DISTRIBUTION AND CIRCULATION IN ROOM 2

     I’ve come to think of teaching and learning as more of a distributive process than an accumulative one. When I’m teaching, I’m not adding anything to the students’ knowledge as much as I’m helping them distribute the wisdom of the universe among themselves. Learning doesn’t happen by piling up facts and insights, but by being open to the free dispersal and circulation of understanding. The universe we inhabit is overflowing with intelligence, and all the students have to do is feel and be grateful for it as it flows through their lives, and all I have to do, really, is make sure I stay out of the way.

THE GREATER GOOD

I often get so lost inside my own special plans and preparations that I lose sight of the only good worth going after – the greater good. It’s astonishing to me that I sometimes – usually, to be honest – think of myself as a small, separate existence in a universe of disparate and isolated specks, when the fact is that everything is folded perfectly together in a never-ending unity. I can no more be separate from anything else than a breeze can be separate from the sweeping winds of the earth’s weather patterns, and any good I’m trying to get for myself is never separate from the greater good found in this vast universe, from the distant and perfect stars to the unspoiled flecks of dust I find on my desk each day. The greater good is like the light of the supportive sunshine all around me, whereas any small, personal good is like some single, insignificant light that I think might be mine if I could just find it in the far distance. The sunshine is always present for me, even on dark days, and the greater good of this grand universe is equally present in every passing second, if I only open my eyes. Whether I live or die today, whether I succeed or fail, the unfolding universe will fill itself with ever more might and beauty moment by moment. The greater good will gather up my small comings and goings into its own satisfying unity, into the powers of far-off stars and smiles of friends and dust on a desk in Mystic.
 

ALERT BUT RELAXED

     Like a good driver, a good teacher must stay both alert and relaxed. When driving on an icy road, I have to be sharp-eyed for especially slippery sections of the road, but I also have to be unruffled  enough at the wheel to steer the car with deftness and suppleness. I have to stay both tense and loose. I must be resolute and steadfast, watching every inch of the way ahead, but I must also be free-flowing and,flexible. I sometimes picture a good driver on a bad road as having furrowed brows (the alertness) but also a slight and sincere smile (the relaxation). He’s working hard but somehow finding genuine pleasure in the work. I picture a teacher in a similar way. Certainly I have to be alert to every shade and tone during class. I need to have fifty eyes instead of just two, and a few dozen ears wouldn’t hurt. Thousands of mental and verbal events happen in each class, and I need to be aware of all of them. However, I must always balance my watchfulness with an equal amount of lightness and easing up. Teaching teenagers the essentials of fine writing and serious literature often resembles traversing a frozen mountain in a car, and while I’m ever on the alert, I also need to be relaxed enough to move the class along the zigzag road that’s always created when free-thinking, restive adolescents come together to discuss the art of speaking from the heart in written words. I need to ‘drive’ the class with the coolest kind of awareness, with an attentiveness that feels like dancing.

YIELDING

One of my favorite dictionaries says the most common meaning for “yield” is “to produce or provide a natural product”, and, in that sense, I always hope a great amount of yielding will occur in my life. Just as a farmer looks forward to an abundant “yield” of crops each year, I look forward to the ripening and flowering of inexpressible miracles in each of my days. The passing moments, you might say, are the fruitful and fecund soil, out of which will slowly rise a lavish crop of wholesome thoughts and events. (I sometimes fantasize that someone noticing my obviously abundant life might be reminded of harvest time on the farm.) Another common definition of “yield” is “to give way to pressure”, as in “He yielded to the demands of his peers.” Each person I come in contact with makes demands on me, brings a sort of pressure to bear – the pressure of their own matchless, extraordinary lives. For me, it’s usually a quiet and gentle pressure – a loving one, too – but it can also be an intense and penetrating pressure. However, one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned over the years is to yield, to give way as gracefully as possible, to this pressure of other people – to this steady and useful wisdom of human lives.

