THOUGHTS IN MY 45TH YEAR OF TEACHING July 2010 – June 2011 Hamilton Salsich
A KIND OF EXPERT I guess you could say I found out this morning that I’m an expert at teaching English. Well, not really, but I did discover, while messing around in the dictionary, that the word “expert” derives from the Latin word for “try”. I picture medieval speakers of English saying something like this: “You have tried so hard to be an alchemist that you are now an expert – an advanced and superior tryer. Thinking along these lines, perhaps I could call myself an expert teacher, since I’ve tried fairly assiduously for a full 45 years. It occurs to me, actually, that this would be an excellent definition of an expert – one who simply tries, again and again and again.
After all, who’s to say when someone actually knows all there is to know about a subject – especially a subject as maze-like as teaching teenagers? Calling someone an expert English teacher is like calling a cloud in the sky an expert cloud: both are silly and pointless statements. Teacherness and cloudness, if we can use those terms, are way too vast and multifaceted to be measured and evaluated. So we’re left with trying as a measure of expertise, at least in the case of a teacher. (I suppose it could be said that clouds are always trying their best.) If I continue to hike the steep and bewildering trails of teaching English, continue to take up the path each day with as much devotion and ardor as I can gather, perhaps I can call myself, in some ways, an expert teacher.
***** SMALL SECRETS This morning a bolt and a nut reminded me of the importance of small secrets in teaching and learning. I was replacing a blade on a sickle, and for many minutes I could not get the bolt to stay still while I turned the nut. The top of the bolt kept turning, the nut went nowhere, and my temper took some turns for the worse, until – ta-da – I discovered the secret. I simply had to insert the bolt from the other side of the blade so its square head fit into a square space on the handle, and, there you go, the bolt never
turned and the nut never stopped turning till all was totally tight. I had seen the small secret of success, and suddenly the job was just a short and simple one. It occurs to me, now that I think about it, that dozens and hundreds of similar secrets lie in wait for my students to come across in their travels through my English lessons and assignments. Of course, part of my responsibility is to show them these secrets, but it’s fun, too, to let some of the secrets lie concealed so the satisfactions of discovery can be enjoyed. Perhaps a student is reading over a first draft and feeling puzzled as to why the sentences sound so flat and lifeless, when, quite suddenly, she notices that the sentences are all roughly the same length. Presto, the secret of varying sentence lengths is revealed to her, and the happiness of composing a stylish essay is hers to savor. Life – including the repair of sickles and the writing of school papers – can sometimes seem full of frightful twists and turns, but every so often a little secret is discovered, and the enormous problem, poof, is gone at a gallop. Starting in September, countless of those secrets will be waiting for my students, and I’ll sometimes dispassionately stand aside and simply observe the searching with a smile. ***** GIVING SPACE I walked in some wide-open spaces this morning, feeling full of the freedom I so often miss in day-to-day matters, and it made me wonder if I could provide more of this kind of sweeping, unfastened freedom for my students. I have often heard people say something
like “Give him some space” and “I need my space”, and perhaps space is, in fact, one of the pressing needs of the students in my English classes. It strikes me, when I give it some thought, that my students may feel hemmed in, constricted, and confined much more than they feel free; they may feel more like prisoners than travelers in wide open spaces. This saddens me, because nothing should be more liberating than reading and writing, and to think that these hopefully refreshing pursuits might be construed as imprisoning by the students is, to put it mildly, distressing. Of course, the learning process is often, by necessity, rigorous and constricting, and studying a Shakespeare sonnet is not, at every step of the way, a liberating experience. However, there has to be some way to ensure that the sudden sense of intellectual and emotional freedom will be a regular occurrence in my classes; otherwise, I am little more than a warden instead of a teacher. Somehow I have to make it possible for my students to occasionally (like every day) feel as free as I felt in the unfenced meadows and pastures this morning. Writing and literature should do that, after all. Even if composing an essay is plain hard labor, I must somehow enable the young writers to feel, albeit when they read just one of their sentences, the joy of having made something that has a kind of boundless beauty. Similarly, while rigorously working through a Joyce short story, there should be at least one moment of sudden deliverance from ignorance for each student. Even if they don’t “get” the entire story, surely – if I’m doing my job – I can show them some heights where small but indispensable truths can be touched, and where their little lives,
and mine, can feel suddenly as spacious as summer fields. ***** DOING DON QUIXOTE I remember being enthralled when I read Don Quixote years ago, and this week I’ve been thinking of the heroic but bewildered knight errant as another new school year comes into view on the horizon. What I especially admired was his eagerness to just go where the next moment led him. Like countless readers, I loved the Don for his wacky willingness to simply accept what comes along and do what must be done. We are told that, as he set out on his first adventure, “he pursued his way, taking that path which his horse chose, for in this he believed lay the essence of adventure.” The word “adventure” catches my attention there, because that’s precisely what learning and teaching should be – a somewhat impetuous and unconstrained expedition. During this coming year, I hope to do a little Don Quixote-style teaching as my young students and I explore the territories of good literature and their own rough-and-ready writing. I’ll have my lesson plans prepared, of course, but I might occasionally give a lesson a gentle kick in the side at the start of class and just see where it takes us. With my teaching reins held a little more loosely than usual, it might be fun, for instance, to follow a lesson on symbolism in The Tempest, even if it decides to take the path called “characterization” shortly after starting. From there it might wander down the trail of “the theme of friendship”, and might end up stopping at the waterhole of
“beautiful poetry”. I must confess that it’s not easy for me to teach this way, since my bent is naturally toward orderliness and singlemindedness, but I might be able to do a little Don imitation now and then – be a little errant and wayward, let my usually disciplined lessons kick up their heels and have their capricious way. ***** INSCAPE AND INSTRESS IN ENGLISH CLASS I have long been an admirer of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and today, reading again about his theories of “inscape” and “instress”, I thought about the collections of teenagers that make up each of my English classes. Hopkins studied scenes in nature with great care, hoping to detect that which made each scene totally unique, and I often find myself wishing that I could discover the secret something that makes each of my class sessions a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. In 9A, for instance, the same kids come day after day, but each day – maybe even each moment – there’s a subtly different makeup or motif in the class, something that renders it, for that moment, a class beyond compare. Hopkins would look at the same tree at five different times in a day and say it had a different “inscape” each time – a different makeup, composition, perhaps even character – and I could say the same about a given group of students. “Instress”, if I understand it correctly, was Hopkins’ term for the force that both energizes and holds together the inscape of every scene and object in nature. Even a totally motionless tree, according to Hopkins, contained
within it a distinctive kind of energy that made it possible to remain a totally unique tree at any given moment. It seems odd to me, but this concept perfectly applies to my classes, each of which seems to fizz with concealed energies, even when stock-still and silent. What’s interesting is that, like the instress in nature, these hidden energies appear to transform moment by moment. Even a relatively relaxed 10-minute discussion, when I watch and listen with care, can simmer almost visibly with ever-shifting forces, much like a grove of quiet trees quivers, though imperceptibly, with its hidden life. In a poem called “On a Piece of Music”, Hopkins says that “good grows wild and wide”, and I see that in my groups of students, each of which is wild and wide, moment by moment, in special and matchless ways.
***** A KALEIDOSCOPIC ENGLISH CLASS Oddly enough, reading about kaleidoscopes today got me thinking about my work as a teacher of teenagers. I loved playing with those strange cylinders when I was a kid, and what amazed me the most, I recall, was the fact that every single twist of the tube brought a beautiful symmetric pattern into view. There were no flubs, no unsightly patterns, no designs that seemed even slightly unbalanced. However many times I turned the tube, something delightful and beautiful always became visible. It’s not easy, but I sometimes try to look at my groups of students as though through a
kaleidoscope. I doubt if a visitor would use the word “beautiful” to describe any particular scene in my classes (we’re just an everyday kind of teacher and some fairly commonplace kids), but I try my best to look through the kaleidoscope of my inner vision. Even a run-of-the-mill 9th grade English class can seem extraordinary when seen with the miraculous help of optimistic assumptions and high expectations. Kaleidoscopes do their tricks with mirrors, and I guess you might say I use the mirrors of my abiding belief that startling miracles can happen in every class, and at any moment. Perhaps because I try to look for the miracles, they seem to be there more often than not. Even a silent and seemingly glum group of English students can suddenly, at the turn of a moment, seem like serious scholars – if I’m watching, and if I’m using my secret inner kaleidoscope. *****
BEING AN ECHO In the school year ahead, I’m looking forward to doing less jabbering and more echoing. I’ve known for a long time that I do far too much talking in my classes – too much prattling on about this, that, and the other idea that happens to show up in my mind. Of the thousands of words I speak in class each day, probably half are thoroughly unremarkable, inconsequential, and therefore unnecessary. Silence would be a fine substitute for many of my spoken sentences – silence, or some soft and precise echoing of what the students say. Instead of throwing out words upon words,
most of them destined to vanish forever in the vastness of the students’ lives, I could see myself as a quiet mountain valley that can easily contain, and reverberate back to them, the thoughts the students express. In conversation, nothing is as heartening -- and rare -- as hearing our ideas spoken back to us, and perhaps I can do that more often for the usually insecure and hesitant young thinkers in my classes. No doubt I must not waver from occasionally speaking my own words of grandfatherly wisdom to the children as we make our way through the school days, but I also need to be quieter more often, like mountains often are as we move among them. When we speak in the presence of mountains, we occasionally hear our words sent softly back across the air, perhaps reassuring us that, yes, our thoughts are still out there somewhere, and kids need some of the same reassurance. If I repeat back what they say now and then – just shut up and be an honest echo – maybe they’ll be amazed by the sound of their young ideas. ***** BEING A MIRROR A mirror doesn’t do much of anything, which is exactly why I have a small mirror hanging on the wall behind my desk at school, just as a reminder that “doing stuff” is not always the best way to teach. A mirror just reflects, or sends back exactly what is sent out to it, and I need to do much more of that in my work with teenage students of English. A mirror is the opposite of a busybody perpetual motion machine: instead of rushing here and there,
saying hundreds of words per minute, and trying to control everything in front of it, a mirror simply stays where it’s put and is what it is. It has one straightforward but superb task – to give back whatever is given to it, exactly as it was given. When I think about it (and I often do), a mirror is a perfect representation of one of the primary duties of a teacher. Most kids (and some teachers) don’t realize it, but the true purpose of school is to discover who you really are, and nothing does that better than a teacher who takes pleasure in being a mirror. My job is not so much to add more bits and pieces of stuff to my students’ already congested brains, but to merely show them a little of who they actually are. Luckily, my subject matter – writing and good literature – can do that, as long as I sometimes keep my lips sealed and occasionally just reflect back to them, like a loyal mirror, what the kids have written or said. Perhaps, in a figurative way, I can do what the mirrors in our dance teacher’s room do. In dance class, the students probably say, now and then as they catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirrors, “Wow, so that’s what I look like!” and in my class, maybe the teacher, Mr. Mirror, can cause them to do a little gaping, not at what they look like but at how they think and who they are. ***** YET When I think about teaching English to teenagers, the word “yet” often comes to mind. Here I’m thinking of it as a conjunction, meaning something like “but at the same time” – as in “I’ve been
teaching for over 40 years, yet I often feel dumber than when I started.” Teaching kids is a puzzling, paradoxical enterprise, which leads me to often feel wise yet also a complete fool. I’m sure I’ve become a more organized teacher, yet, strangely, I sense unrestrained chaos just below the surface of my lessons and classes. I’m a well-trained and qualified educator, yet I sometimes feel, at the start of class, like a kid on the edge of a wilderness. I guess I shouldn’t fret too much about all this yet-ness, since all of life seems to be a ‘yet’ kind of situation. I love my four grandchildren, yet I sometimes pine for peace and stillness when I’m with them for hours. The sunshine brightens beaches not far from my house, yet millions in sweltering places pray for the sun to soften a little. This afternoon, my backyard is a breezy place of beauty, yet down the roads of the world there is woe and weariness all around. All I can do, I suppose, is accept all these ‘yets’ and try to see the good sense of them. After all, life – including teaching -- is a total mystery to me, yet I do so often get a glimpse, too, of its trimness and splendor.
***** A WASTEBASKET AT THE ENTRANCE This year I may put a wastebasket at the entrance to my classroom, just as a reminder to the students that emptying their minds at the beginning of class might be a good way to go. That sounds a bit nutty, I know, but truthfully, some sensible mental
emptying wouldn’t hurt the students, and might make some room in their minds for a new thought or two. If I were an artist, I would draw the inside of a teenage student’s mind as a vast swarm of countless ideas, swelling with each class and careening around with craziness, bulging the head almost to bursting. On the outside my students usually seem fairly calm, but inside, there must be a sort of contained chaos as new ideas struggle to squeeze into the packed space. Seriously, how can I expect my students to accept a new idea in my class unless they first open their minds and dump a few thoughts at the door? Partially emptying a container, after all, means the container is now ready to accept new material. To add fresh water to a glass you first have to throw out the stale. I’m not sure how I can help my students go about this emptying process, but it might help if I simply started each class slowly and quietly. If there are a few minutes of peace at the start of my class, when my words are spoken softly and haste and fussiness are nowhere to be found, that may be all the kids need to allow some old thoughts to float off and be gone. Like a settling pool, some stillness might let their spinning thoughts sort themselves out, thus opening up a little generous space for a few new ideas in English class. ***** WATCHING BUTTERFLIES AND KIDS This afternoon, just after I had spent a few minutes carefully observing a butterfly with my binoculars, the thought came to me that I rarely observe my students with such attentiveness. It
seemed strange, the more I thought about it, that I had just devoted more than a minute to watching a butterfly, whereas I only infrequently pause for even fifteen seconds to observe a student during English class. The beautiful butterfly captured my complete attention, but my individual students, I guess, seldom do. I wasn’t too busy today with my summer chores to pause and study an insect, yet I’m apparently so absorbed in the minutiae of my lessons that I rarely find a few seconds to watch and wonder about these out-of-the- ordinary creatures who are my students. Sure, I see them all before me as we work through an English lesson, and I’m as dutiful and alert as most teachers, but I don’t stop to attentively observe individual kids. In that sense, I’m not a very scientific teacher. A proper scientist observes with steadiness and precision, always taking detailed notes, because she knows that’s the only way to learn about and come to understand the life – the reality – of the subjects of her study. Why, I wonder, don’t I do that? Why don’t I think of my classroom as a teaching laboratory? Why don’t I occasionally grow as silent and observant as a scientist, maybe for ten minutes at a stretch, and carefully take notes on what I am watching? Are not teenagers, in their madness and intensity and brilliance, as interesting as butterflies? ***** NEVER ALONE It’s become more and more clear to me, as the years have passed, that no one is ever alone in my classes, including me. That
goes against accepted logic, I know, since so many students do seem like lonesome travelers as they make their way through the school days. I've had many students who seemed entirely friendless and solitary, speaking to almost no one and seldom sharing in the pursuits of English class. They pass like phantoms from classroom to classroom, and then, poof, they’re gone and no one notices. As a teacher, I, too, have sometimes felt like a phantom. During times of personal troubles, as I stood in front of my students I sometimes seemed to be in a forsaken wilderness. For the duration of those forlorn times – which weren’t many, thankfully -- I was as lonesome as a kid with no companions. However, as my four decades in the classroom have passed, I have slowly come to realize that genuine isolation – the actual separation of one person from another – is, in reality, impossible. During class, my students and I are as together, as one, as drops of water in a river. Yes, in some ways we are separated as distinct individuals, but looking at it another way, it’s obvious that we share everything, and thus are part of a single, integrated reality. We share the air in the classroom, the daylight, the scenes out the window, our glances, our gestures, our thoughts, our words. All of these phenomena pass among us and through us throughout a 48-minute period, making us, you might say, as intermixed and united as breezes in a wind. Even a silent, shy student – even an occasionally sorrowful teacher – can’t really be totally alone. The breeze ruffling my shirt just now is part of something much bigger, and so are my students and I.
