LISTENING TO BIRDSONGS, AND STUDENTS, ALL DAY LONG

I’ve often thought of creating a one-day project of simply listening with attentiveness to birdsongs, but strangely, now that I think of it, I’ve never considered listening to my students in such a particular and single-minded manner. Our large yard is busy with the songs of birds all spring and summer – a kind of concert it is, from dawn to darkness, day after day – and it would be a pleasure to pass the hours noticing the infinite variety of songs. It could be a serious project – an important assignment for myself, a mission, you might say. I could start at dawn, sitting out on the patio in perfect peace, with a pencil and notebook for notes, and a stimulating supply of snacks and ice water, and just listen – just enjoy the inspiring performances from the trees. I imagine myself noting the subtle variations in the songs (although I’m not at all sure how I would do this, being musically challenged), keeping track of where the songs came from, and following with satisfaction the assorted melodies.  I can also, now that I’m thinking about this, imagine myself taking similarly meticulous notes as I listen to my students throughout a given day. Just for one day I could make it my mission to be an attentive listener  (instead of, as is often the case, a distracted chatterer and doer).  I could take it on as a special assignment, a kind of “charge” I would choose to give myself, sort of a unique duty for a day.  On that day my talking would be reduced to the smallest amount possible. Mr. Salsich would be seen but not heard much, since he’s doing a special task—listening like a scientist to the countless ways his students use spoken words.      

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WEEDING A FLOWER GARDEN

I’ve been having fun finding and pulling weeds from our perennial flower garden, and I can’t keep from thinking how similar it is to “weeding” a piece of writing. What I’ve noticed, once again, is the way weeding the garden gives the flowers more room to be the center of attention. Getting the wild stuff out of the way creates open spaces around the flowers, thereby drawing the focus more fully toward them. When the garden is packed full with both flowers and weeds, nothing is especially conspicuous or striking, but when the weeds are gone and generous spaces of soil surround the flowers, the flowers can flaunt their beauties freely. Next year, I must often remind my students of this basic principle of gardening, because a similar rule applies to their writing. It’s hard for them to realize, but deleting the unnecessary words is just as important as writing the necessary ones. Or, I might put it this way: in composing a good essay, de-writing is as indispensable as writing. When a student places a special truth in a paragraph, it’s crucial that there be “open space” around the truth so as to make it more prominent, and the open space is gained by getting rid of any useless, weedy words. I’ve been freeing up flowers these days by digging out the weeds, and next year I’ll show my students how to give emphasis to the special words in their essays by weeding out the needless ones.

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PREPARING A GARDEN . . . AND A LESSON

Getting a new perennial flower garden going this summer has been a fun project for me, and it’s reminded me of a no-nonsense admonition about both gardening and teaching: you can’t get flowers growing or students learning without systematic and scrupulous preparation.  When I started on the garden last week, I simply didn’t realize how time-consuming the preparation stages would be, mostly involving the thorough removal of old grass and weeds and the spreading of fertilizer and mulch. I guess I had innocently imagined that flower gardens can get going overnight – just get some plants, plop them in holes, and have fun watching them blossom. After a full week of work just to prepare the soil, there’s no doubt in my mind that I didn’t understand much about starting a garden – and there are times when I’m not so sure I know much about starting a learning process for my students. Now and then I find myself rushing into a lesson instead of letting the learning proceed in a well-paced, well-considered manner. I always plan my daily lessons, but that’s sort of like planning how and where to plant the flowers. It’s an important step, for sure, but it must always be preceded (and this is what I sometimes disregard) by careful preparation far in advance of the individual lesson. The “soil” of the lesson must be plowed and nurtured in the days and weeks preceding it, otherwise learning, like hastily planted flowers, will fold up and fade away.     

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WATCHING OUR THOUGHTS PASS BY

At times, my teenage students sometimes seem entirely too full of distress and anguish, and it’s then that I should ask them to simply watch their thoughts for a few minutes. Like most of us, the kids in my classes usually take their thoughts way too seriously, as if their thoughts are their rulers instead of just short-lived bubbles in the vast stream of their lives. I can sometimes see in their faces that thoughts are holding sway over them instead of merely floating through their lives and then disappearing.  In a sense, the students, like so many of us, bow in obeisance to their thoughts – “I’m not smart”, “This assignment is too hard”, “Maybe I have a serious illness” – instead of simply observing them as they pass through their minds. It’s strange, how something as ephemeral and fleeting as a thought can throw our lives into absolute disarray. It happens to me as often as to the students, a thought suddenly soaring over me like some god that’s been given the power to rule. Here comes a thought like “maybe this headache is a sign of something serious” and there goes my ability to dispassionately appreciate the moment-to-moment miracles of life. This coming year I will occasionally ask the students to join me in simply observing our thoughts instead of throwing ourselves at their feet. When I’ve succeeded in doing this myself, a strange feeling of peacefulness has almost always come to me, as if I were sitting on the bank of a stream silently watching the currents and bubbles pass by. Even one minute of this peaceful observation of our thoughts by my students and me might make for a noiseless center of stillness in our stressed and anxious lives.   

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TEENAGE RIVERS

I grew up near a marvel of constant motion called the Mississippi River, and I realized, not long ago, that my teenage students are similar marvels. It’s interesting that we give a name to a river, as though it is a solid, static object that can be conveniently labeled and categorized, as though it is always the same, always just the old, unchanged “Mississippi River”, and not the constantly transforming, always newfangled phenomenon we know it to be. My students, too, have names—Maria, Cooper, Kiona, Gaelen, and so on – as if they are packets of humanity that stay the same day by day and therefore can be easily classified and compartmentalized. In that way of thinking, the Mississippi is always just the same Mississippi, and Maria is always pretty much the same Maria. Of course, we know this is ridiculous, for we know that both rivers and kids are relentlessly changing phenomena, never the same from second to second. Rivers rush by us with their countless and ever-shifting currents, and my students’ lives flow past me with equally bewildering variableness. In a single 48-minute class, a zillion changes happen to each of my students – new oxygen, new cells, new thoughts, new feelings. It’s as if I’m standing on the banks of many human rivers, pretending they’re the same as yesterday, pretending their names capture their reality, pretending I can understand who and what they are – but knowing all along that they are as mystifying as the mighty Mississippi.