A BAND AND A BROTHERHOOD

“The problem of pause or cæsura had been a large one in eighteenth-century verse, and care in cæsural placing had in general been as much exercised by the poets as it had been preached by the prosodists.”
-- Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats. London: Oxford University Press, 1945.

When I read the above quote this morning, I could easily see in my mind the poet John Keats and his friends, some 200 years ago, taking great care in putting into their poems, not just caesuras (pauses), but even the smallest words, and it makes me more determined than ever to teach my young students to use a similar kind of precision as they prepare their essays. To a serious writer, words are as prized as jewels, and should be joined in a sentence with as much attention as a jeweler chooses pieces for a chain. I picture the jeweler leaning over an assortment of jewels, sorting and studying them, always considering what the finest possible positioning might be, and I encourage my student writers to work in a similar way. You could say they are working with priceless objects (words) and so they need to place them in precisely the proper places so they can shine and perform in the foremost ways. Keats and his friends helped each other stay devoted to doing their absolute best on each poem, and my students and I can help each other in a similar way. Like the poets, we can suggest stronger words in certain places, or advise a reshuffling of words to work out a smoother rhythm in a sentence, or recommend a thorough reworking of a paragraph. We can be a band of “literary jewelers” joining words with the care and precision of artists – with the consecration and earnestness of a brotherhood of young poets in England.

"Village Jeweler", oil, by Robin Cheers

THERE’S NO ALONENESS ANYWHERE

“The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown”
-- John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale

In the classroom, I am sometimes filled with the feeling of unison and solidarity with all the teachers and students of the past and present. Perhaps it’s the same feeling Keats had when he realized that the songs of nightingales, in a sense, last forever – that inside the moment of his joyous listening to the bird’s song were concealed all the countless times others had listened to the same song. There was a strange timelessness and even everlastingness in Keats’s experience, as though he was in unison with the immeasurable numbers of people, be they emperors or clowns, who had heard and will hear those sweet songs in other gardens. Now and then, fortunately for me, I feel something similar, for there are moments in my classroom when I feel completely connected to the endless family of teachers and students from all times and places. I’m presenting lessons on poems or punctuation rules, and all the teachers and students from the limitless years of the past are there with me, presenting lessons and learning how to learn. It’s as if I’m in the center of a vast and crowded classroom, filled with all those who think deeply and don’t want to stay blind and dumb, and we’re all sort of holding hands as we work our way toward new knowledge. Keats was alone in a lonely garden and I teach alone in a tiny classroom, but in another and real way, there’s no aloneness anywhere, not when nightingales are singing or when kids and teachers take on the task of teaching each other. The universe itself sits and studies with my students and me, the same everlasting universe that sat with Keats and listened.

A LUCKY GUY

I’ve known this for years, but it’s always worth saying again: I am a lucky guy. Here are a few proofs: I’m sitting, at this moment, in a pleasantly snug house on a frosty morning, a lamp is lighting the room in a warm way, my best friend is near and never far away, my classroom in a kindhearted school is waiting for me, the students will show me the blessings of their special lives, breezes will bend the branches of trees, birds will flutter at the feeder, far-off towns and cities will send their high-spirits to the skies, distant stars will always shine, while I’m in a welcoming room walking coolheadedly through books with my students. Again: I am a lucky guy.

COVENANTING IN ROOM 2

When I learned recently that the word “covenant” can be used as a verb, as in “We covenant on Wednesday evenings”, it occurred to me that, in fact, my students and I covenant in my classroom each day. Used in this way, you might say the word means “come together voluntarily to make an agreement”, which describes, fairly truthfully, what happens in my English classes. Of course, in one sense, the kids don’t come to my classroom voluntarily, but in another sense, I think they do, because I think they sincerely wish to become brighter and more sophisticated and better able to understand their bewildering world. They might not rush wholeheartedly to my classroom, but I believe they bring a real willingness to work hard for wisdom. I think they throw themselves into learning, in their own adolescent ways, as thoroughly as I throw myself into teaching. You could say we “covenant” each day because we agree, each in our special way, that it’s good to grow and give the good gift of education to ourselves – that being able to see the significance of the world around us is better than being blind. Fourteen-year-olds and old men like me are equally in favor of finding learning wherever we can, which is why we covenant, with care and accord, in a classroom in the countryside of Connecticut.