***** WHERE’S THE BOTTOM? Reading George Herbert’s poem called “Prayer” today, I came across this phrase -- “plummet sounding heaven and earth” – and started wondering what would happen if I used an imaginary plummet (or plumb bob, as it’s now known) in English class. What would happen, in other words, if I “sounded” the depths of my seemingly straightforward and commonplace curriculum? During a discussion about a story, if I dropped my imaginary plum bob “overboard” (as sailors in Herbert’s time regularly did), when would it hit bottom – when would we know that we’ve said all that can possibly be said about the story? How far down would the plumb have to drop to touch the very bottom of a Keats sonnet? And where is the bottom of good writing – the base, the foundation, the single, final, and first substructure on which all good writing rests? As I thought about this today, I began to realize that my make-believe plumb bob would never touch the bottom of any aspect of English class. Where, after all, is the bed, the final truth, the bottom floor of any work of literature? Wouldn’t my plumb bob just keep descending into the depths of a Faulkner novel forever, falling past one interpretation after another, one opinion after another, one scholarly treatise after another? Can there be a final foundation for any true work of literature? And what about the secrets of good writing and reading? Where’s the bottom of that vast and inscrutable ocean? Toss Herbert’s plummet in there, and you’ll be waiting forever to feel the bottom. My students and I, if the truth be
told, are sailing on a bottomless sea. Hopefully I have some dim idea of where we’re going, and hopefully I won’t entirely wreck the frail vessel, since it is a long, long way down. GOOD TENSION In the early years of my teaching career, I wouldn’t have considered it a compliment if my classes had been characterized as “tense” or “tension-filled”, but my feelings have gradually changed. I guess I’ve come to see the positive aspects of tension, to the point where I purposely try to build it in to my classes. After all, the word derives from the Latin for “stretch”, which is exactly what I want my students to do to their hearts and minds as they read good literature and write good essays. I picture their thoughts stretching out almost (but not quite) to the point of snapping, and their hearts reaching out to far-flung horizons. Problem is, a tense English class, in a way, is the opposite of an “enjoyable” one. If my students are always enjoying my class, it might be because they are utterly relaxed, which might be because they’re not stretching. “Relax” comes from the root for “loose”, and I’m not sure kids can feel loose, at liberty, and stress-free, and still be stretching themselves. Interestingly, the word “enjoy” stems from the same Latin root that gives us “rejoice”, and I’m fairly certain that my students are not able to rejoice at the same moment when they are stretching beyond their previous boundaries. I hope a few might rejoice later when they realize what they’ve accomplished, but while they’re straining to understand what a Shakespeare sonnet is
saying to them, or struggling to see the significance of a scene in O Pioneers, groaning is probably a more common response than rejoicing. Sometimes I compare teaching English to taking the taking the students on a strenuous mountain climb. Surely they would expect to be stretched when ascending a mountain, and just as surely they would not expect to always enjoy the experience. In fact, if it’s a truly arduous climb, there may not be much real enjoyment – surely not much rejoicing – until the summit is reached. However, we all know, or can imagine, the feeling of elation and accomplishment that comes when viewing a valley from a high summit that you have reached through your own brave efforts, and I hope my students can feel at least a little jubilation after feeling the tension that comes from stretching out – often way, way out – to reach the sometimes distant truths in the literature we read. ***** RAINDROPS AND ENGLISH CLASS This morning, during a short-lived rain shower, I stood for a moment to watch raindrops strike the leaves of some flowers beside the house, and the apparent randomness of it reminded me of the seemingly whimsical nature of much that happens during discussions in my classes. The rain was striking the leaves with what appeared to be the utmost arbitrariness – hitting here, there, and everywhere in no obvious pattern. It looked like a soft and pleasant kind of chaos – countless drops shaking the leaves one after another in nature’s casual, unfussy way. Similarly, I often see what seems like a calm sort of chaos in discussions during class –
ideas popping up randomly in this or that student, feelings flowing into new feelings, topics turning into other topics. Like the random raindrops this morning, there sometimes seems to be no sensible order in our discussions – just words dropping in the midst of us as fast and as crazily as the rain on the leaves of the flowers. As I thought about it, though, I began to see that I was making a mistake I have often made: I was assuming that because I couldn’t see any order or pattern in the raindrops or our discussions, then no order or pattern existed. It’s strange how self-absorbed I can be – how certain that the way I personally see things is the way they are. Surely the vast universe, this boundless creation I somehow became part of 68 years ago, has countless patterns and designs that my wee mind will never detect. Surely the raindrops touched the leaves this morning just as they were supposed to, in some perfect but imperceptible pattern, and surely our discussions in English class go their apparently rambling way with wonderful order and aptness. SQUINTING I usually encourage my students to be totally focused when they’re reading, but I also ask them, now and then, to do sort of the opposite – to squint, you might say. I’ve heard that painters sometimes squint at a scene in order to see the overall colors and patterns, and perhaps that’s what I’m after with the students. After zeroing in on specific details for many pages of a novel, it’s good for them to occasionally “narrow their eyes” so they can see the big
picture – the overall drift of the story, the general framework of things. It’s somewhat like skimming the pages (though I never use that word, for fear it will be misunderstood) – the way a painter might skim his eyes across a landscape in order to pick up the flow of shapes and colors. It’s also a bit like closing your eyes in front of a beautiful scene, and then quickly opening them just for a moment, just to take a brief peep at all the beauty. Sometimes that kind of quick glimpse can give us a wonderful sense of the overall splendor of a scene, and I guess that’s what I’m hoping for when I ask the students to squint through a few pages in a novel. Perhaps this fleeting peep at the pages will reveal something that an earnest and conscientious reading might miss. Emily Dickinson advised that we should “tell all the Truth but tell it slant”, and perhaps that’s exactly what I’m talking about. If authors sometimes follow her advice and tell their truths in a sideways fashion, maybe my young readers should sometimes read in a sideways way. Maybe if they occasionally just took quick looks as they read they might experience, now and then, “the Truth’s superb surprise.” ***** CLEARING UNDERBRUSH I’ve spent a good part of the summer clearing underbrush, in a couple of ways. First, I’ve been using an old-fashioned long handled sickle to hack down the rowdy vines and creepers from parts of the forest around the house, hoping to thereby open up better views of the beautiful trees. As I’ve discovered in many areas
of my life, including teaching, clearing things away almost always makes what’s truly important more noticeable, and certainly more impressive. The tall, slender cedars and birches now stand forth in their stately magnificence, as though alone on center stage. I’ve also been figuratively clearing away messy brush from my English curriculum, mostly by carefully reading and reflecting on the posts on this Ning, but also by going over my curriculum with mental clippers and sickle, slicing away whole territories of pointless clutter. It’s quite astonishing to realize how sort of tangled and untidy my curriculum has quietly become over the years, almost without my noticing it. With stealth and persistence, “weeds” of all kinds have entangled my syllabus, wrapped themselves around my slender 48-minute class periods until the really important material is sometimes, I fear, almost hidden from the students’ eyes. A little judicious brush cutting in my curriculum – a little clearing away of the needless scrub – will surely help open up the vista so the kids can see the relatively few English concepts and skills that are truly essential for their growth. Right now I’m sitting outside in front of a few stately trees that now stand splendidly and alone, and in a few weeks I’ll start teaching lessons that, let’s hope, will show a similar kind of clearness and simplicity. ***** A PARTY FOR ANYTHING Yesterday my 3-year-old granddaughter gave a special party for her dolls (she calls them her “babies”), and I enjoyed it so much
I started thinking – and I’m quite serious – about giving similar parties in English class this year. When I asked Ava why she was having a party for the babies, she simply said, “Because they are good”, which seemed to me, as I thought about it later, a perfect reason for organizing a bit of revelry. Simple goodness goes uncelebrated too often, but not in my granddaughter’s world – not for this little girl who gets joy from just jumping up and down in the driveway or seeing her daddy do strange stunts. For her, more or less any aspect of life could be a cause for rejoicing, which is why she set her babies on the table and sang to them as we ate cupcakes to mark the occasion. Honestly, I can picture my teenage students and I occasionally making a similar kind of merriment in the coming year. If the class comprehends Rules 1-7 for comma usage in only seventeen minutes, why not break out Hershey’s kisses and a selection of smiley stickers? When several kids crack open a Keats’ poem like professionals, how about some little lollipops for one and all? Even offering the kids five minutes of free time would be a worthy way to celebrate something – maybe just the fact that the students show respect for each other day after day. I’ll keep Ava and her impromptu parties in mind when school opens in September. She showed us the importance of thanks and happiness, and I’d like to do the same for my students. ***** APPROACHING THE OLD OAK
In my attempt this summer to clear away some underbrush where I live, I’ve gradually hacked my way toward a very old oak tree, and, coincidentally, in my planning for the upcoming school year I seem to be clearing a path toward some old, trustworthy truths about teaching. This oak I speak of is truly gigantic – a great god in this forest of mostly middle aged trees. It measures 16 feet in circumference, and our best estimate (with the help of a few experts) puts its age at around 200 years. The undergrowth – the snaky climbers and creepers of all kinds – has gradually gained control of the area around the tree, and only this summer have I been able to beat back the brush and actually come close to this stately old tree. This morning, as I stood in its vast shadow, the mental work I’ve done this summer about the art of teaching – the attempts I’ve made to bring to the fore the few essential truths I need to remember about working with kids in a classroom -came back to me. Those few truths – those old verities that may have sprung first from Socrates – seem this summer to be as imposing as our old oak. As I’ve worked my way through my beliefs about teaching, I’ve come closer to seeing the small number of truly necessary principles that provide for preeminent teaching and learning. And what are they? Opinions will differ, and mine may change tomorrow, but today I would say just three central qualities – three old oak trees, if you will – are essential in a fine teacher: total love for the work, absolute attentiveness to each student, and unflagging patience. No matter what else goes awry this year – no matter how many “vines” start bamboozling me and making my
work seem crowded and complex – I can look to those three basic, ancient, steadfast requirements for good teaching (and I can go out back and look at the loyal oak when I need a reminder).
***** TEACHING BY LIGHTENING UP Since I’ve been thinking (and talking and writing) a lot lately about clearing away what I call the “underbrush” in my teaching – those many persnickety rules, guidelines, theories, methods, strategies, skills, and concepts that are relatively inconsequential and that make it difficult, sometimes, to see the really essential truths about teaching, a colleague asked me the other day just exactly what are these essential truths, and, at that point, I could only come up with one: A good teacher never rushes. It seemed utterly simple when I said it -- maybe too simple and even commonplace and corny -- but I stand by it. If I could learn how to always do the opposite of rushing – to sort of calmly linger and loiter in my teaching rather than hurry here and there through lesson after lesson – I might start approaching the kind of teaching I’ve always wanted to do. Rushing never fails to fill a class (and me) with disquiet and a certain amount of dread, whereas hanging around a lesson, staying behind for a few moments among the skills or concepts being taught and taking some last slow looks, almost always creates a calmness that can’t help but make learning an easier and more nourishing process. If this means I don’t
accomplish as much in a class period as I might if I rushed, then that’s what it means. I can live with that because it also means I’ve let students let go of some of the weights of worry and tension they tow around with them day by day. Taking our time with a poem – walking quietly among the words, perhaps over and over, until we actually hear what they’re saying – is a good way to both listen in on the poem’s message and also lighten up our lives somewhat. Perhaps, in fact, lightening up is what I’m talking about here – teaching in such an unhurried and unruffled manner that the students mental burdens (which, in teens, are always many) are lessened somewhat so the essential messages of English class can come through. Maybe I should hang a sign on my door: “Quiet please. Lightening up in progress.”
***** WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THE GOLDENROD KIDS When I passed a field overflowing with goldenrod on the way to school today, they called to mind the many late-blooming students – I sometimes think of them as ‘goldenrod kids’ – I’ve taught. These are the students who are silent and inconspicuous for most of the year, but who, when the days are wandering down toward summer, start to show some small signs of blossoming. It may just be an observation or two spoken softly during a literary discussion, or a wise and stylish paragraph in an essay, or even a single written
sentence that shines, all of a sudden, with the student’s irreplaceable wisdom. It may not even happen during the student’s time in my class; years later, the bashful boy or girl may return as a flourishing, full-fledged student of life, with a family, a hard-earned fortune, and a substantial fund of happiness and satisfaction. I love those golden flowers that flow across the countryside just when we think summer is slipping away, and I love those students who surprise me with their good sense and sophistication long after their classmates have blossomed. I must remember, this year, to be patient. The students in my English classes will come into flower in their own impressive way and at their own particular time – some early, strong, and steady, some late, reserved, and, for that reason, perhaps more handsome than any. I delight in discovering the asters shyly standing in the woods in September, almost as much as I love learning from kids who bud and bloom when the applause is almost over. ***** UNCOVERING STONE WALLS This morning, as I was clearing underbrush from the woods around the house, I uncovered an old stone wall, and it reminded me that I would be uncovering some young students starting in a few weeks. It’s taken me many years to realize that that is, in fact, my main job as an English teacher – to uncover the multi-layered and already enlightened young human beings that lie beneath the sometimes hard-boiled exteriors my students show in the
classroom. Of course, part of my task is to show them some helpful concepts and skills, but those will be helpful only if the wise interior lives of the kids can be brought out in the open. Like the old stone wall I discovered today, there’s something priceless in each of my students that needs to be revealed – a fresh and unsullied kind of understanding and, yes, sagacity. Wordsworth, in his “Intimations Ode”, seemed to understand what happens to some kids as they grow up and “[s]hades of the prison-house begin to close
/
[u]pon”
them – shades pulled down by the various confining notions and practices of our culture. It happens mostly, I think, because we simply don’t believe children can be wise on their own – that, to use Wordsworth again, they don’t bring any “clouds of glory” with them in their youth, but must be taught to be wise by adults. I’ve seen it differently for many years – seen teenagers take me into the heart of poems, teach me truths about writing, show me new secrets about novels. Certainly I’ve taught them valuable things (I hope) from my advantageous adult perspective, but from the fresh and shining perspective of youth, my students have been my teachers as well. Perhaps that’s why I hope to uncover the wealth of wisdom they already possess – so I can also be their student as well as their teacher. ***** INFINITE WAYS OF WALKING (and writing and reading and thinking)
My son was telling me today about the countless distinctive gaits of people walking on the busy sidewalk beside his house, and we agreed that there’s a helpful analogy about teaching somewhere in that observation. (He’s a third-grade teacher.) He described a man who walks like he’s in a state of complete tranquility, and another who stares absorbedly at every car as it passes him. There are bouncing walkers, flimsy walkers, rusty-machine-like walkers, and stiff and steadfast walkers – and Jonah says there seems to be no repetition whatsoever. Each strider comes along with his or her matchless style and inimitable aura of uncommonness and significance. As we enjoyed lunch together, we talked about the fact that each of our students is as unique as those incomparable walkers. We also admitted that, unfortunately, their uniqueness is often – maybe very often – hard for we teachers to notice. Buried as I sometimes get in the minutiae of standards and lessons and goals, it’s easy to see my students as just a group of average, everyday kids, instead of irreplaceable human beings each carrying a universe of unparalleled traits. Like the walkers passing my son’s house, my students (and all students, and all people) do everything in a rare and extraordinary manner, whether it’s walking, reading, writing, thinking, or even just raising their arms or smiling at someone or glancing out the window or breathing in and out. Trouble is, I’m often (maybe usually) too preoccupied with my teaching duties to notice the individual marvels sitting in my classroom. Perhaps I need to do what Jonah occasionally does – just sit and watch. He’s a painter as well as a teacher, so he
watches to learn about shapes and forms and motions, and maybe I need to watch to learn about the immeasurable varieties of life that pulsate before me as I go about my teaching tasks. ***** A CLASSROOM CALLED HOPEVILLE I’m thinking of making a sign to hang on the door of my classroom this year: HOPEVILLE The Home of 8th Grade English and a Nice Place to Visit
For years I lived in a town called Hope Valley, and now I live near a state park called Hopeville Pond, so maybe it’s fitting that I use the word “hope” in the name for the little classroom where a few teenagers and one old-time teacher gather round for a while each day. I hope, perhaps naively, that it is a nice place to visit – a place for kids to drop in on their eventful journey through the school day to get some literary refreshment and a few infusions of hope for the rest of the day. Lord knows the students, and all of us, need neverending supplies of hope in these seemingly frenzied and desperate times, and perhaps my modest English class can do its part in that endeavor. If someone asked my students about their strongest feeling as they left my class, I would be thrilled if they replied, “Hopeful”. To be sure, finding hope in English class shouldn’t be
that difficult. Every story, even the darkest, has hope shining somewhere in its sentences, and the students could be sent on a search for it. Plus, there are countless lines and small phrases in the finest poems that are almost prayers of hope, and a single strong sentence in a student essay, if highlighted and praised, could carry a message of hope not only for that student, but for the entire class as well. A teacher could do worse than send the students off with the wind of hope at their backs. I must continue to be a demanding and sometimes stern teacher, but I must also remember to give “the thing with feathers” (as Emily Dickinson described hope) a happy home in my classroom. ***** HAPPY TO BE PASSED Early this school year, I’m going to tell my students that I’m pleased to be passed so often, both by drivers and readers. I will tell them that I almost always drive in a measured and restful way, which means I spend most of my road time seeing cars speed past me. I find driving to be a fairly soothing experience, partly because I can usually notice a number of interesting sights along the way, and partly because it gives my mind a chance to slow down and settle – so I’m never in a hurry to finish a drive. True, I occasionally arrive at my destination a few minutes late, but the pleasurable and sometimes inspiring ride always seems to justify it. I only hope the speedy drivers who pass me find as much satisfaction in racing on the roads as I find in dawdling along in peace. I’m also going to tell
the students that I’m an easy-going and sometimes rambling reader. I read most books the way I drive cars – unhurriedly and observantly, always alert for special sightings along the way. I’m often reminded that most of my friends read much faster than I do, and thus finish far more books in a given time, but it doesn’t worry me that I would be passed by countless readers as I hang around the pages of a novel, turning them slowly and dotingly. I never understood the importance of speed-reading, but I don’t dismiss it; some readers and drivers enjoy rushing along, and others – like me – enjoy a more relaxed pace. Will I encourage my students to read slowly? Of course not. They must gradually develop their own favorite paces and methods in their reading, and of course there are different speeds for different assignments. I’ll just tell them about their slow-driving teacher who also drives through books like he’s looking for bright highlights on every page. ***** COASTING NOW AND THEN Long ago, when I fell into a period of nonchalance and indolence in my teaching, an assistant principal accused me of “coasting” (she was right, and I felt ashamed), but now, years later, I see that there is actually a constructive form of coasting. Back then, my coasting consisted of simply not giving enough quality time to my work, but now I find that occasional coasting actually brings benefits to both my students and me. Because I’ve come to
accept the fact that no one can work at a high pressure, high speed pace all the time, I’ve learned to occasionally refresh myself and the students with some restful coasting. If an assistant principal stopped in at such a time and asked what’s happening, I might say, “Something very important. We’re all coasting for two minutes.” When I coast on my bike after climbing a long, steep hill, I’m reviving and restoring myself, gathering fresh energy for the next climb, and a similar thing happens in English class. If I can’t climb hills for 48 consecutive minutes, why should I expect my teenage students to stay engrossed in my English lesson for a full class period? After a wearing climb, bike riders roll downhill for awhile, taking healthy breaths and bringing some buoyancy back to their bodies, and now and then my students and I do something not too different for two minutes – slouching in our chairs, even resting our heads on the table, even standing outside in the inspiring sunshine. That’s coasting, and it makes the draining journey through an English class period a little less of a grind, and maybe even – who knows? – a little more fun. ***** READING LARGE PRINT When I’m reading on my Kindle, I sometimes like to use the large -- even extremely large – font, and yesterday it occurred to me that it might be helpful to do something similar with my students now and then. With the big font size, the words sort of
wake me up as I read, as if they’re strongly standing on the page and shouting, “We are special! Listen up!” It’s hard to be a blasé, slapdash reader when the sentences seem to strike out at you with their enormous words. Even a comparatively wearisome sentence in The Deerslayer (most of which I love and am rereading) can be a small prize for a reader when the letters stand shockingly tall on the page. I’ve never done it before, but this year I might, for instance, show a passage from A Tale of Two Cities on the whiteboard, and raise the font size way up. The opening sentence might work well for this. I can picture the 9th graders looking up at these 3- or 4- or even 6-inch words:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was …” Perhaps those famous words, now striding like giants across my
classroom board, might surprise the students into suddenly realizing why they have roused so many readers over the years. Of course, the kids and I have to go back to the more modest fonts for most of our reading, but an occasional look at great words in great sizes might make their significance shout out to us. ***** TRUSTING THE UNIVERSE I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. -- Shelley, in “Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude”
I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious or thoroughly starry-eyed, but this year I’m going to try to remember that my “strain”– my daily words to my students – can do what Shelley describes in the above passage. I hope I can keep in mind that my words come not so much from a little mind inside my skull, but from the infinite numbers of ideas, words, events, and scenes that have nurtured that mind over the course of my lifetime. Even when alone, I’ve never lived truly alone in this world, but always surrounded and refreshed by the grand universe itself, and the words I say to my students simply spring from that universe in all its immensity and mystery. Shelley says “Great Parent”, by which he may mean what some people call God, but for me it’s simply the cosmos that extends far and forevermore and makes my worries
