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.

SHOPPING IN ROOM 2

I spent some time shopping at a sprawling mall this morning, and it reminded me, improbably enough, of teaching in my tiny classroom. My room sprawls about as much as a closet does, but still, there’s a certain sense of spaciousness when the students and I are shopping in a mystifying novel for answers to its questions, or searching for the correct keys to crack open a poem. We go browsing among the mass of possible choices, just as a friend and I cruised through the various stores this morning. My friend and I finally found a few items to purchase – items that seemed to precisely fit our needs – and during English class, my students and I usually discover some useful truths in our daily shopping trips. Of course, all of this shopping, whether at the mall or in class, calls for a lot of leisurely looking and evaluating which leads, sometimes, to just a few special discoveries. After an hour or so of searching and assessing, I purchased just one small item this morning, and some English classes might generate just a few truths for the kids to take with them – but that seems to be the necessary way in mall or classroom shopping.

THE BEAUTIFUL CLASS

Since soccer, the so-called “beautiful game”, often seems endlessly tedious, I’ve decided to call my sometimes tiresome English classes “the beautiful classes”. When I watch a soccer match, I’m often lulled into a lack of expectation by the constant passing and back and forth with little or no noticeable excitement, and the same thing might happen to an observer in English class. She or he might hope something besides step-by-step lessons might happen – something besides kids and teacher talking quietly about a book in a not especially eye-catching classroom. A visitor might make the assumption that this is a fairly lackluster class taught by a fairly tame teacher, just as I might decide, when watching a slowly- progressing soccer match, that there are a thousand more thrilling things to do with my time. Sincere soccer aficionados, however, know that nothing is more beautiful than a carefully-crafted attack by a team that takes its patience seriously, and there’s a similar need for patience in practicing the art of teaching English. An earnest soccer team strives to set up fine-looking passing patterns that might produce a fine-looking goal or two, and in English class, we carry on in a similarly careful, and perhaps monotonous, manner, making comments and asking questions that might appear insignificant to a visitor, but that lead us slowly toward the goal of good learning. It’s an inevitably slow and painstaking process, this matter of making goals and knowledge, and lovers of soccer and teaching take seriously the measured and purposeful aspect of it all. There may be only a single goal in a game, and just a crumb of knowledge in a class, but the beauty of the process is priceless.

JOICING

A teacher came skipping down the hall recently to say she was rejoicing about some superior work her students had done, and for some reason it started me wondering about the “re-“ part of the word, and whether the simple word “joicing” exists, and whether I should sometimes, instead of re-joicing, simply do some joicing about my students’ work. In a literal sense, re-joicing means doing it over and over again, as though it’s become customary and expected, whereas joicing might mean it’s a first -- a fresh release of enthusiasm, a mint-condition kind of praise and appreciation. When you joice over something, perhaps it’s as if you’re cheering in a totally revitalizing way, like a breeze blowing among branches as never before. I’ve frequently felt a surprising sense of newness in my classes, as though something totally new was being born before my eyes, and surely that’s an occasion for joicing – for silently shouting approval in a rosy-cheeked way. Whether it’s a boy bringing his bright insights to a conversation about a story, or a girl giving us the gift of her unprocessed wisdom about a poet’s work, or someone complimenting a classmate for clearing up obscurities of one sort or another, or just a shy student suddenly awakening us with her cautious but impressive thoughts, there’s always a time, now and then, for some earnest joicing. I guess what I mean is, there’s always a time for finding newness and uniqueness in my classroom, and thus a time to joice, and then perhaps re-joice.

CLEANING TABLES AND MINDS

When I’m cleaning the tables in my classroom at the end of the day, I often find myself thinking of the “tables” in my students’ minds, and wondering how often they receive a first-rate cleaning. It’s interesting to pursue the comparison – the tables in my classroom, covered with dust and shavings of erasers and perhaps some scraps of paper, and the tables in my students’ minds, so often messy with strewn, used-up thoughts. I wipe my tables with soft tissues so they take on a shining and unsullied appearance for the students, and maybe the students, similarly, might make use of some mental tissues to take off the shroud of dusty ideas. Of course, it’s impossible to actually make our minds spick and span each day, but figuratively speaking, perhaps we can come into each new day with a feeling of spotlessness and roominess in our minds, a feeling that we’re destined to find spanking new thoughts to set down on the freshly washed tables of our minds. Perhaps the students can prepare their minds the way I prepare the classroom tables, making both minds and tables set to receive the best and newest of a new day.

