COOL BALANCE

The concept of “poise” is of principal importance in my teaching. To be poised is, literally, to carry oneself in a state of flawless balance, and that’s precisely what I ask of my students. Whether they’re writing or speaking, I expect them to be so well balanced that their thoughts are communicated in a controlled and composed manner. Their feelings, thoughts, and words should be in the kind of equilibrium that allows them to express themselves articulately and convincingly. This also suggests that they must gradually free themselves from affectation and embarrassment. If the students’ store of English skills steadily becomes more soundly balanced, they will progressively feel more poised, and if more poised, then more confident, equipped, geared up, and eager. There will be no need to put on airs, and certainly no need to feel embarrassed. They will read, write, and speak with coolness and courage. The result of all this for my students is that they will be able to “carry” themselves with a greater sense of dignity. Their demeanor will gradually grow calmer and more distinguished. People will remark on their self-assurance, their buoyant deportment, their overall appearance of distinction. They’ll be cooly balanced on the brink of a bright future, partly because their English teacher demanded, above all, that they be poised.

RULES IN THE HEART

Recently someone told me they had learned a poem “by heart”, and it started me thinking about what I have learned by heart about teaching – or rather, what truths and rules have resided in my heart right from the start.  These are truths that no one had to help me learn, rules that were born in me when I was born. I struggle to be the best teacher I can be, but there’s no struggle involved in following the laws that live inside me, and inside my students. They are as much a part of me as daylight is part of dawn. One of these rules is that this present moment – this 9:42 or 1:17 in the classroom with my students – is the only moment that has any power. All things in our future follow from this moment, and are made by it. The words I speak to my students at any specific moment today are tied up with all my past and future words, and all the words the world has spoken since it started – and my small words have all the universe’s forces unfolding within them.  These words – and this is another rule that resides forever in my heart – are always made from thoughts, and these thoughts make up the only real authority in my classroom. My students and I come from thoughts, we are transformed, moment by moment, by thoughts, and we follow our thoughts like the leaders they are.  An idea at 10:33 in Marion’s mind makes her what she is, and a new thought at 10:34 refreshes and reforms her into something new. This is the way it has to be. It’s a law that lives in our blood and bones. The present moment – its words and thoughts -- is the only real moment, and it makes my classroom, and everywhere, a place of  non-stop, hard-working wonders.

PONDERING AND WEIGHING

It often occurs to me that teaching and learning have much to do with “pondering”. The word derives from an old Latin word that meant “weighing”, and there’s no doubt that my students and I spend a good deal of time weighing ideas. We’re thinking about academic topics throughout the day, and we often do it as if we are holding ideas in our hands to estimate how much they weigh. When I see a student bowed over a book or a writing project, I often picture a scientific balance scale. The pensive student is placing a thought in one of the pans of the scale, then placing other thoughts in the opposite pan, and then checking the relative heaviness. It’s a precise, particular business, this process called pondering, and – like weighing liquids in a laboratory – it requires the utmost attentiveness. Careless thinking, like careless weighing, always leads to imprecise results. One thought might be just a milligram heavier than another, but that could be the difference between a life-changing idea and a dud. I guess my classroom should be, in a sense, like a meticulously-run laboratory. If my students and I are going to be weighing ideas all day long, there needs to be an atmosphere of exactness and precision in the room. We need to keep in mind that we’re absorbed in extremely sensitive scientific work – that of considering and appraising ideas. Perhaps we should put on our lab coats and shielding glasses when we enter my classroom to begin another session of pondering.

JUST FOR FUN

Is this a school,
or is it some stones and boards
the universe brought
to this special place?
Is this a room,
or were the walls and windows
set up by the sun
so it can shine in?
Is this a chair,
or is it  a seat for the air
to sit on when no one's here?
Are these my hands,
or are they the helpers
of the whole world?
Are these my words,
or are they thoughts
the cosmos created
on this computer screen
just for fun?

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

     When I'm in the midst of teaching a class, a strange question sometimes occurs to me: how in the world did we all get here? I mean, how did the universe happen to set my students and me down here in this single classroom on this precise day at this specific hour? Countless things are occurring at this moment around the world, and one of them is me attempting to teach these kids right here, right now. Why? How did this come to happen? How did the stars and seas and cells and all the transforming forces of life link up over the long centuries to finally produce me and these students sharing this small room for these 48 minutes? It's a mystery that sometimes amazes me to the point where I stand still with wonder and even reverence. It’s astounding, really, that somehow, after eons of spinning and whirling and rolling along, the cosmos came up with Mr. Salsich and some teenagers trying to learn from each other in Room 2 in a small school on a commonplace country road. I sometimes look around at my students and the classroom and the shifting sunlight outside with surprise and incomprehension. It’s like I just woke up and here I am, pressed shirt and bright bow tie and a somewhat stunned look, listening to students share thoughts as fresh as this whole unfolding day.

HER BIRTHDAY

It was a day when stars 
sat in special positions
above them, 
and pieces of sunshine 
were seen to be resting 
on their shoulders,
and all their thoughts 
were warm flames 
for their lives. 
It was a day 
when doing anything 
seemed like something supernatural, 
when even sitting beside her
became a mystery 
and a miracle.   

EPOCHS IN ROOM 2

“Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.”

     --- George Eliot, Middlemarch

     If an epochis “a period of time in history or a person's life, typically one marked by notable events or particular characteristics”, as one dictionary defines it, then almost every day in the classroom marks an epoch for me. The Victorian Era was an epoch, but so, for me, was last Wednesday, when some new techniques for teaching took me toward an entirely fresh understanding of my students, and so was last Monday, when I made some unexpected discoveries about doing drill work on literary terminology. On both days, I felt like I had looked into a whole new world of English teaching – like I had turned a corner and there, suddenly, were totally new thoughts about teaching. This happens regularly to me – still, at the seasoned age of 70, after more than four daring decades in the classroom. As I look back on the years, I see, like the historian, so many epochs and eras and periods and special dates, so many periods of time when teaching was more like discovering new lands than implementing a lesson plan, more like a non-stop series of surprising adventures than a day-to-day job. There were epochs when the kids came to class carrying ideas in their heads that helped me look at old books in bright and renewed ways, and there were periods of time – sometimes weeks on end – when my work was a daily escapade of insight and revelation. I was an explorer in Room 2, not a teacher. I was a traveler through epochs of learning and living, looking at the world with constantly restored eyes with the help of hundreds of whole-hearted teenage travellers.