 

AMAZING GRACE

In religious circles, it’s usually agreed that grace is a gift from God, but in my English classes grace seems to come more from caring hearts and strong minds, more from some superforce inside and all around us than from what I usually think of as God. It is truly “amazing” to sit with my students and feel their hearts unfolding a little as we read and discuss a chapter in Dickens, or to listen as the students’ say what their young minds have suddenly or slowly brought to the surface. There’s no explaining where these thoughts or feelings come from, except to say they are somehow “given” to us, my students and me, moment by moment in every class. We don’t consciously create the fresh ideas that evolve in each class. We don’t say, “Now I am going to make this specific thought”, but rather the thoughts seem to think themselves up, sort of the way the weather works out its patterns in its own mysterious ways. We are all under the sway of the sunshine and cloudy skies that come our way, and the same is true of the ideas and emotions that seem to be grace-fully made especially for my youthful students and me as we sit in my classroom and pay attention to the powerful voices of our hearts and minds.

LIGHTER AND STRONGER

"Easy Float", oil, by Don Gray

Yesterday, when I heard someone say their single goal for this year is to become lighter and stronger, I said to myself, “Yes, and that’s my single goal for my students.” The kids in my classes often come slumping into my room as though they are bearing the burdens of heavy cares and concerns, and I would love to lighten that load. I’m supposed to simply teach the English curriculum, but certainly that must include caring for my students, and to care for someone is to seek to help them find how light life can feel. I want to show the students how to compose successful essays, yes, but in the process I hope to help them “lighten up” so they can sail and soar in my class instead of wilt and sag. Surprisingly, this lightness, this nimbleness and buoyancy I want them to feel, also implies a certain kind of strength. If they are feeling buoyant, then chances are they are feeling lighthearted, which suggests they will find the strength necessary to move through serious works of literature with ease and suppleness. If their lives feel light to them, the tasks they undertake for me may feel light as well – light and alluring and perhaps even pleasurable, easy jobs for someone who feels both limber and well-made.

THE RISING

"Fresh Bread", oil, by Hall Groat II

I occasionally bake a few loaves of bread, and seeing the dough slowly rise in the bowl sometimes puts me in mind of my young students and their secretly rising lives. A few grains of yeast puts a mysterious, transformative power into bread dough, and there’s a similar force transforming my students moment by moment as they sit before me. The dough seems like a lifeless blob as it rests silently in the bowl, and my students, to be honest, are often more like clusters of drowsiness than emergent human beings, but there are great good works going on inside both. Somehow the dough gradually grows more expansive, more resilient, and, you might say, more full of the forces of life – and the same, I know, is happening to my students all the while they are in my classroom. The dough, before long, will become brown and beautiful loaves of bread, and my sometimes drowsy and lackluster students will, each day, see fresh ideas flowing toward them, and new horizons in their young lives, and lighthearted, unbelievable possibilities for themselves.
 

ABSOLUTE SUCCESS

One day recently, toward evening, I said to a dear friend that I thought it had been a “successful” day, but almost as soon as I said it, the thought came to me that every day is successful. When I was thinking the day had been a success, I was thinking from the smallest possible perspective, that of an  infinitesimal, isolated person called “me”, who presumably can judge whether a day has been what it should have been. It’s as if I was a sitting in a judge’s chair in some vast courtroom, solemnly passing down my decision to the waiting universe: This day has been successful. It became more ridiculous the more I thought about it. Who am I, this small speck of a soul in an endless cosmos, to pass judgment on the praiseworthiness of a day? Can I know whether the sunshine spread itself around in the appropriate manner? Am I to decide whether the thousands of cars in Connecticut crossed from one place to another in the most perfect way possible ? Is it up to little me to judge the rightness or wrongness of an entire winter day? The more I thought about it, the more clearly I remembered a simple truth: from the largest perspective, that of the measureless universe itself, every day, every hour, every instant, is precisely what it has to be and should be. Absolute success is built into each passing second of time. Stars shine as they should, as magnificently as possible, and shoes scrape along a sidewalk with a similar impressiveness, just as they must at any given second in this marvelously successful universe.