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ENJOYING A DRIVE THROUGH A STORM

Fortunately for me, I seem to be learning how to drive through stormy weather with a fairly comfortable attitude, and I’ve also grown more comfortable with the storms that occasionally swirl  through my classroom. The coming on of clouds and showers used to take the fun out of highway driving for me, but I’ve learned to let the storms show me their magnificence more than their menace, and a similar change has happened in my teaching. Tough times come to any teacher – poorly planned lessons, little misbehaviors here and there, a thorough feeling of monotony among the students – and I’ve slowly learned that leaning into these obstacles is better than resisting them. There’s something striking about a storm descending across a road, if only I can open myself to it, and the same is true of the trials that sometimes test the wisdom of every teacher. When a lesson loses momentum and makes me feel like a failure, I can try my best to bring my attention to the strange aptness of it all – the fact that it happened, the fact that something else will happen in the next moment, the fact that suitable mysteries will continue to happen forever. Finding a certain fascinating properness in storms on highways or collapses in the classroom is not easy, but I’m learning to do it – and am learning to relax and smile more in the process.

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TWO ANCIENT AND WISE TEACHERS

     A friend is facing some pain and fear, and I’ve been deeply impressed by his attitude toward these enemies all of us have faced. Actually, he told me he tries not to consider them enemies, but rather simply as conditions that have come along in his life – conditions he can’t avoid and may as well try to get to know and understand, and – who knows –maybe even appreciate (his words). He tells me he tries to think of the pain and fear as teachers, and he says they might be the best teachers he’s ever had. He says he’s even, in a strange sort of way, grateful for their presence in his life, for he’s spent many years in—as he puts it—a closet of anxiety and closed-mindedness, and this pain and fear might force the doors of his life wide open. For one thing, he thinks it might open him to a greater awareness of the pain and fear that billions of people are feeling at any given moment. His situation, as he puts it, will make him a member of the vast community of sufferers on our planet. He says he has high hopes for his journey with pain and fear as he looks ahead to what he will be learning from these ancient and wise teachers.
     As he embarks on his “adventure of learning” (his words), I plan to stay close to my friend, for I have a feeling he will, in turn, be a wonderful teacher for me.

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A BREEZE IN AN ENDLESS SKY

Yesterday, my friend who is facing some serious pain and fear told me he is trying to see the genuine spaciousness of life. He said he realizes now that he has always thought of life as being small, cramped, and confining, but he has a strong feeling, these days, that he’s been completely mistaken. He has a feeling – and it has often come to him during this recent time of pain and fear – that life is not only not small or cramped or confining, but that it is, in fact, infinite – that it knows no boundaries, no start or finish, no limits of any sort. He told me he sees himself, sometimes, as if he is floating in an endless sky – no bottom, no sides, no top – and that the small life he has always called “his” – even the pain and fear—is actually like a breeze in this endless sky, swirling effortlessly, coming and going and passing by in the immeasurable spaciousness of life, always with ease and properness. He said it’s a feeling unlike any he has ever had – a feeling of absolute naturalness and assurance.

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TEENAGE STRESS AND COMPASSION

Stress in our lives can actually lead us to live more compassionately, an odd fact that I will ask my students to occasionally consider next year. The kids in my classes are usually carrying significant loads of unease and angst as they make their way through teenagedom, and it’s my guess that they have never considered the positive aspects of this stress – never realized that their toil and trouble can make them more aware of their membership in the vast, worldwide family of fretful teens. If they could step back a bit from their personal worries and get a more distant perspective, they might be able to picture the millions of other anxious kids in the world, and thus might be able to breathe a sigh of reassurance in the understanding that they are not alone. Indeed, the feeling of being alone – of being the only kid in the world who feels weighed down by stress and disorder – is the real burden, and if I could help lift that burden off them – help them realize they have brother and sister teenage sufferers all over the world – perhaps I would be a slightly better teacher. My job is to teach English, true, but my students are people with powerful feelings, and they will learn literary terms and comma rules better if they know they’re not alone in sometimes feeling bulldozed by pressures beyond their control.  They will still worry, but they will worry, I hope, with more compassion for their countless worrying comrades around the world.

THE MIRACLES OF THOUGHT

I used to not believe in miracles, but over the course of my many years in the classroom I have come to see them as almost commonplace, especially when it comes to thoughts. After all, isn’t a single thought – the appearance, out of the blue, of an idea – a  true miracle? We’re sitting somewhere, perhaps sipping a 7up or saying something special to a friend, when presto, a thought comes to us as if on a breeze from the back of beyond. We know nothing of where it came from or why, just that it’s here with us and shaping our life a little differently. And these mysterious helpers – these powerful forces we have named “thoughts”—come to us some tens of thousands of times each day! I often think of this during a 9^th grade English class, when it would be easy to see dullness and tedium instead of miraculousness. It helps me to remember that, at any given second of any class, dozens of brand new thoughts are being born – thoughts that no thinker has exactly had since thinking began. What greater miracle is there, really, than the birth of something as fresh and strong as an idea – and it happens in a non-stop way in my classes. It may be an idea like “It’s a beautiful day outside”, or “I think I’ll call Jimmy tonight” or something more extraordinary like “I finally understand this poem”, but whatever form it takes, an idea is a darting signal of change in a person’s life: our minds are made over ever so slightly by each and every infant idea, every smallest miracle of thought.

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EVER CHANGING CLOUDS AND KIDS

This afternoon I was lazily gazing at some passing clouds, noticing their ever-shifting shapes and thinking, too, of my always changeable students. These clouds were the kind that seem stable, as though they are solid blobs of matter moving along, but on closer scrutiny become slowly transforming swirls of almost nothing, and I often mistake my students in a similar way. They sit in class like solid and separate entities, each one always the same, always seemingly set in her or his ways, and yet I know for sure they aren’t the same from one second to another. Like clouds, they can fool me with their ostensibly fixed appearance. They can trick me into taking them for granted – “Oh yeah, here come the same kids I taught yesterday”—while all along they are transforming as constantly as the clouds this afternoon.

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THE INFINITE RANGE OF THOUGHT

A friend recently spoke of what she called “the infinite range of thought” – her belief that there are absolutely no limits to what we can think – and her words brought to mind an odd combination—my students and a boundless sky. It does seem like a peculiar combination, especially since most of my students think their thoughts flutter around in the tiniest of skies. If I asked them to compare their minds to something, they might select a closet or a kitchen cupboard, something so small that only a few trifling thoughts can fit. My students, year after year, seem to see themselves thinking in very small spaces instead of in boundless skies. My friend would tell them something different – that thoughts are immaterial and therefore not tied to the typical laws of materiality. Thoughts can move as fast as sound or sunshine, and  out beyond the farthest borders. No fence, no frontier of any kind, can hold back even the smallest thought. Of course, if my students believe the range of their thoughts is confined and cramped, then, for them, it will be. We make our own prisons, especially when it comes to thinking, and most of my students sometimes choose to stay in their mental prisons, preparing undersized thoughts in what they consider to be their peewee brains.  A significant part of my job as their English teacher is to show them the vast – indeed, infinite – span of their minds – to help them realize that they can think any of the countless thoughts available to all of us in this measureless, mysterious universe. All they need to do is believe it. *

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TIDINESS IN A FLOWER GARDEN AND A LESSON

This summer I’ve enjoyed the fulfilling work of setting various kinds of edgings around our perennial flowers, and now the final, finished look of the gardens gives me some sense of how my best-planned classroom lessons might look next year.  The flowers themselves are lovely, but somehow the trim and tidy look provided by the edging enhances their beauty, and it’s possible that some of my lessons could look just as well-set and shipshape. What I wish to teach in a lesson is actually no more important than how it’s presented to the students – it’s staging, you might say, or it’s presentation. Simply strewing a bunch of beautiful flowers here and there, with no visible borders, will bring little or no joy to viewers, nor will scattering skills and concepts through a lesson, with no discernible tidiness or method, bring much meaningful learning to my students. Both the good looks of a flower garden and the effectiveness of a lesson plan depend greatly on a simple feature that’s often overlooked – straightforward, old-fashioned tidiness. 

