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.

A GENEROUS CLASSROOM

 “Mr. Quallon the banker kept a generous house.”

--George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         Mr. Quallon kept a generous house in part because he was wealthy, and I hope that, even in my necessarily tightfisted school, I can keep a generous classroom. To me, that would mean a kind and big-hearted classroom, one that benevolently welcomes all kinds of kids and ideas. It would mean a charitable classroom, where the students and teacher are as interested in giving as in getting, as willing to distribute as to receive. It would mean, too, an abundant classroom, containing more than enough support and payoffs for everyone, enough honors for one and all to make students and teacher perhaps actually take sincere pleasure in their stay there, perhaps even think of it as a satisfying place for a stopover each day.

PLIABLE TEACHING

“ … her pliancy had ended in her sometimes taking shapes of
surprising definiteness.”

-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

         As the years have passed, I’ve tried, with some success, to become more pliable in my teaching, which is why I was particularly struck when I read the above words today. In the novel, Mrs. Gascoigne’s pliancy is not always constructive, but for a teacher it can be a useful and rewarding attribute. I guess I’ve gradually learned to be more elastic, bending and bowing with the students as we do our work. I’ve become better at adjusting and fine-tuning myself during a 48-minute class. When I’m teaching, I often think of trees and sailors – trees for their unfailing flexibility in winds of all kinds, and sailors for their judicious management of sails in shifting weathers. I picture myself as an old but limber beech tree – limbs grown long and large over the years, but still as flexible as ever, bending stylishly in breezes or storms. Teaching English to teenagers can be an unsettled, even tempestuous, enterprise, and suppleness is a necessity. I’ve noticed that old trees sometimes bend the best, and I’m hoping that might be true for old teachers, too. I also see myself, on certain days, as a sailor in a small ship with my students. Whatever the “weather” of the classroom throws at us – rowdy ideas, , unmanageable lesson plans, and assorted other surprises – the old teacher-captain has to be pliant enough to change plans, alter course, shift sails, and work with, instead of against, the conditions present in the classroom.  I think of myself, sometimes, as a kind of “Elastic-man”, able to change shape and style at will, always ready to coil and curl and change directions as the students and I work through a lesson plan. Perhaps I should do mental aerobics before class, just to prepare my mind to be extra-flexible in the face of my fanciful and capricious teenager thinkers.

LIKE-MINDEDNESS

Sometimes it seems clear to me that my students and I are like-minded. That may seem strange to say, since I am a 68-year-old, wizened, old-world teacher and they are newly blossoming adolescents, but still, a strange similarity seems to exist among our thoughts. We seem to think a similar mixture of apprehensive, anxious, promising, and optimistic thoughts. They sometimes feel afraid, as I do, and they occasionally feel full of assurance and security, as I do. I often wonder if thinking is a kind of ocean, and my students and I are simply waves and swells in that single ocean. It’s easy to get spellbound by the notion that we’re all separate thinkers doing our own unique kind of thinking, but to me, that seems far from the truth. It’s also easy to look out at the ocean from the beach and pretend that each wave is a separate entity, but in that case we know it’s a pretense, because we know the ocean is a single vast force, of which waves are simply phases. Thinking, it seems to me, is also a single force, of which my students and I are phases, parts, and stages. The fears and hopefulness I feel are the same fears and hopefulness they feel, but just in different parts of the measureless sea of thoughts. We’re like-minded because we live in the same ocean called thinking.

ALL THE SURPRISING IDEAS

         The other day, after a student had shared her interpretation of a poem in class, I replied, “That’s a really surprising idea” – but it occurred to me later that all ideas are surprising. Because we grow so accustomed to ideas, their inimitability and lushness often go unnoticed, but the fact is that each idea is a pristine marvel.  It seems clear to me that every idea is totally new, never been thought in just that way in the history of thinking. A thought may be similar to other thoughts, but in certain, sometimes secret ways, it has its own matchless style and substance. Every thought is like every moment – fresh, unblemished, and ready to do its irreplaceable work. Luckily for me, I spend my days in the classroom surrounded by the steady streaming of these new ideas – hundreds and thousands of them. In a 48-minute English class, my students and I together might produce 37,000 ideas, a figurative Mississippi River of spanking new thoughts surging through the classroom and our lives. If I thought about it as I was teaching, I might feel utterly overwhelmed by the reality of so much newness and brightness of thinking.