about what I’m going to say to my students seem very small and silly in comparison. The universe has given me limitless gifts for years and years, and it is these gifts that, in turn, give the gifts of my words to the students. I needn’t worry what to say in class any more than raindrops need to worry how to fall. I’ll continue to plan my lessons with great care, but I must then trust that my words will speak with the genuineness and strength of the universe that formed them. ***** NATURAL SCATTERING Walking in the disheveled late-summer woods yesterday was a good way to remind myself at the start of the school year that some of the best writing and reading – and teaching -- occasionally has a scattered look to it, a sense of messy loveliness, a feeling of things falling apart but doing it quite necessarily and marvelously. As hard as I looked, I could see no orderliness in the woods – no patterns, no designs – and yet all seemed utterly perfect, just as student essays sometimes show a strange kind of muddled elegance. Sticks, leaves, vines, stones, and trees were all tossed together in the kind of flawless disorder I occasionally see in the students’ interpretations of literature. It started me thinking about some modifications I might make in my attentiveness to tidiness and order in my teaching. I usually arrange my lesson plans with as much precision as possible, and will continue to do so, but I
realized yesterday that I also need to allow for some inspired scattering every so often. The universe, it seems, works that way, dispersing its wonders with wonderful impulsiveness and caprice, and maybe I must learn to let go a little and occasionally allow English class to just do what it wants to do. There may be messiness and even the beginnings of mayhem, but, like the cluttered but beautiful woods yesterday, there might also be something similar to splendor. *****
UNFOLDMENT A dictionary doesn’t give much help in understanding what it means to say that something unfolds, but I’m sure I will see one indisputable meaning of the word each day in English class this year. As has happened so often in the past, most of the students will surely come to my classroom, more often than not, with minds folded up and shut away somewhere – thoughts and dreams and wonderings and hunches all tucked together and out of sight. It’s as if they don’t trust school to be a place where their most prized thoughts will be appreciated, so they cuddle them close and carry on as dutiful students without them. They sit in my room and smile and make insightful statements, but the real treasure of their
thinking and feeling lives is folded away inside them. Luckily, though, there’s something about English class – not the perfectly ordinary teacher, for heaven’s sake, but simply the material at hand -- that always brings about some slow but sure unfoldment. Is there a classic short story that doesn’t have at least one sentence that will unroll some portion of a student’s heart? Will a carefully selected poem not always prompt at least a little straightening out of the tangles in a teenager’s thoughts? Can kids write paragraphs about a powerful feeling they have and not sense some small unfurling inside? I’ll be watching all year for this unfoldment – this almost irresistible tendency for feelings and thoughts to open out when wholehearted words are written or read. ONE BOUNDARY GONE In my teaching this year, I’m hoping to eliminate at least one troublesome boundary. In any classroom, of course, there must be the usual beneficial boundaries between adult and child, as well as the requisite boundaries between proper and improper behavior, but I’m hoping to do away with the make-believe boundary between the people in the classroom – the imaginary fence my students and I seem to see between each one of us. Jimmy’s over here, and he feels separated from Julie over there, and they both see boundaries between each of them and all the others (including me) in the classroom. It’s as though each of us believes we’re on our own personal island, separated by concealed barriers from everyone else. This year I want to help us better understand that, when you’re doing the cheerful work of sharing thoughts and feelings (which is
what teaching English is basically all about), there are simply no boundaries. Jimmy’s idea, once he shares it in class, crosses all pretend boundary lines and becomes part of all of us. His idea is now our idea, which means that, in a strange and wonderful sense, his life is now our life. Even unspoken thoughts know no boundaries, as Julie thinks about Tom’s idea and thus, in a small way, becomes part of Tom’s life, and Tom wonders why Annie doesn’t like the poem they’re discussing, and therefore finds a part of Annie inside him. There’s entirely too strong a feeling of isolation in the world today, and I don’t intend to add to it in English class. When people come together to read and write with truthfulness, the false boundaries of necessity break down, and the thinkers and speakers become one. Trouble is, the kids usually don’t realize they’re in such a wide-open, boundary-less place in English class, but I hope to change that this year. ***** A LAST MINUTE REMINDER I find it weird (and wonderful, I guess) that, after more than four decades of teaching, and on the eve of starting another school year, a single book can create a small storm in my mind about what makes a good teacher. I’m talking about Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov, which I’ve been immersed in this afternoon and which, in just a few hours, has gently shaken up both my deepseated and systematized teaching theories and my carefully planned curriculum for the coming year. I feel sort of like the captain of ship
who wonders, a few days before embarking on an expedition, if he needs to significantly refurbish his boat. I’m sure I’m exaggerating a bit, but the truth is, this book has caused me to reconsider some of my beliefs about teaching. I’m not going to toss out my curriculum in these last few days before school starts (I think it’s a fairly good one), but I am going to consider cutting back on the various trifles and trumpery I sometimes employ and simply stay focused on teaching a straightforward and solid lesson each day. Lemov reminds me that being a champion teacher doesn’t depend on how many “exciting” gimmicks I use or how much “fun” the students have, but only on how much the students learn and how good they feel about their learning. It’s a message I might have missed all year were it not for this rousing, call-to-arms book that was brought in the mail yesterday. ***** GREAT BRANCHES I love to consider how many ideas unfold during one of my English classes, and I often compare the process to the unfolding of the seeds of trees. In a 48-minute class period, it’s possible that something like 45,000 ideas come to life in my classroom (assuming a new idea every moment), and each of those ideas, no matter how we might judge their usefulness, is a seed that instantly starts to sprout. Surely we don’t notice the sprouting, or have even the faintest sense that the ideas are beginning to grow, but grow they do, each of them in their own way, speedily and impressively or
slowly and secretively. No idea dies away and disappears forever; like seeds, they stay in minds (ours or those we’ve shared them with) and slowly but surely start to send out shoots. It’s wonderful to think of this, especially when I seem to be teaching a tedious and utterly undistinguished lesson. I carry on as best I can, remembering that, no matter how poorly I’m performing as a teacher, ideas are dropping around me by the hundreds – dropping, staying, and waiting (perhaps for years) to start some roots. Some of those ideas, I assure myself, are constructive and useful, and will eventually grow and give out great branches. It’s very possible – and I’m quite serious – that ideas planted in my modest English classes are now, years later, standing in some former students’ lives like stalwart trees to lean on and take shelter under. It would be nice if I could convince myself that all these fully grown ideas were originally sown by me, but the truth is they might have been sown by a song the student was thinking of during class, or a passing observation by a classmate, or even by a bird coasting past the classroom while we discussed a story. After all these years, it’s doesn’t matter to me who plants the ideas, just as long as they’re planted – and it always comforts me to realize that they surely are, each day, by the thousands. ***** OLD LOGS AND TEENAGERS Yesterday, working in the woods, I rolled over what looked like
an entirely lifeless log, only to discover swarms of minuscule creatures crawling every which way, and it reminded me my sometimes lifeless-looking classroom. Truly, a visitor to my room at a given time might see what appears to be unresponsive and even comatose teenagers sitting around a table, close on the borders of daydreams and slumber. I assume this happens in most teachers’ classes, but I know it does in mine – the occasional silent descent of tediousness and lassitude. If my classroom were a log in the woods, a casual observer might assume that all life had long ago left it. However, it’s good for me to remember the seemingly lifeless log spilling over with secret energies yesterday, because my students, even at their most sluggish, art part of the everlasting activity of the universe and are constantly engaged in mental and emotional pursuits. True, they are often not the pursuits I would wish for them to undertake during English class, but they are definitely pursuits -- the ceaseless quests that all of our minds and hearts engage in all of the time. My job, it seems to me, is not to “activate the thinking” of my students (to use a common pedagogical phrase), but perhaps to simply redirect it. The kids are constantly thinking and feeling, even under the sheltered canopy of sleepiness, and my only hope is to steer their thoughts and feelings in fresh directions. There are great comings and goings happening inside them while we’re in class; hopefully, I won’t pass mindlessly by and miss them. ***** SOMETHING REASSURING
Listening to the filter bubbling away in my grandson’s aquarium this morning was a soothing experience, sort of like coasting on sounds, like being lulled along while the rest of the world dashes after something or other – and it made me more determined than ever to provide a similar sort of reassuring atmosphere in the background of our earnest work in English class this year. I don’t have an aquarium in the class room, but perhaps the overall serenity that I try to maintain with my students can be a kindly setting for our minds and hearts as we study stories and poems. My students and I try to avoid raised voices, sudden movements, and eruptions of any kind – sort of like strong but unruffled rivers – and maybe that will make it easier, this year, for all of us to be as constantly put at ease as I was this morning, listening to the melodies of Noah’s small filter in the next room. ***** PASSING BREEZES In a way, I hope my classroom is a “breezy” place this year. It’s a stretch, but I hope the students leave the room each day feeling a little refreshed, a little enlivened, the way they might feel if some short-lived breezes had just blown past them on a stuffy day. I must admit that it’s hard to imagine them feeling that way after spending 48 minutes making their way through an multifaceted and perhaps exasperating English lesson, but don’t the best breezes sometimes blow just when we’re working the hardest, and doesn’t a breeze often feel the best just after some strenuous labor? I thought of this
today after noticing some tall grass by the interstate bending in the breezes of passing cars. The grass, you might say, “felt” the gusts going by – was influenced by them – and perhaps something similar might happen in 9th grade English. Some of the words we say in class to each other, and even the thoughts we think, might, unbeknownst to us, be like evanescent winds in our lives, occasionally shaking us or our classmates like small pick-me-ups in a bustling school day. Perhaps, if a student occasionally leaves my classroom with a smile, it may be the smile of someone who’s just been silently freshened. ***** HARD TO BELIEVE The other day, when a former student from long ago said to me, “I can’t believe you’re still teaching,” it brought to mind the countless number of things I simply can’t believe. One of them, incidentally, is the same fact that so stunned my former student – that I am still teaching, after 45 years. I’ve been pinching myself for the last few days (school starts next week), wondering if it’s actually true. Am I actually going to have the privilege of teaching yet another group of shrewd, spirited, and ingenious teenagers? Are parents and administrators actually willing to hand over dozens of children to my guidance and care? How did I get so lucky? And all through the school year, there will be frequent feelings of disbelief: “I can’t believe a 13-year-old can understand a Shakespeare sonnet so deeply.” “I can’t believe how respectful he was to her in the
discussion.” “I came late for class, and I can’t believe how quiet the students were when I entered.” I guess my work as a teacher takes place in a miraculous realm, since three out of five happenings seem amazing to me. “How can he possibly understand Whitman so well at the age of thirteen?” “It’s mind-boggling to me that they don’t like this story.” Even my malfunctions and crashes as a teacher seem incredible, like mistakes only a novice would make, not an old guy who’s an old hand. But maybe that’s the greatest wonder of all: “I can’t believe I feel like an anxious apprentice after four-and-a-half decades!” ***** NOT CONQUERING, JUST DISCOVERING The learning process often seems to involve variations on the idea of “conquering” – we might speak of getting the better of assignments, overcoming obstacles, surmounting previous achievements, and rising above weaknesses – but this year, for some reason, I’m seeing the entire process as more about discovering than conquering. I would like my students to come to class prepared more for a focused expedition of discovery than a relentless and punishing ordeal. When they walk into my room, I hope to see more smiles than grimaces, more expressions of anticipation than of trepidation. In a way, exploring literature and learning to write with distinction should not be a distressing experience. It might even be as easy a process as uncovering the
hideaways of crickets or walking into a cave to come across its secret creatures. The crickets and the creatures are there waiting, and so, in a sense, are the truths of books and the skills of superior writing. You might say all the students have to do is take the time (and it sometimes take a long time) to do the cheerful finding. I don’t for a minute mean to suggest that what we call “hard work” isn’t involved in this discovery process – just that it’s different from the work of conquering. Conquering involves a contest of some sort, a competition, a struggle, a fight to the finish, whereas discovering simply involves looking faithfully and carefully. Many students see school as a struggle, but I hope my English students see it as more of a quest. To find the truth in a poem, the students just have to keep their hearts D and minds always open as they read the words again and again. If that’s work, it’s work of a wonderful kind, and I hope my students see it that way. ***** OLD MAILBOXES AND TUMBLEDOWN FENCES Driving to school today in my typical on-the-road trance (observant but mindless), I surprisingly happened to take in, at a bend in the road, a line of old mailboxes, and then, around the next turn, a torn-up, tumbledown fence. For some odd reason, the topic of books jumped into my mind, and I wondered, as I drove on, how many sentences and words I’ve passed carelessly by in my reading, just as I’ve passed those mailboxes and that fence countless times and never noticed them. It worried me a bit, this tendency to simply
not see – not truly experience – a lot of what is happening in my life, and by the time I got to school, I was ready to do some serious thinking about both my reading and my teaching. When I’m reading, I simply need to slow down and look around. I need to drive my eyes and mind through the pages as slowly as I might drive my car through a spectacular national park. Who knows what string of reserved but secretly inspiring words is waiting in the next sentence? Who knows how many phrases that seem as falling-topieces as the fence are in fact full of quiet magnificence, if only I would take more than a fleeting look? And I can say something similar about my work as a teacher, which I restart once again on Tuesday. Hopefully I can find it in me this year to stay alert to even the slightest occurrences in class – perhaps the way a student breaks into a smile every time I speak to him, or the glow on a girl’s face one fall morning, or the sadness standing just behind the eyes of a boy. Two of my favorite tasks are reading and teaching English, but I need to work, this year, on staying honestly present with everything that’s happening in them. If books and lessons can be thought of as street maps, I need to follow them attentively while also carefully noting the sometimes startling sights along the roadsides. ***** GRAZING I stopped yesterday to watch some cows quietly grazing in a pasture, and before long it became clear that my students and I will be giving some time to a sort of peaceable grazing during this school
year. It’s perhaps not too far-fetched to think of a book like A Tale of Two Cities as a pasture of sorts – an expansive and plenteous region where readers can forage for whatever delights they like to look for in books. Of course, to the students the book may sometimes seem more like a mountain than a grazing land (and occasionally climbing literary peaks is an essential academic task), but this year I will try to find places in the book where my youthful readers can follow their hearts in search of whatever satisfies them in books. After finishing a chapter, I may ask them to take twenty minutes to “graze” back over the sentences to see what refreshments they might have missed. Even if they understood little on the first reading, some light and pleasurable browsing might enable them to take something wholesome away from the chapter. I, too, hope to do some laid-back grazing, especially as I’m preparing lessons – looking around in books and articles, perusing through old lessons, and generally browsing among the myriad ideas available to me and all English teachers. Some teachers think of planning lessons as hard work, but I try to see it as a positive exercise in rummaging. I’ve never been sure that I actually “make” my lesson plans; it seems more likely that they lie around my life like food for my work, waiting to be found and put to good use. I casually browse each day and almost always discover what I need to know for a good day’s employment among teenage English scholars. *****
LEARNING AND LORE It was inspiring to recently discover that the word “learn” is related to “lore”, for it gave this brand new school year a special air of honor and glory. “Lore” refers to a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth, and I feel honored to think that I am part of this essential and somewhat sacrosanct process. I’m proud to take part in the indispensable work of “passing the torch” – handing down whatever wisdom I’ve been blessed with to the generation on the rise. Teaching, after all, is not simply about telling kids a collection of facts; it’s more about making a pristine, state-of-the-art world with and for them. A teacher’s task is to pass along the seeds of wisdom so new sprouts can spring up in the students for years to come, sprouts that will become ideas for fresh and more wonderful ways of living. As a teacher, I have been entrusted with the task of giving the good gifts of humanity’s knowledge to the young scholars in my classes. I teach poems and stories, but what I really teach is lore – the stockpiled wisdom that hopefully will let the new generation be relatively joyful in the journeys ahead. ***** LET THE TOOLS DO THE WORK As I was sawing some stove wood this morning with an oldfashioned handsaw, I thought of my late father, and then of my young English students. Dad always told me to “let the tools do the
work”. I’d be sweating away with a saw, forcing and shoving and slamming it through a log, and he’d come along and softly suggest that I simply let the saw do the work. The saw is a fine tool, he would say, but you have to lighten up and allow it to show its stuff. I remembered Dad’s advice this morning, and I also thought of my new students, whom I will greet on the first day of school tomorrow. They will be using many tools this year in English class, and I hope I can persuade them to loosen up a little and let the tools take them through the assignments. Words, for instance, are tools of tremendous power, and they are quite capable of making marvelous sentences and essays, if the students will only let them. You might be thinking that the students make the essays, not the words, and of course that’s true in one sense, but in another sense, we might say the words actually make the essay, just by being their matchless and spirited selves. A few words burst out of a student’s mind and into the essay, and those words, in their inimitability and feistiness, call forth more words, which in turn tell other words to take their place in the essay, and so on and so forth. Writing can almost be that easy – just standing out of the way, you might say, and trusting words to work their magic. Of course, some type of planning is indispensable, and the students must make sure the sentences are under a reasonable amount of control, but still, some faith in the force of words themselves is essential. I must convince the students that words, like handsaws, do their best work when we let them do their best work.
***** THE SUBSTANCE OF ENGLISH CLASS An interesting idea came to me on the drive to school this morning, and it occurred to me that the idea, in a sense, had no “substance” – nothing that could be weighed, measured, assessed, or graded. It was truly a marvelous idea, one that stirred and even shook me a bit, one that seemed possibly life-changing in some small but significant ways, and yet – where exactly was it? What exactly was it? Of what “stuff” was it made, what material, what substance that I could lay out on a table to examine and evaluate? I find it strange that this idea that so inspired me this morning was actually as insubstantial as the wind, and, oddly enough, I feel a similar sense of strangeness when I try to assess my students’ work in English. Of course, there are the objective quizzes and tests I occasionally give, which provide a reasonably safe kind of measurement, and the students’ essays, at least to a degree, can be evaluated by their relative orderliness and clarity, but what about the really essential aspects of English class, like ideas? English deals with words, and words are born of ideas, and ideas are the forces that transform the world moment by moment – so how do I measure the subtle and transitory ideas born within the students each day? My job is to teach English, which means not just proper punctuation and the meanings of literary terms, but also the life and light available in the best books. The books I use hopefully help my students to see in new ways, to think things they’ve never
thought, to maybe even make new lives for themselves, at least in small ways – and how, for heaven’s sake, is this to be quantified and assessed? A new idea in a student’s mind is like a breeze from the back of beyond, or a sudden stretch of sunshine, and I know for sure there’s no way of appraising such experiences. I guess all we can do – the students and I – is simply welcome the experiences with a smile, the way we smile in a breeze and beneath fresh sunlight. *****
WHO, OR WHAT, DOES THE TEACHING? I confess to wondering, sometimes, just exactly who – or what – does the teaching that happens in my classroom. I long ago gave up the notion that a single individual called “Mr. Salsich” does all of it, because I simply know that’s not true. To me, saying I do all the teaching is like saying a breeze in my backyard brings about all the great winds of the universe. Each day something wonderful occurs in my little classroom (and no doubt in all classrooms, to one degree or another) – something beyond my ability to understand, something that shifts and shakes up the young lives I’m entrusted with – and I know without doubt that I, a small breeze in a vast wind called learning, am not totally responsible for it. What happens is called learning, but it might as well be called “changing
lives”, because that’s what all learning does, and I don’t feel comfortable calling my small self a life-changer. No, I’m just part of an immeasurable process, just a passing gust in the endless swirl called education. When a breeze blows by me, I know not to ask where it started, because its origin lies in the immensity of the atmosphere, and, for a similar reason, I may as well not ask who or what does the teaching. I suppose the best I can say is that it just happens, like winds from wherever bluster among our streets on these fresh September days. ***** THE MUSIC OF ENGLISH CLASS Yesterday morning I started my work day by listening to my school’s middle school chorus singing with rousing exuberance, and it inspired me to wish there was singing of some sort in my English classes – but then I realized that, in fact, there is. The kids in the chorus were singing so well that it shook me a little, standing there on the third day of school – shook me to see students giving their all to something as simple as making music. There wasn’t anything fancy about it, nothing spectacular or especially polished – simply teenagers telling their music teacher, and me, that singing, at least on some mornings, was made just for them. As I watched and listened, I started to see that a similar kind of singing, if I can call it that, sometimes happens in my classes. Can’t earnest and occasionally deep discussions about books be seen as a kind of
singing? It’s not music like the kids in the chorus make, but it’s surely music to my ears to hear teenagers telling each other the feelings that flow through their young hearts, feelings that sometimes rise to the surface in our literary discussions. And isn’t the nimble and harmonious writing that young people occasionally produce – the sentences in their essays that sometimes sing with youthful zeal when I read them, and the paragraphs that can croon and hum with the coolest adolescent wisdom – isn’t this a kind of music? Passersby wouldn’t hear songs from musicals and movies making their way out of my classroom, but, if they’re listening with their hearts, they might hear the songs that written and spoken words sometimes sing.
