DRAFTING IN ROOM 2

"Upper East Side Bikes", oil, by Susan Cox

I often ask my students to write a “first draft” of an essay, but, as with so many words, I’ve never taken the time to carefully consider the meaning of these words – and “draft” has three meanings that are especially interesting. First, one dictionary says a draft is “a current of air in an enclosed area”. That brings to mind a picture of my students’ young minds, all sealed up and filled with various fears and worries, when suddenly some ideas for an essay pass through like an unforeseen gust of air, or “draft”. If they’re speedy about it, they can find the source of the draft, open it wider, and enjoy the free flow of thoughts as they begin their writing. A second definition of “draft” is “a team of animals used to pull loads”, and in this sense, my essay-writing students are like draft horses. It can be a disheartening task to drag four wagons called paragraphs, loaded with weighty ideas, all the way to the finish line of an essay – and often the road runs steeply uphill. This is why I drive my students so hard day by day in the classroom: I must train them to skillfully and smoothly pull enormous and cumbersome thoughts week after week. Finally, another curious definition says that “draft” can mean “to move, ride, or drive close behind a fast-moving object so as to take advantage of the slipstream, especially in a race”. This could be comforting to my students, for it would help them realize that they are writing their essays along with 20+ classmates, all of them pedaling together on their mental bicycles along the road of successful writing . As all serious cyclists know, if you stay in a pack the work is less painful, and you sometimes even feel like you’re effortlessly flying along. I must remind my students to stay together as they toil on their essays throughout the year. The road of fine writing may be steep sometimes, but drafting with friends can make the trip seem almost bracing, almost refreshing.

"The Warden", by Anthony Trollope

There seems to be a stirring of suspicion that the will of Mr. Hiram is not being honored precisely. Mr. John Bold is starting to investigate whether the warden of the hospital for elderly poor men is taking too much of the inheritance for himself, but Mr. Bunce, one of the residents of the hospital, is opposed to Bold's efforts. Here is a wonderful description of Bunce:


"He was one on whose large frame many years, for he was over eighty, had made small havoc;--he was still an upright, burly, handsome figure, with an open, ponderous brow, round which clung a few, though very few, thin gray locks. The coarse black gown of the hospital, the breeches, and buckled shoes became him well; and as he sat with his hands folded on his staff, and his chin resting on his hands, he was such a listener as most musicians would be glad to welcome."

I love the idea that his 80+ years had made only "small havoc" on his life.

Yesterday was a first for me -- the first serious bike-ride of the season, the first time, I'm fairly sure, that I've ever ridden in February, and the first time -- I'm positive --  that I've ridden when it's 20 degrees! It was a frosty but fantastic ride of 6 miles, Mystic to school , and I can't wait to do it again soon. 

TEACHING AT NIAGARA FALLS

"Waterfall", oil, by Delilah Smith

Today I should feel a kind of delight as I go about the business of teaching, for a power of immense peacefulness will be prevailing over all that happens. Unfortunately, I rarely remember this truth. As I concentrate on carrying out my lesson plans and controlling the flow of my classes, I tend to forget that thought actually controls everything that happens in my room. From the smallest event to the most significant, everything occurs because thought, or consciousness, is ceaselessly at work. My classroom is like an infinite fountain of ideas, and it is that fountain which rules the room every minute of every day. It’s an astonishing fact to meditate on, and to picture. I can see in my mind, not 36 individual material bodies, but, each moment, 36 innovative, ground-breaking, state-of-the-art thoughts. I once calculated that approximately 450,000 ideas come into being in my classroom every day – a magnificent surge of thoughts that are constantly reshaping the lives of my students and me. Perhaps it would help, today, if I see in my mind something like Niagara Falls, with its astonishing flow of water, and remind myself that I teach in a “Niagara Falls” classroom. There is as much – and much more – power in my classroom each day as there is at those famous falls. The immeasurable universe is ceaselessly spinning along, creating almost half a million ideas in little Room 2 in Pine Point School. I probably should just sit back and be amazed by it all, just as I would stare in wonder at Niagara Falls flowing over its cliffs.