A CURIOUS TRAVELER

“…Till the whole cave, so late a senseless mass,
Busies the eye with images and forms
Boldly assembled…”
-- Wordsworth, Book VIII, “The Prelude”

I sometimes feel like I’m entering a dark cave when I walk into my classroom. It’s not an especially dark room, but a strange kind of figurative darkness exists when I think of the inscrutability of both my students and the subject I teach. After all these years of teaching, teenagers are still as obscure to me as the darkest cave, and nothing, to me, seems more impenetrable than some of our greatest literature -- a Hopkins poem, for instance, or a story by Faulkner. In spite of all I’ve learned about teaching English over the years, I’m as much “in the dark” as I was when I started back in 1965, the only difference being that now I know I’m in the dark. It often reminds me of the above passage, in which Wordsworth speaks of “curious travelers” who enter a cave and, as their eyes slowly grow accustomed to the darkness, gradually see astonishing “images and forms” along the walls. As a teacher, I have definitely been a “curious traveler”, a wanderer in the wilds of English education, and much of my time, it seems, has been spent slowly adjusting to the darkness of my own ignorance. Even with the most carefully planned lesson, I almost always feel like I’m tiptoeing through a shadowy cave, watching and hoping for pathways and truths to slowly reveal themselves. It sometimes reminds me of a time near the start of my career when a veteran spelunker led my students and me into a cave in Missouri. When we entered a section of almost total darkness, we could see nothing at all, which is often the way I feel about ten minutes into a lesson. However, as we patiently waited for our eyes to adjust, we slowly began to see strange “images and forms” along the walls of the cave, fantastic shapes that had been hidden from us. “See?” our guide said. “All you have do is wait” – and I’ve tried to heed his advice all these years. Literature and teenagers are as murky as ever, but if I good-naturedly wait, wonders usually reveal themselves.

HOPE AND HAZARD IN ROOM 2

“…himself he feels,          

In those vast regions where his service lies,          

A freeman, wedded to his life of hope          

And hazard, and hard labour interchanged          

With that majestic indolence so dear          

To native man.”

--Wordsworth, Book VII, “The Prelude”

         My work as an English teacher takes place in a small, nondescript classroom on a commonplace country road, and yet I often (almost every day) feel like I’m laboring in “vast regions”, to quote from Wordsworth’s lines above. He’s talking about solitary shepherds among the hills and valleys of England, but I might as well be a shepherd as I attempt to herd, persuade, guide, and sometimes simply drive my young students toward the goals I set for them. It’s often a solitary feeling, too – the sense that it’s just the students and I alone in a wilderness of spoken and written words. We wander here and there in our discussions as we try to find meaning in poems and stories, with me circling, prodding, containing, rousing, and stimulating. As the students write their weekly essays, they, too, probably feel like shepherds – or border collies – as they attempt to push their unruly words into reasonably recognizable paragraphs. However – though I’m not sure the students feel this way – I feel like a total “freeman” as I go about this sometimes lonely, hit-and-miss work of teaching. There’s “hazard” in the job, of course (wilting lessons, inscrutable students, parents on the prowl), but there’s more than enough “hope” (lessons like missiles, kids with grins to give away) to balance things out. I put in a great amount of “hard labour”, but I always find, to my amazement, a feeling of “majestic indolence” floating through me at odd moments during class. I often pause in the midst of a class and take a few seconds, privately, to express my thanks for my good life as a classroom shepherd. While kids in my care are sharing thoughts about a topic, I sometimes sit smiling in the classroom rocking chair -- a fortunate, privileged, prosperous 68-year-old guide and guardian. 