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HIDDEN GIFTS

Not long ago, toward the end of a restless, almost sleepless night, the thought came to me to good-naturedly watch for the good that will come from this spell of insomnia, and I began thinking, later in the morning, that this is excellent advice for a classroom teacher. Halfway through my wakeful night, I was not thinking positively about my tossings and turnings, nor do I usually see the bright side of the various misfortunes that take place in my teaching.  Just as I desperately wanted to fall into a sound and soothing sleep, in my classes I simply want a steady dose of success, and I grew just as frustrated with my sleeplessness as I do with any malfunctions in my lessons.  However, toward morning the odd thought came to me that perhaps this nighttime wakefulness has some blessings for me. Perhaps, I thought, I should quietly wait and watch for the good that’s been given by these hours of missed sleep. It was strange to think that what seemed like sheer misery from midnight to morning might actually be a bequest from the vast universe just for me – a generous bestowal to use as I see fit. I’m still waiting and watching (no signals as of yet), and I hope to be able to do some similar waiting and watching when things fall apart in my teaching next year. Who knows what gifts might be disguised as a disastrous lesson?

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IN QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE

It might seem a stretch to compare one of my 9^th grade English classes to a workout at the gym, and yet I am striving to build a certain kind of strength in my students – a strength that’s very much connected to quietness and confidence. It’s a shame that strength, these days, is so often associated with noisy bravado – with bragging and boasting and singing your own praises – when, to my way of thinking, true strength constructs a quietness that’s far more remarkable than clamor and horn-blowing. I want each of my students to develop an inner power that produces quiet confidence, the kind that sometimes creates a strange calm in classmates, as though just sitting next to this student settles you and sets you up on a mental hill.  The quietness, perhaps, comes from knowing that what you know is nothing compared to the vast expanses of knowledge in the universe, and therefore you might as well relax and appreciate the sheer smoothness and lightness of all this nonstop knowledge. I hope my students come to discover that knowledge is not really something to struggle for or labor after, but that it’s more like a current in a quiet sea, a current that can easily carry them to incredible places and create a confidence that’s way stronger than shouts and chest-poundings.

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STRENGTH AND GLADNESS

No student, I’m sure, feels especially glad to be coming down the hall to my English class, but I actually hope, in all honesty, that some small amount of mental strength might be gained during class, which in turn might create some real satisfaction, perhaps even gladness. If each student, for instance, could sense something new inside them during English class, some unusual understanding, some small insight into the mysteries of written words, this could possibly produce a silent, private shout of good cheer. If the students, each in their special ways, could find a further appreciation of some aspect of the literature we read, then maybe an honest bit of strength and gladness might be given them during a modest English class in Room 2 on Barnes Road.

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THE LIGHT SHINES

Every so often I’m tempted to turn off the lights in my classroom and just let the light of thoughts throw its brightness over all of us. After all, there is light, and then there is light, and the light of freshly made ideas makes fluorescent light look dim by comparison. It’s strange to me that my mania for “getting things done” in class sometimes causes me to be blind to the light of the thinking that’s always happening. My students and I can’t stop thinking new thoughts any more than our lungs can stop causing new air to come into our bodies. Each moment of English class is a sunrise of thoughts, a silent explosion of concepts, notions, images, schemes, plans, feelings, and beliefs – more than enough light to let all of us stretch out and grow strong in its influence. The light of thought always shines in English class, whether we see it or not, whether we feel its soft and fulfilling pressure or not.

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RETURNING AND REST

Strange as it sounds, I sometimes think my main job as an English teacher is to help my students discover how to return, and how to rest. Returning and rest, in a sense, are the keys to learning anything, for it is only by returning, again and again, to the subject matter that we make it a part of ourselves, and only by resting in the center of each new understanding do we discover its true depth and breadth. Returning and rest is the opposite of restlessness and bustle: by quietly returning to a poem again and again and resting, without mental struggle or anxiety, in its various meanings, the student settles the mind and meets with fresh intuitions. Dashing ahead with never a glance back or a breather is the way of reckless students, whereas constantly coming back again and taking a break inside a topic or concept creates students who save what they learn for years to come. Realizing this,  I sometimes stop my students in their tracks. I say, “Let’s reread this page, slowly and with special treatment. Lets rest for a few moments inside the meaning of the words.” They usually sigh and seem to be saying, “Oh god, can’t we please just move on?”, but my task is a simple and special one – to show the students the power and pleasure of revisiting and taking a respite among good words.

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MAKING FREEDOM

It’s good for me to give some thought now and then to the freeing aspect of English teaching. We’re all fond of freedom, including my fidgety teenage students, but too seldom do I consider the ways that freedom can find us as we work our way through my curriculum. It’s freeing, for instance, to simply see something in a written sentence that you didn’t see before, or to set words side by side in a refreshing way, or to listen to a student speak about a poem with force and wisdom.  Each of those small, daily occurrences can bring a bit more freedom to our lives that so often seem small and restricted. In that fashion, English class, as run-of-the-mill as it might be, can set my students and me free in small but distinguishing ways.

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THE WAYS

When I think about it, I realize that I taught for many years with the notion that there was basically one way to do just about anything in the classroom, but now, after four decades of teaching, it’s clear to me that, on the contrary, there are an infinite number of ways, and all just about equally effective.  I sometimes think of sunshine, and how it spreads its light in countless patterns across the earth, all of them special and handsome in their distinctive ways – and can’t we say that all sincere approaches to understanding a short story are, in surprising and perhaps hidden ways, equally wise?  Or the rain as it falls in numberless rhythms and speeds: is it more beautiful at one moment than the next, and is one student’s halting but honest attempt at an essay assignment less inspiring than a whiz kid’s creative masterpiece? I guess what I’m saying is that all students who try their best build a kind of masterpiece of one sort or another, and I need to stay alert to the curious and sometimes strange splendor of their work. To me, the way of the natural straight-A student is no more magnificent than that of the dutiful but stumbling C student. There are a zillion kinds of success and a zillion ways to get there, which is precisely what makes living – and teaching – such an adventure.