AN ENDLESS STREAM

Every so often the astounding thought occurs to me that approximately 57,000 of these thoughts work their way into my life every day. Day after day, in sixteen hours of wakefulness, the wonder is that I’m not constantly stunned by the sheer numbers and newness of this flood of thoughts that flows through me. It can’t be stopped, but relentlessly takes good care of me by bringing me ideas that didn’t exist the second before they come to me. It’s my good fortune to be part of such a powerful and influential force each day -- the spectacle of the endless stream of ideas. What’s especially fascinating to me is that these thoughts are not under my control. I can’t create thoughts the way I might make something with a saw and hammer; the thoughts seem to think themselves into being, bringing something shining and fresh for me each moment. If I’m sitting in my classroom before class, swift and unforeseen ideas will be getting born by themselves by the dozens as the seconds pass. If I’m walking down the walkway at school, stray ideas will pass through me faster than I can follow them. It truly is a striking display, this profusion of thoughts second after second, hour after hour. First thing in the morning, perhaps I should make myself ready, prepare myself for the surge of garden-fresh thoughts, this stream of absolute newness that will never stop.

A FRIEND

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
-- John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

I haven’t often thought of the books we read in English class as “friends”, but rereading Keats’ poem this morning makes me see some sense in the thought. The poet presents the idea that, in the midst of all the reworkings and ups-and-downs of our lives, all the occasional “woe[s]” and disillusionments, something “shal[l] remain” to remind us of what’s truly essential in life – and for Keats, this something is the kind of flawless magnificence represented by the Grecian urn. There’s something stunning in all of our lives, Keats suggests, and it’s not just in museums, but directly in front of us in the most commonplace loveliness – in the shape of a pencil on a table, in a window with a wide view of a town’s lights, in orange peels in a flower-patterned bowl, and certainly in some lines from Shakespeare or Keats. When my students come to class with their usual cares and distresses, I can comfort them, perhaps, with a paragraph from A Tale of Two Cities. I can show them that the sense of well-being they so badly need is possibly waiting in just a few words working together to make something exquisite on a page in a book. A book is just a “silent form”, a “cold” collection of words, but it can carry a splendor inside it that can comfort even the most fretful teenager. Perhaps all my students “need to know” is that something lovely – a poem, a sentence well structured, or just a bird at the bird-feeder outside the classroom -- can always lead them out of worries into the simple truth that life is basically a beautiful thing.

A MORE FITTING AND PERFECT WAY

This morning my shower showed me something new about teaching. For years I have usually entered the shower at the front, by the faucets and the shower head, but this morning, for some reason, I decided to enter from the back, and what happened will help me be a better teacher today. As I stepped in, I realized -- ta-da! -- that the spray from the shower head was not hitting me, and that therefore I could gradually get myself under the shower's waterfall, instead of  being assaulted in a sudden and disagreeable way at the front of the shower. It was an instant realization, and it made me wonder why I've been such a simplelton all these years of showering. I thought about this incident later in the morning, and it began to look like a small light to shine on my teaching. How many times, I wondered, have I done something in my classroom simply because I’ve always done it that way, like always stepping into the shower from the front and being instantly soaked with water? How many fresh and simple truths about teaching are sitting in front of me, waiting to be discovered, like this morning when I went into the shower from one end instead of the other and found a more fitting and perfect way?

