A WALK ON THE MILLBURY TRAIL

Yesterday, I drove up to Millbury for a walk on a beautiful trail that winds through the woods in the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor. Little Josh, Luke, and I rambled along in a peaceful, happy way, watching the many walkers and bike-riders (and a few skaters) pass by.
Check out the short video.

ANOTHER CAUSE FOR HUMILITY

         Today I misinterpreted something I saw, a mistake that happens to me way too often in my classroom. I was driving on the highway in the bright sunshine, when I saw, far ahead, what looked like cars coming straight for me. For a few seconds I was concerned, but I quickly saw that the sun was simply glancing off the backs of cars, making the light look like headlights heading my way. In reality, the stream of cars was proceeding precisely as it should. I wondered, as I continued driving, how often I have totally misconstrued events in the classroom. When I thought a boy seemed bored with the book we were discussing, was interest and enthusiasm, in fact, slowly spreading inside him? When I thought I had been a fairly effective teacher in a class, were the kids, in fact, riding miles away on daydreams?  As I’ve known in my heart for years, and re-learned today, I very often have no accurate idea what’s happening right in front of my eyes. It’s another cause for humility. All I can do is look again, and then again, and hope the truth will somehow slip past my hasty and flawed judgments.

TRAFFIC AND TEACHING

      

         For my morning workout today, I walked the hilly streets near my house, and the relentless rush-hour traffic reminded me of the mayhem I sometimes make for myself in my work as an English teacher.  The cars were rushing past me in a noisy hubbub, as if each driver was desperate to reach some special destination, and I occasionally see some of that desperation in my teaching. The cars were speeding up and down the hill the way I tear through topics in a lesson plan every now and then, as though just touching a topic is the same as teaching it. Like breakneck driving, that kind of hasty teaching makes no sense to me. This morning I felt for the drivers as they dashed who knows where, because I know what it’s like to get awestruck by speed: how fast can I do this lesson, how many stories can we read this semester, how many literary terms can we look at today, how many pages of this novel can I read tonight? Thankfully, I’m usually a reasonably undisturbed teacher, preferring purposefulness to haste and hurry, so the speediness trap doesn’t catch me too often. Unlike the cars this morning, I’d rather linger and hang back with my students. Reading and writing, after all, are chores of thoughtfulness and attention, not speed and tumult.

Yesterday spring came a little early. It was like the forward guard of the season, the initial advance, the pilot showing the way for the warm, upcoming days. I sat in the park for awhile, next to this self-assertive tree, while many families enjoyed the park in this trial-run of spring.

I spent this morning up in the Brooklyn (CT) area, enjoying the warm weather with Ava and Noah. The best fun was at a playground near Jaimie's house, where the kids ran and jumped and swung and laughed. Later, back home, I sat in the park for awhile, reading George Eliot and feeling very fortunate to be alive.

LISTEN AWHILE

“These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum 

Of mighty workings? —————
Listen awhile, ye [teacher], and be dumb.”

-- John Keats (in a sonnet addressed to his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon)


      I took the liberty of replacing “nations” with “teacher” in the above lines, because as a teacher of teenagers, I do have to learn to “listen awhile”, and perhaps “be dumb”, meaning silent and fascinated, a little more often. I think of my students when I read the first line – “these” meaning the feisty, foolhardy, wise, and cunning kids I am fortunate to spend some time with each day. They may frustrate me with their stretches of impassive silence and bewildering craziness, but I have no doubt that, as the years pass, they will indeed “give the world another heart.” I may be in charge of my students now, but in the future, it is they who will provide the “pulses” for the life of humankind. I need to simply shut up more often during class and listen for the early “hum” of those pulses. It’s sadly true that I get so busy with my ten-thousand school day tasks and responsibilities that I miss many chances to catch the interesting buzzings of my students’ thoughts. There are “mighty workings” going on in the minds of each of my students (to doubt that would be the height of either smugness or blindness), and I need to stand back and stay silent more often, listening respectfully to the youth of our world. “They’re just kids”, someone may say, and I would say, “Yes, and a sunrise is just a sunrise.” A new day dawns for humanity tomorrow and ten years from now, and these restless and perceptive kids in my classroom will help lift whatever kind of sun rises.