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MARVELOUSLY MADE

Not long ago a friend was speaking about a dresser she saw in an antique store, saying how it was so “marvelously made”, and later, I mused about how marvelously made all of us are, including my young students. It’s easy and commonplace to marvel at the machines our society produces these days – the computers, the miraculous cars, the colossal planes that somehow ascend above us – but what about the human machines that make miracles each second of their existence? What above these boys and girls that get fresh ideas by the dozens in my classes – ideas that may not be made-to-order for the lesson I happen to be teaching but that nonetheless are minor miracles? What about the students’ feelings that flow unceasingly and in unlimited fullness throughout every class, and that transform their inner lives moment by moment as surely as oxygen transforms their bodies? What about the words they place in essays, words that, as simple as they might be, can brighten a teacher’s day as he reads them? These essays, these words, these feelings and ideas, these young students of mine – these are truly marvelously made, more, in my mind, than any dresser sitting in a store.

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GOOD STUFF

In baseball circles, “good stuff” refers to a pitcher’s ability to throw a ball at very fast speeds, but in my English classes it refers to the gift all kids have to create ideas that positively burst across the room. I’ve seen it in every student I’ve taught – the wonderful flair for saying things that throw a new light over a discussion, sort of like a brief spread of sunshine on a misty day.  Of course, this kind of thinking – this good stuff – sometimes hides for days and even weeks in some kids, but it never fails to suddenly surge out at odd moments.  The most silent and insecure students have, on occasion, made statements during discussions that shined a fresh brightness over the class, as if some new scholar had suddenly appeared among us, when it was really just one of the kids coming on with the good stuff of wisdom.  

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ON THE MOUNTAINTOP

When a friend said yesterday that she was surprised that her sister gave up teaching – gave up what my friend said was a job “on the mountaintop” of all professions – I felt silently grateful that I have had the privilege of working on this grand mountaintop for many decades. My friend understood something I’ve known for years – that giving the gift of new learning, or at least making the gift more possible, can make a teacher’s life something like a marvel.  Mountains can make you feel fulfilled when you reach their summits, but something far more special occurs when a student’s eyes start shining with newborn wisdom. I’ve been to the tops of real mountains, and yes, it’s spectacular, but I’ve also been to the tops of classroom mountains – those peaks that you can’t prepare for because they usually soar up suddenly like new lights in the darkness – and honestly, I’m confident that no actual mountain peak can compare.  After all, what summit can you stand on almost every day and see lives transforming before you – lives sometimes turning inside out as they think intensely about stories or poems? What Appalachian peak can compare to the view across a classroom of students who have sincerely—and sometimes joyously—received the blessing of brand new knowledge? I trust my friend’s sister had good reasons for turning away from teaching, for no one would unthinkingly give up the chance to stand on mountain summits day after day.

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SETTLING

As a boy, I always enjoyed watching a stream slowly settle after being stirred up, and I feel fortunate that I can see the same kind of settling almost every day in the classroom. It’s accurate, I think, to compare my students coming down the hall for class to a forest stream surging along in its sprawling way. Between classes, the kids are a liberated group, blessed with undisciplined thoughts and free feelings, and flowing along with all their force and liveliness. It’s as if something stirs their lives for a few minutes after each class, and, like an unsettled stream, they flow down the hall to their next class. Actually, I like the unsettled nature of their young lives, in much the same way that I like the look of a swiftly flowing stream. One never knows what a hurrying stream will do next, which is part of its poetry, and likewise, I enjoy the persistent unpredictability of my students. I would never want them to be a thoroughly settled group, sinking into a tedious sameness. However, part of my responsibility to them is to insist that they sort themselves out without much delay and set about the business of being serious students of English for forty-eight minutes. I set up a routine at the start of the year that enables them to do this fairly efficiently, and they usually subside, within a few minutes, into a quietly industrious group of scholars. It’s like seeing a stream in the woods of Missouri, way back then, bring itself into peacefulness within a few moments of being stirred up by a meddlesome boy.

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AN A+ FOR GOODNESS

Like most teachers, my grades for students tend to spread out across a suitable range from D’s to A’s, but in one category they always receive A+’s: plain and simple goodness. I recall a film where Robert DeNiro looked at someone and said, with emphasis, “You are good!” – and I say exactly that to my students quite regularly, simply because I believe it. They’re not perfect in their understanding of dramatic irony or in detecting dangling modifiers in their writing, but they are, to my way of thinking, perfectly good.  To me, their goodness has neither defects nor border lines, but is as unblemished as the sunshine. Does this mean their actions are always respectable and first-class? Of course not, just as sunshine is not always at its best and brightest. There are days in my class when the students’ attitudes seem far from wonderful, just as there are days when the light of the sun dims and darkens behind clouds. However, I know from long classroom experience that an impressive sun of goodness is always shining inside these boys and girls, just as our loyal sun in the sky stays full of flawless light no matter what the clouds do. I can grade essays with C’s and A’s, but I can’t grade a person’s goodness, mostly because it’s not a quantifiable entity – not something I can measure and appraise. My students’  goodness is like sunshine, boundless and everlasting, and who can pigeonhole or grade sunshine?

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OLD PATIENCE?

        Every so often the thought comes to me that I am too old to be teaching teenagers, but then, thankfully, I usually remember that the really essential qualities in teaching, like patience, simply can’t grow old. Teachers—like me with my folds and furrows and shining bald-headedness—definitely grow old, but can a quality like patience get gray-haired and weary as the years pass? Can you picture patience, in its old skin-and-bones, bemoaning the fact that it can’t do its job anymore? Old teachers moan and groan, but patience, being of the heart and spirit, is as ageless as the sky. At the end of another year, I personally may feel weary and worn down, but surely I wouldn’t look at the sky and feel sorry that it’s grown so old. The sky in my 69^th year is as fresh and youthful-looking as it was when I was six, and likewise, the patience that is available to me is as alert and perky as ever. I could be wheeled into my classroom on a cart, coughing and wheezing in my elderly way, but still my patience could be as strong as a stallion and as endless as the sky above our school.