  

REBELLIOUS READING

“We now have multiple authors rather than single solitary geniuses. We now acknowledge the existence of multiple versions of important works rather than just one text per work. Instead of a single real or ideal reader, we have multiple readers all over the place-classrooms full of individual readers in our college and high school literature courses, journals and books full of readers in our academic libraries, auditoriums full of readers at our conferences. And all of these readers are constructing interpretations as fast as they read. As one might imagine, when it is a complex work that is being read, the interpretations differ from one another as much as the readers do. It is not possible that only one of the interpretations is correct and all the others are wrong.”
-- Jack Stillinger, “Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats”

Professor Jack Stillinger of the University of Illinois is one of my heroes, for he stands for the same rebellious approach to reading literature that I have learned to love. He believes that all readers bring their different minds and hearts to the books they read, and that these readers, all of them, have wholehearted thoughts and feelings about what they read, and that these thoughts and feelings should be respected by other readers, especially teachers. To take some sentences from A Tale of Two Cities and say that I, the teacher, and only I, can tell the true story of what those sentences mean, makes about as much sense as saying only a teacher can understand the sky. Hundreds of thousands of readers have read Dickens’ novel, and each one was stirred in a special way, and each one walked away from the book with some fresh and special feeling in her or his heart. I have always thought it strange that certain people presume to understand books better than others, which seems as silly as saying the meanings of swirling ripples in a river are open only to certain superior somebodies. All of us, my young students included, have the right to see what perhaps only we see in the books we read, and no one should want to dissuade us, or deter us from following the trails of our own irreplaceable impressions. Professor Stillinger sees that truth, which surely has made his students feel fairly well-off in his classroom.

WE ARE NOT ALONE

Since I’m sure my students sometimes feel very alone in my English classes, as if they are solitary travelers in some wilderness of writing and reading, I remind them occasionally that being alone in the study and use of words is actually impossible. Words themselves, after all, are never alone, but live, you might say, in a universe of endless numbers of brother and sister words, all influencing and transforming each other. The meanings and pronunciations of words are constantly shifting as they circulate and stir with each other around the world. Linguists even speak of “families” of words, suggesting the vast interlacings and alliances, so to speak, of words. I occasionally remind my students of this, and suggest that they are also members of a family – the family of readers and users of the countless families of words. When my students are reading Shakespeare’s words, they are joining with the endless numbers of readers who have had that pleasure over the centuries. When they share their interpretations of sentences from A Tale of Two Cities, they are figuratively establishing a friendship with his countless commentators of the past and present. In a very significant sense, my students’ thoughts about the books we study are the offspring of all the thoughts of past readers – the children, so to speak, of earlier students of these authors. We are all in partnership as a family of serious readers, even when we sit silently in our classroom, studying a passage by ourselves, or when we are at home hoping for some sudden inspiration. It will come, I say to my students. It will come because we readers are connected to all readers, even when we sit by ourselves with a thoroughly puzzling page before us. 

ELEGANT PROOFS

I’ve seen countless “elegant proofs” in my classroom, which makes me think serious mathematicians might enjoy visiting with me and my students. As I understand it, in mathematics an “elegant proof” occurs when the proof of the correctness of a formula is so smooth and unassailable that it’s said to be literally stunning, a kind of beauty I’ve seen in my classroom on almost a daily basis. We don’t use math formulas in my classes, but we do try to solve the “problems” presented in poems and stories, and sometimes the solutions are extraordinarily striking. Just the other day, a student spoke about the sentences at the end of a chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, and her thoughts seemed absolutely exquisite, and somehow totally true. She was just a teenager trying to unscramble a book that has stymied scholars for decades, but somehow her words seemed as flawless as a circle, as gorgeous and right as any rainbow. For that moment, what she said about those sentences from Dickens was as picture-perfect an analysis as I had ever heard. Of course, I know that on other days other students of Dickens will share different thoughts about those same sentences, and their thoughts may shine with a similar classiness – but that’s the beauty of elegant proofs, at least when it comes to literature. The light of sophisticated and deep reading is always shining, wherever there are readers ready to see it. 