WANTED: DISPOSABLE DIAPERS FOR ENGLISH CLASS

After a hard day’s labor in the classroom, I sometimes wonder how long it will take for my carefully planned lessons to utterly vanish from my students’ minds. Will some of them disappear from their lives as fast as short-lived spring breezes? Will some last only as long as the shapes of clouds, which fade away almost as fast as they form? Or, if I’m lucky, will some lessons be as enduring as banana peels, which experts tell us take up to five weeks to decompose? It’s an honest question to ask when you’re teaching teenagers, whose lives transform as swiftly as weather patterns. I spend many hours each week painstakingly preparing what I believe are significant lesson plans, but, in my more skeptical moments, I think I may as well be preparing significant bubbles to blow into the breeze. As Emily Dickinson would know, my students’ brains are “wider than the sky”, providing plenty of room for my diminutive lesson plans to drift away in the distance, pop, and pass away. However, there may be hope. Scanning the Internet this morning, I came upon the fact that disposable diapers take upwards of 500 years to decompose. If diapers can withstand the years, why not lessons on symbolism and semicolons? Perhaps, without my realizing it, the lessons I share with my students each day settle inside them like diapers at the dump, silently persisting, refusing to go away. Perhaps years from, even generations from now, the remnants of a lesson on using participles may give off steam enough to set some future life in a fresh direction.

TRUSTING TOTS AND TEENS

“Those who trust us educate us.”

         -- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         I imagine teenage students are somewhat stunned whenever they come upon a teacher who actually trusts them. In their shaky relations with teachers (and all adults), real trust is probably seldom offered to them by their skeptical caretakers. Adolescent students are probably more often thought of as prospective offenders than promising scholars, which is why many of us teachers tie them securely to rules and regulations rather than releasing them to their innate sense of responsibility and correctness. We don’t trust the students because we fear what might come to pass if we did.  I’m no different than most, being usually a little leery of adolescent craziness blossoming in the classroom when my back is turned. However, I’m slowly learning to care for my students the way I cared for my four children when they were learning to walk – by trusting that they can and will do what’s required of them. When they were ready to unsteadily try their first steps, I had to trust that they could and would do it. I had to stand aside and consent to their right to be their own little best selves or fail gallantly in the attempt. There were many failures, of course, just as there are occasional failures when I trust my students. They sometimes collapse into youthful madness and disregard, for which they receive just consequences, and from which they learn of the sting that comes from mistreating a teacher’s trust. Like my children, however, the students continue to receive my trust, for how else can they continue striding – or staggering – toward trustworthy adulthood?

DANIEL DERONDA and THE FAERIE QUEENE

Ah, I'm a lucky reader these days, alternating between the harmonies and descriptions of Spenser and the profound philosophical sentences of George Eliot. I do believe that The Fairie Queene is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read, bar none, and I find myself highlighting a sentence or two on each page of Eliot's novel. The story is deepening, growing more intense and revelatory. Gwendolyn is entirely ashamed of what she's done with her life, and it seems like Deronda may become her "teacher" and show her a new way to live.

A MEAGER LITTLE MIND

 “Will was his guide … “

         -- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

         Like Spenser’s Red Cross Knight, who gets into trouble when he lets his will guide him, it’s obvious to me that using my headstrong, badly informed will as a teaching guide has usually led me down dead-end, and sometimes ruinous, streets.  I’ve often been on my high horse as a teacher, galloping wherever my stubborn resolve sends me, usually ignoring any greater wisdom than my own undersized knowledge of how things should be. More often than not, I let the reins on my will go slack and it careers wherever it wishes through lessons and curriculums. You might ask what else there is for a teacher to follow than his own personal will- power and determination, his own good thinking, and I would answer by quoting a sign often seen at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings: My best thinking got me here.  To be honest, I’ve learned from experience that my best personal thinking is about as impressive as a small pile of soil beside the mountains of the West.  All the scrapes and troubles of my life have been caused by following the leadership of my finest thoughts. They’ve led me with bold words and bright signals, and usually I’ve ended up in a morass that seemed strangely similar to where I started. So no, I don’t trust my own thinking or my own supposedly sensible free will, and yes, there is a better way. There’s an extensive and good-natured spirit of wisdom always around us, and I’ve been trying to stay open to it, instead of to my closed-off and insufficient personal thoughts. Clouds follow the weather patterns wherever they lead, and I guess I’m trying to follow the movements of a larger wisdom instead of my fairly meager little mind.

READING, WRITING, WAVING

         It occurred to me this afternoon that waving is what my students and I should be doing more of in English class. I was sitting in a friend’s house, watching some tall trees waving in the wind, and I was impressed with how stress-free they seemed as they swayed and slanted this way and that.  They were waving the way waves in the ocean do – with total spontaneity and ease. Of course, sometimes, as the wind strayed away, they came to rest for a few moments, and their rest also seemed simple and trouble-free. Watching from the window, I realized that my students and I could learn a lesson from these compliant trees. We are all faced with the inconstant winds of responsibilities, assignments, schedules, successes, and disillusionments, and our best approach is to adjust ourselves to their quirks and foibles. We need to bend and bow, not diffidently but daringly, like the trees that lean almost, but not quite, to cracking.  When we’re reading, we must flow with the waving of the words, getting lost sometimes in the movements of phrases and paragraphs. When we’re writing, our thoughts blow strong and soft, blustery and easygoing, and our best bet is to tag along behind, doing what they do, writing the words they say.  It’s interesting, too, to think of another meaning for “wave” – that motion of our arms and hands that signals hello or goodbye. Sometimes I wave to my students as they leave the classroom, a small gesture to show, perhaps, that I like to live like trees do. My arm waves back and forth like life moves in waves all day long, in English class and out.

SEIZURES IN ROOM 2

         Here’s one of the best compliments my students could offer me: “That was a surprising class, Mr. Salsich.” Surprises have always had magical power for me, the way they can suddenly blow apart a lackluster moment into something stunning. I’ll be floating along the supposedly tedious river of my life when, out of the blue, a surprise alters everything. It might be true for most of us: surprises (at least the good ones) can transform dullness into delight. Since my English class constantly leans dangerously close to dreariness, I’m always hopeful that surprises will occasionally seize the young students. Interestingly, the word “surprise” derives from the Latin word for “seize”, as in “The enemy forces surprised (i.e., seized) the castle.” I like to picture my students sitting impassively in Room 2 when, with great suddenness, a line in a poem or a phrase in a story takes unexpected hold of them. I picture them looking at me in stunned surprise, as if to say, “Help, Mr. Salsich! Something has seized me!” Certainly I would rush to their aid (in my best senior citizen manner) if a human intruder tried to get hold of them, but a literary prowler is more than welcome - -the kind that pounces on and  reshuffles minds and hearts.  

March 14, 2010

         Yesterday, late in the afternoon, I realized with a shock that I had spent almost the entire day thinking about myself. Whether it was worrying about my health, wondering what I was going to have for lunch, planning my afternoon, or scolding myself for past mistakes, it was all about little, isolated, fearful me. It was an appalling thing to realize, because it made me see clearly, once again, how much I miss in a given day. While I was fretting over my supposed isolation and vulnerability, the grand universe was performing its astonishing tricks, as usual. Stars and planets were rolling right along, winds were free and full of life as usual, and life in all its immensity and grandeur was giving its gifts to all of us – and I was fussing about dozens of harmless and inconsequential matters.

"Rain", oil on board, by Rene PleinAir

March 14, 2010

         Yesterday, the first of my spring vacation, was a rainy and roaring one. All day the rain sped across the town, blown by strong spring winds. I sat inside with candles burning, watching the weather do its March tricks and reading comfortably in my pleasant apartment. In the evening I drove the rainy streets to have dinner with good friends in the brightness and friendliness of their home.

SILENT SPEAKING

         As a teacher, I have to remember that speech doesn’t always have to be spoken. There are times during class when, though my students are silent and seemingly impassive, the expression on their faces speaks a clear message of quiet interest. It’s like sunlight shining behind a motionless screen of trees: you know it’s there, silent but staying strong in the background. At times, a visitor might think my students are thoroughly uninterested  (and at times they definitely are), but I can sometimes almost hear the concealed voice of curiosity in their soundless faces. Many teenage students, when they’re in class, are like trees on windless days. The limbs and leaves move only slightly and almost indiscernibly, and the students’ voices are hushed, as if both trees and kids are sleeping – but all the while immeasurable forces are flowing underneath. Sometimes I walk among the taciturn scholars like I’m strolling in the park. I enjoy the company of quiet, beautiful trees and wise, silent children – and I listen for what both of them are saying.

QUIETISM IN ROOM 2

         I am not a Christian or a church-going person of any type, but I might still be called a “quietist”, at least in my teaching. “Quietism” was a 17^th century Christian movement that encouraged the abandonment of personal will and the quiet acceptance of the way things are, which fairly accurately describes my approach to teaching. As my 40+ years in the classroom have passed, my individual will has continued to slip more and more to the wayside, leaving mostly just an inquisitive interest in what’s going to happen next. I guess I’ve slowly come to realize that, even after all these years, my pocket-sized personal wisdom tells me very little about the real truths of teaching. I’ve learned, too, that there’s another kind of wisdom, an immense kind, that knows everything about teaching, and that I may as well put my little “self” aside and let that wisdom do its good work.  I’m not talking here about “God” or some mysterious supernatural power – just about opening myself up to the wisdom that awaits people who, like the Quietists, finally get their private egos, or wills, out of the way. The education of a human being is a bizarre and bottomless task, and to pretend that I can manipulate it with my own fierce but measly will is the height of craziness. To resist any pedagogical methods except those that I personally like, and to accept only results that I privately sketch out, is mind-boggling foolishness. Instead, these days I quietly listen for understanding as I work through the daily lessons. I try to be more accepting of the countless educational miracles that happen in my classes, most of which I didn’t (and couldn’t possibly) plan for. I hope to gradually understand that being humbly attentive to what’s actually happening is sometimes better than being confidently single-minded about what I want to happen.   

TEACHING BY WAFTING

“… [as] unobtrusive as the wafted odor of roses.”

            -- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I’m against pushing of almost any kind, including the kind I used to do as a teacher. In the early years of my career, I was very much into pushing kids into becoming successful English students. I guess I pictured myself as something like a heavy equipment operator, my job being to figuratively move, shove, pull, thrust, and impel my students to achieve the goals of the syllabus. I was a “pusher” of the first order. Everything I did in the classroom resembled snowplowing more than genuine teaching. A teacher who constantly pushes his students (as I did) is an obtrusive teacher – one who  encroaches upon the students instead of earnestly and unpretentiously teaching them.  I was an insolent, bad-mannered teacher, in the sense that I didn’t much care what the kids were feeling or thinking; I had a syllabus to teach, and everything else be damned.  I was an intruder^nd year of teaching, I guess I try to teach by wafting rather than pushing. I think more good things happen in the universe by rather than a teacher. Luckily, it’s different nowadays. I was struck this morning by the passage from Eliot above, because now, in my 42drifting, floating, gliding, or hovering, than by goading and ramming – and so I try to teach like the universe acts. The lessons I want to teach will have a far greater effect if they sort of inconspicuously float into the students’ lives instead of battering and pummeling them. I’d like them to come to understand a poem the way they might slowly but surely come to take pleasure in the ambiance of a forest, almost without knowing they’re doing it. I’d like the teacher in Room 2 to be as unobtrusive as a breeze that, while it goes largely unnoticed, unassumingly does exactly what it’s designed to do.           

MEETING

     Having just come from a faculty meeting, I’m now sitting in my empty classroom thinking about the whole idea of meetings. When I “meet” people, or with people, I come into their presence – and the word “presence” seems significant there.  Truly being in the presence of a group of people means being totally there with them -- in their company, in their circle or set. You might say I “belong” with them. The word “presence” derives from the Latin word for “being”, which suggests that if I wish to be truly present with a group, I should actually be there with them – body, mind, and heart – not miles away on the flights of daydream and reverie. Instead of going over innumerable mental tasks in my head during a meeting – to-do’s, wants, regrets, shoulda’s, woulda’s, coulda’s -- I should actually be present ­ at the meeting – totally, ardently, actively.  Unfortunately, I was far from present at today’s faculty meeting. I might as well have been on a mountain peak in Peru. My body was there in its pink shirt and blue bow tie, but my mind and heart were drifting around the universe somewhere. I wasted my time and slighted my colleagues. It makes me wonder how often I’ve met with students in class but actually been far-gone on desires and dreams. Maybe somebody should get their money back.

STAYING

         As the weeks of a school year pass, there are many classroom situations both my students and I would like to escape from, including ramshackle lesson plans, stifling air, and – more often than I like to admit – overpowering weariness. Occasionally in Room 2, we’re faced with conditions which seem to call for instant flight -- times when we’d all like to be anywhere but my classroom. Strangely enough, however, it’s times like those when my students and I, if we’re watchful, can catch sight of an important purpose of education - – learning how to stay instead of run.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, for running away from difficult conditions is a widespread custom among humans, but in my small classroom in the country, perhaps I can offer some encouragement to my students – and myself – to stand and fight rather than run and hide. There are many situations in class that my students might surely call insufferable – going over grammar guidelines for the zillionth time, listening to Mr. Salsich explain yet again how to write a good closing paragraph, examining the crowded infrastructure of a James Joyce short story. If I can demonstrate a quiet endurance and open-mindedness when classroom conditions seem oppressive to me, perhaps my students will be able to learn something about calmly “staying” when things seem tiresome and everlasting to them. Staying is a vital skill for an English student and teacher – staying with a sentence you're writing until it’s transparent and graceful, staying with a page in a novel until nothing’s left but the wisdom of it, staying with a lesson plan until it rises above all the others you’ve ever made. It takes serenity and persistence, two of the major qualities of a flourishing adult, but this staying ability can be learned and loved, including during English class.

DANIEL DERONDA, THE LADY OF THE LAKE

The story has turned sad again, with Gwendolyn falling into despair because of her family's financial troubles. At this point, she is acting like a spoiled brat. I find nothing in her character to admire, but I'm hoping that will change.

I'm also reading Sir Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake", a dreamy but musical narrative poem from the hills of Scotland. 

AN ODD MIXTURE

“Her thoughts generally were the oddest mixture of clear-eyed acumen and blind dreams.”

         -- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

         As a teacher, I hope my thoughts can be like Maggie Tulliver’s in Eliot’s novel – a mishmash of realism and reverie. Certainly I must stay focused on the everyday necessities of English teaching, but I never want to abandon my gift for far-flung daydreaming and air-castle-building. Teaching, especially English teaching, must be founded on both practicality and pipe-dreaming, both a willingness to do the necessary step-by-step plodding and a keenness for jumping off the edge into deep water. It’s my responsibility to teach the proper procedures for punctuating a sentence, but it’s also my responsibility to dream up daring lessons and  heroic assignments now and then.  I often wonder if some veteran English teachers find their days drifting into tedium as the years pass – and if they do, I can recommend Maggie’s way of thinking.  We need to have at least as many “blind dreams” as orderly lesson plans if we are to keep our teaching infused with airiness and sparkle. When planning a lesson, perhaps we should occasionally stretch out in the grass after dinner and give the stars the duty of deciding how we proceed – or perhaps our 10-year-old child could choose precisely what 9^th graders would love to learn about the poems of Emily Dickinson. Good teaching requires discipline and doggedness, but it also requires a willingness to take wing now and then and shout to your students to follow.   

TALK AND TALKERS

“Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress;” while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer … and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth.”

--Robert Louis Stevenson, “Talk and Talkers”

It’s too bad a Pulitzer Prize isn’t given for talking, because there’s something artistic and arresting about talking at its best. On most days in English class I see this phenomenon – the full and flowing creation of spoken words. The students and I talk from the moment we enter class – words leading to other words, words pushing each other into sentences, words roving out to the frontiers for fresh ideas.  As Stevenson suggests, there’s nothing stagnant or lackluster in spirited talk. When sincere students and their teacher start sharing thoughts, who knows where the words will run or what new borders they’ll cross. It’s a good kind of creation. Thousands of words are spoken in every English class, most of them filled full with the power of invention, most of them free and ready for fun. Of course, there’s also a kind of talk that’s artificial and fairly useless – merely the motoring of idle minds. Hopefully, that kind of chatter doesn’t happen often in my classes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want whimsy and far-out flights of fancy in our discussions. Talkers, by nature, are inventors, and inventors need the liberty to let loose.

STARTING FIRES

“He was early impassioned by ideas, and burned his fire on those heights.”

-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

When I’m teaching a class, it sometimes suddenly comes to me that I’m doing mickey mouse stuff – striking small matches for the students when I should be setting serious fires. So often, my lessons seem to be about the little details of English teaching – comma rules, participles, point of view, setting, etc. I regularly find myself slogging with a class through the relative dreariness of literary terminology and grammar guidelines, as the students slowly slip to the wayside in drowsiness. I always have the best intentions when I’m planning my curriculum, but as the weeks pass, the comparative unimportance of many of my lessons becomes uncomfortably clear.   Ideas are what English class should be mostly focused on, not niceties like the ins and outs of punctuation rules.  My students and I read stories and poems packed with inspiration, and that’s the fire I should be fanning. Certainly the technical aspects of English can’t be ignored, but most of my teaching should be done on “those heights” where sizeable ideas can be set aflame.

DANIEL DERONDA

Things have really picked up in the last few chapters. I whole new thread of plot has entered the story, involving Daniel Deronda himself, a compassionate nephew of Sir Hugo Mallinger (and thus a cousin of Mallinger Grandcourt). Deronda rescues a young Jewish girl from drowning herself, and takes her for shelter to the home of his best friend's family. Deronda appears to be a wise, sensitive, and loving young man, and I'm suddenly very interested in how his role will play out with the rich, refined, and rather "boring" people of the first part of the book, especially Gwendolyn Harleth.

NOURISHMENT, NOT NAUSEA

   

“Her vomit full of bookes and papers was.”

--Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 1

Going back through a bit of Spenser this morning, I came upon these lines and, oddly enough, they brought to mind the tens of millions of students who have taken English courses in high school and college. Surely many of them enjoyed the “bookes and papers” they were required to read and write, but just as surely many of them felt, upon finally graduating, that they’d like to gag and throw up and leave it all behind. Why, I wonder, do so many English departments cram students to the point of choking with literary works and writing assignments – and what is their motivation? Do they think that shoving novels at students at the rate of 50 or more pages per night will actually benefit them? Do they actually believe that making students slog out stacks of “literary essays” every semester will produce people who enjoy writing? Why do we compel our students to run a high-speed, frenzied marathon of reading and writing in English class? Thoreau said that a great book should be read about as slowly as the author wrote it, but many English departments, as far as I can tell, have reversed his wise advice. Many of us seem more interested in rapid reading and speedy writing than in the kind of measured and carefully considered efforts that bring out the best in books and in students’ writing.  If Thoreau were sitting in an English class today, he might still be savoring the first few scenes of Hamlet when the teacher announces that 50 pages of Jane Eyre is due tomorrow.  As the years have passed, I have tried, with modest success, to work against this crazed devotion to haste. In my classes, we read as few books as possible as slowly as possible. I’m more interested in how carefully the students read than in how much they read. When I assign pages, I assume the students will read every sentence, every word, with total attentiveness, and that they will examine and re-examine the more bountiful sentences (of which there are many in any significant literary work).  Does this mean I am failing to prepare the students for the sometimes hysterical pace of higher-level classes? No doubt – but I console myself by remembering that I am preparing them for higher-level devotion to deep reading and insightful writing – the kind of reading and writing that fosters nourishment rather than nausea.

ENGLISH CLASS TRAVELERS

         I often feel like a traveler as I make my way through the English curriculum, and yesterday, leafing through the dictionary, I discovered that the word “travel” derives from “travail”, which originally grew out of the Latin word “trepalium”, meaning “an instrument of torture”.  Strange, that traveling originally meant suffering – that getting from one place to another was initially connected with trouble and tribulation. But perhaps it’s not so strange, at least when it comes to English class, where my students sometimes stagger under the weight of cumbersome novels and solemn essay assignments. Quite often, my course is plain hard work – not torture, exactly, but seriously irksome labor. When we work our way through a poem together, I sometimes picture my students as trekkers trying out new trails on the sides of a mountain, huffing and puffing and praying for it all to end. I’m sure my class sometimes feels like torture to the students, but, oddly enough, there’s a good side to that word, too. When a guy says he’s gone through torture because of his love for a woman, the torture is perhaps of a sweet kind, like sailing successfully through a storm or ascending the far peaks of the Rockies. Some torture is worth it. Reading King Lear is not exactly a kick-up-your-heels kind of thing, but the rewards are generous, as I hope they are in English class as we travel the often nameless trails.

LIVELY GRACE

“Gwendolen did not greatly distinguish herself in
these first experiments, unless it were by the lively grace with which she took her comparative failure.”
-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

At the end of each day, I hope I can award myself an ‘A+’ for my failures. Like most mere mortals, I fail many times each day, and I hope I can do it each time with “lively grace”, as Eliot puts it. It’s easy to be nimble and bubbly when life is falling into its textbook places, but I want to be good company even when much of a school day seems lost in disappointment. When I read this passage today, I immediately pictured a dancer moving across the floor with “lively grace”, and I wondered if it’s possible for a person who has badly failed to behave in a similarly balanced and beautiful way. If a visitor came to my classroom just after a lesson plan had broken down, I would hope they would see a teacher who seemed poised and brave. I would want them to see a teacher who knew that his failure could foster fresh insights and new occasions for success, and who thus seemed relaxed and ready for triumphs.

DANIEL DERONDA

I've been enjoying this novel for a week or so, pondering the many poetic passages, highlighting them as I read. So far, the plot is not particularly engaging -- just the story of a proud young woman, Gwendolyn Harleth, trying to decide among many suitors. But Eliot's utterly graceful writing is captivating, so the plot seems secondary to me, at least at this point. Gwendolyn has decided, it seems, to accept Mallinger Grandcourt's marriage proposal, but Grandcourt's butler, Lush, seems to have other ideas. He has just greeted a woman and her two young children at the station, and he appears to think her arrival will mean the wedding will never happen. 

Of course, I'm still wondering when Deronda will come back into the book, having disappeared for the last 150 pages.

ALL-OVER-THE-PLACE THINKING

 “Klesmer's thoughts had flown off on the wings of his own
statement, as their habit was.”

-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         Don’t thoughts often do this – winging away as soon as we’ve put them into words, soaring off to far-flung worlds of new thoughts? And isn’t this one of the best things about thoughts – their restlessness, their ability to travel to mental places we never knew existed?  I’m lucky to see and experience this phenomenon everyday in English class. My students and I give voice to innumerable thoughts each day, and all those thoughts, I’m sure, take wing as soon as the words leave our lips. They flutter off to who knows where, with us following in our whimsical ways. In this manner, we let our thoughts lead to other thoughts, which make new words for us to speak, which set more thoughts soaring off in search of more new thoughts to make more new spoken words. It’s a high-ceilinged, haphazard, freestyle sort of experience, this thinking in English class – somewhat like spring breezes starting countless other breezes blowing. Growing up, I was often advised to discipline my thinking, to tighten the reins on my thoughts, and no doubt there’s a place in school for that kind of regimented thinking – but there’s also a place for liberated, all-over-the-place thinking. Especially in English class, adventurous thoughts shouldn’t have to stay in birdcages.

NEW LIGHTS

 

“It was literally a new light for them to see him in.”

--George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         I was struck by the above sentence this morning, because it reminded me of the kind of teacher I hope to one day become. I hope I can grow to consistently see the new lights that shine on (and in) my students each day – lights that enable me to be grateful for them in new ways. The lackluster overhead lights in my classroom shed the same featureless light down on all of us, so it’s important that I notice the other kinds of “lights” that illuminate my students. It’s important that I see each of them as surrounded by their own distinctive light, one that shifts and varies and shines in new ways moment by moment. And of course, the special light of their individual lives is always there, always glowing. Each of my students is an assemblage of gifts and powers beyond belief – a work of untainted wonder that can’t be replicated. They each think thoughts and feel feelings whose lights could light up many classrooms. They are youthful dynamos of undreamed of mental and emotional power, able to transform lives (their own and others’) with their own minds and hearts. Alas, I’m often unable to see or appreciate these powers – these lights that shine around and inside my students. I’m like a blind man who doesn’t know there’s a stunning sunset in front of him. At any given time, there are many young lights flaring and flashing in my classroom, but it takes wide-open eyes to see them.