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SCRATCHES AND A CANDLE

“Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.”—George Eliot, Middlemarch

    In this passage, Eliot could just as well be speaking of my English classes, since they often appear to be little more than words and actions “going everywhere impartially” but occasionally “produce[ing] the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement.” The word “scratches” seems fitting, because sometimes that’s what my teaching seems to be – just a scattering of scratches on the surfaces of the students’ minds. After many a class, I have marveled at how little seemed to have been accomplished – how random and roving my instruction seemed to have been, and how slight the students’ progress was. I may as well have been placing random scratches on “surface[s] of polished steel” as teaching English to human beings. However, there are also those days when, at the end of class, everything does seem to slide together in a sensible display of understanding and progress. Eliot says a candle can do this to haphazard scratches, and perhaps, on those days of conquest in the classroom, I could be said to be the candle, shining among our seemingly cluttered activities and producing what appears ro be a prize-winning “concentric arrangement.” Perhaps I shouldn’t struggle against the seeming chaos of some of my lessons as we work through them, but simply wait with patience for the “candle” of good teaching to hopefully do its assigned task and turn our chaos into something like a handsome presentation of new knowledge.

* * * * *

WINDS, WORDS, AND THOUGHTS

As strange as it may sound, I sometimes think of the wind when I’m teaching. I’ve always loved listening to the wind and watching it and wondering where it comes from and where it goes, and I find myself wondering something similar about the thoughts and words that waft or rush through one of my English classes. My students and I produce countless thoughts and spoken words in a 48-minute class, all coming from some source that’s always remained a mystery to me. It’s far too facile to say, well, they just come from our brains, which is like saying the wind coming through my yard simply came from the yard next door. All the world’s winds have origins lost in the boundlessness of the universe, and something similar, I think, can be said for the thoughts and words we make in English class. Somehow they arrive in our lives, just as the wind somehow arrives at our doorsteps some mornings, and I love to think of the mystery of where these fresh thoughts and words might have been before they brought their unused lights to our classroom.

WORDS WITH POWER

I sometimes tell my students they are lucky to be taking my class, because our subject matter – spoken and written language – is the most powerful force on earth. After always seeing some shrugs and sighs and looks of puzzlement, I explain that without words being said and/or written, no war would have started, no marriage would have been made or unmade, no plans for anything would have been laid, and not even the littlest shared deed would have been done. It all starts with words, those smallest and most transient of our creations, those short-lived inventions we make with our mouths and place on computer screens or paper. They’re like significant explosions, each of them—little lights let loose in the world to enlighten or bewilder, pacify or sting. They carry immense forces in their small containers, and my students and I are lucky to be learning of their powers each day in English class.

* * * * *

AFFECTIONATE ATTENTION

Since we teachers are accustomed to asking our students to give us their attention, this year I’m going to make a major effort to give my classes my complete attention – my affectionate attention, in fact. I say “affectionate” because I want to put some genuine friendship in my attentiveness – not so much the friendship between people, but the friendship between a teacher and whatever takes the stage in his classroom life. To me, each of my English classes seems like a stage where, over and over, surprising words are spoken and perplexing episodes take place.  I often feel like I’m in a theater audience looking on, puzzling over the thoughts the students share and the paths their conversations take.  I plan my lessons with care, but always some off-course wanderings carry us away for a few moments, and that’s when I wink to myself and smile, because I know it’s all okay. It has slowly come to me, over the decades, that affectionately attending to whatever comes up in class is a better way than beating my head against it. It doesn’t mean I like every off-course digression – just that I’ve learned to look for the secret strokes of luck in each of them. By paying attention, with real affection, to whatever happens to occur during class, I’m able, surprisingly, to set free the usefulness of just about everything.   

* * * * *

A LIMITLESS PARADISE

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed thinking of teaching and reading literature as being a process of searching, but gradually I have come to see that there’s never an end to the search – that the seeking and exploring and rummaging among facts and ideas doesn’t make things clearer and simpler, but mistier and weirder and more wonderful and more endless. In my younger days, I guess I believed that the best ideas about a book or a poem would eventually be revealed to anyone who spent enough time searching for them. Knowledge, for me, was a finite entity that could be searched and brought under control with enough steady, watchful work. Any work of literature, even the longest and deepest, could be dealt with the way you would deal with a piece of land that needed to be mapped and made plain. Now, though, it’s clear to me that words set down on paper don’t have boundaries to their meanings. The thousands of words in a Dickens novel know no end to what they can say and signify to us. When my students and I set off on an expedition through A Tale of Two Cities, we must understand that one truth will lead to 10 more truths which will lead to 100 more truths, all in strange and distant directions, with never a finish in sight. Reading good literature is like landing on a planet with no prepared maps. You can search and search, but instead of hoping to reach a destination of some sort, better to simply appreciate what it’s like to be lost in a limitless paradise.    ‘

* * * * *

NEVER LOST

When a friend was saying the other day that she recently thought she was lost in a forest but soon realized that she would have reached a road by walking in any direction, it brought to mind the many times my students and I have made a similar discovery in the classroom. We have often felt lost together in a chapter of a novel or the lines of a poem, but it’s interesting how frequently we found our way to the center and back out again just by continuing to reread with attentiveness and share our thoughts with sincerity. Strangely, it never matters, really, whether we walk this way or that way in a work of literature, whether we go down this literary trail or that one, as long as we do it with a firm focus and an honest interest in the thoughts of others. Whichever approach we take, in the end we will find ourselves, presto, in the very soul of all the words on the page. Someone might say, well, your soul of The Tempest  is not my soul, and of course that’s correct. There are a thousand souls at the heart of a great book. All we have to do is dare to keep reading, rereading, and sharing – and soon, like a sun in the mist, we’ll see one of the exceptional truths in the words. It makes being lost in literature hopelessly impossible.

* * * * *

THE KINGDOM OF ENGLISH CLASS

I recall reading old stories about various vast and splendid kingdoms – places that seemed, in my imagination, to stretch out to the farthest boundaries – and it pleases me that I now find myself working in a similar kind of kingdom – the kingdom of English class. I’m sure not many teachers, as stressed as most of us are, would compare their classroom to a fanciful kingdom, but nonetheless, no metaphor makes more sense to me. When we start each English class, we are entering  a land that lets us see, if we choose to, the outermost limits of life – the land of great literature, and of our own immense but unrealized promise as writers. English class is about ideas, and all ideas, no matter how seemingly mundane, are vast kingdoms in themselves, immeasurable mind nations that know no border lines. English class is about words, and what word can be kept in a small container and not released into the untold kingdom where all words dwell?  Yes, yes, I have to deal with the everyday, finite fundamentals of English – comma rules, the writing of correct sentences, the place of symbolism in a story, etc.—but those are like little winds wandering across the great kingdom of ideas and words, a kingdom I’m lucky to come to each morning in Room 2. 