ENGLISH CLASS IN THE BASTILLE

“People who share a cell in the Bastille or are thrown together on an uninhabited island, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and humours so as to know where they must go warily and where they may lean their whole weight.”
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, “Virginibus Puerisque”

Happily, my classroom is not much like a prison cell or an isolated island. There’s usually a fair amount of sparkle and merriment in my classes, and I don’t think my students feel much like inmates (even though the hard labor I force upon them may often seem punishing). There’s usually a spirit of comfortableness in my classes that would be hard to find on a deserted island. Yet, in a very real way, my students and I are strangers when we meet each day, strangers in the sense that what we show to each other, what we say and how we act, is just the slight surface of our vast and baffling lives. We actually know no more about each other than we know about the reaches of outer space. It’s as if we all stumble into Room 2 and greet each other afresh each day, washed up and stunned on an empty island. However, as Stevenson suggests, we usually “find some possible ground of compromise.” I’m a well-weathered senior citizen and they are unsullied, up-and-coming children, but we slowly “learn each other’s ways”, make concessions, and find the middle ground. I learn to “go warily” in certain areas with the students, and they learn, I’m sure when to tiptoe around me. Of course, I also steadily discover where and when I can “lean [my] whole weight” on the young people – let the influence of 68 years of learning and living gently but relentlessly urge them onward. We’re way different from each other – teenage children and a weathered old guy, restless kids and a stress-free granddad. We’re basically strangers sitting together in a small classroom each day, but we usually find Stevenson’s “possible ground” where sitting sometimes becomes sharing.

CONSTANCY

“…Who rides his sure and even trot
While the world now rides by, now lags behind.”
-- George Herbert, “Constancy”

Of all the virtues I admire in good teachers, none is more special to me than constancy. One definition is “the quality of being faithful and dependable”, which is exactly the way I hope my students would describe me. I don’t especially care if I’m an exciting or funny or creative or even “excellent” teacher (whatever that means) – but I very much want to be a faithful and dependable one. Amid the young scholars’ sometime muddled and mixed-up lives, I want their English teacher to ride his “sure and even trot” day after day. If some things fall apart around them, well, at least Mr. Salsich will be the same. Of course, “being the same” could mean being boring, but it doesn’t have to. It could simply mean being dependable – being a sort of solid rock in a fairly tumultuous world, a strong tree in the blustery lives of the students. Actually, “strong” may be exactly the right synonym for constancy in this regard. A teacher with constancy is a strong teacher – one who stays faithful to his principles in the midst of distress and distractions, one whom students can depend upon to be basically the same today and tomorrow as yesterday. Since there is more than enough caprice in my students’ lives, I don’t need to add any more by changing my behaviors and routines every other week. I guess I’m more interested in being a sound and steady teacher than an “exciting” one – more like a well-built building than the whimsical weather. “While the world now rides by, now lags behind,” may Mr. Salsich stay the same, a constant and true old teacher who has a few simple things to share with young scholars of English.

WORDSWORTH, "THE PRELUDE"

                                                                   "...Immense

          Is the recess, the circumambient world
          Magnificent, by which they are embraced:
          They move about upon the soft green turf:
          How little they, they and their doings, seem,
          And all that they can further or obstruct!                  60
          Through utter weakness pitiably dear,
          As tender infants are: and yet how great!
          For all things serve them: them the morning light
          Loves, as it glistens on the silent rocks;
          And them the silent rocks, which now from high
          Look down upon them; the reposing clouds;
          The wild brooks prattling from invisible haunts;
          And old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir
          Which animates this day their calm abode."

              --Wordsworth, "The Prelude", Book VIII 

PEACE SO PERFECT

      ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY AND DECAY

         by William Wordsworth

         The little hedgerow birds,
         That peck along the roads, regard him not.
         He travels on, and in his face, his step,
         His gait, is one expression: every limb,
         His look and bending figure, all bespeak

         A man who does not move with pain, but moves
         With thought. — He is insensibly subdued
         To settled quiet: he is one by whom
         All effort seems forgotten ; one to whom
         Long patience hath such mild composure given,  

         That patience now doth seem a thing of which
         He hath no need. He is by nature led
         To peace so perfect that the young behold
         With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels.