FINDING COMFORT

In my English classes, I hope my students find value in the poems we read, power in the pages of the novels we study, and smoothness and strength in their own written words, but most of all, I hope they find comfort. I don’t mean comfort of the soft and sentimental kind – the kind that says to students that English class will always be easy and pleasurable – but comfort, rather, of the brave and well-built kind. After all, the word derives from the Latin word meaning “with strength”, suggesting that true comfort comes in the form of an influx of power rather than approval, of confidence rather than commiseration. I want my students to be comfortable in my classroom in the same way they might be comfortable on a mountain trek – because they know they have the power to perform the necessary actions. If I bring comfort to the students, it means I make them understand that they have more might and merit than they ever thought possible. It means I make them feel the forces present inside them, which in turn comforts them with the knowledge of their own power. Being comfortable in English class doesn’t mean the students loosen up and relax and let things happen as they will. On the contrary, it means making sure their real power is presented to their classmates, their teacher, and their world in as poised and positive a manner as possible.

THE CHILDREN OF ROOM 2

      In Room 2 at the small school where I teach,  groups of young children gather together several times each day to experience the intricacies, satisfactions, and sporadic pains connected with the study of English – and one of these children, the teacher,  is 69 years old.  Yes, I have come to realize, as the years have passed, that I am as much a child as my adolescent students, and that all of us are like tots taking our first steps into the world of literature. True, I’ve been reading books for 60-some years, but I still often feel, quite honestly, like a lost little boy in an astonishing forest when I find myself inside a new story or poem. I know all the impressive terms and turns-of-phrase that English teachers use in discussing literature, but those are like so much smoke sent out to simply camouflage the fact that I’m not at all sure what any of this writing really means. Sometimes, like a confused kid, I feel like I want someone’s hand to hold as I read a Dickens novel – someone who can show me which of the thousand trails of meaning I should follow.  I guess teaching English, for me, is a lot about pretending – making believe I know exactly what this book means and what that poem signifies, when in fact I’m as bewildered as a small boy who has wandered beyond his yard.  Luckily, I don’t always pretend. Sometimes the child in me makes a stand for honesty, and I simply say to the students that I have absolutely no clue what Dickens or Shakespeare or Dickinson is saying.  I throw up my hands like a lost boy, and then it is that we children of Room 2 – students and senior-citizen teacher together – set off on a cheerful search for the countless truths always concealed under beautifully-written words.
 

MADE IN SECRET

More and more, life seems to me to be composed of secrets, and never more so than in my work as a teacher. In the classroom, as I steadfastly try to teach the students my carefully planned lessons, I feel the fullness of an entire universe of secrets just below the surface of things. While the students and I share thoughts on the significance of sentences in a Dickens novel, great treasures of undisclosed mysteries are lying all around us. It’s as if we work in a wilderness of puzzles, this small classroom called “Room 2”. In a way, every thought that comes to us is a secret: What does this thought really mean? Where did it come from? Where will it go from here? We pretend that we understand our thoughts – that they are simple and understandable statements – but the truth is that every thought is like a locked room and its little key has been long since lost. We share our ideas in class, but essentially, each one is as secret as a closet with a closed door. I guess what this all leads to is the utter secrecy and silence of all of our lives. Around the seminar table in Room 2 sit many adolescent mysteries and a single senior-citizen puzzle, all prepared to pretend we understand each other. We’re foghorns surrounded by vast shadows and dimness, calling out to the darkness in the hope of receiving signals sent back. If this sounds dismal and cheerless, it doesn’t to me. On the contrary, coming to visit mysteries each day seems like an escapade to me, a rousing mission made just for Mr. Salsich.