* * * * *

A FANCY COSTUME AND A SPOONFUL OF WATER

A colleague told me, years ago, that when she was teaching, she imagined herself wearing a clown’s costume and carrying a spoonful of water, and slowly but increasingly the significance of her statement has become clear to me. She never fully explained what she meant, but over the years I’ve begun to see it as an assertion about the importance of both humility and precision, both ingenuousness and absolute attentiveness to the task at hand. Perhaps, as she stood before her students, the imaginary clown costume served to remind her how relatively inconsequential she was in the vast design of the universe, sort of like a silly clown carrying on in its insignificant ways. When I become too puffed up with my own supposed importance, like a clown claiming center stage in a circus, picturing myself in a clown costume helps me remember how silly it is to consider myself any more special than a single star among the zillions in the sky. As a teacher, yes, I’m important, but so are all the sights and sounds sent to my students by this ever-unfolding universe. On the other hand, while I’m teaching, I also try to see myself holding – carefully balancing – a full spoonful of water. This is the other side of the story of teaching – seeing myself as a totally serious and focused professional. Through all the swervings and tossings and up-springings of a typical English class, I must hold the spoonful of water – the goal of my lesson --  delicately and firmly in hand. I may be no more special than a silly clown, but I happen to be a clown carrying a singular responsibility. Thinking in this way, I can good-naturedly laugh at myself and, at the same time, make any specific lesson an absolute success.

* * * * *

SURPRISE MIND

I once heard someone refer to the mind of a certain writer as a “surprise mind”, and since then I’ve often used the phrase in thinking of my students and me as we make our way through the capricious ups-and-downs of English class. In a full forty-eight minute class, who can tell how many thoughts run through our minds and out into the conversation, and who can say that these thoughts are anything but surprising, even sometimes startling? We can’t plan our thoughts, any more than the wind plans its swirls and puffs. We like to pretend that we know what our next thought will be and where it comes from, but the truth is that our thoughts are as unforeseen as the next drifting breeze.  I sometimes think of Cervantes’ hero, Don Quixote, who let his horse lead the way and surprise him, just as our weird and wonderful thoughts lead the way during English class. They’re like horses, these thoughts of ours, and if we trust them enough, they’ll take us to sudden and sometimes astounding places.

* * * * *

LARGENESS OF HEART

Somewhere, years ago, I heard a person described as having “largeness of heart, like the sand on the seashore”, a description that returns to me off-and-on when I’m teaching. Like any teacher, I need a heart large enough to find room for all the wonderful and foolish events that unfold during any class. A small heart in a teacher means doors are closed to all but the expressly described “goals and objectives” of the lesson, a situation that usually results in devastating tediousness and even disgust, whereas a teacher’s heart that’s as vast as “the sand on the seashore” can happily hold whatever happens, and thus, perhaps, produce a feeling of light-hearted interest among the students. When I’m teaching, I’m sometimes fortunate enough to see, in my mind, an immeasurable seashore (me) with waves of countless varieties (the thoughts, feelings, and events that occur during class) washing up on the sand. If the shore (the teacher’s inner spirit) has neither end nor beginning nor boundaries of any kind, it can conveniently welcome whatever the sea (a class) sends it. This is largeness of heart, the kind of heart I only rarely feel spreading out inside me, but the kind that’s always there, nonetheless, just waiting for me to welcome it into my work. 

* * * * *

SITTING, READING, and WRITING WITH DIGNITY

    I require my students to sit up fairly straight during class, and it occurred to me this morning that this is somewhat similar to my requirements for reading and writing. Sitting up in class, to me, is an act of dignity, and I also expect a certain kind of dignity in the students’ reading and writing. Sitting up is the opposite of slouching and lounging, just as writing and reading with single-mindedness and precision is the opposite of throwing yourself heedlessly through assignments. Living with dignity means living in a thoughtful and respectful manner, something I expect of my students in both their posture and their school work. In reading, this means reading written words with the kind of deliberation and care with which they were written. In writing, it means making each sentence shine with as much precision as possible, as though all the words are proudly sitting up straight in their assigned places, like my industrious and dignified students during class.

* * * * *

WISDOM AND STATURE

I find it interesting that the word “stature” derives from the Latin word meaning “stand”, which perfectly links it to wisdom, since wisdom only works its magic when a person stands up straight and strong among ideas. It’s strange to me that some of my students seem to wish to slouch their way through their school days – strange because no real learning will happen when the learners are letting their bodies and minds slumber. Drooping shoulders mean drooping thoughts, drooping self-assurance, and drooping desire. I want my students to grow wise in various small but essential ways, but I also want them to grow in stature – to feel how fine it is to stand proud inside yourself as you do your best with the best ideas available. They must think generously and deeply, and they must also sit up straight at their places – I insist on it—if they wish wisdom to slowly stand up inside them.

* * * * *

BENEVOLENT  SENTENCES

“But the end of Mr. Brooke’s pen was a thinking organ, evolving sentences, especially of a benevolent kind, before the rest of his mind could well overtake them.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

This quote so completely captures, for me, what often happens when I’m writing, and, I imagine, when my students are writing. In the novel, Mr. Brooke sometimes set out to write something simple and straightforward, but would often swerve off into generous side-sentences that weren’t part of his plan, and a similar thing seems to happen, at least occasionally, when my students and I are writing. My paragraphs have been known, now and then, to throw themselves far off my planned approach and take wing for wherever they wish. I’ll start with a straightforward topic sentence, but before long some strange sentences show up and lead the words off course, something I’ve seen more than a few times in student essays. Often the students make a fine start, with words steering easily into sentences and then into a few fine phrases, but lo, here comes a quiet, fresh, and benevolent thought, and the essay is off on an evolutionary road of its own. What’s so fascinating (and it seems to have been so for Eliot) is that much of this meandering kind of writing has some mystery and magic in it, the kind that is frequently missing in more orderly essays. Mr. Brooke’s pen, it seems, showed the way to surprising and kindly sentences, and every so often a similar wonder works its way into the writing my students and I do.

* * * * *

ATHLETIC MINDS

“Books are to be called for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-trained, intuitive …”

-- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

Since I have long thought of literary reading as an arduous form of cerebral exercise, it was inspiring to come across this quote this morning as I prepare to start another year’s worth of strenuous “exercises” with my teenage students. I’m afraid that some of the students who will come to my class next week consider reading a novel to be a sort of “half sleep” process, as Whitman puts it – a way of escaping from all mental labor by drifting off on an entrancing story—but the reading they will do in my class is more like ascending a sheer mountain than falling into a soothing sleep. In fact, I often use the mountain analogy, reminding the young readers that reaching the vistas at the summit of both great books and great mountains requires punishing work—the kind of labor set aside only for earnest readers and climbers. They would expect to pay such dues on a mountain ascent, so why not on a climb through the chapters of a Dickens or Morrison novel? I sometimes remind the scholars that they should feel utterly exhausted after reading a chapter in A Tale of Two Cities, just as they should after a serious lacrosse practice. If they feel well rested after either form of exercise, they’re only pretending to be readers and athletes.