         I have loved this poem for many years, and have always secretly harbored the hope that I could someday be like Wordsworth’s “Old Man”, especially in my work as a teacher. As a senior citizen, I am already an officially old man, and I’d like to learn how to do oldness with the “patience” and “mild composure” of this man. I’m not quite sure why, but I’m quite happy to be an old teacher, perhaps for some of the same reasons that this man seems happy. As the years have passed, I have found more “settled quiet” in my teaching, more opportunity to “move[]/ With thought” rather than with stress and strain and pain. Teaching seems more like the capricious breezes of spring than the somewhat stormy seasons of my earlier years in the classroom. In a way, it’s even rather nice that my students, like the “hedgerow birds” in the poem, sometimes seem to not even notice me in the classroom. I don’t mean that they’re more disrespectful or unruly than in earlier years; in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Like the poet’s old man, perhaps I don’t “stand out” in my classroom precisely because I “fit in” more now than in the early days of my career.  I’m no longer a jarring, strident, and strange outsider to the kids, but simply an old teacher who quietly shares his wisdom with them. They “peck along the roads” of education, and I’m right beside them. Perhaps they’re even a little comforted by the “long patience” I’ve gained over the years. I work hard, but I don’t do much rushing or dashing or stressing anymore. Teaching has become such a gentle process for me that, indeed, it sometimes feels like “[a]ll effort seems forgotten”.

NIcholas Nickleby, by Charles DIckens

Read just a page or two this morning as I enjoyed a spinach and asparagus omelet. Here's a quote from p. 12 about the idiotic debates in Parliament (the satirical Dickens at his best):

"Mr Ralph Nickleby seconded the resolution and another gentleman having moved that it be amended by the insertion of the words and crumpet after the word muffin whenever it occurred it was carried triumphantly only one man in the crowd cried No and he was promptly taken into custody and straightway borne off."

TEACHING AND UMBRELLAS

         Someone once told me that a teacher should be like an umbrella for his students, and I’ve been thinking about that analogy recently. An umbrella basically protects a person, gives a person a safe shelter, guards a person in unsettled situations – and that’s also what a teacher does. The world my teen-age students are growing up in is a turbulent one, and it is the responsibility of the school and its teachers to offer a safe haven for the students, a place where they can learn and grow in security. When they enter my classroom, my students need to know that there’s order and safekeeping here – that they can accomplish much because the “umbrella” of Mr. Salsich's teaching is always there for shelter. Part of that sense of shelter comes from the fact that my classes are orderly affairs. Insecurity arises in young people when things are chaotic and unruly – when they literally don’t know where they're going or what will happen next. In my classroom, I need to provide an umbrella for my students’ sometimes stormy lives. I need to create an atmosphere of stability and consistency, a setting where they know exactly what the procedures are and exactly what they need to do. Indeed, even my hardest assignments can be a sort of umbrella. If my students are given clear (though perhaps complex) guidelines, and if the goals of the assignment are totally obvious and the necessary resources are available to them, then they will feel, surprisingly enough, secure. They will know precisely what needs to be done and how to do it. The umbrella of the well-designed assignment is there to keep out any confusion or uncertainty. A final point to make is that sometimes umbrellas are not needed. On sunny days, we can leave it at home, and in certain situations in the classroom, the students can be free to work without the specific guidance (protection) of the teacher (umbrella). That’s a good feeling for them and for me. They’re on their own, using their own resources and providing their own guidance, and I can put the umbrella away and simply watch.

