OPENING BLIND EYES

         In a way, my task as a teacher is fairly easy: I simply have to help my students – and me – open our eyes. I actually don’t have to teach, instruct, guide, or enlighten – just join with the students in the marvelous enterprise of raising some eyelids so the miracles all around us might be seen.  The strange truth is that my students and I – and most of all of us, I would guess – consistently miss seeing the wonders that are always working their magic in our presence. For some reason, our inner eyes are closed to the unobtrusive blessings that are bestowed on us with the consistency of sunshine on the best summer days. Every one of the thousand of seconds in a school day is an absolute stunner in its freshness and fertility, and yet I’m afraid the boys and girls and I give little attention to this unceasing, everyday splendor, tied up as we are in the workings of our personal hopes and fears.  Every word in a poem is potentially a powerful force, as is every statement a student makes in a discussion, as is even every glance given across the room and all the ways the sunshine lights the windows – and all the students and I need to do is open our eyes and see it.  My task, in a sense, is as easy as raising the shades of windows. Each moment in class, we are called by a world full of wonders, and I simply have to help us answer.     

OLD IDEAS SUDDENLY DANCING

Sometimes, when English class seems as uninteresting and stationary as a stone, I recall a friend telling me about a passage in the Bible where someone strikes a rock and water flows freely out through a wasteland like a stream. I think of this story occasionally, especially when my students are silent like stones and my lesson looks more like a lost trail than a street that leads to wisdom. There are days when daydreaming works more magic in my classroom than any teaching tricks I might use – days when mental darkness drops down upon my students and me, no matter how many meticulous plans I have made. The sunshine might be magnificent outside, but in Room 2 there is sometimes a shadowy kind of world-weariness. That is when I picture the rock being struck and something fresh and gratifying flowing out. I see solidness turning into liveliness, and boredom becoming the bright lights of curiosity and enthusiasm. I see mountains making rivers of lava, and dark days breaking open into sunshine. I dream of old ideas suddenly dancing, and dead words working with heartiness once again. It doesn’t always happen this way in English class – sometimes the tediousness is just too rock-solid – but there are moments when, yes, it seems like someone suddenly opens a rock and a river of thoughts start streaming through the classroom as we all sit stunned and pleased.
 

SOMEWHERE DISTANT BUT CLOSE BESIDE US

After a colleague stopped in to visit one of my classes recently and said, “There’s a lot of intelligence in this room,” I began to wonder exactly where that intelligence exists. The easy answer is that it exists in the brains of the students and me, but that’s like saying the sunshine on my windowsill exists in the windowsill. I guess, like most of us, I pretend to accept the conventional view that thoughts are made by the small series of ashen tissues inside my skull, but I hold in my heart a wonderful and irrefutable fact – that intelligence is far too vast to reside inside any small space, or in any space whatsoever. Intelligence, to me, seems as widespread as the stars above us, as immeasurable as the winds across the earth. Intelligence isn’t just thoughts thrown together by a brain; it’s the unceasing force that fashions all things – thoughts, brains, and the beautiful sky I saw yesterday at sunset. Sometimes, when I’m startled by the ideas my students share in class (which is almost constantly), I feel as though some powerful influence has just passed among us – as if we’re afloat on a stream of understanding. During class I often wonder, “Where did that idea come from?” and the answer that usually comes to me is something like “Somewhere distant but close beside us, somewhere immense but as small as the sounds of our spoken words.”

GRACEFUL LEARNING AND TEACHING

Yesterday, as I was watching some birds break away from a far-off tree and float off, I thought, for some reason, of my young students and me. I saw, in my mind’s eyes, all of us gracefully giving our best to the study of English, working as partners with politeness and poise. Gracefulness, to me, is a gift that all people have been given, but that few of us find and develop in ourselves. We live among the graceful things of this world, from the smooth meanderings of clouds to the unruffled movement of our blood to the flowing traffic of highways, and yet we often feel more strain than gracefulness, more pressure than lightness and ease.  My students and I, even as we sit in my comfortable, homelike classroom, probably carry more concerns with us than joys. Strange, that such a spectacularly supple universe, a place overflowing with elegance, should produce so much apprehension in my students and me. Strange, that we can’t carry on our scholarly classroom duties with a bit more ebullience and a bit less trepidation, seeing as we are lucky enough to be learning and teaching on a planet that’s constantly performing miracles, spinning and shooting along in space at indescribable speeds. Even in my small classroom, there’s gracefulness all around us – in the electricity that passes easily through the wires, in the heat that hums up through the vents with steadiness, in our breathing that brings new air to our bodies with wonderful evenness – so why shouldn’t there be a studious kind of gracefulness in our studies as we pursue the pleasing wisdom that waits for all of us?