DIAMONDS IN THE CLASSROOM

When my teaching seems dull and lack-luster, when there seems to be no polish or flash in my classroom, I think sometimes of a useful analogy: students as diamonds. Years ago, someone explained to me that a diamond reveals its countless facets only when it is slowly spun in the light. If it always sits at one angle to the light, a diamond can actually appear almost uninteresting. Only by spinning it in as many ways as possible can an observer begin to appreciate the almost endless faces of its loveliness. It often helps me to think of my students as “diamonds” in that sense, and to imagine that it’s my task to keep “turning” them in the light. After all, if a diamond has a thousand facets to its beauty, each of my students must have a zillion. Far more than a diamond, a human being – any human being -- is a magnificent display of talents and class, and I see several dozen of them in my classroom each day. I’m surrounded by living diamonds from 8:30 to 3:00. However, I won’t notice much of their splendor unless I constantly spin them in the light. By planning scholarly and stimulating lessons, I must turn each of my students so they are able to show off another talent – another aspect of their magnificence. I must help them reveal their sometimes concealed brilliance, hour by hour, day by day. When visitors enter my classroom, I want them to be just as impressed as they would be if they were in the presence of a necklace of flawless diamonds.

"The Warden", by Anthony Trollope

I CAN ALWAYS DO THIS

It’s comforting for me to remember, at those times when I don’t seem able to do anything correctly in the classroom, that there’s one thing I can always do with distinction – notice what is happening. No matter how horrible a situation seems, no matter how many mistakes I appear to have made, I can always simply wait and watch – just stand back and dispassionately witness whatever situation is presenting itself. It bears repeating: I can always do this. When I suddenly feel like a fool in front of the students for having forced a silly assignment upon them, I can always simply step away and observe my feelings of foolishness. If, in the midst of a lesson, I let myself fall into discouragement, there’s always the option of pulling back and quietly keeping my discouragement under observation. What’s intriguing – and comforting – about this is that I don’t have to actively do anything. Indeed, it’s the doing and manipulating and planning and presiding over that tends to tire me out, but simply noticing needs only alertness and sincerity, and actually leaves me less tired and more wide-awake than before. My life as a teacher is an endless parade of episodes, each one full of fascinations and bombshells, and truly taking pleasure in it – all of it – is simply a matter of making it something to notice, and perhaps stare at, with amazement.

The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser

     Lately  I've been reading Book 3 of Spenser's classic poem, and I've enjoyed some of the cantos immensely. There's the usual elegance of his verbal music, some of the most graceful rhythms in all of English literature. I especially enjoyed this passage in a description of Venus taking care of Adonis as he slept:
Where him to sleepe she gently would persuade, 
Or bathe him in a fountaine by some couert glade. 
And whilst he slept, she ouer him would spred 
Her mantle, colour’d like the starry skies, 
And her soft arme lay vndemeath his hed, 
And with ambrosiall kisses bathe his eyes.
     In a way, Spenser's rhythms are fairly simple -- mostly alliteration with a strict adherence to iambic pentameter -- but in that simplicity he manages to create music of great beauty.

THE TEACHER AS EMPEROR AND CLOWN

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I heard this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown. . . .”
-- John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”

"Clowning Around", oil on linen,
by Robin Cheers

     It’s always been interesting to me that Keats places an emperor and a clown side by side, and I’ve often thought of this unexpected pairing as I’ve paced around my classroom in my commanding yet strangely ridiculous manner. Keats suggests in his poem that there isn’t really much difference between an emperor and a clown, and I’ve gradually come to see that the same is true for a teacher and a fool. The emperor pretends to be brave and sensible while in his heart he hears himself laughing at his own foolishness, and something similar happens to me when I’m teaching. I see myself standing before my students like some sort of sage or magistrate, but at the same time I see the clown in me, the jester who jokes with “Mr. Salsich” to help him see that he actually doesn’t know much about anything. For me, teaching has become a pleasant and sometimes joyous play-acting experience, in which the teacher-actor prances around the classroom to create the illusion of expertise and wisdom, while the prankster inside him, the one who wonders why all things are absolute mysteries, wanders around in merry amazement. I enthusiastically play the prince and pilot for my students, hoping to help them in significant ways, but the comic in my heart has the truth of things, and smiles and sits back.

BEING INFLUENTIAL

"Upper Falls Flowing", oil, by Laurel Daniels

I used to aspire to be an influential teacher, but now, after these many decades in the classroom, I see that I have no choice in the matter, that I am always influential – as are all of us, as are all birds and winds and rivers and sunsets and stormy days and all things. The word derives from the Latin for “flow”, and flowing, you might say, is the foundation of everything. Flowing is what makes molecules and atoms the miracles they are as they constantly stream through the universe. All of the limitless cells in our bodies are continuously coursing through us, sometimes crossing out into the widespread universe as we interlace with all things. Flowing is simply what happens – what has to happen, second by second by second. We are all part of the everlasting flow of everything, all as influential as the ever-flowing rivers and the surging stars above us. As I stand in my classroom during class, whatever wisdom has been bestowed on me is, of necessity, endlessly flooding out to the students, and, of course, the students’ high-spirited wisdom is streaming across to me. It’s not our choice. It’s just the way things are.