***** HOW BIG ARE FEELINGS? Yesterday, when the students in our school chorus sang a stirring rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, I was moved almost to tears by a mixture of feelings, and later I wondered just how big those feelings were. Of course, in some ways it’s a perfectly silly question, because there’s no way to measure feelings, and surely never will be. A feeling is not a material object, like a shoe or a sack of potatoes – not a “thing” that starts somewhere and stops somewhere and thus can be easily measured. A feeling, I guess, is the opposite of a material thing – an invisible force as measureless as the air around us. When we say we are “carried away” by a
feeling, we don’t realize how right we are, and that a feeling can bear us beyond the farthest frontiers. Sometimes I see this in my students’ eyes as we discuss the books they’re reading. It’s as if the book has given birth to feelings that are still flying away inside them, and the students are simply hanging on for the ride. I see it sometimes in their written sentences, too – in sentences that clearly carry the weight of young feelings that are big beyond measure. I feel fortunate -- privileged, really – that my daily work involves being in the presence of such limitless forces. *****
IMPRISONED IDEAS “But the little man suffered from imprisoned ideas, and was as restless as a racer held in.” -- George Eliot, in Felix Holt, the Radical
This year I have many of George Eliot’s “racers” in my English classes – kids who can’t begin to count all their spanking new, raring-to-go, but locked-up ideas. As I watched them in class last week, I pictured limitless numbers of ideas dashing here and there inside them – new-born thoughts as well as thoughts a thousand years old passed down to the kids through the generations. The ideas are surely full of frantic energy, eager to find some way to express themselves, but unfortunately the mental jails of teenagers tend to be taught and unyielding. As the kids sit restlessly in class,
I can almost see them straining to keep control of their restive, ready-to-break-out thoughts. Of course, at times the thoughts do break free – in a burst of blurting, in a totally rowdy paragraph, even in a whole essay that’s blessed with both looseness and precision – but usually the ideas the students set free in English class are the tame ones, the trusted ones that can be counted on to say the right thing. This year perhaps I can convince the kids to cut some of the locks and let a few ideas fly around in freedom. They’ll have to go easy, of course, and keep some sort of control over their thoughts, but thinking freely can be a fun experience when you’re a freshman English student. It’s like racing around in the fresh fall air, just joining in with nature’s free ways – just reading and writing with wise and stirring spontaneity. *****
A PRIVILEGED MAN Coming out of a store this afternoon, I happened to look up at the sky, and for some reason it appeared totally remarkable to me with its curling set of multicolored clouds. I think I even paused in the parking lot to take it all in – a September sky that seemed like none other I’d ever seen. On other days I might have passed under it with scarcely a notice, but today there was something arresting about it, this strange assemblage of gray and windy billows above me. As I was driving home, I thought about meeting my students for English class tomorrow, and whether I might pause at some point to take in the remarkable nature of all of them, these teenagers who
could tell the world a few things about living life with gusto and a great amount of goodness. I’m as privileged to be their teacher as I was to be present beneath that extraordinary sky this afternoon, and, as I did today outside the store, I need to occasionally pause among the students and be grateful for my good fortune. ***** MONOTASKING I ask my students each day to join me in daring to be monotaskers. Mind you, it’s not easy for me, for I often fall into the fashionable practice of multitasking, but at least when I write my daily paragraphs, it’s usually just me and the words, and sometimes, as my assertive ego at long last drops into the background, it’s just the words. When I’m truly focused on the task of placing words on a computer screen in graceful and wise ways, the wide world could go crashing off somewhere and I might just keep typing. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, this type of unswerving, lost-in-thought effort feels like total fulfillment – and I hope my students can learn to let it happen for themselves. You might say it simply requires a love of one-ness – an affection for being thoroughly present with the single task that needs to be done. In a world gone haywire with two-ness, ten-ness, and thousandness, it’s a challenge for the students to settle for simply doing the one job that’s at hand, but once they do, they usually find it’s no harder than having, and really enjoying, a single delicious apple for an afternoon treat. It’s hard to enjoy five apples at a time, and it’s
just as hard to write a satisfying essay when sixteen concerns are careening around your mind. I ask my students to write and read the way they would eat the most marvelous apple ever – unhurriedly and with affection and deliberation, one high-quality word at a time. *****
GRADUALNESS On my early-morning 50-minute drive to school today, I gave more than usual attention to the slow but sure increase of daylight – the gradual gift of another day – and because of this, on impulse I decided to adjust my lesson plans for the day, with a revised focus on the importance of gradualness in the study of English. It was, indeed, a beautiful beginning to the day, mostly because of the almost imperceptible way in which it occurred, and I talked to the students about the fact that understanding often begins in just such a slight and hardly noticeable way. They often want to tussle and brawl with the books we read, as if comprehension comes through the use of haste and force, but I asked them today to try another technique, something like the restful way of this morning’s sunrise. Could they, I asked, think of understanding as something
that usually shows up in our lives slowly, like sunshine lighting up an interstate little by little? Could they talk themselves into goodnaturedly waiting for knowledge the way they’re content, I would imagine, to wait for the sunlight to stretch out across their lives each day? We often read books in class that are full of a miraculous kind of obscurity, and you can’t force clarity into those kinds of books. There’s light inside the pages, for sure, but it only rises and shines on us when we’re willing to wait and let the words slowly glow in their faint and gradual way.
***** THERE IS A RIVER When my students, like most of us, occasionally fall into dismay and discouragement, I always hope they will soon be able to see the river of good thoughts that’s constantly flowing inside them. There is, indeed, a river there, and in all of us, and it has more rousing and optimistic ideas than we could ever count. It flows from somewhere or nowhere in its relentless manner, and the only way we don’t notice it is by simply turning away and noticing the pessimistic river instead – and that’s a steady and persuasive one, for sure. It’s easy for kids, in their sometimes snarled and frenzied lives, to be spellbound by the flow of negative, downbeat, disapproving, and downright depressing news and thoughts that pour past them, which is probably why I try to select books to read in class that will bring a brighter view. I don’t mean that I avoid
books that show the certainty of sorrow in human life, just that I look for books that also show the strength and inspiration that can come with, and even be created by, the sorrow. There is a river I love in great books – a river that carries light for the darkness and quiet confidence for the future – and those are the books that can be the creators of new life for young students, bringing a stream of stirring ideas that any teenager can make use of. Those are the books, too, that can turn the students back to the good river of hopeful thoughts that’s always with us all, if we could only turn and see it. ****** A WORD LIKE A FIRE My students often get discouraged in their writing endeavors (usually because of grades they consider to be second-rate), but I try to persuade them to look beyond a letter grade to the features in their written words that throw a light on their true talent – features like the powers residing in single words. If an essay receives a C because of assorted problems, it still, most likely, has some phrases, even specific words, that seem to glow when you read them. Even the student who regularly struggles with organization and clarity can sometimes set down words that work like small fires in an otherwise undistinguished piece of writing. I try to point out to the students the special words in their essays – the ones I come upon like lights on dark trails – and convince them that just a few of those strangely eye-catching words can win over a reader. No
doubt some students will still receive Cs on their essays, but perhaps the presence, now and then, of a word like a fire will help them hold fast to the thought that a few compelling words can cause an essay to glow a little, if only like a small and hesitant flame. ***** LIGHTS ALONG THE ROAD On my long commute to school in the darkness of these September mornings, I get pleasure from seeing the streetlights along the roads -- those small signals that let a little light down on the millions of us who make our way to our important places each day – and it often starts me thinking about my young wayfaring students. I long ago realized that my English courses are faint and shadowy roads for many of the students, and that a little light along the way sends strength for a successful journey. I don’t want to eliminate all the darkness, since darkness seems to be where most wisdom is born, but I do want to set out a light now and then just to say, “This way, boys and girls.” In the midst of wandering off course in a chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, a precise suggestion from me can bring some useful illumination to the scholars. It’s a cheery sight, at six-fifteen on a murky morning, to see so many lamps lit up along the roads, and maybe my job is to make reading Dickens and writing essays a bit less obscure and mysterious by setting out, at sufficiently far-flung intervals to preserve some of the enriching darkness, a string of educational lights along the route.
***** NUTTY TEACHING When I saw the hickory nuts spread out on the grass beside my house this morning, I thought, strangely enough, about teaching. I find teaching to be almost always a pleasurable enterprise, but there are times when I need to be, you might say, as hard as the shell of a hickory nut. In the midst of teaching a lesson, occasionally I must present a severe -- even stern -- exterior to the students. I need to sometimes remind them that I am absolutely serious about keeping their attention and teaching them something. It’s not easy to break open a hickory nut, and I need to occasionally demonstrate for the students that my steadfastness is of a sound and indestructible sort. On the other hand, there’s a softer seed inside the hickory nut, a seed that may eventually sprout and produce a prosperous tree, and there’s always, I hope, a softer side to Mr. Salsich that my students can easily see. In every essential way, gentleness is the strongest of all the teaching virtues, and I trust my students can sense the gentleness nestled inside my sometimes steely appearance. Like the hardest hickory nut, I need to be hardy and durable on the outside, but hopefully there’s always a promising seed hiding inside. ***** CLIMBING HIGH ENOUGH
“It’s always a beautiful day, if you just climb high enough.” -- airline pilot to passengers
Each day, I try to climb high enough in my work as a teacher. It’s so easy to get lost in the feeling that everything’s small and restricted in teaching and learning – that I and my handful of students are wee creatures at the center of a diminutive universe called 9th grade English. From that close-up perspective, teaching and learning is little more than a relentless struggle against enormous and persistent obstacles. We may find success one day, but there’s always the fear that some type of failure will find us tomorrow. However, like the pilot, I know that somewhere up above my shortsighted view there’s a perspective that shows English class in its proper place in the universe. My students are learning how to use and understand their language from countless “teachers” each day – my English class, yes, but also everything they read in any class or anywhere, every word they speak or hear, every television show or movie they watch, and on and on. From the largest and farthest perspective – the “big picture”, we might say – Mr. Salsich’s English class on a country road in Connecticut is a minuscule current in an endless and shoreless river of language learning. I’ll keep working hard writing detailed lesson plans and pulling my weight in the classroom, but I’ll also try, as often as possible, to climb in my thoughts to a higher place where the truth of things comes clear – that the river of learning will continue to course along, come what may in my little classroom.
***** WONDROUS THINGS I feel a little odd and old-world this morning, so I’ll use some old-fashioned language and say I hope to behold wondrous things in my classroom today. Actually, that’s my hope everyday, because I’ve become convinced, as my 68 years have passed, that wondrous things happen around me constantly, moment-bymoment, and that all I have to do is open my eyes and behold them. Because the eyes of my mind are usually more closed than open, I have completely missed a countless number of astonishing occurrences - – the slight smiles of students, the way wandering leaves float along in the fall, the sun letting its light down on the walls of my classroom in different ways at different times, the leaning forward of this student and the leaning back of that. I live in the midst of ceaseless miracles, and yet life sometimes seems as featureless as a sheet of paper to my unseeing eyes. Today, though, is a day for wide open eyes and an unfastened mind – a day to truly behold what this impressive universe has prepared for my classroom. Every sentence spoken by the students will be extraordinary, simply because it’s never been spoken before in all of history; every face will shine in ways never seen in the world; every bend and turn of the trees outside the classroom will be beautiful beyond belief. If you can’t see the possibility of this, then perhaps your eyes are just as shut as mine usually are. I wish you a day of simply seeing, like I’m looking forward to today. *****
FACE TO FACE This year one of my teaching goals is to do more face-to-face teaching. By this I don’t mean aggressive, in-your-face teaching – the kind of teaching that takes a teacher right up against the students in a hostile stance, putting him in a contentious position as the students’ opponent instead of partner. That’s the kind of socalled “tough” teaching that I thought was distinctive and first-rate back in my first rash and incautious years in the classroom, but I’ve learned that bluster and only creates chaos in the minds of kids, certainly not wisdom and peace. Given that kind of cantankerous teaching, it’s better for kids to travel the streets for wisdom than waste time in a quarrelsome classroom. I guess I’m talking more about the kind of teaching that takes me and the students face-to face with what should be at the center of all English lessons -- words and ideas. When I’m planning lessons and teaching, I often get lost on side roads and by-paths, instead of focusing on what’s truly important – the significance and influence of individual words and ideas. After a class, I sometimes feel like forceful words and great ideas were lurking along the route of my lesson, but we never managed to come face to face with them. What it will take is a little slowing down on my part. I need to be a more deliberate and unhurried teacher, the kind of teacher who takes his students slowly along the road of a lesson to see the special sights, the words and ideas that can carry kids’ minds to surprising heights. If I don’t “cover” as much in a lesson, at least we haven’t missed the miracles along the way. There will be time for
the students, sooner or later in their remaining 80-some years, to find the miracles we missed. ***** A BEAUTIFUL FINISH When I heard someone exclaim that a certain table had a beautiful finish, I was reminded of a student’s recent essay, and of the student herself. Her essay was certainly not a work of academic perfection, filled as it was with sporadic errors and whole sections of sluggishness, but still, it had what I would call “a beautiful finish.” Just as an antique table might be scattered with nicks and scrapes but still be considered a masterwork, so did this girl’s writing win me over with its modest and sincere artistry. There was a shine on the sentences as I read them -- mostly, I think, because I could sense that she tried her very best and that the words were the work of a big heart. You might say her essay, then, was “finished”, as though, for that single endeavor of her young life, it was as good as it could be. For some reason, it made me think of the sky, and it came to me (I was outside beneath a bundle of fall clouds) that every sky that appears above us – every different display of clouds or haze or sunshine or storms – is perfect just as it is. Every cloudy sky is a perfect cloudy sky – has a perfect finish to it, in other words, just as this girl’s flawed but heartfelt essay was perfect for what it was. There was a finish to it that seemed like something lustrous as I set it down on my desk – my soiled and disordered desk that should have been thankful to have such writing resting
on it.