A MERE CONVENIENCE

Perhaps I should think of myself as a convenience for my students -- an appliance, perhaps, that assists them in building a passably satisfying academic life for themselves. Just as a laptop computer is seen as a convenience for the traveling executive, making her or him a more effective and efficient manager of the company’s affairs, I might consider myself – and I’m completely serious -- as a sort of utensil for my students to utilize as they pursue their studies. Don’t we surround ourselves with conveniences, and aren’t some of these conveniences of special and necessary importance to us? If I want to read at night, I have lamps suitably ready to glow and give good light for my eyes. If I want a drink of water, I have the convenience of the faucet and its trustworthy flow. Conveniences make it easier for us to do essential tasks, and isn’t that what a teacher does? The students want to learn – need to learn -- and Mr. Salsich is there to make the task easier, more convenient, for them. Similar to a stapler or a pencil sharpener or a laptop, I’m ready to assist the young people as they prepare themselves for their futures. The word “convenience” derives from the Latin word meaning “to come together”, and I guess what I’m doing as an English teacher is helping my students come together in the classroom to discover and prosper, helping their individual talents come together to write and read with wisdom, and helping their faith and confidence in themselves come together so they can simply smile a little more often.

TEACHING WITH STYLE

I hope my classroom – and my teaching – has “style”. When the students enter my room, I’d like them to think, “Wow, this place has some style and taste.” We often think of classrooms as drab and dreary places, but does it have to be that way? Why can’t a classroom for teenage English scholars have some panache, some feeling of youthful and street-smart chic? And why can’t a teacher, even an elderly and furrowed one, have a little style in his bearing and behavior? Why can’t he wear sprightly bow ties and impeccably pressed shirts, as much as to announce, “This teacher has some technique, boys and girls”? Why can’t I show a sort of flamboyant confidence and manner, as if to say to the scholars, “This is the way I live, and it’s the way I read and write, too – with style -- and you can too”?

ON THE GOOD LUCK OF NOT KNOWING

“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive-- it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
-- Anne, in Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

These sentences, which I read recently, remind me of my good fortune in not knowing everything – in actually knowing next to nothing. On a far-spread planet in a measureless universe, I am simply a speck among the swirling comings and goings of boundlessness -- a fragment floating in the currents of a measureless sea. How I came to think – as I sometimes do – that I actually know a lot, and that wisdom is increasing in me day by day, is an utter mystery, since this universe, this astonishing existence which I am part of, is, in the end, as inscrutable as the origins of this present moment. Anne of Green Gables is fascinated by this breathtaking world, as am I, and both of us know that the cause of the finest surprises and the most satisfying learning experiences is the simple fact that we know so very little. We stand on the shores of wisdom, but that wisdom is a sea that actually knows no shores – that doesn’t start and stop but simply lies around us like light, and our good luck is to be able to be led by that light day after day, and to know that the more we know, the more the light will lead us on.

FLIPPED

Yesterday I learned about the value of “flipping”, and today I might try some serious flipping in my own life. At a teacher’s conference, a speaker spoke about flipping homework and schoolwork, so that homework is done at school and the usual schoolwork is done at home – in other words, doing the exact opposite of what we’ve been accustomed to doing -- and what he said woke up something in me. I began wondering whether whole groups of routines in my life could be profitably flipped – whether parts of my life might look less colorless and a lot livelier if flipped upside down. Like most of us, I love the customs I’ve created over the years – the day-after-day rituals that give a sense of rightness to my life – but what would happen if I turned them, at least now and then, upside down? What would happen if I occasionally sat at a desk in my classroom and my students stood before me as my guides and counselors? What would happen if, for a day, my car rested at home and I had a day of walking? What would happen if, instead of being asleep by nine, I sat up late outside and saw stars spread out above us all? Years ago, if someone was acting crazy, friends might have said he had “flipped”, but could that kind of craziness be something to seek after? Could a tipped-over life be a life of freshness and newfound fullness?

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?