THE FOUNTAIN OF LEARNING

When I feel like learning is simply not arising in my classes, I’m sometimes lucky enough to recall that, essentially, it has no choice in the matter. Learning, by its very nature, can never stop happening, never stop bringing its skills and transformations to the surface of our lives. Like the blood in our bodies that constantly supplies us with restoration and even rebirth without our assistance, learning lets itself unfold in our midst moment by moment. Whether a student is making an annotation in the margin of a book, or bothering the student beside him, or simply staring at birds among the trees outside, he or she is sharing in the ongoing process of learning. There’s a fountain always flowing up among all of us, whether we sense it or not – a fountain made for revitalizing our lives with learning. 
 

LOOSENING UP

 TS When I surprisingly discovered yesterday that the word “analyze” derives from the Greek word for “loosen up”, I suddenly pictured my youthful students of literature disentangling themselves from their worries about their academic abilities, and simply unwinding a little among the pages of the books we read for class. Perhaps I’ve had the wrong notion about literary analysis – that it’s a matter of major concentration and intensity. Perhaps the best way for my students and me to appreciate the artistry of a novel or poem is to actually ease up among the sentences, perhaps “put our feet up” among the words and phrases and just see what happens. If we really want to analyze some pages in a story, possibly we should make ourselves less uptight about the process and sort of sprawl among the sentences -- sort of lounge around and idly look for the lights of meaning the author might have placed here and there. Perhaps, going back to the Greek, we should analyze literature by “loosening up” the words on a page -- figuratively shaking them, turning them all upside down, or dropping them out of a third-story window and watching what happens. I get the feeling from the Greek origins that analysis has more to do with amusement than meticulousness, more to do with games than grim obligations.

HE TRUSTS IT

He trusts it,

the present moment,

a force he feels

will always stand beside him.

The whole sky

could sit inside

the present moment,

and mighty storms

of softness are stirring

inside each one.

He walks in confidence,

for a friend

is always with him.

MAKING AMAZEMENT

I’m sometimes amazed during my classes, but the amazement comes too seldom, considering that I’m always in the presence of astonishing events. There are so many startling occurrences during my classes that I should be shocked, in a sense, second after second. Each of my classes is miraculous – literally. No, there are no sudden shafts of light landing on my students and me, and no, no one is raised up from sickness during my classes, and yes, some students learn zippo in their 48 minutes in my classroom -- but still, there are absolute miracles made in our midst moment by moment. Consider this: oxygen atoms that may have been in Borneo or France a few days ago are given to our bloodstreams all during class. And this: my students and I each have 50 trillion cells in our bodies making pure magic for the full 48 minutes. And this: breezes that have never blown before in the history of the universe are constantly sailing past the classroom windows. And this: sunlight that has traveled 93 million miles takes its place silently on the windows while we’re working in class. Are not these miracles enough to make us amazed? Should we not stand in silence every so often during English class, out of respect for the spectacles unfolding before us?

ON NOT BEING CAREFUL

If we have confidence, in one sense we can stop being so careful about everything. If my students and I truly see the strength and diversity of our own thoughts, and the indestructability of them, and the fact that they flow through our lives with irresistible steadiness, then the need for caution and carefulness drops away. We know that nothing can prevent us from presenting ourselves to the world as thinkers of thoughts that are bursting with freshness. In a way, we have no choice in the matter. Our make-up is that of free-flowing rivers of ideas. All we have to do is put aside diffidence and faint-heartedness, and let the flow pour on. This sort of reckless confidence in the classroom seems contrary to the usual suggestion that students should think and write with unreserved caution, always selecting their thoughts and words with the utmost restraint, but I guess what I’m wanting in my students’ work in English class, at least some of the time, is less self-discipline and more looseness and even rowdiness. Why all the diffidence and hesitancy about our capacity to think astonishing thoughts? Does not our blood flow freely and liberally? Do not our lungs let in grand drafts of refreshing air without our fretting and being careful about it?