POPPIES AND PREPOSITIONS

"Poppies by the Roadside", oil, by Karen Margulis

Yesterday our entire school sat down and made paper poppies to show our appreciation for the indispensable work our veterans do, and it started me speculating, surprisingly enough, about the relative unimportance of prepositions. Over the years, I have spent endless numbers of hours teaching supposedly essential topics like prepositions, but it all seemed inconsequential yesterday as I thought about our servicemen and women waging peace around the world. Yes, I know that knowledge of the ins-and-outs of our language will be beneficial to my students, but, in the bigger picture, it fades in comparison to the crucial life-and-death efforts our veterans are, and always have been, engaged in. While my students and I sit in ease and safety in Room 2, women and men around the globe are giving themselves to the task of taking good care of our freedom. While we discuss whether we need a comma or a semicolon in some sentence, soldiers and sailors far from their homes are helping America remain free. I have always wondered why my small independent school insists on having school on Veterans Day, but perhaps its because we can bring some understanding to the students of just how special the role of veterans is. Perhaps I can remind my students today that the use of prepositions in essays is an utterly frivolous topic when set beside the essential lives and deaths of the veterans we honor.

THE DEAREST FRESHNESS

“Nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

When I’m making my way through a school day that seems stuck in dullness, I sometimes think of this line from Hopkins, and soon I’m starting, once again, to see the freshness in my students’ lives. It’s certainly true that any sense of tediousness in my classes is caused, not by anything in the students, but by my own confused view of them – a view that sees lifelessness where there is actually unspoiled vitality and creativeness. It’s easy to see drabness in the students, as easy as seeing just another sunset in endless shades of light spread across an evening sky. If my inner eyes are closed during class (as, sorry to say, they sometimes are), then I surely won’t notice the everlasting brightness of the students' faces and their spoken words. At this time of year, when nature seems to be settling into sleep as falling leaves leave the trees stripped and empty, it’s important to remember Hopkins’ insistence that “nature is never spent”, and it’s just as important to see this kind of endless freshness in my students’ lives. They may sit before me in class like silent stones, but there’s always a steady expansion of life inside them, a constant widening of the circles of understanding. There’s a “dearest freshness” in Room 2 –always – and it’s my essential task to see it and cherish it.

THE MUSIC OF YOUTHFUL WRITING

As my classroom years have passed, I have grown increasingly interested in showing students the pleasures of making music with their written sentences. For most of my career, I focused, like many writing teachers, on topics like clarity, coherence, and general tidiness, but over the years I have steadily placed increased emphasis on the harmonious characteristics of their words and phrases. It seems clear to me that much of the smartness and magnificence of written words comes from their melodious qualities – their ability to bring to our minds and hearts the kind of whole-hearted peace we are sometimes blessed with when listening to music. Of course, the content of my students’ written words is important, but somehow even run-of-the-mill content can be carried marvelously along if the music of the words is exceptional. This is why I’ve been bringing to the students, now and then, the assorted musical tools available to writers – tools like alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhythm, and internal rhyme. Realizing that assonance – the recurrence of similar internal vowel sounds – can create stylishness in an otherwise lackluster sentence brings some satisfaction to students who otherwise might consider writing to be simply a mystifying and painstaking task. In the same way, using subtle rhymes inside a sentence can show young writers that writing school essays can be a frisky and lively experience instead of a bland and lifeless one. The ideas my young students share in their formal essays are not always stirring, but, if they are set with lightheartedness in reasonably musical phrases and sentences, they can at least be satisfying -- and even sometimes rousing -- to read.

DOING NOTHING IN ENGLISH CLASS

"Meditative Mood", oil, by Robin Cheers

I try to meditate for a few minutes most mornings – just a way of taking a break to do nothing at all but breathe and be grateful for my life – and I sometimes, surprisingly enough, do a kind of meditating in English class. Occasionally, in the midst of the pleasant maelstrom that is teaching teenagers, I simply turn silent and stand still for a moment or two. Thirty or forty seconds might pass while I stand in silence in the classroom, just following my breaths as they bring in and take out air. I’m sure the students are still somewhat bewildered by this behavior, but I think they are slowly becoming comfortable with these occasional moments of meditation by their peculiar, old-world teacher. I can sense their thoughts of surprise and perhaps astonishment as I silently stand among them for my minute or so of refreshing idleness. It’s as if some of the tautness and seriousness in the room is softly escaping, as from an enormous pressurized system called school, and what’s left when I start talking and teaching again is a more supple and easy-going atmsophere, full of the free-wheeling thoughts of a teacher and students who simply wish to understand more of the miraculous world they live in.