"Nicholas Nickleby" by Charlles DIckens

 "... There was a great bustle in Bishopsgate Street Within as they drew up and (it being a windy day) half a dozen men were tacking across the road under a press of paper bearing gigantic announcements that a Public Meeting would be holden at one o clock ..."
(p. 11)

I read a few pages this morning at the breakfast table. Dickens goes well with hard boiled eggs, spinach, and fine coffee. I especially like the sailing metaphor in this passage. 

AN EXHAUSTING ENGLISH CLASS

        I wonder if my students ever feel like flopping down in utter exhaustion after English class. When they walk out of the classroom, are their minds ever, so to speak, gasping for breath because of the intense brain workout they’ve experienced during my class? Do they ever feel like the class they just left was one of the most demanding ordeals they’ve ever been through?  I actually hope so. In a way, I wouldn’t mind if my classes had some similarities to the women’s Olympic10K cross-country ski race I watched this afternoon. As the competitors crossed the finish line, they collapsed with fatigue, leaning on their poles and struggling for breath. They had given all of their strength to doing their best, and all they could do at the end was stagger and slump in weariness. Why shouldn’t my students feel a kind of breathless fatigue at the end of English class? If I’m doing my job as their English teacher (or coach, as I often think of myself), shouldn’t I demand their absolute best at all times? Shouldn’t I expect them to drive their brains with the same intensity that the Swedish gold medal winner drove her body today? The ski race was a grueling test for the competitors, and maybe I should think of a 48-minute 9^th grade English class that way. Maybe I’d like to see the kids come to class with severe and single-minded faces, the way they might approach the starting line of a punishing race. At the end of class, I could offer, perhaps, cups of ice water to refresh their worn out minds as they drag themselves out the door.

Here's a wonderful poem by George Herbert. I especially like the last two words.

PRAYER        

The Churches banquet, Angels age,
        Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
        The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth ;

Engine against the Almightie, sinner's towre,
        Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
        The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
        Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
        Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church bells beyond the stars heard, the souls blood,
        The land of spices, something understood.

THE POEMS OF SHELLEY

Lately I've been reading some of Shelley's poems, going back over ground I first covered some 40 years ago. Yesterday I read "Mutability" again, and was again inspired. Many critics find a lot of skepticism and pessimism in the poem, but I don't. This poem, to me, speaks of the humble (and maybe joyful) acceptance of the impermanent nature of the universe. Impermanence can be thought of as a blessing as well as a curse.

Mutability

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! -For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutablilty.

HEARTS, LUNGS, WEATHER, AND WORK

When I picture myself (which I occasionally do) as a heavily burdened, harried teacher laboring away like a self-sacrificing hero of some sort, that line of thinking is usually brought to a stop fairly quickly by the realization that, while I’m admiring my self-styled valiant efforts, other kinds of labor of more astonishing proportions are continually happening. For instance, while I’m carrying the supposedly grave weight of teaching teenagers, my heart is carrying a truly amazing responsibility – that of keeping me alive. In a typical 48-period English class, my loyal heart beats about 3,000 times, always in perfect rhythm, always pushing precisely the right amount of blood out to my cells. Not only that, my lungs faithfully rise and fall hundreds of times while I go about my allegedly prodigious task of teaching writing and reading. All I’m doing is trying to get some kids to stay alert and learn a few skills; my heart and lungs are giving me the gift of life, over and over again. And then I look outside at the breezes and the clouds and the sky vanishing in the distance, and I wonder at the ceaseless work of nature. While I’m mentally commiserating with myself for the “wearisome” work I have to do for a few hours each day, the sun and wind and weather continue to do their truly epic work. When I’m slumped over my desk at lunch, wondering how I can possibly make it through my last two challenging classes, the earth, as it has done for about fifteen billion years, keeps working its way through space, dutifully carrying me and mountains and seas and a few billion other riders.