***** THINGS This morning I fell into thinking about all the “things” I had to do in class today, but fortunately I remembered that English class doesn’t deal with things, but with thoughts. As I prepare my lessons, it seems odd that I often picture myself manipulating “things”, as though teaching English is no more problematical than pulling and pushing furniture to different places in a room, or setting out stones on a garden path. It’s as if I believe that simply by assembling certain “things” (goals, objectives, methods, etc) in the right arrangements, learning will inevitably happen. What I remembered this morning was that teaching is far more like charting the cosmos than arranging “things”, far more like seizing the wind than organizing steps in a lesson. We English teachers deal with words and ideas, which are as different from tangible, maneuverable “things” as clouds are from concrete. Yes, I have to carefully prepare my lessons each day, but that’s sort of like a pilot preparing to fly. In due course he has to place himself in the hands of the vast and capricious winds, and each day I must put myself, with all my carefully composed plans, in the hands, not of “things”, but of evanescent and boundless words and ideas. *****
A STEWARD OF ENGLISH I am a teacher of English, but I sometimes think I’m more of a steward of English. My on-line dictionary tells me that a certain type of steward takes care of people, and perhaps manages some aspect of their lives, and I actually like that as a description of a teacher. It seems to me – and I enjoy reflecting on this – that I’m taking care of my students when I’m teaching them grammar rules or how to read sophisticated novels. They bring me the part of their lives that deals with understanding and using the written word, and I do my best to help them oversee it and hopefully refine and polish it. An airline steward looks after the needs of the passengers, and it seems to me that I do the same for my students as they travel through their widening worlds of writing and reading. If they appear to need punctuation assistance, I’m there with a rule and a smile, just as I am when they need a strenuous but inspiring writing assignment. It has often seemed to me that I am – and perhaps should be – more of a helper than a teacher, more of a steadfast and unassuming servant than a loud leader. I can hear some readers responding that students need leaders more than servants, and of course, in a way, that’s true, but perhaps I can be both a leader and a servant, both a teacher and a steward. I am not at all reluctant to embrace the assignment bestowed on all teachers – that of being of service to students – because it is in serving students that I can best teach them, and it is in taking care of their academic needs that I can be a leader who truly leads. Passengers need stewards to show them the way to an easy and satisfying
flight, and kids need teachers who teach and steer by serving and caring. ***** AS GOOD AS IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE When I came across this dictionary definition of “perfect” this afternoon – “as good as it is possible to be” –it came to me, in a flash, that my students are always perfect. In the face of the seeming ludicrousness of that statement, let me stand by it and say that it does seem to me, now that I think about it, that each of my students – and their English teacher, for that matter – is, at any given moment, as good as he or she can possibly be, at least for that particular moment. At 9:07:53 a.m. or at 1:26:31 p.m., each of us is precisely what we must be at those exact moments in the history of the universe. We are as good as we can possibly be for that specific instant. I think the reason we so often get lost in making judgments about worse, good, better, and best is that we have the all-consuming habit of comparing ourselves at different moments: I’m not as good this moment as I will be in some future moment, or as I was in some past moment. We see ourselves as worse or better or best simply because we live more in the past and future than in the present, and thus we are constantly making comparisons and passing judgments. The plain truth, however, is that my students and I – and all of us – live only in the exact present moment, which is always, to use a current cliché, just what it is. At 10:42:12 a.m. on September 27, 2010, only that moment exists, and it – and we –
are as good as we can possibly be right then and there. When the next moment arrives, we will no doubt be different from the previous moment, and for that new moment, we will be, as usual, a perfect fit. As I thought about this curiously astonishing fact this afternoon, I was sitting in a lawn chair watching leaves float down from the trees, and it occurred to me that we would never think of saying, “Oh too bad. That leaf floated down in an imperfect way”, or “I wish those leaves could do a better job of falling to the ground.” No, we seem to instinctively realize that falling leaves always do their handsome tasks in perfect ways, and it now seems to me, surprisingly enough, that my students and I do too. *****
***** SEEKING CALMNESS “I will seek calmness in my ordinary duties.” -- Rev. Rufus Lyon, in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical
Calmness is not usually associated with teaching teenagers, but lately – like Rev. Rufus Lyon – I’ve been finding some serenity as I go about my everyday duties. I guess there’s goodness in even the slightest tasks of a teacher – distributing papers, bestowing smiles like small presents, listing and describing assignments – and this past week I was blessed and soothed by this usually concealed richness. Nothing special happened – no long leaps forward in learning, no group hurrahs by students as they suddenly grasped
something, no particularly top-notch teaching – but still there was comfort in carrying out the tiny tasks that all teachers must take upon themselves. Just saying to the students, “Let’s take a look at Chapter 4” felt like something special, like lots of things would change because I said it. It may seem silly, but on Wednesday, in a 9th grade class, I walked from one side of the room to the other to throw something in the wastebasket, and the throwing brought the thought that the class would be a calming and winning one, and it was. It’s a curious truth – and Rev. Lyon knew this – that the most pedestrian duties can sometimes be the most restful and inspiring ones. ***** SLOW-WORKING WORDS I sometimes think of my spoken words in class as small specks of yeast released into the dough of the students’ lives. It’s somewhat reassuring to think that at least some of my words might slowly sift their way through the students’ hearts and minds and make at least a small change in the way they think and feel. When I make a loaf of bread from time to time and see the lumpy dough slowly soften and spread and rise, I sometimes think of my students stretching out and transforming day by day, perhaps sometimes because of words said in English class. With my still wide-eyed optimism, I always hope at least a handful of my hundreds of words per class might cause a useful change in the students. Like a baker of bread, however, I must always practice patience. The dough takes almost three hours to gradually give way to the yeast’s
reconstructing powers, and who knows how many hours, months, and even years it may take for a few spoken sentences of mine to take their soft effect? There’s no rushing in fine bread making, and a good teacher knows his words may need years to prove their worth to the inner lives of the students. Of course, most of my spoken words are probably lost forever, like yeast grains spilled in the sink and washed away. Still, I take consolation in the fact that far off in the future, a former student might suddenly understand something new about the nature of this life, partly because of a few slow-working words from a long-ago English teacher. *****
SEEING THE STONES The other day, driving to school among the fall fields and woods, I noticed a small section of a stone fence I’d never seen before, and it amazed me rather the way I was amazed, this morning, by the new things I saw in To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve taught the novel for many years, so you might assume that I’ve already noticed all there is to notice, but this morning I saw, as though for the first time, some qualities of Miss Maudie Atkinson I had apparently missed in earlier readings. I shared my surprise with my students: How can a long-time reader – an English teacher,
no less – miss so many details in a book on numerous readings? Are my reading skills so unsharpened that small details effortlessly dart past me? Quite honestly, the answer is probably yes, and it seems like a gift given to me to be able to say that – to be able to admit that a well-seasoned senior citizen teacher still has tons to learn about serious reading. This was a humbling lesson for me, but a helpful one too – this finding out how far I have to go to as a skillful reader. It helps me hold in mind the most important truth about pinpoint, polished reading – that it’s a mountain whose summit is still somewhere out of my sight. ***** WHO MADE THIS TEACHER? One of the questions I was supposed to ask myself as a small boy in religion class was, “Who made me?” and I’m still asking that question, but rephrased as “Who made this teacher?” It puzzles me, really, this mystery of where this silver-haired, somewhat creased and crumpled senior citizen English teacher came from? Who, or what, made or brought or pushed or dragged or unfolded him to the point where he still loves every second he spends in the classroom? It’s a question that baffles me as much as “Where does the wind begin?” or “What made this moment?” In religion class, the answer was simple -- “God made me” -- and now that I think of it, perhaps a similar force was responsible for making the teacher my students see each day in English class. I am not a church-going person, but surely there’s something vast and endless about the powers that shaped me – the countless spoken words and books and articles
and sights and events and master teachers and conversations. How can I possibly pry into these forces enough to understand the wonderful ways they worked together to assemble Mr. Salsich-the68-year-old-teacher? And it wasn’t just people, but weathers and woodlands and mountains too, and rainstorms when I was six and days of fall light just last week. All of these, and limitless others, threw together, over forty-plus years, this still-young-at-heart instructor who, alongside his students, struggles and fails and prevails each day. Somehow it all happened, and here I am, resting at my desk, lucky to be looking forward to again finding 8 th graders in my classroom in about 16 minutes. *****
THE LARGENESS OF THE WORLD “She wanted the largeness of the world to help her thought.” -- George Eliot, in Felix Holt, The Radical
When Esther Lyon is struggling to make an important decision and stares out at the sky and stars for help, it strikes me as exactly the feeling I often have as I search for help in making the small but special daily decisions about my English classes. More and more as the years pass, I see myself as a minuscule ship in an endless ocean called learning and teaching, with the hesitant captain (me)
always on deck calling into the darkness for assistance. I make dozens of decisions each day as I do my classroom work, of which a fair share seem to produce suitable results, but I often have the hazy but strong presentiment of a vast world of ideas out there that could call down useful lights on the decision-making process. It’s like I’m using a teensy flashlight to make my choices, when allpowerful floodlights are instantly available. In the novel, George Eliot captures this feeling so well as Esther searches the heavens for inspiration. I’ve done something similar as I’ve driven my 40 miles to and from school each day, seeking ideas for lesson plans in the look of peaceful fields and in the way leaves (these days) lift and fall in their light ways along the roads. As I speed along in my small car, the wide world seems immeasurable -- without end and uncharted and chock-full of wisdom. It seems impossible, each morning and evening, that this boundless universe I’m moving through wouldn’t wish me well with a few astonishing ideas for lessons – and, luckily, it sometimes does. There have been days when a thought threw itself into my car as though from the endless civilization of trees or the never-stopping sky. On other days an idea for a lesson seemed to light itself up in the passenger seat beside me, as if to be sure I would notice. I understand Esther as she stands at the dark window and waits for help from “the largeness of the world”, and I also understand her quiet confidence that help will come. ***** WARM ONCE AGAIN
After spending this morning outside in the chilly air watching my granddaughter’s soccer match, I was comforted to be warm once again inside my car, and it reminded me of the feeling I hope my students have, over and over again, when they gain the comfort of at least a small amount of understanding after being “out in the cold” of a baffling book like a A Tale of Two Cities. Actually, it occurred to me, as I was driving away from the field and finding comfort in the car’s warmth, that I should be grateful to the almost frosty air at the field, because without it, I would not have been able to take pleasure in the comparative coziness of the car. First there was ninety minutes of cold, and, then precisely because of it, there was the pure pleasure of warmth. The truth is that if I was always contentedly warm, day after day and year after year, warmth would be thoroughly unexciting, and I’ve known for a long time that a similar odd truth holds in English class. I purposely put my students in seriously disagreeable literary situations – in the frosty regions, you might say, of bewildering books and poems – specifically so they can enjoy the warmth won by persistent and painstaking reading. Like me this morning, if the students don’t suffer some discomfort, where’s the use and blessing of comfort? ***** SECRETS AND MYSTERIES “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” -- Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities
It’s amusing, really, how I sometimes enjoy pretending that I know my students well. It’s as if I’m up on stage playing a role in a play called “The Dedicated Teacher”, and at the same time I’m also in the audience, laughing quietly at the humor of it all. The dedicated teacher walks around the stage with furrowed brow as he struggles to “get to know” his students, while I sit in wonderment in the audience, smiling because nothing is clearer to me than the fact that finding any truth about the inner lives of my students is a hopeless enterprise. While the actor/teacher named Mr. Salsich continually carries forward his mission to make himself into a teacher who “understands” his students, the Mr. Salsich in the front row can’t help but find the funny side of the performance, mainly because of the “wonderful fact” that Dickens understood. I can pretend – and I do it day after day – that I understand people, but that’s as foolish, and funny, as pretending to understand why the universe does what it does, or why Niagara Falls falls the way it does at a given moment. It may sound preposterous to some, but I truly believe that the students in my classroom are as vast and mysterious as a thousand solar systems -- so where’s the honesty in saying I understand them? Do I understand the thousands of ways rivers run? Do I understand where the wind arrives from? Only an actor could carry off such a charade. ***** WINDS AND THOUGHTS Today the wind is working hard among the trees outside my classroom, as though it’s performing some special deeds out
there, but the ideas passing through my life seem soft and easygoing. No great ideas have been stirring today -- no inspiring brainstorms about teaching, no unused and rousing ways to present lessons, no refreshing wisdom. All day I have been living with thoroughly unruffled mental weather – a wonderful situation for daydreams and castles-in-the-sky musing, but not so good for a teacher who waits for ideas the way sailors wait for the wind. As I watch the trees tumbling in the wind outside, I wish a little of that rough and ready liveliness would let itself loose in my mind, but I know, at the same time, that weathers in the mind, like weathers among trees, must constantly change and rejuvenate themselves. Tomorrow the trees might be stock-still and soundless, and a great idea about teaching might break open and blow through my mind. Next week, no winds whatsoever might make their way among the trees, while inside my life good gusts of ideas for class might start up. It takes patience, I guess – watching the weather and thoughts. I have to wait and watch and, before long, I’ll see that both winds and thoughts work the way they must, moment by moment and day by day. ***** WIDE KNOWLEDGE “He was not of the material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in narrow tracks.” -- George Eliot, in Daniel Deronda
When I read this passage this morning, I was first struck by
the phrase “narrow tracks”, I guess because it started me thinking about my 8th and 9th grade students and the strictly regulated roads I make them travel in English class. Young Daniel Deronda, the subject of the above quote, would not have fared well in my class, with its fairly inflexible assignments and meticulous rules and regulations. Something “had sprung up in him” as a boy, sort of a desire to stretch and reach for far-off realms of learning, and my modest but almost fussy essay assignments would surely not have satisfied that desire. He wanted the kind of “wide knowledge” that quite honestly, is probably seldom discovered in my little and limited classroom, but is best searched for in the liberty of the world around us. I must say, though, that I’m a bit like Daniel in that I sincerely wish my students and I could stumble upon this “wide knowledge” more frequently. I wish more poems could propel us past the borders of the usual literary analysis and out into the territories of free-range feeling and thinking. I wish more sentences in stories could send rockets across our minds and make a few lights flash and signal inside us. Maybe it happens more than I think. Maybe the young people in my classroom occasionally come to Deronda’s longed-for “wide knowledge” as they’re working on a formal essay, or perhaps remembering my voice as I spoke the lines of a poem, or maybe just thinking of a classmate’s simple thought shared with sincerity during class. I hope so. ***** WHAT WILL THEY REMEMBER?
This morning I found myself remembering the wonderful stories of Sherwood Anderson, and it soon started me wondering what my students will remember about my classes. I must confess that the words “very little” were the first that came to mind, but then I realized, to my surprise, that I actually remember very little about the Anderson stories. What I remember is the atmosphere of those stories, or what I might call the aura. Thinking back, I feel again the simplicity and sincerity I felt when I first read the stories – the sense of everyday lives described in a skillfully straightforward and seemingly effortless way. I honestly can’t recall a single scene or character from the stories – just the aura, the atmosphere, the soft and earnest shine that seemed to rise from the sentences. I guess I wouldn’t be disappointed if the students recalled my classes that way -- not because they learned how to read Robert Frost or use commas correctly, but because a certain impression of kindness and openness and slowly-increasing understanding seemed to suffuse the classes. I hope the students gain some specific knowledge that will help them in their future school years, but more importantly, I hope they gain a certain new impression about books and words and writing – a fresh feeling for their possibilities, an awareness of the wisdom available inside them. Years from now, when former students are asked what they recall about Mr. Salsich’s class, I would hope they might respond with words like “quiet” or “peaceful” or “fulfilling”. Whether they remember writing with participles or the poetry of Ezra Pound pales in comparison.
***** JUST BE A LIGHT “What in me is dark Illumine...” -- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1
Like most teachers, I occasionally fuss and upset myself over what exactly I’m supposed to be doing – just what this bewildering line of work is actually all about – but every so often these wonderful words come back to me: “Just be a light.” Years ago, when I was adrift and far off-course as a novice teacher, someone gave me this advice, and it sometimes reappears in my mind, often just when the darkness is greatest – when I have no clear idea what I’m doing in the classroom (which, after 40+ years, still happens to me on a regular basis). It reminds me that being a teacher is really an astonishingly simple task. All it involves, as Milton seemed to understand, is shining a light on what’s already there, inside the students. Yes, there’s a lot of darkness in the students – the darkness of ignorance, perplexity, and miscalculation – but all darkness of any kind disappears instantly when a light shines on it. In a sense, I don’t have to add anything to my students’ inner lives, but rather just shine a light so they can see the wisdom they’ve been harboring inside them all their young lives. Of course, I teach them new concepts and skills, but these, I think, are simply more lights to shine on and dispel the darkness of ignorance so the astuteness of the students can shine like it should. I don’t have to
change the students, or help them grow, or insert new ideas in their minds. Teaching is simply a question of lighting their world up to some extent -- essentially a rather simple task, like switching on a lamp to let a good light show what’s always been there. ***** VAGUENESS AND MYSTERY “To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery.” -- George Eliot, in Silas Marner
When I read this sentence today, it came to me that my students and I are little different from Eliot’s “peasants of old times”, but at least we’re luckier, because books can bring us out from the little prisons of our “direct experience”. Like many of us, the students and I exist, for the most part, in the undersized universe that we encounter moment by moment – the sights and sounds and words of our rather restricted lives -- but the books we study in English class can help our worlds, at least to some extent, unwrap and widen. Without books, we are fixed firmly in our personal lives, but fortunately, my students and I share the boundless universe of written words. However, that doesn’t mean the sense of vagueness and mystery is absent. The world of literature presents no clearness or straightforwardness for us – just inscrutability of a new and occasionally astonishing kind. A book like A Tale of Two Cities confronts my young readers with mental mountains and mazes, but at least they’re mountains and mazes
that can show the students the way out from their limited adolescent lives. Great books bring great worlds to us in my classroom, a modest space on a quiet Connecticut road where vagueness and mystery sometimes make larger lives for us. ***** TRUSTING SIMPLICITY “The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner's face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that defenceless, deer-like gaze …” -- George Eliot, in Silas Marner
I guess the “trusting simplicity” I sometimes see in my students’ faces is what I love almost best about teaching – and I wish I could reclaim more of it for myself. I love the ease with which the students seem to think – the way thoughts apparently pop up inside them like bubbles in a brook, and the way the kids often have full faith in them. My so-called “mature” mind is so conditioned to pass judgment on every thought, that I’m almost powerless to welcome ideas as they display themselves by the thousands inside me, but my students share the trusting assurance of Silas Marner. They seem to sense that thoughts – any thoughts – have unusual powers and should at least be received and appreciated, if not listened to and worshipped. Marner’s strength, perhaps, was his “absence of special observation”, and I see the same quality in my young scholars. They often come to class with “deer-like gaze[s]”, seemingly seeing English class as an utter mystery, like a light in their eyes in darkness – but there’s an
adolescent acceptance in those eyes that can make for a large measure of learning. Because they’re not looking for anything in particular, it may be that they can see the surprising and special truths that sometimes start up in class like the smallest froths in a stream – truths that I, with my constantly critical mind, might miss. *****
RAKING LEAVES AND WORDS I still persist in rounding up fallen leaves the old-fashioned way, with a rake, mostly because it’s a soft and hushing kind of activity, much like writing often is for me – as I hope it sometimes is for my students. These last few days I’ve loved the silence of the yard as I’ve swept the rake back and forth, finding a strange kind of serenity with almost every stroke. As the leaves let themselves be brought together in piles, so do my feelings seem to fall into their proper and peaceful places inside me. The noise of stressful thoughts subsides into softness very much like the sounds made by my moving rake. I try to write a paragraph each day, and I often find a similar smoothness in the process of setting words and sentences down in a disciplined fashion. There’s sometimes a sense of almost flawless synchronization in the writing, as if the words can do nothing else but be just where they are on the page. A miserable day can become as soft as piles of leaves once a paragraph’s words are put down. Is it ever the same with my
students? Perhaps not often, but I do hope they can occasionally feel the fullness of peace that placing words carefully together can bring. Perhaps, in the privacy of their rooms at home, they can sometimes see their words become as one on the computer screen as easily and softly as leaves assemble on lawns these days. ***** LED BY NATURE On the long drive to school this morning, I fell in behind a truck bearing the logo, “Led by Nature,” and fairly quickly I thought, “ That’s what I should be in the classroom.” I’m all too often led by my personal and usually small-minded ideas about how to do this and why to do that, and all I get out of that leadership is what seems to me to be pretty superficial results. On the surface, I guess I accomplish a fair amount in my classes, but underneath, where soul-shaking learning occurs, my personal kind of management doesn’t have much of an effect. While I’m pursuing my individual goals on the outside, on the inside the students’ lives probably continue to move along on their unchanged paths. I long ago realized that I do my best teaching when I get myself out of the way – when I’m rather modestly following the lead of what I might call inspirations, or flashes, or revelations. Old-time poets spoke of listening to the Muse while they were writing, and perhaps that’s what I’m experiencing when my teaching is on-target – the sway and influence of ideas that simply don’t seem to have come from inside me. Maybe it’s nature, or the universe, or even what some
people call “God”, but whatever label we choose to place on it, it’s a forceful presence beside me when my teaching is going well. It’s like there’s no Mr. Salsich anymore – just teaching and learning. It’s like the teacher had disappeared into the wind, and only the wind is blowing.
***** MAKING FUN OF A TEACHER I would definitely dislike it if anyone made fun of my teaching, but over the years, I have learned to enjoy making cheerful and heartfelt fun of myself. After school, I sometimes sit in my classroom laughing to myself at all the foolishness I had put on display during my classes – all the self-important posturing, all the posing as a distinguished, higher-than-thou individual, all the pretending and play-acting, as though I am actually an unusually
talented teacher. Occasionally I even break into gentle laughter as I picture myself striding around the room, cross-examining my students about the subtleties of Dickens’ prose, lecturing about the light that can lift up from fine sentences, sometimes leading the class in cheers for themselves. I see myself, then, in those insightful after-school moments, as a devoted and moderately capable actor playing a sometimes momentous but always slightly amusing role. I think what I find so funny is the seriousness with which I take myself, as though a greater weight rests on my shoulders than on most other people’s. My teaching wouldn’t be quite so amusing if I wasn’t so unreservedly earnest about it, so thoroughly convinced, it seems, that I am a kind of knight in shining armor for my young pupils. I seem to be saying, “Let other folks find their way in menial occupations; I labor in an honored and hallowed calling.” Yes, I get some good laughs as I drive to school in the morning and recall this histrionic classroom performer named Mr. Salsich. My almost-daily laughter before school is good for me, because it always slows me down and lets me see, again, the simple truth – that I’m no better or greater than anyone else trying to do a decent job, be it controlling pests, building bridges, or creating English lessons for kids. All of us are, in a very good sense, actors playing roles the universe bestows on us, and all the roles are of equal value. While I’m on stage in my classroom, the maintenance guys are on another stage down the hall, and the bus drivers have their own special stage to strut their very necessary stuff on. What I have to do is keep playing my role with heartiness and fidelity, while always remembering that
it’s simply one of a zillion parts played across the cosmos -- and that it deserves a light-hearted laugh every so often. ***** BLOWING LEAVES OR SMOOTH MACHINES Watching the fall leaves taking flight and scattering across the streets of my New England village today helped me understand something about myself – that I’d like to teach more like blustering leaves than a steady machine. I loved seeing the spirited movements of the leaves in today’s winds, as though they were full of honest and spontaneous get-up-and-go and were simply expressing their instinctive leafyness. I know they’re just dead leaves drifting around in a purposeless way, but they brought an important truth to mind about my work with students – that throwing aside carefulness occasionally and just moving freely through lessons like leaves on the streets would tell the students that their teacher takes looseness and spontaneity seriously. I don’t want the students to see a machine called a teacher in the front of the room, faking it as a bona fide person and being merely a mechanism that moves through lessons like a lifeless apparatus. Of course, I do have to have detailed plans prepared for each class, but there have to be times, too, when the plans are put aside in favor of a little liberty and even foolishness for a few minutes. There’s something reassuring about a teacher taking off his formality for a time and treating himself and his students to some short-term fun. It seems, once again, that the teacher is one of us, simply a person sharing, with pleasure, the honest-to-goodness spirit of his life.