RUNNING WITH PATIENCE

"Runner", oil on brown paper, by Robin Weiss

During a day at school, I often feel like I’m racing around with reckless eagerness, scurrying toward various finish lines, but sometimes, fortunately for me, I am able to run my school-day races with a kind of settled and satisfying patience. It might seem strange to think of racing patiently, but it’s begun to make sense to me, especially when I recall a long-distance runner I used to watch when I was an apprentice runner in high school. This fellow seemed to flow around the track as he ran; instead of struggling to run fast, he seemed to simply allow the fast running to spontaneously happen. It was as if he wasn’t working at all when he ran – as if something called “running” was doing the work, and he was just joining in the effortless amusement of it all. Early in a long race, he was often close to last in the field, but gradually, as if with self-assured patience, he always passed the other runners until, at the end, he sashayed across the finish line first, and always with an unflustered smile. When I’m whipping around the classroom in a frenzy to finish this or that lesson, I sometimes think of him and his serene and enduring way of doing great things on the track, and then I usually smile and settle myself down to do this taxing work of teaching with the kind of trustful patience it requires. Teaching teenagers can be like a race, yes, but one that’s best run in soft and graceful ways.

TAKING OFF THE WEIGHTS

TAKING OFF THE WEIGHTS

Every so often, as I prepare for a class, I remind myself to just simply take off the weights. It's strange to me that I so often willingly carry enormous weights around with me when I'm teaching, and it is a definite relief to set them down and see them shrivel away to nothingness. These are not physical weights, but the shapeless, evanescent weights we carry inside us, like remorse and worry and diffidence and fear. If I'm not feeling guilty about not giving my best teaching to the previous class, then I'm concerned about the lack of creativity in this upcoming lesson, or about my lack of ability to steer the lesson to success, or about the blunders I might make as I bumble along. True, there are many times when I take the first steps in an English lesson with a cocky kind confidence, but there are too many instances when I carry the burdensome weights of my own irresolute attitudes. This is why it's such a relief when I remember to lay all those inner weights right down -- to simply set them aside and raise up my thoughts in liberation and sovereignty, to just say I am me and this is the moment and I can make miracles with this class. When I do this before a class -- when I loosen and let go of all the needless burdens -- I sometimes feel as light as the sunlight in my classroom. On those days I teach as easily as a breeze blows along, and the happiness I feel seems to flow from somewhere far beyond my sight.

MY LUCKY LIFE

"For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Spiritual Laws"

After a disquieting day at school, when I feel, for sure, that I have "wrought and suffered" more than a person should, I sometimes consider again this sentence from Emerson, and almost always I start smiling at my breathtaking good fortune. Yes, I suffer through a fair share of disappointments in my days in the classroom, but Emerson thankfully reminds me that a wide world of smoothly-working marvels is always all around me, and that these marvels are a whole lot more like smiles than frowns. When I'm feeling sorry for myself, now and then, for teaching like an utter tenderfoot, the sunlight is sharing its miracles, new winds are renewing the world, and happiness is holding its countless doors wide open and waiting for me. When my teaching seems to be collapsing into pointlessness, the boundless power of life is letting loose its harmonious and beautiful forces, as usual. The life I'm so lucky to be part of is infinitely more immense than my small classroom and its paltry ups and downs. There are stars sweeping the sky that make my tiny troubles trail off in insignificance.