SPREADING ROOTS

There is a serious amount of silence during my classes, which I guess I should be grateful for, since roots always spread in silence. My young students make a habit of holding their thoughts inside, and, as exasperating as it sometimes is for me, perhaps this is what allows the thoughts to slowly send out roots. Gardeners gradually come to see that plants cannot be pressured into growing, and teachers must likewise discover that neither can ideas, especially those of students who are just starting to rise to the surface of their lives. In the sometimes resounding silence of my English class, the freshly-made thoughts of the students are, I like to think, slowly distributing their roots out and down into the depths of insight and wisdom. It makes me wonder if I should actually foster more silence in my classes, reasoning that this would support the expansion and emergence of the students’ newest ideas. Maybe I should make an occasional announcement that we will now hold our silence for 60 seconds so our freshest thoughts can come closer to the surface

GOING ON

There's always a lot "going on" in my classes, and, even if some of the goings-on have more to do with student daydreams than with English, I'm happy to know that nothing stands still in my classes. In fact, nothing stands still anywhere at anytime, and so my always lively English classes simply share in the customary business of the universe. If my students and I are constantly “going” somewhere during class, it’s only because it’s what all of life does. We are part of an ever-energetic cosmos, so we have no choice but to go, go, and go. Bear in mind that my “lively” classes are not necessarily fascinating or successful, and surely occasionally fall into the doldrums of sheer dreariness, but still, something is always going on. Thoughts, for one, can’t help but going on, moment after moment after moment. If the number and variety of our thoughts during class could somehow be portrayed on a screen, it would show something like the flashing and signaling of the endless stars above us. True, our thoughts might be far off course from the lesson and may be bizarre and even crazy-sounding, but they’re definitely “going on” – easily and ingeniously, from second to second for the full 48 minutes. Of course, along with our steady streams of thoughts, our bodies are also sharing in the incessant goings-on of the classroom. Our blood is reborn with new oxygen with each passing second, new air steadily enlivens our lungs, and our skin’s cells are replaced by fresh ones almost constantly. We have no choice. It’s not up to us. As we sit or stand in English class, everything is going on, continuously and refreshingly -- and, for us, fortunately.

VASTNESS

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When I'm teaching in my fairly small classroom and feeling like I'm working in a restricted, pocket-sized space, it sometimes comes to me that, in fact, I'm in a place of great vastness. After all, teaching English is all about ideas and words, both of which know neither beginnings nor boundaries. Ideas, I believe, don't ever start, but simply bring themselves to our minds when we're ready, and then work their way out to countless other minds without end. Words, too, are the creations of all the infinite number of people who have ever lived, and my students and I are merely the fortuitous sharers of those words. When I'm in my classroom with my students, at the center of this endless universe of ideas and words, how is it possible to feel small and constricted?

SILENCE AND SLOW TIME IN ENGLISH CLASS

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"Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time..."
-- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Despite the haste and hurry that is sometimes involved in teaching teenagers, I almost always have the sense that something like Keats' "silence and slow time" is the strength that actually produces most of the learning that occurs in my classes. Every so often, amid the outer noise of discussion and the inner noise of criss-crossing thoughts, there are a few moments of silence when time moves, you might say, slowly and restfully, and it is then, I think, that new thoughts can most easily be born to bring us guiding lights. When silence and the seemingly slow progress of time encircle my classroom, as happens with some consistency, the thoughts of my students often come alive in fresh and useful ways. Silence, so to speak, is the comforting presence, and slow time is the supportive escort for the new ideas -- the kind of ideas that are found when peace and a little leisure come together in English class.

NEVER A BETTER DAY

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“The air that floated by me seem’d to say,

‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day.’”

     --- John Keats, “To Charles Cowden Clarke”

     Sometimes, when I’m in the midst of teaching a tiresome lesson, I often wish it was tomorrow or yesterday or any chance day besides this one, but occasionally I recall these lines by Keats, and then the day usually develops into, not an unblemished one, but at least the very best one for now. I’m sure I’ve spent thousands of minutes in my life wishing it was a better day for teaching or writing or thinking or hiking or holding a hot cup of coffee in my hand, when the fact is that any day is the best day it can possibly be. As the saying goes, any day is just what it is, and my teaching on any day is just what it is – just me making the best of whatever is given me, be it gold or god-awful mud. I recall an old Bible line about a furnace making gold from garbage, which makes me think I’ll always “never have a better day”, even on a so-called bad day of evidently feeble teaching, for there may be a furnace in the day’s midst, silently making something precious underneath the rubbish. 

BEING STARTLED IN ENGLISH CLASS

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“Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”
-- John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey

Every so often, something startles me in English class, and it is usually nothing more spectacular than the soft look of a student’s expression, or the shine the sunlight places on someone’s shirt, or –occasionally – a “sparrow […] before [the] window” working to get some food at the feeder. Like Keats, almost “nothing startles me beyond the [m]oment” – beyond the commonplace happenings that life lets us come across moment by moment. I make big plans for each class, hoping, I guess, to be given great rewards in the form of energized students and a satisfied self-image, but most often the rewards come in modest, usually disregarded forms – a fervent look from a girl, the song of a boy’s voice, a sudden wind beside the windows. I even pause, now and then, to admire the birds at the feeder just outside the classroom – even in the midst of a convoluted lesson. I find the birds startling, sometimes, and so I take the time to “take part in [their] existence”. It’s just a few seconds of silent appreciation, and I’m convinced it helps me make my lesson, as I return to it, a little less wearisome and perhaps a little more startling.

DISAPPEARING IN THE CLASSROOM

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     “As to the poetical Character itself … it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet…. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, The Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity.”

     -- John Keats, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818)

         I have always loved Keats’ idea that a poet must make himself melt away in his poetry, and I think the same is true for a teacher. As the years of my career have passed, I have held it more and more imperative that a teacher take himself or herself as far out of the picture as possible – that the “self” of the teacher grow gradually smaller and less significant. That sounds strange, I’m sure, to those who think of teachers as trailblazers or captains or spectacular performers, but it makes sense to me, especially as I recall the few captivating teachers I had as a student. These were teachers who took me, not into the world of their own personal interests and beliefs, but into vast realms of literature and ideas, where their personalities seemed to disappear. I remember these teachers being not like bright beams of light that blinded us to all but their radiance and brilliance, but more like soft, unassertive lamps lighting the way. The personalities of these magnificent teachers sort of vanished in the brightness of the literature they taught and loved. You might say the teachers disappeared so the learning could arise in their place. My humble hope is to disappear in a similar way, day after day among my ever-blossoming students.

   

DIVINING IN ROOM 2

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divine  |diˈvīn|

verb [ with obj. ]

discover (something) by guesswork or intuition

       According to the above definition, I definitely do some “divining” in my classroom. Intuition is my handiest tool, really – that strange inner sense that makes certain words seem sensible to say and certain actions the precisely suitable ones. I don’t carefully consider each and every word, several seconds before I speak, nor do I cautiously design each gesture I make. Most of my speaking and moving during class is a consequence of sheer guesswork, the work of an intuition that loves to leap into words and actions. Somehow I “divine” what to do and say during class. It’s as if bolts from the blue bring about everything that happens. Of course I do plan my lessons, I’m proud to say, with significant care, but once a class gets started, the guessing, and I might say wizardry, take over. I usually cover each part of my plans, but it seems like some transcendent influence is causing the lesson to flow along. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m in some special correspondence with the universe – just that things happen in such an eccentric, accidental manner that they all seem made by some far-off force. It’s as if I’m a puppet being operated by powers I’ve never known – powers that produce thoughts and actions with the smoothness of sorcerers. Lest this seem an admission of helplessness and despair, let me add that I’m an enormously contented and grateful puppet.