***** HAVE A JOYFUL CLASS! A friend once told me that his definition of “joy” is simply “the expectation of good”, which, if he’s accurate, means that I have a joyful class every day. I fully look forward to good things happening in each of my classes – spanking new ideas, subtle transformations in students, surprising shifts and new understandings in discussions. Why shouldn’t I expect good, when I’m blessed with the presence of kids whose lives are unfurling with fresh thoughts each moment? Why shouldn’t good give us its gifts each day, when all of us in the classroom carry immeasurable goodness inside us? There are, for sure, times when I don’t feel this joy – when I seem certain that more problems than pleasures will arise in a class – and I must confess to not understanding why this attitude occasionally comes over me. It seems as silly as visiting the Grand Canyon and expecting more unsightliness than magnificence, or being given a thousand dollars and droning on about why it’s not a thousand and five. My students and I aren’t perfect, but neither, I guess, are sunsets or snowfalls, but they sure stir up some joy in me, and so does every English class. ***** ON NOT KNOWING WHAT WILL HAPPEN On many mornings, as I drive to school I think about an astounding fact – that I have no idea what will happen at any given
moment in my classes. Sure, I have my lesson plans, usually fairly tidy and comprehensive, but that’s simply a wise kind of guesswork, sort of like a meteorologist saying how the winds of a storm will swirl on a particular street. The truth is that countless varieties of events await my students and me at every second – situations, spoken words, wild ideas from far off, interruptions of the most far-fetched kinds – and my precious plans are no more to those events than a sieve is to rain drops. Emerson wrote that we should “mount to paradise/ By the stairway of surprise”, which tells me he would be happy with my English classes, where, in a sense, surprises happen every passing second. How, for instance, can my students and I possibly predict what thoughts will materialize in our minds in a 48 minute class? And how can we foretell what feelings we will have, or what words will pass among us like haphazard puffs of our minds? Perhaps, in fact, we do have a sort of paradise in my classroom, a place where surprise parties happen every day. ***** A TINY FLY ON THE TEMPEST Yesterday, as I was rereading parts of The Tempest outside, I noticed a tiny insect making its way across some lines of Prospero, and I couldn’t help but think of my students and me in English class. As I watched the little creature crawling among the words on the page, turning to the right and left and looking over the edges of the book, I thought of all of us in class as we work our way through
Shakespeare or Dickens, sometimes moving slowly, struggling to see some sense in the words. I include myself in this, for after 46 years in the classroom, I still occasionally get as lost among Dickens’ sentences as the small fly that was wandering around on my Shakespeare page yesterday. Like the fly, I sometimes seem to be staring out from the edge of a page in absolute bewilderment. As I watched the insect, I also thought of the transient nature of his life, and of all things, including our understandings of the words we read. Soon the insect will be simply a wisp of the dust of the measureless universe, and so, to be honest, will the ideas my students and I dream up about a Browning poem or Prospero’s statements. We ourselves are comparatively small specks of life in this limitless universe, and, like everything, we will go where the universe carries us and leave our lives behind when the universe is still as fresh as an infant. The ideas we share in English class are like spanking new lights in the shadows, but soon our lights will flicker and fall away and new lights will take their places in the everlasting procession of ideas. As Prospero says, “our little life is rounded with a sleep” -- the insect’s little life in the midst of the majestic words of Shakespeare, as well as the lives of my students and me as we shine the fearless lamps of our thoughts onto the sometimes mystifying words we read. ***** BIRDS IN THE BUSH I try to focus on getting “a bird in the hand” in my daily English classes – a specific and detailed lesson taught with
thoroughness – but I must also confess to enjoying the sense that there are multitudes of “birds in the bush” somewhere out there in the distances beyond my little lessons. While I’m teaching a lesson on metaphors in A Tale of Two Cities, I hope the students come to an understanding of what a metaphor is and how Dickens distinctively uses them in the novel, but I also hope they gain at least a hazy awareness of the multifarious extended meanings of these metaphors – meanings that reach far out beyond the words on the pages. I want them to be able to deal successfully with my assignments and tests involving metaphors, but, more significantly, I want them to get a glimpse of the limitless “birds in the bush”, those furtive truths that surround any great literary work and extend out beyond reckoning. We’ll never truly take hold of and fully understand most of those truths, but perhaps that’s precisely what makes them special – their remoteness, their inaccessibility, their dimness and secrecy, like far-off mountains we can admire only from a distance. Sometimes a simple question like “Why does it matter?” can start students thinking about these misty, distant truths, as in “Why does it matter that Dickens compares wine spilled in the streets to blood? Why does it matter for our lives – teenagers and an old teacher – right here and now, in October of 2010? Why does it matter that we even read this strange, inscrutable book?” These are questions that can’t ever be definitely answered, like mountains that can’t ever be reached and climbed. All we can do is ask them and wonder, hoping to get a hint, at least, of the birds in the bush beyond counting.
***** A PERFECT CLASS It often occurs to me, right in the middle of a class, that everything is happening exactly as it should – that it’s a perfect class, another words. Of course, this doesn’t happen when I’m mired in a small-minded view of things – when I’m seeing the class and my lesson as a piece of complicated machinery that depends on only me for its efficient operation. When that’s my line of thought, nothing is ever perfect – not the lesson, not the kids, not the distracting sounds in the hall, not even the songs of birds outside.
When I’m looking at my life in the classroom with a shortsighted, always-disparaging lens, defects bordering on disarray seem to be everywhere. There are times, though, when I feel the strange sense of being far, far above the classroom and quietly looking down on the comings and goings of the seasoned teacher and his students. With that distant, wide-angle view -- one that takes in not only the small classroom in the Connecticut countryside, but the fields and cities of the state, the spreading earth itself with its endless abundance, as well as the continuous stars -- all seems right in Mr. Salsich’s Room 2, just as all seems right with any sunset or wave in the sea or wind in the trees. Small-minded views pass judgments; big-picture views sit back and appreciate.
***** A GRATEFUL HEART A respected colleague has often told me the most important quality in a good teacher is an open mind, and several others believe it’s a caring heart – but my vote goes to a grateful heart. When I become befuddled and filled with unease in my work with middle school students, the only assured remedy for me is turn to gratitude and its gifts. I have so much to be grateful for that it would take me many hours after school to list it all, but just a few
minutes usually succeeds in lessening my concerns. After an exasperating day in the classroom, by 3:30, after some serious assistance from gratitude, I’m usually smiling with a kind of humble satisfaction. After all, with all the gifts I’ve been given – my faithful and affectionate family, the teaching I’m privileged to do each day, the food that fills my refrigerator week after week, the lungs that let life renew itself inside me, the sun that unfailingly rises for me each morning – why shouldn’t I absolutely shout with gratitude? Why shouldn’t I constantly smile in the classroom, since I’m one of the luckiest people on earth – a person who not only was born on third base, but gets constantly reborn there every second, all set to easily score. I don’t have much money in the bank, but better than that, I have a limitless supply of inspiring thoughts and generous feelings, fostered in me over the years by the inspiring and generous people I’ve been fortunate to know. Dollars can disappear, but thankful thoughts and feelings flow from far off, ceaselessly, and I feel their force day after day without end. For allergies I go to my doctor; for unease about my teaching, I go to a grateful heart. ***** THE BIG BANG AND ME When I get confused and downcast about my teaching, it sometimes helps to remember that all the atoms in my body were brought into being by the “big bang” many billions of years in the past. Fantastic as it seems, scientists say that all matter was made those many eons ago, and that I am composed of atoms that have
made a magnificent journey from that original explosion, circulating through countless material forms and eventually finding each other in the form called “me”. Inside me, while I’m fussing about whether I taught the use of prepositions properly enough, atoms from the unimaginable past are performing their tasks with inconceivable precision. It’s as if I have a universe inside me, one that’s as old as the oldest star, and one that’s been dancing, in one form or another, for around fifteen billion years. When a lesson breaks down almost before it starts, or when the students seem miles away in daydreams during a Shakespeare discussion, it helps to remember what’s really happening – that right here in the midst of my tedious lesson, immeasurable numbers of atoms are staging an unseen but astonishing show. My seemingly wearisome words, the students’ lassitude, the featureless fluorescent lighting, all are part of a performance the universe has been masterminding for what might as well be forever. It’s not about me and some kids and prepositions and Shakespeare; it’s about atoms as old as stars spinning ceaselessly and flawlessly around in a place in the limitless universe called a classroom. ***** GONE FISHING I don’t fish in lakes and rivers, but I do try my luck at my desk when I’m designing plans for my classes. It’s a cheerful process for me, simply tossing a line into the never-ending stream of ideas that flows through this universe, and then, like an unflappable fisherman, waiting for nibbles. I’m not hard to please when I’m
fishing for ideas. Like most fishermen, I bring in whatever bites, whatever suggestion rises from the depths, even if it seems utterly lackluster or perilously bizarre. I pull up the idea, and nine times out of ten, after inspecting it with a trusting eye and a welcoming heart, I put it into place in the lesson plan. If that sounds like a naive and reckless approach to teaching, I prefer to think of it as an unrestrained and ingenuous one – a way of teaching that enables me to accept some of the zillions of extraordinary but zany-seeming ideas a more cautious teacher might discard. For there are, indeed, countless ideas available for me to use in class, some of them completely crazy looking, but it is often those outlandish ones that set a lesson off and flying. Does this policy sometimes produce disasters – lessons that limp out the classroom door like duds? Of course, but it also produces, way more often, a sense among the students that something special is happening. I’ll continue to take my chances as I fish for ideas, fully believing that the strangest ones can occasionally call forth the finest learning. ***** PUTTING ON THE BRIGHT LIGHTS Driving to school today in the morning darkness, I appreciated the usefulness of the car’s bright lights as I flashed them up occasionally, and it started me thinking about the kind of lights I shine for my students on certain obscure passages in the books we read together. Admittedly, much of A Tale of Two Cities remains in darkness as my students read the pages, just as the countryside is
covered in darkness as I pass along the the back roads on my way to school. It’s a veiled and baffling book, in many ways, and the best I can do for my students is shine the bright lights of my reading wisdom, as much as I have, on certain murky sections. They have possibly another 70 years in which to explore the great novel; what I want to do is drive them through it for the first time in a slow and exploratory way, appreciating the strange darkness and using the bright lights to occasionally shine some understanding on the road ahead. ***** SNAPPING OUT OF IT When he saw me sinking into one of my listless, lazy moods, my dad used to say, “Snap out of it”, and it has often seemed to me that my students and I do some of that kind of snapping in English class. There’s a kind of sleep-inducing dreaminess that occasionally comes over my classroom, almost like a soft cloud of slowness has descended on us, and it’s lucky for all of us that something usually happens to snap us out of it. It might be a sentence from To Kill a Mockingbird, or a few phrases from an Emerson essay, or some spoken words sprung on us by one of the students, or even a sudden sweep of wind in the trees outside – something usually cracks open the sleepiness so it drains away and leaves some fresh attentiveness in its place. Now and then it’s my brusque words that arouse the students, as happened today when a boy was spellbound by sparrows outside the windows and a few words from
me forced him back to our discussion, but usually something more commonplace occurs to carry us back from dreamland. I’ve seen a whole class suddenly sit up and look alert when a student speaks a few forceful words about a story or poem. It’s like an alarm sounded, or sunshine suddenly fell on us after a few overcast days, or lights came on in a dark stadium. It happens every day in English class, sometimes over and over, this rising up from the slumber of tedium, this graceful snapping out of it. *****
RHYTHMS This morning as I drove to school and gratefully found the sunlight once again spreading across the countryside, as it has each morning for many billions of years, I got to thinking about the rhythms of all things, including the rhythms of English class. There’s night, morning, and then night again, and in English class
there’s confusion, understanding, and then confusion again. Like the rising and falling and rising of my lungs, or the silence of the wind and then its shrieking and then its silence again, my lessons soar and stagger and, sooner or later, soar again. All comes round in a rhythm – seasons, beats of hearts, the attentiveness and carelessness of students, the success and collapse of my teaching. I even realized, as I drove toward school this morning, that rhythm is behind the beauty of the literature I love. The reason certain sentences stay in my thoughts is because of the musical movements of the words – the way sounds shift and flow in graceful patterns. Aspiring writers, I often think, should foster a love for the music of words, because their best writing has to work like melodies work, making ideas and feelings flow with force and stylishness. I’m going to talk more with my students about this idea of rhythm – about looking for rhythms of all kinds in the books we read, and about bringing some easy rhythms into their essays. They could do something as simple as repeat some ‘s’ sounds in a few sentences, or set up a reverberating pattern among phrases in a paragraph. They could look for the rise and fall of successive subordinate clauses in Dickens, or the straightforward but long-celebrated repetitions of iambic pentameter in Shakespeare. They could do this – or they could look out the classroom window at the rhythms of birds’ wings as they flutter back and forth from the feeder. Rhythm is rhythm – and beautiful – wherever it’s found.
***** SACREDNESS “Sunday bells were a mere accident of the day, and not part of its sacredness.” --George Eliot, in Silas Marner
When I read this sentence this morning, it occurred to me that just about everything that happens in my classroom seems more like a casual accident than a sacred event. Truth is, I don’t often see any type of sacredness or blessedness or holiness or purity in my work as a high school English teacher. What I mostly see is a seemingly haphazard, hit-or-miss assortment of activities which appear to arrive out of nowhere at the start of class and disappear without delay at the end. I plan my lessons rigorously each day, but still, I have a strong sense that uncertainty and arbitrariness are concealed beneath it all. Even when I’m operating with the most carefully polished and foolproof lesson plan, everything seems to be perilously close to confusion and chaos just below the surface. So, no, I don’t often see the sacredness Eliot speaks of, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know it’s there. One dictionary gives this as a definition for “sacred” – “regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular group or individual” – and, by that definition, everything that happens in my classroom is sacred, for all of it is, to me, as special as a church service or a momentous ceremony. Yes, it’s just a bunch of kids and a senior-citizen teacher talking about poems or paragraphs or faulty punctuation or the power of iambic pentameter, but to me it might as well be high mass at St. Peter’s.