* * * * *

THE LIGHT IS ALL

 “From within or from behind, a light shines through us and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”

The fact that I am nothing is not to be overlooked as I look ahead to the start of another school year. Mind you, I am neither a masochist nor a particularly self-denigrating person, but I know, in my heart, that I am the best teacher I can be when I fully understand that “the light is all” and little me is mighty far back in the background.  As I stand before my students next week, I will be as small as a single star in a universe of trillions of stars – just one of the immeasurable influences that will flow past my students in their young lives. Somehow they will learn and grow, but to attribute any of that to someone named Hamilton Salsich is like saying the sunlight on one stone made the sunlight on the stone next to it. As Emerson knew, “the light is all”.  I receive the light of learning from somewhere, and so do my students, and somehow it all blends and breaks out into new knowledge for all of us.  Teachers, myself included, all too often get into giving themselves center-stage in a process where there is actually no stage and no center. Learning happens like wind happens, and where it comes from and what caused it will stay a secret forever. I am part of the wind – or light – of learning, but so is absolutely everything else in this beyond-belief universe, including my students, the sunshine on their desks, the people they passed in the hall, and the songs they may hear in their hearts while I’m standing before them in Room 2.

THE CHOSEN ONES

I sometimes think of my students and me as “the chosen ones”, not in any biblical or religious sense, but simply in the sense of being a special selection of people brought together in a classroom to complete extraordinarily essential tasks. I imagine us being carefully selected for these particular sections of 8^th and 9^th grade English – being hand-picked, first–rate candidates for some significant awards in scholarship and schooling.  I sometimes make believe that we few students and a teacher have been carefully chosen from a choice group of thousands of the best and brightest, and have been brought together in a small classroom in Connecticut to create educational miracles beyond explanation. Strangely enough, this fantasy scenario is, in some ways, absolutely true. The measureless universe will somehow set my students and me down in Room 2 on Barnes Road tomorrow morning, and there will be no other collection of learners exactly like us in the wide world.  Autumn winds wander every which way and deposit leaves, by some means, just where they should be across lawns, and, in a similarly incomprehensible way, each of my students and I have been brought together for this year of finding new knowledge. We will be a one-of-a-kind group, a Number 1 band of brothers, sisters, and one old-time leader, all looking to learn whatever there is to learn about the way words work in this old, odd cosmos.   

* * * * *

STARS AT DAWN

It’s always somewhat saddening to see a few morning stars slowly disappear as I drive to school, but at least it does me the favor of reminding me that everything eventually disappears, even the successes I have in my English teaching. If this morning I make new paths with the students through a Shakespeare sonnet, much of that knowledge may be no more real than a wisp of air by tomorrow. The words we say in class this afternoon will float off beyond our minds by breakfast in the morning, when other words will wander into our lives with their look of self-importance. All things eventually vanish – clouds, rainbows, echoes in the mountains, and the seemingly special accomplishments of an English teacher on an undisturbed countryside road in Connecticut. This, though, makes me happy rather than sad, because the disappearance of success into the universe means more success can find space in my life. Thoughts arise and pass away in my classroom, which means new thoughts will throw themselves across the room like lights. Stars do fade away at dawn, but it only means the mighty light of the sun will be shining soon. 

* * * * *

RAINBOWS AND THOUGHTS

I saw a surprising, split-second rainbow the other day, and I’ve already seen some similar wonders in my middle school English classes. This was an especially wondrous rainbow – a sudden and extensive band of colors above a small cloud in an otherwise blue sky – because it came in the midst of a dry, sunshiny day.  Usually rainbows, at least in my experience, appear after some rain, but this one was different and sort of shocking, so much so that I called a friend to share my surprise. Later, it made me think about the bright rainbows that have suddenly shown up in the midst of my few English classes so far – rainbows in the form of colorful feelings and thoughts shared by the students. We’ve gone through some minutes of fairly mundane remarks during our discussions, but then, always before very long, a student has said something that stuns all of us, sort of like my rather astonishing rainbow. For a moment or two, we’re silent with wonder at the student’s startling comment, but soon its glory goes away, like the transitory rainbow, and we’re left with the usual and simple successes of English class, sort of like the blue sky last week when the rainbow slowly but surely disappeared.

ENDURING RICHES

Strange, but sometimes I feel, as I’m standing or sitting among my students, that I am a millionaire many times over. My actual bank account wouldn’t break any records, but the wealth that’s with me when I’m teaching sometimes seems over-the-top, totally beyond counting, inconceivably vast. It’s a wealth that no trials or tribulations can take away and no economic downturn can damage. It’s mine to make use of as I wish, now and for evermore. I’m speaking here, as you can tell, of interior riches—of thoughts, insights, enlightenments, stray feelings flowing past during class, any of the countless wonders of the mind and heart that happen to any teacher every day. If I could somehow count it all, add it up like currency, the final total would take up whole pages. I could break a bank with all the wealth I win each day in class.  Even now, as I sit at my desk in my classroom in the cooling hours of the late afternoon, I find myself smiling as I consider the countless new feelings and thoughts that flew softly into me today from somewhere or everywhere as I was teaching. I don’t have piles of money packed in vaults in the bank, but I do have ideas that don’t stop pouring in like cold cash as I carry out my blessed duties as a teacher.    

SILENT FORCES

As my students enter my classroom each day, I try to keep in mind that they carry countless unseen engines inside them, engines that silently furnish more force than winds across the countryside. Some of these engines are physical, for sure, like their loyal hearts and lungs, but the ones I love are the silent machines that make beliefs and inspirations by the thousands. It’s as if the students, as they sit quietly before me, are inwardly moving around in whirlwind ways as ideas dance in and out of their lives. It’s these inner, silent forces that move their young lives ever forward. Their hearts help their blood and bones be full of life, but it’s the thoughts they think that steer their young lives and show them new, wide-open doors almost daily. Beliefs and brainstorms by the hundreds are starting up each second in my classes. I often feel like I’m in the midst of a strong, voiceless storm as I move among the kids—a good storm to watch and wonder at.

* * * * *

THE MYSTERY

It’s funny, but finding my way in any given class is often as frustrating as finding my way blindfolded through the paths of a maze. As diligently as I plan my lessons, I sometimes feel lost and out of touch with both my lesson and my students, as though I’m in a wide desert land with only distant signals to show that other people are here with me.  There are moments (not many, thankfully) when, as I walk among the students, things seem so astonishing, so bizarre and full of surprises, that I wonder where I am and why. It’s like I just awoke and here I am in a classroom full of kids. Strangely, this is not a depressing feeling for me, for I’m realizing more and more that I actually look forward to these moments, these split seconds when the unreserved mystery of teaching overwhelms me.  More often than not, I pretty much prance through my lessons with ease and almost casualness, as though I know precisely what I’m doing and where I’m going, but every so often the haze of mystery descends on me, and the inscrutability of teaching another human being becomes overpoweringly real. At those times I hope the students don’t see me as dazed and stupefied, though that may be a suitable description of this old but youthful-feeling teacher who often feels befuddled by the strange obscurities of teaching teenagers.  