THE OCEAN IS NEVER A MESS

"Cloudy Day at Sharkey's at the Beach", oil, by Maryanne Jacobsen

Someone once said to me, as we were standing on the shore on a blustery day, that “the ocean is never a mess”, and I sometimes recall his statement on those occasional days when I’m struggling through a class that seems an unreserved disaster. We were staring out at an ocean that seemed, from one perspective, to be in a state of total untidiness and disorder, with whitecaps crashing crazily into each other and winds working in every possible direction. It was not an especially pretty scene. It appeared to be simply a sea let loose and gone crazy. Few people would have praised its orderliness and efficiency, and yet my friend saw something else, and I try to see something else at school when my lesson plans appear to be pulling apart and crumpling. He helped me understand that whatever the sea seems to be doing is precisely what it should be doing, and I try to see the same truth in my collapsing lessons. There’s loveliness, he said, in even the wildest swells and breakers, and there’s loveliness, I know, in even the most disastrous days at school. My particular plans may not be breaking records for success, but beneath them, there’s always learning of some sort proceeding at a steady and perfect pace. The students may not be understanding what I want them to understand, but they’re surely understanding, in their youthful hearts and minds, some truths that will take them toward new and necessary knowledge. Surely there is the inescapable order of all things right where I’m seeing only academic disorder and disaster. I often feel thankful to my old friend for helping me see the splendor in even the stormiest days at the shore, for he also showed me, in an unforeseen way, that the failures of lesson plans can prepare the way for surprisingly prosperous learning.

A RESONANT CLASSROOM

Resonate: "To evoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief. To correspond closely or harmoniously"
Resonant: "Strong and deep in tone; resounding: a resonant voice. Having a lasting presence or effect; enduring. Strongly reminiscent;."

"Perfect Harmony", watercolor by Andy Smith

     When I recently read an article in which the author stated that, if a stringed instrument is vibrating, nearby instruments tuned to the same frequency will begin to vibrate, or resonate, in harmony with the original device, I began wondering whether my classroom was resonant in that sense. Could my students and I be thought of as stringed instruments, and could my goal be to get all of us tuned to the same frequency so we can resonate -- be in harmony -- together? It was a thought-provoking picture – a classroom resounding with insight and sentiment because it is filled with human learning instruments tuned to the same frequency. There are many ramifications of this idea, but one of the most fascinating is that any of the instruments can begin the vibrating. I could certainly be the tuning fork that sets the classroom resonating with ideas, but any student could, as well. If we’re all tuned to the same frequency, it doesn’t matter who “sets the tone”. We’re like the stringed instruments in an orchestra, all pausing to see if someone will start a string vibrating so we can all join in. As the definition above suggests, this can produce superb oneness and accord in the classroom, but, as the definition goes on to suggest, it also can create an enduring effect. A resonant classroom is one that stays in the memory – one that yields learning that lasts. Long after the students leave such a classroom, the “sounds” of the learning that befell them there will, perhaps, resound ever so softly in their lives. Decades later, perhaps a page from a book of poems discussed in my English class will still be resonating in a soft but significant way.

LETTING THE SAW DO THE WORK

While I was sawing some old limbs in the yard this morning, I remembered something my dad told me years ago – that I should always let the tool take the burden of the work – and it brought back some old wisdom about teaching. I remembered being down in the basement sawing boards with Dad, exasperatingly pushing the saw back and forth, and he would occasionally say, in his tasteful and easygoing way, “Just let the saw do the work, Ham.” He was reminding me that saws are made to slide through wood with a certain ease and evenness, but they won’t work so well if we struggle and shove as we do the sawing. “Easy does it”, Dad would say, and then, if I loosened by grip and slackened my desire to be the boss of the saw, suddenly the work was easier and the slicing of the wood seemed to proceed almost effortlessly. Sometimes, as I’m struggling in the classroom to be the best teacher I can be, I recall those days in the basement with Dad. I can be shoving my way through a lesson or pestering my students to polish their essays, when suddenly Dad is by my side, softly suggesting a mellower way. “Let the ideas in the lesson take charge of the teaching,” he might say, or “Relax and allow the plans to point the way.” In those long-gone days, sometimes, after seeing my scuffles and defeats with the saw, he would take me outside to show me how clouds carried themselves across the sky with effortlessness, or how the winds worked among the trees with style and ease, not with struggles and confrontations. He said nature doesn’t know how to strive and wrestle, but only how to flow and follow the easiest way, and that’s what I should always do. Occasionally, after a series of setbacks in the classroom, I think of Dad and those carefree clouds above our house, and those winds that never seemed to work hard, but simply passed along their course with simplicity. I sit back in my chair and look out at the way the trees beside the school always let the sunlight land on their limbs the way it wants to, and I think, Yes, Dad, that’s the way I will teach tomorrow. 