We don’t do anything spectacular – no fancy words or sentences, no world-shattering statements, no suddenly reshaped lives – but just the same, there’s something singular and wondrous about what happens. After all, young-at-heart human beings (myself included) are thinking and speaking with all the freshness of their youthfulness, and new ideas are being born faster than we can follow them. Pages of books sometimes break open for us like small gold mines, and we’ve all felt -- my students and I, every so often during class -- the flight of surprising and unforgettable thoughts inside us. It’s true that most of my minutes in English class are nothing like sacred – just the routines of a teacher and kids carrying out the duties of academia – but occasionally I spring awake, for some reason, and see the wonder of what we’re doing in my little classroom on a quiet country road in Connecticut. ***** BRAVERY WITH A BOOK October 30, 2010 As I was listening to my 7-year-old grandson read aloud to me this evening, the earnestness and intensity in his voice as he sounded out the words was a reminder of what a brave and audacious process reading really is. Those of us who have been reading rather easily for years may have lost sight of the thrill and fear involved in setting out for a trek through a book when you’re just a beginner. I could almost feel Noah’s nervous
wholeheartedness as he stared at each word and worked out its meaning, almost as if he was hiking up a severe but spectacular mountain trail. When he was finished with the story, his smile and soft exclamations of pleasure told of a boy who had been on a brave adventure and come through. Later, as I was doing some reading myself, I sensed in myself some of the exhilaration I saw in my grandson. I realized, once again, that reading words is as astonishing an act as anything a person can do. Each word was a door to somewhere strange, each sentence a set of wondrous signals. Just by understanding marks on a page I was wandering into other worlds, thinking surprising thoughts, feeling life getting fuller, sort of like Noah a few hours ago. ***** SHUTTING UP This week, thanks to my courageous grandson, I’m going to work on shutting up in the classroom. Noah, who is just seven and striving earnestly as a novice reader, was reading to me this afternoon, and I had to seriously struggle to stop myself from helping him. Whenever he would pause over a word, I was right there with my help, ready with a handy hint to keep him going and get him some good feelings. Always the teacher, I was trying a little too hard to teach this lad who, I soon realized, just wanted to work this out by himself. Luckily, I learned my lesson within a few minutes, and was soon sitting back and staring at Noah’s face and mouth as he made his brave way to the end of the story. By
shutting myself up, I made it possible for him to have a small triumph, and I intend to take that approach with my students this week. A teacher has to know how to shut up, stare, and be amazed. ***** DIMMING MY HEADLIGHTS In the morning darkness today, I occasionally had to dim my headlights so as to make it easier for oncoming drivers to see their way ahead, and it started me thinking about my students and their need for a clear road to follow in the sometimes mystifying darkness of English class. We read books that can bring on a cloud of confusion and obscurity, and the writing projects I assign can produce the kind of puzzlement a nighttime driver might experience when faced with oncoming bright lights on a dark road. I purposefully put the students into these murky situations, because it often fashions a wonderful kind of learning, but at times I need to soften the lights of my own senior-citizen, seasoned-teacher wisdom so the kids can see where they’re going. It’s all too easy for me to metaphorically speed along the roads of my lessons with my 68year-old knowledge shining its brightest lights, but that often makes it almost impossible for the students to steer a successful course. Faced with my almost constant stream of advice, suggestions, directions, instructions, and opinions, it’s not surprising that the students occasionally lose their way and wonder where in the world they are. It sounds strange, but the truth is that I can sometimes be the best kind of teacher by dimming the lights
of my own ideas, sometimes even turning them off completely. When kids are lost in misunderstanding and perplexity, the last thing they need is the imperious intellect of the teacher shining straight into their eyes. Maybe, in fact, they sometimes need total darkness, so their own promising thoughts can start to throw some youthful light on the road before them. ***** FACE TO SCREEN FACE Today I had to teach the old-time way, and it was a refreshing pleasure. The Internet at my school was down, so I was forced to do what teachers have been doing for millennia: I simply sat face-toface with the students and shared thoughts with them. Instead of walking around the room while the students stared at various aspects of the lesson projected on the screen, I pulled my chair close in a circle with the students and we just spoke to each other for a full 30 or 40 minutes. There were no gadgets, widgets, thingamabobs, or doohickeys – just young-at-heart learners learning, again, how to look at and listen to each other. It was a powerful lesson, for me, about the force and magnificence of simple, sincere conversation. It didn’t make me want to turn away from using technology in the classroom, but it did forewarn me against forgetting about what should be the centerpiece of any classroom – a teacher and students sharing ideas. Computers and projectors and screens are machines; teachers and students are works of wisdom and passion. Tomorrow I will use the machines, when it’s
beneficial, but the students and this fortunate teacher will stay center-stage, speaking and listening and learning as one. ***** COUNTING THE SUNNY HOURS I heartily accept the often-heard accusation that I’m a hopeless optimist when it comes to my students, and I think I actually enjoy hearing it, because it never fails to remind me of the sundial I used to see in my grandmother’s garden, the one that had “I only count sunny hours” inscribed on it. I used to think a lot about that sundial’s message when I was younger, about the fact that there’s so much sunshine in our lives, so much to marvel at and be grateful for, and I began to be bewildered as to why people so often insisted on seeing only the sinister side of things, counting mostly the gloomy hours instead of the sunny ones. It may be that I began “looking on the bright side” way back then, when that silvery sundial showed me that brightness is a big part of our world, and that sincere and sensible cheerfulness about things could be mine for the choosing. And it is a choice. When I sit in meetings concerning students and listen to list after list of negatives about the kids, I sometimes think, “What if we chose to use these sixty minutes to make a list of the strengths of the students instead of the weaknesses? What if we counted the moments of sunshine these students bless us with instead of detailing, over and over, their faults and failings?” It is definitely a choice, and I choose, whenever possible, to focus on the brightness rather than the
darkness. If I have one hour to talk about 40 students, I’m going to give a report on the sometimes small and scarcely noticeable strengths I saw in the past week – perhaps Peter being polite to a girl in the hall, or Jeanine jumping for joy when her friend got a good grade in English class, or Karrie Lee creating one splendid paragraph in an otherwise undistinguished essay. There’s enough darkness in the world without my adding more to it. I choose to see the sunshine in my students’ work, and there’s always a generous supply of it. Even Jerry, who’s just managing to pass my course, occasionally says something in a discussion that will wake up the room as though newfound lights have been suddenly switched on. ***** WALKING SLOWLY IN TRAFFIC This morning, in rush-hour traffic on a dark road, I paused at a light and watched a man walking very slowly and casually across the dark street, and for some reason it brought to mind some of my students, who amble along in the quietness of their own lives as I am rushing here and there through lessons and assignments. Cars were busy on the roads this morning, making their swift way to their destinations, while this fellow followed his own free will and walked as though the road was all his. It brought me up short to share the busy street with a man who made dispassionate walking a special skill. At 6:15 a.m., he obviously had no place in particular to go, so he gave leisurely and on-the-loose walking all his attention. In English class, I usually have many places to go – goals to reach, lessons to be learned, little and big tasks to be undertaken
– so I’m sure the students often see me as someone set on getting somewhere fast, so fast that they sometimes, no doubt, take no notice of me as I speed by with my fancy lessons. I suspect most of my teenage students are somewhat like this morning’s undisturbed walker, more interested in being peaceful than in pursuing faint and far-off academic goals. They see the “traffic” of my English lessons dashing hither and thither, and I’m sure they sometimes simply keep walking in their minds to make their tranquility last. Yes, they learn a few things in my class, but the best part, for them, is most likely the little trips they take with their daydreaming thoughts, like a man strolling with serenity across the traffic. ***** WAKEFUL THINKING As a teacher, I’ve been accused, now and then, of what is called “wishful thinking”, but I prefer to think of it as wakeful thinking. The wishful thinker often manufactures castle-in-the-sky successes where no authentic accomplishments exist, whereas the wakeful thinker simply sees what’s actually right in front of him. This world is a place of ceaseless wonders, from leaves in the fall to the look on a face in front of a sunrise to the moves fingers make on a keyboard, and wakefulness works to help me see those wonders. My students are not perfect academicians, but every day they bring their individual miracles with them to class, and I watch, and am sincerely grateful, for them. I’m talking about just about anything, because just about anything is a miracle – the way Milly gives her always surprising thoughts in a discussion, the way George turns
in his seat in the sunshine from the window, the staring at the windows that Hugh does when he wanders away in his mind, the steady smiles of Kyle. I try to think in a wakeful way because I don’t want to miss any of the countless little wonders that occur in every class. No, the kids don’t always connect with my lessons, and no, they don’t always behave like first-class boys and girls, but they can’t help but bring their miraculous lives with them when they enter my room. All their hearts are pumping with precision and their lungs are lifting and falling flawlessly, which are miracles enough for me to want to stay wakeful and watch these young wonders who do their English work with me each day. ***** EVALUATING A STUDENT CALLED THE OCEAN With the passing years, it seems more and more foolhardy of us teachers to believe we can accurately evaluate “the whole child”. I’ve sat in meeting after meeting where we assess not only the students’ academic work, but occasionally drift over to discussing their emotional and personal lives as well, and increasingly it makes very little sense to me. We say things like “He looks like a very angry boy” or “She doesn’t really care about the quality of her work” or “He’s sometimes dishonest” – statements that often have no demonstrable, provable basis, and that deal only with a minuscule part of the students’ lives. They’re little more than sincere but casual comments – and yet we seem to believe they actually help to evaluate “the whole child”. It seems as unrealistic as presuming we can evaluate the “whole ocean” by describing a few
surface features at one particular beach. I don’t mean to be flippant about this, but I sometimes imagine a meeting in which teachers who live near a particular beach evaluate “the whole ocean.” They comment on things they noticed on the surface of the water at their beach – the way waves work on various days, the colors of the breakers, the kinds of birds that come and go – and then they proceed to evaluate the entire ocean. They make the gigantic jump from a few informal observations of one speck of the surface of the immense ocean to an evaluation of the entire ocean! Surely we can see how foolish this is, and yet is it any more foolish than assuming we can come to an understanding of a “whole teenager” by commenting on a few chance behaviors? To me – and I couldn’t be more serious – each of my students is as inscrutable as the ocean, as sphinx-like as the endless sky. With my training as an English teacher, I have reasonable assurance that I can appraise their abilities as writers and readers, but that’s like making passing observations about one aspect of the surface of the sea. Underneath all my English assessments – my grades, comments, reports, and recommendations – the immeasurable lives of the students remain, like the unfathomable ocean, an undisclosed mystery. ***** WHERE’S THE LOVE? When a friend of mine received a seeming rebuff from his girlfriend the other day, for a while it seemed to him that all love had left his life, and, oddly enough, I have a feeling my students in
English class share that feeling sometimes. Of course, we don’t deal with love in some traditional senses, but if love can mean the enjoyment of and appreciation for others, then there’s at least a modest supply of love in my classes. My students and I usually do our best to bring a feeling of friendship to our discussions, and all our smiles and nods and encouraging comments to each other are surely a kind of classroom love. It’s an atmosphere I try to foster in my classes – a sense of closeness and comradeship, a feeling of being fellow learners instead of opposing rivals. Nevertheless, now and then students, I’m sure, feel that friendship is miles away from Room 2 – students, perhaps, who have little success with essays or sit silent and isolated during discussions – and to those students, and my friend, love probably seems faded and far-off. To them, it’s like love is a bank account that’s been closed for good. What I hope my friend and my students can come to understand is that love is not a material commodity, like dollars or diamond rings or pieces of paper with ‘A’s at the top. Love is made of something way different than material objects that start and stop and break down and die away. Love is like the wind that has no starting or finishing place, or like the everlasting sunshine, always with us, steady and supportive behind even the occasional covers of our personal clouds. I hope my friend and my students can always see it. ***** A DROP IN THE BUCKET I occasionally like to reflect on this old saying, especially when I’m thinking, as I often do, about the vastness of the bucket called
“teaching English”. I say thousands of words each day to my students, and I teach hundreds of lessons each year, but it is completely clear to me that these words and lessons are mere drops in a bucket that’s as big as the starry sky. If my students wanted to learn everything possible about reading, writing, thinking, and listening, it would take them not 180 days, but 180 years, the subject is that colossal. After all, in English class we deal with ideas, those short-lived but endlessly spacious and spread-out forces that preside over the world. Our bucket is indeed enormous, and my day-by-day instructions, as sincere as they may be, are just small tinklings in a container of incalculable proportions. ***** METAPHORS: ENDLESS RESEMBLANCES The 9th graders and I have been discussing metaphors recently, and, as always for me, it has called forth an appreciation for the astonishing resemblances among all things. Metaphors have been prominent in literature from the earliest writings, partly because of these resemblances – these secret and strange similarities that seem to be interfused through the universe. Indeed, everything, when studied with interest, seems to be somehow similar to everything else, somehow much more like a sister and brother to everything than a stranger. A cast iron pot is like a person’s concern for others, a soft carpet is like a smile, a sky in November is like the lonesomeness we sometimes feel, and a discarded tissue is like anything you please. I’ve been encouraging the students to use metaphors and similes in their essays, perhaps
like signals of their individual style and inventiveness, perhaps just to say to the reader that this special sentence was written with spirit and pleasure, perhaps to point out how things are way more similar than dissimilar. I’ve also been encouraging them to stretch out for the strangest comparisons, the ones that seem preposterous at first but then slowly shine with a new truth about life. In some small way or other, anything is similar to anything else, and seeing the likenesses among all things is one of the stirring joys in life, including English class. ***** HILLS AND A VALLEY I was watching what seemed like endless hills on my drive into school today, when suddenly they spread back into a spacious valley, and, as happens so often, the scene brought with it thoughts about teaching English to teenagers. When we’re reading A Tale of Two Cities or some poems of Shelley, I’m sure my students often feel like they’re lost among strange, bewildering hills, and yet there are always soothing valleys somewhere along the way -- places in the reading that do make sense, that do open the kids’ minds to thoughts they haven’t met before. They must learn the patience of the serious reader – learn to let the confusing places have their way until the way leads, now and then, to a few moments of wisdom and pleasure. After all, confusion is a generous gift if it leads, as it surely can, to its opposites, understanding and appreciation. I’ve always believed, weird as it might sound, that one of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to cause my students to
enter what I might call wilderness areas in their reading and writing, because only then can they discover the secret and surprising ideas that can supervise their continuous growth as intelligent human beings. I could keep the kids in effortless and comfortable valleys of reading and writing throughout the year – an easy way to win kids over and have them saying, “We love English class!” – but that would be ducking my duty. There are thrilling things to be learned in seemingly mystifying and unmanageable books and assignments, but the hills do have to be climbed. The easy valleys will be there, but only among the sometimes lofty hills. ***** CONNECTIONS Much to my dismay, the little independent school where I teach keeps school open on Veterans’ Day, but this year I was somewhat pleased about it, because it caused me to consider, as I was waiting in my classroom for the students, the many connections we have to people from the past, including veterans. The fact is that the students and I are able to study Dickens’ sentences and enjoy stimulating discussions and sit at ease in my restful room day after day, only because of the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people in past years. Countless anonymous heroes – unknown women and men who made being dutiful a day-afterday habit -- helped make a path down through the decades and centuries right to the door of my classroom. I’m thinking of “veterans” of all kinds – from the pioneers who put up the first houses on this property centuries ago, to the soldiers who served to
save freedom for all of us, to the plumbers who prepared the drinking fountains we use each day, to the guys who get our school spotless each night so we can carry on our important work the next day. As we sit in my classroom and speak of appositives and writing styles and Dickens’ characters, we are imperceptibly linked to countless forces from all the years before – forces that found a way to make 8th grade English at a small school among pastures in Connecticut a possibility. ***** LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN “Yes – the door was open. The money’s gone I don’t know where, and this is come from I don’t know where.” -- from George Eliot’s Silas Marner
I sometimes think of these words of Silas Marner when a miraculous day of teaching follows a dreadful one. I try to leave the door of my mind wide open as I’m planning my lessons, letting in all possible ideas and allowing them to linger long enough to evaluate their usefulness, but that kind of openness contains a risk. On many occasions a perfectly foolish idea for a lesson has persuaded me of its value, and the result has almost invariably been catastrophic. True, many wonderful ideas for lessons have made their way through the open door of my mind, but now and then a thoroughly silly plan has managed to make itself seem worthwhile, at least long enough to demolish a day’s teaching. What’s strange, though, is that, on more occasions than I can count, a truly incredible and useful idea comes to me that very night, and the next
day’s lessons is like lightning in its brightness and liveliness. One day disaster, next day nothing but triumph – and I have no idea where either one came from. Silas Marner would understand what I’m talking about. In Eliot’s novel, Silas customarily leaves the door of his hut open, and one day a robber walks in and promptly walks out again with Silas’s carefully stored savings, but, oddly enough, not many days later a golden-haired orphan named Eppie comes like a gift to Silas through the same open door. One day, “the money’s gone”; another day, a little treasure takes his hand in hers. My favorite words in the quote are “I don’t know where”, because, like Silas, I truly don’t know where my fiascos and conquests come from. One day my lesson lies down and dies, next day it shines like summer – and who can say why? ***** LISTENING November 14, 2010 “Eh, Aaron, my lad, are you there?” said Silas. “I wasn’t aware of you; for when Eppie’s talking o’ things, I see nothing but what she’s a-saying.” -- from George Eliot’s Silas Marner
I wish my students and I could always listen to each other the way Silas listens to Eppie. For Silas, the world withdraws when his stepdaughter talks to him, so much so that he might be exactly accurate when he says he “see[s] nothing but what she’s a-saying.” When she is speaking to him, only she and her words -- those
treasures that he takes to his heart -- exist for him. Perhaps he actually does “see nothing” but her mouth moving and the music of her words and the thoughts they symbolize. It’s like being lost in what someone is saying, a sensation I wish we could experience more often in English class. My hope each day is to see all faces shift to attentively focus on the next speaker, then the next, then the next, and so on. Friends across the room, passersby in the hall, birds at the feeders – all should fade away as we listen to someone’s words. This is the kind of focus that could free the kids and I to find the sometimes secret significance in what others say. Gold inside hills will give itself to us, but only if we give our attention to uncovering it, and the same can be said of the gold in the sentences spoken in English class. ***** BUILDING WITH LEGOS AND WORDS Watching my 7-year-old grandson building with Legos this morning made me wonder if my students could write their essays in a similar manner. Noah loves to carry out tests with the blocks as he builds, assessing the various sizes and shapes to see what he can create. He seems to have no map in mind as he manipulates the little blocks, just letting them line up and link together in unplanned ways. It’s a joy to watch him work in such a freewheeling way, and I wish my students could experience that kind of looseness and liberty in their writing. I can picture them sitting, in a perfectly unperturbed way, like my grandson, and
setting sentence after sentence down with as much ease as if they were working with pleasure on a sandcastle at the seashore. Noah has a big box full of Lego pieces to pick from, which makes his job a joyous and fairly effortless one, and, similarly, my students have their vast assortment of thoughts and words to put to use as they construct their essays. They could reach into their minds and muddle around among the thoughts and make their selections with a certain amount of openness and – who knows - -even happiness. What they would end up building with their words might be as distant to them as the stars in the sky, and just as inconsequential. What would count, if they could write this way, would be the fun they would have as they help sentences stick together with the smoothness of Lego pieces – as much fun as Noah nodding and smiling while he watches his construction take shape. *****
AS QUIETLY AS GRASS
“They rooted themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly as grass.” -- George Eliot, Silas Marner
Not a lot seems to be happening in many of my English classes as the sleepy students sit through my sometimes (I must confess) tedious lessons, but perhaps inside minds and hearts, away from the lackluster discussions and activities, some promising thoughts and feelings are quietly growing. It occurs to me, now that I think about it, that almost everything of importance grows slowly and quietly, away from the superficial clamor of a thoroughly rushing world. While countless misfortunes, shouts of pleasure, disasters, and peaceful moments of satisfaction have come and gone, an oak tree in my yard has been growing, bit-by-bit, for more than 200 years. While I’m typing this, the skin on my fingers is silently transforming itself as cells pass away and new ones form, and the grass outside, as Eliot knew, is growing in its secret and steady manner. Everything, you might say, is always growing, and the growth usually makes as soft a sound as possible. Perhaps, then, I shouldn’t be pessimistic about the seeming lassitude in my students, because it may be that serious expansion and progress is occurring just inside the silence of their uninterested faces. Perhaps a thousand helpful thoughts are slowly thinking themselves into something special, into ideas that will someday push up and blossom like exceptional flowers. Who knows? Maybe a few of those up-and-coming thoughts might have been thrown down in the students’ minds like seeds during one of my classes, seeds which
needed hours of silent rest (sometimes provided by English class) in order to sprout and show their surprises. ***** GRACE AND GLORY I’m not a church-going person, but I do recall hearing, in a passing conversation with a Christian friend, something about “grace and glory”, and, surprisingly, those words occasionally come back to me when I’m doing the daily work of a middle school English teacher. I think of grace, not in a religious way, but in an everyday, commonplace way, as the quiet gifts I regularly receive of good thoughts and helpful feelings. When I’m working with the students, continuous useful ideas somehow seem to flow toward me, and feelings that make good teaching possible are given to me in astounding abundance. I have no idea where all this comes from, all this munificence of spirit that I make use of each day, but I feel it fully, moment by moment. This, for me, is what grace is – the nonstop giving of a universe that seems so full of goodness the giving might never stop – and it is this grace that causes me to feel the simple and straightforward glory of teaching. I’m not talking about big-time glory, like superstars seem to bask in, but rather the calm glory of seeing a student send out a stream of smiles because she finally understands a Dickinson poem, or watching a boy break through his hang-ups about writing and just set down his thoughts with liberty and delight. The glories of English class are as small as a student holding a chair for another student, or the shy thankyou’s I sometimes receive at the end of class, or the creation of
carefully shared ideas during discussions. It’s a simple thing, I think, to feel the glory given to any person blessed enough to be a teacher. They’re all around me in my classroom -- constant, rousing gifts from anywhere and everywhere. ***** HIGH SPEEDS IN ENGLISH CLASS I’ve written often about the apparent lethargy and listlessness in some of my classes – the sense I often get that everything in the classroom, including the students and I, is on the very threshold of sleep – but, at the same time, it’s fun to remember that, actually, everything in the room is constantly on the move, and sometimes at fairly high speeds. For one thing, scientists tell us that every element of our body is ceaselessly moving. The countless atomic and subatomic particles zoom here and there without rest, causing the entire body to be a swirl of constant activity, even when a student is sitting in a haze of daydreams in his chair. The student seems to be entirely stationary and still, but science shows us something different, the streams and spirals of non-stop motion that make up the student who seems ready for a snooze. Also, isn’t the earth my classroom rests on speeding around at rather blistering speeds? While my students are sometimes staying awake with only their finest efforts, the earth beneath us is careering around on its axis at roughly 1,000 miles per hour, while at the same time racing around the sun at a blazing 67,000 miles per hour! It’s almost impossible to believe that sentence, to accept the
fact that we are all passengers on a ship moving at unthinkable speeds, even during a lackluster English class – but it seems to be the truth. This brings encouragement to me in the minutes after the last class on a day of fairly lifeless teaching, minutes when I sometimes wonder why I ever thought I could be a good teacher. As I’m sitting in the empty classroom offering condolences to myself, it sometimes comes to me that, whether we know it or not, my students and I are always voyagers on a journey that defies description. While I’m having only small success spelling out the meaning of a Dickens paragraph, the good ship Earth is sailing so fast it’s a wonder we can keep ourselves in our seats. ***** SACRIFICING IN ENGLISH CLASS In a world where “me” is making its case for the most important and popular word, I’m pushing for something else in my classes. Amid the egocentric mayhem of our fairly selfish world, I want a different world in Room 2 – a world where kids and the teacher, instead of grabbing what they can get for themselves, treat each other like the real kings and queens in the room. It takes a little sacrifice on our part – not the sacrifice of diffidence and weakness, but the sturdy sacrifice that simply says there’s something wonderful in each person in the room and we want to watch for it and be thankful for it. Forgetting about ourselves is actually one of the smartest things we can do in English class, because it always calls out the creativity in others, which inevitably blesses us with its wealth. It’s like closing the door, for forty-eight
minutes, to our small cares and concerns and, in turn, opening several dozen doors to the bountiful lives of the others in the room. It’s the kind of sacrifice that finds treasures for all of us. ***** STILLING THE WILD WINDS “… a Swain, That to the service of this house belongs, Who with his soft Pipe, and smooth-dittied Song, Well knows to still the wilde winds when they roar, And hush the waving Woods” --- John Milton, Comus: A Mask
When I read this passage this morning, it seemed to be describing the type of teacher I try to be. I don’t play a “pipe” and my singing is the opposite of smooth, but I do consider one of my main responsibilities to be “stilling” – not “wilde winds”, but the swirling, swarming minds and hearts of my teenage students. I always hope to have a peaceful class, one in which the “waving woods” of my students’ inner lives can be hushed to some extent. Not much literature can touch the lives of kids who can’t escape their own spinning thoughts and feelings, so, from the moment the students enter the classroom, an atmosphere of ease and orderliness is maintained. I guess my usually subdued voice takes the place of the “soft Pipe” of the poet, and perhaps my insistence on respect and kindness at all times works like a song to settle the kids down. With any luck, this kind of easygoing atmosphere leads to some lighthearted but stirring work by the students and me.
