and the wonderful ones. As Whitman suggests, the only person a student has a chance of knowing is herself or himself , and it’s a vast and puzzling person indeed, as vast, I truly believe, as the scattering stars above us – and isn’t it important to provide time to sit back and be satisfied with that marvelous person? In a way, none of us is perfect, but in another way, we are each as perfect as any riffle in a river or any collection of clouds coming over. Rivers, you might say, are content to be just what they are, mud and murkiness and detours and swirls included, and I want my students to feel in themselves a similar contentment. They certainly can improve as students of English, but they have no need for improvement as creations of this limitless universe.