BIG BEAUTY, SMALL BEAUTY

         A friend and I were admiring an early morning scene recently, when she made the surprising observation that she saw both “big beauty and small beauty” in the scene.  She was speaking both of the spreading sunshine on the eastern hills and the minuscule specks of sunlight on the needles of some yew bushes outside the windows. She said she loved the greatness of the sun as it slowly showed itself, but she also took pleasure in the small signs of light in the trees and on the roofs and sides of houses. As I watched with her and thought about bigness and smallness and the numerous “sizes” of beauty, I was reminded of some discussions we had in in class last week. The students made several statements that I thought were surprisingly perceptive – filled with “big beauty”, you might say – but they also made some comments that carried the prestige of unobtrusiveness and modesty, what my friend might call “small beauty”. These were shy remarks made in passing by kids who didn’t care to show off their thoughts, but just wished to share some things they were thinking about. Their beauty broke through to their classmates the way winter sometimes works its way into autumn in indiscernible ways. Thinking about it, I guess I like the small beauties of classroom life best of all – the way the most insignificant words or actions can carry a class away to first-hand understanding, the way even a slight gesture can suggest a fresh way of finding truth in a story. I’ve seen it countless times, the soft sound of wisdom that’s heard even in the midst of the seemingly trivial talk that takes over, now and then, when teenagers talk literature with this somewhat bowed but blessed teacher.     

TAKING IN, GIVING OUT

I sometimes seem to hear my classroom breathing, and it makes sense, since thoughts are consistently taken in and given out during class. It’s a seamless process, the giving and receiving of ideas as the students and I search through stories and poems and prepare sentences for essays. It’s a sharing that’s similar to the partnership seen in nature, where nothing survives by itself, but all is participation and synchronization. Winds pass among tree limbs and the limbs push the winds past, just as my thoughts make new thoughts for the students and theirs do the same for me. We can’t make it alone in English class. I take in an idea from a student and somehow, perhaps in the slightest of ways, it reworks my ways of thinking, and then I give out the gifts of my own thoughts. We think thoughts for each other. We break open the beginnings of new knowledge together.

A GREAT FACT

Sometimes, when my teaching seems lost among thousands of trivialities, I’m fortunate enough to find, again, a few great facts, and one of these is that I never have to help my students think deep thoughts, because they already are. When they enter my classroom, they are carrying on, at that moment, the noble labor of thinking about life. Their thoughts may be of sleepovers and lost chances and shirts to wear on the weekend, but those are the indisputable delights at the center of their lives. Little, lighthearted things like what someone said on Saturday can signify the meaning of all of their lives. They always think deep thoughts because their lives look deeper to them than oceans. My task, then, as one of their teachers is not to "turn on" their thoughts, but to simply find the force and magnificence in the thoughts they are already thinking. Perhaps listening would be a good lesson for me – just listening to hear in their earnest words the thoughts that move their minds and hearts in endless ways. They are boys and girls who have been given the gift of unblemished and bottomless thinking, and I can learn a lot about teaching by simply appreciating their rather extraordinary everyday thoughts.
 

VALENTINES AND STONES

Flowers come to mind when most of us think of Valentine’s Day, but today I will consider, instead, the magnificence of stones. Flowers are soft and pleasing and stand for things shared and cherished by friends, but stones are striking, too, especially in the way they stay silently in the center of wherever the universe places them. Stones are satisfied, it seems – pleased to unobtrusively persist just where they are. On this day when friendship and kindheartedness are acclaimed, isn’t it important to pay attention to the parts of our lives that let things happen the way they’re supposed to happen, like the stones that sit where they are as rain and winds and sunshine pass across them? Love, most of all, is about allowing the loveliness of all things to talk to us, to tell us the story of the abundance and beauty of our lives. Love, for me, is far more than magical moments between two people. It’s the summer grass giving us its best greenness, and the tires on cars carrying people with perfect ease, and trees twisting with style in breezes, and stones in ditches doing their best to be simply stones. A stone is a handsome something as it sits beside the street on my way to school, handsome because it’s modest and unassuming in this world where most of us slave away to be noticed and praised. I say my greetings today to stones, those simple things that know how to sit and stay in this unceasingly unsatisfied and rushing world.