***** MY OLD FASHIONED CLASSROOM “Our old-fashioned country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of men, which are forever moving and crossing each other with incalculable results.” -- George Eliot, Silas Marner
I’ve always thought of my classroom as a sort of “oldfashioned” place, but I never actually stopped to consider what that might mean until I read this passage this afternoon. There are, for sure, “many different aspects” in my classroom, which is understandable given the amazingly miscellaneous group of kids who come to me each day. They are as different from each other as galaxies are from neighboring families of stars, as different as firstrate summer days are from lingering, melancholy winter days. Trying to understand each of them, I find, is like trying to understand a snowflake or a fast-flowing river. Thankfully, these days, after decades of teaching, it’s become easy for me to feel the “multitudinous currents” coursing through the classroom – the countless forces and influences that subtly persuade us to think this thought or say these words. My young students and I are forever feeling the effects of energies effortlessly “moving and crossing each other”, caring for us all by bringing us the bright future of new feelings and thoughts. What’s scary -- and somewhat exhilarating -- is that all of this leads to perfectly “incalculable”
results, to ends that are as capricious and unforeseeable as the formations of clouds. I enjoy pretending that students can accomplish the specific goals I set, but it’s only a pleasant deception. The fact, as Eliot knew, is that old-fashioned life, whether in early 19th century England or my modest classroom in Connecticut, is more multitudinous and whimsical than the winds that spin and swirl around our school in their uncertain ways. Predicting what will take place on a certain day in Room 2 resembles the craziness of guessing precisely how snowflakes will land in the grass.
***** SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLE Teaching, to me, has grown to be an entirely unbelievable enterprise. Sometimes the things that happen in my classes are simply beyond belief – beyond anything that I might have imagined decades ago when I began teaching. Every day incredible events occur, from an unusual smile by a shy student, to a string of discerning sentences spoken by a boy about a book which he says he hates, to even – these days – the steady flow of warm air from the floor ducts. These may seem like just commonplace occurrences, but hidden inside their ordinariness is a strange kind of rareness. It often feels obvious to me that every incident in every English class is so strange and new-fangled as to be thoroughly incredible. Just the other day a boy turned in an essay shining with insights, this
from a guy who usually gave English assignments a swift glance and no more. Yesterday a girl grew red in the face when I praised her paragraph in front of the class, and later a small smile from me caused the whole class to turn into laughing fools. These are, yes, just ordinary events in my usually run-of-the-mill English class, but, for some reason, they sometimes shine like implausible mysteries. ***** BEING THANKFUL FIRST I sometimes spend a few minutes after class feeling grateful for even small accomplishments, but this year I’ve actually been silently expressing my thanks at the start of class. It seems to make more sense to me, since I know beyond a doubt that helpful things will happen during class – every class. No matter what plans I put in place or how ingenious or uninspired my teaching might be, ideas of substance and merit will make their appearance among the students, and significant learning will work its usual magic. No, it may not be the particular learning that I was looking for, but it’s always there, the relaxed, trouble-free learning that’s constantly occurring inside all of us. None of us can avoid learning as we live our lives, and my young scholars are no exception. My lesson on alliteration in some Hopkins poems might make only a sleepy impression on the kids, but you can be sure some learning is happening – some subtle changes in the way they think about things. To put it another way, each of my classes is a thoroughly
instructive session. The lessons the students learn may be vastly different from what I planned for, but I’m thankful for any learning that occurs – and it always does, which is why I say my silent thanks just before we start. ***** I DON’T KNOW THEM AT ALL Many years ago, when I was complaining that a certain student was lazy and unmotivated, a wise colleague replied, “Ham, you don’t know him at all, so don’t pretend to.” It was a shocking and somewhat upsetting statement, but as we talked about it for a few minutes, I realized he was right. I was the student’s English teacher, and all I really knew about him was how he performed in my class. For me to pretend that I could see into his life and learn about his motives and inner failings was the essence of foolishness. My colleague had come to my rescue and shown me the simple truth that talking about the personal lives of students as though I actually know what I’m talking about is stupidity bordering on nastiness. What I know about my students resembles what I knew about the Grand Canyon when, some years back, I stood at the rim staring out at the vastness. What I knew about the canyon was what I saw, nothing more, and the same is true of my relationship with my students. To me, each of them is a far greater mystery than the Grand Canyon, and every bit as concealed from my understanding. I know how they score on tests and whether they can compose a thorough essay, but beyond that, my friend was
right: I don’t know them at all. FORCE AND DARING Monday, November 29, 2010 These day, a good friend finds holding his life together to be more than full-time employment, and my hope for him is that he will soon see that he doesn’t have to do the work. The vast universe he belongs to is doing the holding-together for him, with true steadfastness, daily and hourly. I know from experience how easy it is to slip into a style of living that considers myself as the main mover in my life, but it simply is not an accurate understanding of reality. While I’m fretting over self-protection issues, trying my best to preserve and strengthen my small personal self, the endless universe is flawlessly supporting and sustaining even the smallest part of itself, be it the lungs of a fox or the life of my friend. Our world that sometimes seems so small to us as we struggle with our private problems is actually an immeasurable vastness, speckled with far-flung planets and comparatively infinitesimal specks like my friend and me. The fact is that none of us are separate, solid, defenseless entities, but absolutely essential and inseparable elements of this graceful and limitless cosmos. In a sense, we are no more responsible for the maintenance of our supposedly separate selves than a breeze crossing my shoulder is responsible for maintaining the movement of the winds of the earth. We are always in the good hands of the universe – my friend and I and all of us.
For me, this doesn’t mean I can dodge my duties and become a loafer as I let the universe carry me along. Rather, this understanding fills me with force and daring, and a fullness of confidence that I can take part in grand creations in my life. After all, to employ a phrase my students sometimes use, the entire universe – rivers, stars, sunsets, cells, and seas – has my back. ***** IN THE BEGINNING “In the beginning was the word” is a Bible phrase that’s always seemed strangely associated with my duties as an English teacher. Words stand at the very beginning of all things in my classes. All lessons, exercises, readings, writings, quizzes, tests – all discussions, debates, arguments, speeches, lectures, comments, and remarks start with the force of a few words. Even the thousands of thoughts that arise among us during a 48-minute class are constructed with the words we know, as buildings are built with boards and stones and steel. It’s as if words are an invisible power present in the classroom, a power that ignites thoughts and carries conversations and assembles interpretations – a power that stands ready at the starting line of everything we do. In fact, it has always seemed to me – and I often share this with my students – that students and teachers of English do business with the strongest force in the universe. All wars start with words, as do all friendships, quests, transformations, and triumphs. A world without words would be a garden without daylight, a seed with no
soil. I’m grateful that I find myself, having just turned 69, still surrounded in the classroom by the everlasting liveliness of words. ***** UNSEARCHABLE KIDS Wednesday, December 1, 2010 In these days of ubiquitous search engines and searchable online books, it’s comforting to reflect on the fact that my students are entirely unsearchable. Unlike the Internet, which – immense as it is – can be systematically searched, categorized, classified, and labeled, my young English scholars are as immeasurable and inscrutable as the vastness of outer space. I must admit that I often pretend that my students can be uncovered, probed, analyzed, and diagnosed, but in my more sensible moments, I see the utter foolishness of this charade. It’s like looking at the sky through a transparent grid and believing the sky itself is divided into grid-like sections. It might make for interesting diversionary conversation, but it would completely miss the endlessness and incomprehensibility of the sky. Actually, I suppose pilots and other people who pass much of their time up in the air do benefit from organizing the sky into various “sections”, perhaps based on weather and winds and other flights, but surely they realize that this is only a convenient device superimposed on a sky that knows no end. Like me, they know they’re essentially working with something immeasurable – they with the heavens that have no boundaries, and I with students whose minds, as Emily Dickinson
would agree, are even “wider than the sky”. ***** TRICKSTERS One of the pleasures of spending four decades in the classroom is slowly coming to realize that English teachers are essentially first-class tricksters. As a small boy, I decided I wanted to grow up to be a magician, and the miracle is that I’ve done just that. Each day I dare to do all sorts of tricks for my students in the hope that the magic of learning will, in some small ways, remake their lives. I don’t use ropes or coins or cards – just my unembellished words and gestures as I try to turn my no-frills classroom into a wizard’s place of work. In point of fact, all of us English teachers are toying with magic – with the enchanting and unexplained -- as we work with our students. Just the solitary accomplishment of understanding a line in a Shakespeare sonnet is an act of magic, a stroke of mystery and miracle. One moment a student sees only darkness in the words on the page, and in the next moment a mighty light shines from the same words. Is this not an act of magic? And is it not magic when a student sees the world of 1940’s white supremacy arising before him as he reads some sentences from Invisible Man? The student sits in a nondescript classroom out in the countryside of Connecticut, but through the wizardry of words, he’s more altogether present in the hostile city with Ellison’s storyteller as he carries on his struggles. I don’t give myself much credit for creating the magic that occurs in my
classroom, for most of it resides in the words we read and speak – words which might as well be wands, since just speaking or reading them can occasionally – presto – reshuffle our lives. ***** BOTH IN AND OUT OF THE GAME “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm in an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.” --Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
This passage speaks perfectly about the kind of teacher I try to be. I absolutely want to be “in the game” -- sharing the learning process with the students, feeling their liveliness or lack of it, contributing to the creation of ideas in discussions -- but at the same time I try to stay “out of the game”. A teacher must be a talker, a performer, a maker, and a manipulator – but he must also be a silent witness, a passerby who’s fascinated by the strange deeds of adolescents. He must, at the same time, be involved and detached, drawn in to the action and aloof from it. It’s not an easy task, this living a double life, but it has its splendid compensations. It’s like skydiving and simultaneously observing myself doing it, or riding a rowdy horse and at the same time watching myself with interest and astonishment. It’s a chaotic and sometimes frenzied life, this teaching of teenagers, but also a serene and unflustered one. I’m always down on the field for the tumultuous sport called “English class”, but happily, I’m also, at the exact same time,
surveying the action from the bleachers like a curious and mystified spectator. * * ** *
SEEING BETTER WITH BARE TREES A friend said today that she could see birds a lot better now that the trees are bare, and it started me wondering whether something similar should occasionally happen in my English classes. Perhaps complex plans and detailed objectives can sometimes act like the layers of leaves on summertime trees, layers that throw the inner limbs into shadows. Perhaps my meticulous preparation -- my many goals and hopes for each class -- can actually make it almost impossible for the students to see the substance of the lessons, like looking for birds in trees loaded with leaves. Now with the trees standing disrobed and showing only their silvery shirts of bark, it's easy to see the squirrels and birds going about their winter business. The entire inner world of the woods near my house is exposed in all its intricacy and simplicity, a universe I missed in the leaf-filled months. I wonder: could it be that my students see more in my lessons, and thus learn more, when the "trees" of my plans are fairly free of fine points and accessories? Maybe I should sometimes present lessons as stripped and stark as the now slim-armed maples near my house -- lessons that might make their points with the graceful simplicity of frosty trees. ***** THINGS IN THEIR PERFECT PLACES
When I awoke this morning, I saw my pen, phone, and watch on the bedside table, and, for some reason, they seemed to be in the exact perfect alignment. I remember thinking that's exactly where they should be. I had set them on the table in a random manner the night before, but when I saw them this morning, there was rightness, even gracefulness, in the way they were placed. They were sitting in what appeared to be the absolutely perfect positions. For some reason, it called to mind the many instances in my classes when aimlessly spoken words were mysteriously transformed into the perfect words for the occasion. I'm sure my students and I don't meticulously plan each word we speak, and yet our spoken words sometimes seem like skillfully designed utterances, just right for the specific situation. It's as if our words were slowly set side-by-side in a wordsmith's studio -- as if our words were a work of art instead of just casual sentences. Things happen like this in our world -- seemingly purposeless pieces of life presenting themselves as stunning creations. Scattered snowflakes falling across lawns can seem flawlessly organized, items on a table can take on a look of precision, and hit-or-miss words in English class can shine like perfectly-placed spotlights. ***** A LITTLE FLUTTERING OF WINGS My students occasionally stare out the classroom windows at the birds on the feeder, but somehow it doesn't bother me that they're finding more marvels out there than in my lessons. Perhaps the birds actually bring some sprightliness and luster to English
class. Maybe the brightness of the birds and their winsome movements as they take their snacks lends a pleasant ambience to my sometimes tedious instructions. After all, the surroundings of my lessons can let in some valuable light on the truths I'm trying to teach -- can freshen what might otherwise be a fairly stale class. Plus, the students doubtless need a break from adverbs and metaphors every so often, and i'm sure gazing at the good-natured liveliness of birds brings refreshing relief. A few minutes spent seeing sparrows and finches finding food for themselves can perhaps send a student back to a lesson on literary terms with at least partially replenished interest. Bring on the birds, I say. A little fluttering of wings following a fifteen-minute lesson on symbolism might be just what the young scholars need.
THE BEAUTY OF LIGHTS AND WORDS When I drove across a bridge today in the early morning darkness and saw the scenic lights shining around and across the river, I was reminded of something I’ve often noticed in my work as an English teacher. The lights below the bridge were beautiful in a seemingly nonfunctional way, as though they were works of art spread around the river for their sheer loveliness. I’m sure they all had a specific purpose, but for a few moments it felt like I was looking down at a work of stylish art someone had set up – a stunning assembly of lights for the sole purpose of bestowing grace and sophistication on the city. The lights seemed to have no function other than throwing an impression of classiness out to
passers-by. I’ve noticed something similar in English class, both in the students’ writing and in the books we study. I realize that novels and students’ essays should have a specific purpose – a stated thesis and some painstaking details supporting it – but still, I sometimes see sentences that flash their stylishness the way the lights across the river did this morning. When I read a sentence like this, whether in a Dickens story or a student’s essay, it matters little what the sentence says, what its purpose is. All that matters is the graceful good looks of the words as they spread themselves across the page like lights in darkness for readers to look at. They might be thoroughly puzzling words -- the kind of inscrutable sentences Dickens and my students sometimes write -- and still I would read them over several times to better appreciate their strange charms. It’s hard to admit to the students that sometimes the sheer splendor of a piece of writing is more meaningful than its actual meaning, but it’s the truth. Like the lights along the river, written words can cast a spell, no matter what their actual purpose might be. ***** LAUGHING BEFORE DAWN I’m an early riser, and usually I find myself doing lots of laughing before the sun has even risen. I try to spend an hour or so doing some good-natured thinking before starting the duties of the day, and often it arouses more amusement in me than seriousness. During these pre-dawn reflections, I end up doing far more laughing
than brooding or fretting. Life seems wonderfully full of nonsense and silliness as I sit quietly with the rising sun. What I’m usually laughing about is simply myself – my high-strung seriousness, my insistence on seeing myself as the center of the universe’s attention, my bizarre obsession with me, me, me. When I’m sitting beside the window looking out at the last of the darkness, it often comes to me how small my little “self” is compared to the endless universe I’m part of. Dwelling in the midst of countless and everlasting oceans of stars, it seems more than slightly ludicrous that I see myself as so important. In the early morning, my crushing worries of yesterday seem no more significant than a single stroke of a breeze on a sleeve. This realization, far from being bad news, is vastly reassuring to me, which is what leads to my smiles and wholehearted laughs. Since I see that I’m not center stage any more, but simply a part of an endless, strong, and smooth-working universe, I feel instant relief, as though I’ve just set down a seriously heavy burden. My universe – our universe – suddenly seems so powerful and peaceful that nothing could ever seriously go wrong, including the infinitesimal part of the universe called “me”. I take a deep breath of comfort and assurance, smile out at the encouraging sky, and let out some laughs before breakfast. ***** SIMPLY I have gown to love the word “simply”, I guess because it seems to describe so well what I enjoy about teaching. One
dictionary defines the word as meaning just, only, or no more than, and that’s precisely how I try to think of my work in the classroom. I am just one human being among uncountable numbers of creations of this universe, only one ordinary guy giving his all to understanding the astonishing cosmos he’s part of, no more than a wandering, wayfaring, often faltering teacher trying to make sense of the mysteries of his adolescent students. When my work seems crushingly complicated, I remind myself that, in the end, my main job is simply to accept and appreciate whatever the present moment presents. After all, there is always just the present moment in my teaching – no distressing past lessons and no unfathomable and threatening future classes, only this unassuming moment that is making itself known right now. In order to find peace at this instant, and every instant, I need do no more than accept what is happening. Becoming a satisfied teacher is simply that simple.
***** IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER