SURGERY AND ENGLISH CLASS

I underwent a minor surgical procedure yesterday, and interestingly, it seemed a lot like English class. No, I don’t put people to sleep in class (well, not completely), and we don’t use scopes and scalpels in my classes, but still, there’s a strange association between what we do in Room 2 at my school and what happened to me at Westerly Hospital yesterday morning. As I lay in the recovery room, I reflected on the similarities between the small assembly of nurses, doctors, and a 70-year-old patient in the surgical ward, and the team of adolescent scholars and a senior citizen teacher who gather together each day in a small classroom in Connecticut. There was tension, distress, kindness, and courage at the hospital, just as there is in all my classes. I felt some fear as I waited for my appointed time with the surgical team, and in a way, my students might see my classes as disquieting and even scary, but I hope they also sense the compassion and bravery that we each bring to the class, just as I felt the full power of simple thoughtfulness as I lay on the stretcher. Yesterday the nurses’ and doctors’ kindness carried me along, from my early morning admission to when I was rolled out in a wheelchair to a friend’s car, and I see the same kind of kindness among my students as they assist each other through the fears and unease that some of my lessons and assignments cause. Surgery, of course, is usually a far more fearsome and awe-inspiring experience than a 9th grade English class, but the comparison still seems reasonable, especially when I think of the selfless compassion and understanding I felt at the hospital, and the sympathy my young students show to each other as they suffer through the sometimes unsettling trials of English class.

STRONG SOFTNESS

Softness is an essential quality in my work as a middle school teacher. Obviously the word has many negative connotations (weakness, indecision, uncertainty), but its positive aspects are useful to me as I carry out my classroom responsibilities. For instance, the word suggests a willingness to yield readily to pressure or weight, a trait I find helpful when it comes to respecting the students’ comments and suggestions. I come to class with my own set of beliefs and ambitions, but I try to always be prepared to submit, if it seems suitable, to new ideas presented by the students. If the pressure of their judicious thoughts builds to a point where their correctness seems incontestable, I try to be ready to respectfully acquiesce. Far from being a sign of weakness in a teacher, I believe it’s a sign of inner forcefulness and influence. It’s an intrepid teacher who can surrender with enthusiasm to a young but truthful idea. 

THE GENTLE SPIRIT

“… the gentle spirit of moving words …”
      -- Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

I love this quote, mostly because it makes me feel like I’m doing something significant when I speak to my students with quietness and kindness. I rarely raise my voice in class, not because I don’t sometimes dislike my students’ behavior, but because soft, expressive words spoken with seriousness and purpose can present much more power than words raised up in displeasure. “The gentle spirit” of peaceful and unobtrusive words can work calm wonders, whereas words hurled like lances usually simply light the fires of misunderstanding and resentment. Especially if I can speak “moving words” – those that move the thoughts and feelings of my students the way soft, steady rains move rivers – I find that I can softly force the students to adjust their behaviors. In fact, I often picture myself as either a soothing sunrise or an easygoing fall of rain in the classroom, both of which can calm any of us as we work our way through a life or an English lesson.

NEVER-ENDING CURRENTS

When I’m steering my students through a new lesson, I sometimes sense the flow and influence of many kinds of currents, as if we’re on a ship and sailing across tricky tidal waters. In a way, it’s a wonder we all don’t drown in English class, what with the crazy currents of ideas and feelings flowing around us. They’re not seen by visitors, but these streams of thoughts and emotions can make my class more like a rowdy journey than a well-reasoned presentation of an English lesson. It’s just under the surface, the steady movement of tides of ideas and streams of feelings, so that even when the students seem to be snoozing through a lesson, their thoughts are always functioning and influential, following and interweaving with each other in a never-ending stream. In some ways, I guess I could be a good teacher simply by settling in and sailing easily on these currents that are always there -- these tidal forces of feelings and ideas that don’t ever stop moving in my classroom.

INEFFABLENESS IN ROOM 2

“Ineffable (adj): too great or extreme to be expressed in words”


     I’ll admit that I haven’t often thought of my students as being ineffable, but when I heard the word used this morning, I made the connection immediately. A friend was saying there was an ineffable loveliness in a landscape he saw at a museum on Saturday – a loveliness which simply couldn’t be expressed in words – and I instantly thought of my students’ essays, as well as their often profound but baffling comments during discussions. When the students write, they work out their thoughts as they construct their sentences, which sometimes makes for essays that are both majestic and mysterious. When I’m reading 9th grade papers, I sometimes have the sense that I’m in the presence of both ancient, shining ideas and universal confusion. The sentences occasionally skip along with a friskiness that any writing teacher would adore, but they can also spread out before me like an obscure and pathless forest. This somewhat charming situation becomes a problem when I have to evaluate and grade my students’ work. Their kind of mystifying, almost otherworldly abilities with written words is nearly impossible to categorize. It’s like placing a breeze in a box, or saying what a starry might looks like in six words. It’s the kind of ineffability I’m faced with when listening to a Lizst piano piece, or working with my inscrutable scholars in Room 2.

CHEERFULLY CONTENT

“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.”
-- Walt Whitman

As a teacher, I often force my students to be busily ambitious, always bringing new and more serious assignments their way, but I also try to temper that with the knowledge that satisfaction and patience plays a powerful role in learning. In their often furiously busy lives, my young students need to know that I treasure those times in English class when we can all “sit content” for a couple of moments, just welcoming what knowledge we’ve already gained, and giving thanks for all our thoughts, both the wee and the wonderful ones. As Whitman suggests, the only person a student has a chance of knowing is herself or himself , and it’s a vast and puzzling person indeed, as vast, I truly believe, as the scattering stars above us – and isn’t it important to provide time to sit back and be satisfied with that marvelous person? In a way, none of us is perfect, but in another way, we are each as perfect as any riffle in a river or any collection of clouds coming over. Rivers, you might say, are content to be just what they are, mud and murkiness and detours and swirls included, and I want my students to feel in themselves a similar contentment. They certainly can improve as students of English, but they have no need for improvement as creations of this limitless universe.

BARBAROUS IN BEAUTY

“[N]ow, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise […]”
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

Strangely enough, this line came to mind this morning during a 9th grade English class, when several unkempt and scruffy teenagers taught me a few things about a novel I thought I knew well. These were kids who probably care way more about basketball and texting than teaching an old teacher about an old book, but nonetheless, there they were this morning, making me sit up and see some sentences in A Tale of Two Cities in an entirely fresh way. We were discussing a puzzling passage which I had, I thought, come to some understanding of a few years back, when these two boys abruptly brought me around 180 degrees. They were dressed somewhat shabbily, and I remember hearing them sort of throwing themselves down the hall as they came to class, but once we started discussing last night’s assigned reading, they broke forth like the lights of a new and wild wisdom. For a few minutes, they made several of Dickens’ strange sentences shine as clearly as candle flames, these untidy boys who break all records racing around at recess but who only this morning made me aware of their skill in decoding cryptic books. In some ways, the word “barbarous” could be applied to these boys who often forget the simplest manners and make a brief but crazy chaos between classes. However, in some ways, like this morning, they also bring a peculiar beauty to my classroom – the beauty of bold ideas born of youthful sincerity and uprightness.

SPEAKING THE TRUTH

“But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Harvard Divinity School Address”

I hope my students understand the importance of speaking the truth as they see it, for this kind of speaking can show the miracles their young lives are made of. It doesn’t matter whether their words carry the weight of “the truth”, whatever that might mean -- only that their words wear the clothes of their own special and irreplaceable ideas. If a student considers Dickens to be a bewildering writer, then that is the truth for that student, and she has a responsibility to say it convincingly so all can understand her. If a boy can’t believe his English teacher hasn’t read the Harry Potter books, he should say that to the teacher with graciousness but energy, for it is the truth as his heart apprehends it. Emerson makes the point that powerfully putting your perception of the truth out there for the world to at least understand, if not welcome, will inevitably bring the blessings of a universe that thrives on the truth of things. Just speak what you honestly believe, I say to my students, and the powers of the wide world will work with you. Emerson suggests that the universe will “stir and move” and make new forces for us to use, if only we will say the truth as we sincerely but unpretentiously touch and experience it at this moment.

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.

RAISING THE WHITE FLAG

As a teacher I have spent more than several of my 46 years in one sort of struggle or another – the struggle to understand a novel, the struggle to set down a decent lesson plan, the struggle to understand my students’ minds and hearts, the struggle simply to survive those occasional tiresome days that try any teacher’s soul. Lately, though, I’ve been bringing the surrender flag to school and unfurling it in front of myself now and then. I’m giving up struggling. I’m setting down my combat tools, putting aside my weapons of warfare. I’ll still be an attentive and faithful teacher, but I’ll be attentive in a more temperate way, and faithful like flowing rivers are faithful, with a peaceful kind of pushiness. Rivers, I have always realized, do not struggle. With rocks in their way, they simply slide around them and move along, and when trees topple, the waters open wide and say “welcome”. Rivers are powerful in a soft but persevering way, and that’s what I’m aiming for in the classroom. I guess I’m trading struggling for flowing, and I have a feeling my students will follow along with more willingness than when I was a classroom warrior.

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.

SO MANY BIRDS

So many birds
find the food of life
at the feeder, and
so many ideas
dawn in his mind
like mornings at the shore,
sunrise after sunrise
in his mind
as he watches
the wonder of birds
bringing their lives to the window
of his hushed classroom.

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.

FLAWLESSNESS

She knows that the stars
are perfect in their places,
and that the moon
lets its light shine
where it’s supposed to shine,
and that her hands on the keyboard
are carrying themselves
with the poise of the perfect hands
that all of us have.
She knows this for sure,
and she also knows
that all the days will dance
in their exceptional ways,
and what she wants to do
is sit back and stare
at all this flawlessness.

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.

NONSTOP OPPORTUNITIES

Snowed in by a bizarre October storm on Saturday, I spent some time looking around in the dictionary, and when the word “opportune” appeared before me, I soon realized that the crazy storm was, in fact, an opportune one for me as a teacher, for it helped me understand that opportunities parade before my students and me with the steadiness of the snowflakes that were falling around the house. Actually, according to the dictionary, everything offers an opportunity, for everything provides a path home to some harbor or other. The dictionary says that “opportune” derives from the Latin word for “port”, and that originally, an opportune moment was simply a moment that made it easier for a ship to steer its way toward its port. In English class, we care about only one port – learning -- and letting the moments of my classes take my students and me home to that port is my only proper task. What I remembered on Saturday, through my dictionary work, is that every moment of class can carry us a little closer to the docks where wisdom waits. Just as a seaworthy sailor knows that all winds, one way or another, can be used to steer the ship in the chosen course, I should know that whatever works its way into my classes can carry us to some type of fruitful learning. Teachable moments, to tell the truth, are every moment – or should be. If a boy brings his own boredom into the room, I can, perhaps, discreetly use it to help him see how boredom breaks apart a character’s life in some short story, or how boredom suddenly becomes passion in a certain poem. Similarly, if we turn off the track of my carefully considered lesson plan, which sometimes happens, maybe the new path can provide learning I had never looked for. This screwy and astonishing snowstorm before Halloween holed me up in the house on Saturday, helping me get some past-due writing done, so it actually was a sudden and opportune gift from the gods of the weather, and my task as a teacher is to be forever ready for the opportunities given by the gods of Room 2 – the continuous gifts that get my students and me closer to any one of the limitless harbors in the land of learning.

POWER THAN CAN'T BE LOST

We’re presently in the midst of a strange autumn snowstorm, and there’s much TV talk of losing power, which simply makes me think, once again, of the finest kind of power, the kind that can’t ever be lost. If we lose electrical power, my family and I may be making our way through dark and frosty rooms for the next few days, but we’ll always have access to the power that doesn’t depend on transformers and wires and wonderful weather. When it comes to qualities like patience and peacefulness and compassion for others, no storm can stop their powers, and no downed trees can triumph over their ability to bring the best of life to all of us. A home in disagreeably cold darkness is still a home, provided the people in it remember that real power is inside them and thoroughly ready to go to work, with or without electrical power. My hope, over the next few days, is for my family to feel, maybe more fully than usual, the forces of kindness and endurance and even serenity within the dark but warm-hearted rooms of our home.

STEADINESS

"Pocket Watch", oil, by Hall Groat II

He's noticed
the second-hand of his watch
moving unfailingly
in the midst of a storm.
He's  seen it stay its course
when his days
were collapsing like sticks,
and when his whole life
seemed to be slowing to a stop.
The second-hand
keeps in control of itself.
On his bedside table at night,
it does its quiet work
while his heart is doing its
and the steady stars
are doing theirs.

STILL, AT 69

I still think the world
wakes up each moment.
I still want
to toil in the fields of books,
to rest in the green grass of thoughts,
to see dawn
shake out its hair over the sea,
to help myself
to whole hours of happiness.
I still want to feel the freedom
of walks on far-away trails,
of words waving their arms on pages,
of poems sailing somewhere like ships.