UNDERSTANDING DUST

The other day, as I was consoling myself about my inability to understand my students, I recalled a colleague saying we might as well try to understand the dust as understand adolescents. I guess he was speaking of the scattered and infinitesimal aspect of dust and students, the way they both seem to constantly shift and never stay settled, never seem able to be studied and understood. Dust and students constantly surround me in the classroom, and yet they seem as mysterious to me as the world’s lights seen from a mountain’s summit. They are simple and commonplace, these kids and these ever-present specks of dust, yet they are both strangely secretive and incomprehensible. It might seem odd to compare the students I’m trying to teach with mere flecks of miniscule dust particles, but it’s the fact that both kids and dust are ordinary and at the same time astonishingly extraordinary that I’m thinking of. I almost never notice the dust in my classroom, and I often miss seeing my students in their absolute matchlessness. Like the dust, they are in the classroom everyday, seemingly the same as yesterday, and yet, like the dust, they are transforming and shifting second by second. If I had super hearing powers, I could surely hear the dust being reshaped in amazing ways as I’m teaching the students, those unpretentious but astounding persons who are made new every moment in my classroom.
 

RISING AND SHINING

My dad used to shout “Rise and shine!” when he wanted to put some spirit into his wake-up call, and recently I’ve been saying those words to myself occasionally. The world, I’m noticing, is always ready to rise and shine, and is actually doing it on a second-to-second basis. Each passing moment rises up out of somewhere and shines in its astonishing way, and every day, no matter how dull it seems, is absolutely rosy with newness. Nothing happens anywhere that hasn’t arisen from the boundless, shimmering universe we’re all part of. I saw it today -- the way winter sunlight sparkles in slightly different ways as the seconds pass, the way a wish can spring up in my mind in a matter of milliseconds, the way water at the fountain always flows in fresh ways. I guess I don’t have to try to rise and shine, because all of creation, including me, is doing it steadily and rather enthusiastically. The blood in my body rises with freshness to all my cells unceasingly, and my lungs let in new air, over and over, like morning lets in the sunshine. As I type these words, pieces of dust are rising in the latest ways beside the windows, and these letters are actually shining on the screen as I tap the keys. Expanding and sparkling always, the universe continues on its way, with me and my late father as lucky, rising-and-shining passengers.

BEING LOWLY WISE

“Be lowly wise.”
--The angel Raphael to Adam, in Paradise Lost


This is sage counsel for a teacher of teenagers. Certainly I need to be a wise teacher for my innocent and occasionally mystified students, but I also need to remember how vast is the sea of ignorance inside me, from which small fish of wisdom spring up only occasionally, and always in short-lived ways. I have some knowledge to share, but I must keep in mind that what I don’t know would fill the oceans of the world.  In terms of insight and discernment, I’m still a child, an infant in an always surprising universe. Perhaps Raphael is telling Adam to be wise in a modest way, to be “smart”, yes, but to also be aware and accepting of his ignorance, because from that “lowly” ignorance can shoot up, now and then, a small but spectacular flash of wisdom.

AN ASTONISHING KIND OF POWER

As I prepare what I hope will be powerful lessons for English class, I often forget that an astonishing kind of power is ceaselessly preparing me to prepare the next step in the lesson. It’s easy to get lost in the assumption that a separate individual called “me” makes things happen in my life, when the fact is that a far vaster force is pushing and pulling all things along. I set down words on the lesson plan page, but the power behind those words is wider than all the seas and more spacious than a thousand skies. Every thought that comes to me comes from far, far away, to find its place, for a few moments, in my life, and then leaves for other lives. I sometimes sense this strange force in my classroom as I carry on my duties among the students. The light-hearted or solemn looks on their faces, the light that seems to shine in their earnest ways of saying things, the thoughts that sometimes spring out of them like spurts of brightness – behind all these I often feel a force at work that makes me wonder why I’m so privileged to be part of it. Sure, I stand in the center of the room and seem to be setting out the steps in the lesson, but somewhere unseen there’s a power that makes it possible for me to stand, for the classroom to stand where it does, for sunlight to look in the windows as my students and I are sent down so many surprising streets of learning.