THE BEST GAME EVER

The other day, as I was pondering the old maxim “it’s only a game”, I was reminded that teaching is better pictured that way. In fact, I think the surest way to achieve true contentment is to view my classroom work not just as a game, but as a friendly, pleasant spectator sport, where I am both an active player and a bemused fan. Instead of seeing myself as part of an intensely serious contest, the results of which carry life-or-death implications, I need to occasionally step back and be an observer of the light-hearted game called education. I need to see my little “self” down there in the playing field of my classroom, dashing here and there, performing weird and wonderful feats, or just temporarily convalescing on the “bench” (my chair at my desk). I should cheer, boo, sigh, scream, or applaud for my “self” and the other players (my students), all the while remaining at ease and satisfied because, after all, it’s only a game. With that kind of a distant eyewitness viewpoint, I would, perhaps, eventually come to realize that all my daily doings and goings-on as a teacher, all my earnest endeavors and pursuits in the classroom, all my seemingly serious thoughts and aspirations about being the best teacher I can possibly be, are, in fact, merely part of a highly entertaining game – a game in which there are no losers. (The inventor and referee of the game is the Universe, and it only allows winning. Unfortunately, many of the contestants don’t realize that.) If something “bad” happens to my "self "– a boring class, an irate parent, a principal gone haywire — oh well, it’s just a game, and anyway, eventually I’ll see my self (and all my teammates and competitors) holding up the cup of victory, as usual. Sooner or later I’ll see, once more, that winning is the only possible outcome for the game of education, and that even failure, oddly enough, is a victory for learning. I’ll sit back, get out my binoculars, and continue watching Hamilton Salsich – so distant, small, and beautiful in this measureless arena owned by the Universe – playing the game of teaching in his intense, comfortable, and buoyant way.

TEACHING ENGLISH, TOSSING PEBBLES

It came to me today that teaching is somewhat like tossing pebbles from a boat into a lake. During each 48-minute class period, I sit in my tiny teacher-boat and throw stone after stone into the vast lake of my students’ lives. I toss in steps in the lesson, suggestions, statements, questions, reminders, reprimands, commands, and demands – one after the other, dozens and hundreds, maybe more than a thousand pebbles in each class. What’s interesting to realize is that every one of these pebbles has an effect on the students, just as every pebble sends out ripples in a lake.  All the hundreds of words I speak, gestures I make, smiles and frowns I show, are small rocks that splash inside the students’ minds and hearts and instantly send small waves rippling out.  It’s impossible to say what kind of effect these ripples will ultimately have on my students, but that they will  have an effect is beyond question. Every ripple in a lake alters the lake, if only in the tiniest ways, and every pebble I flip out to my students modifies their young, sensitive lives, if just in minuscule and marginal ways. As I thought about this today, the unpredictability and uncertainty of it all was slightly unsettling. The truth is that most of the words, gestures, and expressions I use during class are casual, haphazard events. I plan a careful lesson each day, but once class starts, I begin tossing pebbles just about as fast as I can think. It’s a wonder my figurative teacher-boat doesn’t swamp and sink each day, what with all my arbitrary and incessant pebble-tossing.  Maybe I can change. Maybe I can slow down enough to at least periodically use some care in selecting a pebble, and maybe I can occasionally pause, just for a second or two, to see how the ripples shape themselves and start rolling out to some distant shore.

ASTONISHING SILENCE

Every now and then, I remember to use silence to bring some intensity to the atmosphere in my classroom. I've always felt that, in teaching, silence has at least as much power as sound, and sometimes considerably more. Since the students hear teachers and each other talking almost nonstop throughout the day, any moment of silence can be a refreshing, almost shocking, break in the routine. In the students' noisy world, a little silence can be like sunshine after hours of rain. Not many days ago, I read a poem aloud to a 9th grade class, and when I came to the end I simply stood in silence at the front of the room. I remained silent for only about twenty seconds, but I suspect it had a surprising effect on the kids. In their often strident and raucous lives, twenty seconds of silence can seem like time without end. As they were sitting silently and listening to the ticking of my classroom timer, they might have been thinking, "This is really strange", and I'm okay with that. After all, 'strange' can also mean surprising, extraordinary, even astonishing -- three adjectives any teacher would be proud to be associated with.