PERFECT CLOUDS, PERFECT KIDS

"Clouds", oil, by Becky Joy

Since no one would ever consider calling a certain set of clouds second-rate or deficient, why, I wonder, do so many teachers think of some of their students that way? When we look at the sky, the clouds are just clouds – not ‘A’ clouds and ‘C’ clouds and ‘F’ clouds. All clouds are first-rate just as they are, whether bright and brimful, or grayish and stretched out, or shadowy and unsettled. We don’t say that a certain cloud “doesn’t have the skills” to be a perfect cloud, or that another cloud isn’t “up to speed” with the “more advanced” clouds, or that a particular cloud needs an IEP (Individual Education Program) in order to be a better cloud. They’re all simply clouds, and each one, in its own distinctive and extraordinary way, is special and satisfactory - and I feel precisely that way about my students. Each one --and I couldn’t be more serious -- is perfect, flawless, as good as new, the best, and beyond compare. True, they are each different, but their differences do not set them apart as better or worse - - just different. Their individual differences, you might say, are perfect differences. A student who reads at a very slow pace is a perfectly slow reader, in the sense that the slowness is what sets him part as a distinctive, one-of-a-kind student. He is good at being slow, just as any cloud in the sky is good at being unerringly the kind of cloud it is. Granted, I realize that kids are not clouds, and that this analogy loses power at certain places, but still, it’s interesting to notice how willing we are to rank and rate students with all kinds of scores and labels and grades, and yet how preposterous it would be to place something like clouds – or sunsets or dawns or sheets of stars across the sky -- in similar categories. To me, all the stars I saw this morning on my dark drive to school were consistently startling, in their special ways, and so are all my students.

THE SETTLING OF A STREAM AND A LIFE

"Creekside Morning", oil, by Don Gray

This week has worked some small currents of disarray into my life, and it’s been fortunate for me that I’ve remembered how it was, years ago, when I watched a stream near my house settle after I had stirred it up with a stick. I recall being astonished, again and again, when I waited beside the stream and watched it slowly settle and become clear again. Even at seven, I saw that there was some sort of law at work – that the stream always sorted itself out and re-established a kind of peaceful transparency. No matter how many times or how vigorously I swirled the water and the sand, the stream – a small, shiny one I considered mine alone – always went back to its basic clearness and composure. What was most wonderful was that I didn’t have to do anything. The settling happened by itself, while I did nothing but sit silently by and notice sand and water quietly clearing itself up. These memories made this fairly confused week a little quieter, and thus somewhat easier to accept. Somewhere around midweek, I decided to give up getting frustrated and full of unease, and just began to be still and watch the waters of my life slowly settle -- as they did, over and over again. Something would happen to stir things up, but always, if I stood aside and simply observed, all would soon enough come back to quietness. Once, in fact, after I messed up a 9th grade English class fairly completely, I stood outside and simply waited. I saw myself beside my special stream as a boy, and soon I saw the waters, and my seemingly disordered teaching, settling into their inborn and beautiful stillness.

What He Saw at 5:09 AM

He saw the darkness outside,
And the small lamp on his desk,
And the signs of happiness
In his hands, and the holiness
Of the simple things of his life --
The students he studies with,
His family that enfolds him
In their arms,
The woman who washes his days
So they sparkle,
The days that don't stop smiling
And sailing.

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.

SCHUBERT AND ENGLISH CLASS

(First posted in 2008):
Yesterday, I was listening to a Schubert quintet in the early morning before class, and I began focusing on the wonderful harmony in the music. One definition of harmony is “a pleasing combination of elements in a whole”, and I certainly heard that in this piece of music. I especially noticed the contrast between the deep-sounding, unhurried cello and the sprightly, fast-paced violin. There were moments of soft, slow sounds interspersed with periods of almost skittish sounds – times of near silence balanced with periods of practically riotous sounds. This was true harmony – a pleasing combination of the most varied and opposite elements. It started me thinking about my teaching. I have an infinite variety of students – quiet, loud, shy, noisy, diffident, self-assured, and so on – and my job as their teacher is to, like Schubert, blend them together in a “pleasing combination”. I’m sometimes tempted to over-emphasize the work of the confident, voluble students – to gauge the success of a class by how well the “smart”, talkative kids take charge -- but to do that would ignore the natural harmony of the class. Who wants to listen to a piece of music in which only fast-paced, high-pitched violins are heard? A conductor needs the voices of the languid cellos and basses every bit as much as those of the elevated and lively violins and clarinets, and a teacher needs the silent, pensive students as much as the vociferous ones. Diversity, not uniformity, is the necessary ingredient for harmony -- in music as well as in teaching.