RIDING -- AND READING-- BACKWARDS

I sometimes enjoy riding backwards on the train, seeing the countryside recede in front of me as if I am traveling back past places I passed earlier on the outward bound trip. It reminds me often of the feeling I get when I take my students backwards through a book we just finished. It's as if, at the end, we step off the train of the book for a few days, but then hop back on for the backwards trip to enjoy the journey from a fresh perspective. As we bring ourselves back through the chapters, scenes or sentences we missed might suddenly seem especially significant, or characters who were quiet on the first reading might make their thoughts thoroughly heard on this backward trip through the book. As we retrace the trip, the book, perhaps, unfolds in a fresh manner, making a new experience for us. The book then becomes two books, or three books, depending on how many times we board its train and sit backwards as the story progresses back to its start.

TUNING IN

I got to thinking about the Internet the other day, the way it’s always there, just waiting for us to “tune in” to it, and it reminded me of the mighty power that passes the time in my English classes, patiently waiting for us to tune in to its soft but far-reaching influence. I guess I’m speaking of whatever it is that puts together our thoughts and feelings – whatever it is that makes thinking and feeling such profoundly revamping and replenishing activities. Where do they all come from, the ideas and sentiments that stream through the lives of my students and me as we work through a Shakespeare sonnet or a Jane Austen story? Where does this power have its home – the power that provides my classes with whatever useful lessons might be learned in 8th and 9th grade English? When I muse over these questions, I sometimes do think of the Internet, the way it connects us, with a simple click of a key, to an almost infinite source of ideas – a source that seems strangely similar to that which produces the powerful ideas and feelings that flow among us in my classes. It’s so easy – accessing the widespread wisdom of the Internet, or tuning in to the thoughts of all time and space in my small classroom. For the Web, we simply touch a keypad, and for inspirations in English class, we just swing open the doors of our minds and make room for the millions of thoughts forever waiting there.

REJOICING IN AFFLUENCE

I have always loved the fact that the word “affluence” derives from the description of flowing water, and this year, as usual, I see a lot of this affluence in my classroom. I’m not speaking of dollars and cents, but of ideas that don’t stop flowing from the start of class to the finish. They don’t always flow in the directions I might have planned for them, but they flow nonetheless – effortlessly and relentlessly. My classroom is an absolute sea of ever-flowing streams of thoughts, coming and going and getting started again and again. Occasionally, just to prove this to myself and the kids, I ask them to stop thinking for sixty seconds, and of course it’s an impossible request. Their lives, and mine, are non-stop rivers of ideas that no damn can bring to a standstill, and I rejoice in my good fortune that finds me in the midst of these rivers for six or seven hours each day.

POLISHED CASUALNESS

When a friend and I passed a restaurant yesterday that advertised “polished casualness” as its motif for fine dining, I immediately thought of the kind of writing I expect my students to do. We didn’t eat at the restaurant, but as we passed by, I pictured the pristine but stress-free atmosphere, just the kind of ambiance I hope to see in the students’ essays. I insist on order, precision, and correctness, but I also encourage a little looseness and liberty in their writing, a bit of the casualness that probably comes along with the polish in the restaurant we passed. There’s room in good writing for both tidiness and independence, both adherence to rules and affection for inventiveness. I’d like to see sentences in their essays that are graceful and at the same time somewhat undomesticated. I always hope their writing stands up with stateliness and last-word authority, but also dances with the most casual kind of confidence.

LUCKY WORDS

"So may some gentle muse
With lucky words favor my [teaching]."
-- John Milton, "Lycidas"

I love the idea of "lucky words", and I'm grateful to have been graciously given so many millions of them over the years of my teaching. Lucky means fortunate, but it also means magical and mysterious and felicitous and blessed. It means words that come to me like alerts from a wilderness when I'm teaching, words that work their way into my teaching the way water flows wherever it will. I don't wish my words into existence; they simply show up, one after another forever, flowing into my life and out to my students moment by moment. In a sense, they are all lucky words because they all bring me, in some way or other, the prosperity of this vast life that I, and all of us, are part of. Words work the best of all wonders, shining their lights so my students and I can see which ways to go in our studies. Every so often, I say a silent thanks to these promising signals, these always encouraging words that wander from somewhere into my teaching, time and time again.