MAZING IN ENGLISH CLASS

Yesterday a friend told me she was “going running” later in the day, and for some reason it started me thinking about “going mazing” in English class. I realize that’s a somewhat bizarre use of the word, but it makes sense to me. As the many years have passed, teaching English has become a more and more maze-like business to me, so you might say I’m going to “maze” through my classes next week, the way my friend was going to run through the town yesterday.  No matter how carefully I plan my lessons, still the actual teaching tends to be like locating the secret paths through a web of wonders. My lessons seem to be clear-cut, perfect paths to selected goals, but actually they are more like trails drawn on the surface of the sea, shifting and disappearing almost as fast as they are drawn, so that, sometimes five minutes into a class, my work suddenly widens before me like a mystifying maze. To be honest, I don’t mind that feeling, because working my way through a maze, or going “mazing”, has usually been a happy experience for me. I sometimes send out a silent cry of thanks that I’m fortunate enough to do some serious mazing each day with serious, maze-solving young students. 

SHOP TALK IN ENGLISH CLASS

Occasionally I see a group of guys gathered around some motorcycles doing a little of what we might call shoptalk, and it makes me think of my English students on the days when they comment on classmates’ essay drafts. They’re talking about words and sentences instead of motorcycles, but their talk does occasionally take on the appearance of a creative, academic kind of shoptalk. They sometimes look at a classmate’s sentence on the projection screen the way guys stare at a carburetor, and they often comment on a sentence with the keenness of bikers bringing their praise and criticism to the bikes of fellow riders. A student might say, pointing to a properly placed adjective, “I really like that adjective right there. It’s in a perfect spot”—and I picture in my mind a biker guy getting giddy as he praises the look of some sweet exhaust pipes. I have ice water and small cookies available for my students, so they sometimes take a sip of water or a bite of a cookie as they stand back to praise a prepositional phrase or suggest a better placement for a participle. They’re not swilling down a beer as they talk, but still, they sometimes remind me of biker dudes doing shoptalk around a first-rate Harley in front of the local watering hole.

* * * * *

BEING ICE WATER

           I make ice water available to my students in my classroom, and it’s gradually become obvious to me that I myself could be a similar kind of refreshment for the students. After hours of sitting in other classes and carrying out homework assignments, the kids are sometimes half crazed with confusion when they come to my classroom, and a little refreshment could be a restorative gift to them. Perhaps if I prepared myself to be like a cooling stimulation for the students rather than a bossy bringer of assignments and instructions—perhaps then my classes could be a brighter part of the students’ day. I don’t mean to suggest that I should stand silently in a corner like a cooler full of water, or that thoughts of earnest, painstaking, and studious work should be thrown out the window. No, I can be a serious teacher and at the same time be a pick-me-up for my industrious and sometimes exhausted students.  I can be a strict leader and at the same time be a glass of bracing ice water in their hassled academic lives.

* * * * *

THE ENORMOUS TABLE

 I recall a poem about a table that was so huge that it could conveniently carry an infinite number of objects on its surface, and I sometimes think of such a vast and tolerant  table when I’m teaching my middle school students. In fact, I sometimes see myself as a quiet, uncomplaining table upon which my students can set down their ideas and talents as readers and writers. In a way, I should be so vast and sturdy, like a one-of-a-kind table, that I can carry whatever the students might bring to class, even the craziest ideas and least disciplined feelings. In this analogy, I don’t really have to do much except make myself available as a resting place or storeroom for the limitless lives my students bring to class. This, of course, includes their less-appealing thoughts and feelings, the ones they might think are dim-witted or downright silly. The English teacher’s table should be big enough to carry all the stuff of the students’ inner lives, whatever they want to bring with them through my door. Dump it all down on my table, I want to say to them; we may not deal with it all, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make room for it. As I think about it, it does seem there is something patient and peaceful about a teacher who is like a table – something that welcomes wandering students and the mental baggage they bring with them. This kind of teacher is not always talking and teaching, but sometimes simply waiting and receiving, like a trustworthy table.  Come in, students, I might say. Unload your life a little. Pile your thoughts up and let us ponder them awhile.

* * * * *

LEAVES AND STUDENTS

Today I was watching a few leaves lingering in the air as they let themselves down to the grass, and it brought to mind my young students, whose minds seem to linger and glide and flow with any winds of thoughts that waft through the room. It usually frustrates me to see this kind of capriciousness in the students, but strangely, it doesn’t frustrate me to follow these little autumn leaves as they stray around and finally down to the ground. The leaves take a beautiful and lazy route as they fall, and my students sidle around and around as they think their way through a novel or a poem. Why should their whimsicality and waywardness be any less enjoyable to watch than the falling leaves I saw moving carelessly among the trees surrounding my house?

STANDING IN THE CLASSROOM

Today, when I told my young students they should feel free to stand at any time during my classes, I was surprised to see expressions of astonishment on their faces, as if school is supposed to be only for sitting. Later, I came to understand their sense of amazement, and to feel sad for them because of it. What has brought education around to this place where students across the world always sit, for hours and hours and hours?  When did sitting become the foremost prerequisite for learning? John Dewey once wrote (and I’m roughly paraphrasing) that a 12-year-old can’t learn much of anything without moving her or his body, and perhaps that’s why I allow the students to stand in my class whenever they wish. Why can’t a student study Shakespeare’s words as easily standing as sitting, as easily leaning against a wall with the words in his hand as sitting in a hard chair with boredom bearing down on him? These days we all love to be outside in the fresh air of fall, so why can’t I bring some of that sense of liberty and leisure into my classes by making it possible for students to stand now and then, and to even take a few steps around as though they are sidling through a Shakespeare play instead of simply sitting and lifelessly studying it?

* * * * *

CLASSICS ON GRASS AND STONES

We only study classic, time-tested works of literature in my classes, but that doesn’t mean we always study them in the classic, traditional ways.  There are times, yes, when we sit at our desks under the fluorescent lights, but there are also times when we’re outside resting on the grass, or sitting on the stones of the many old walls surrounding the school, or just strolling around the grounds with good books in hands. With some instruction on proper attentiveness outside amid the distractions, most kids can come to appreciate being free of the stuffy classroom and able to study great writers in the great outdoors. We sometimes walk among the trees on our campus, discussing the words in whatever we’re reading, sharing ideas as easily as the breezes are blowing around us, thinking an occasional astounding thought. The students, not surprisingly, seem more at ease, more serene, less interested in resisting our studies of Shakespeare and Dickens when we’re out in the fresh air and perhaps finding fresh inspirations coming our way across the campus.

* * * * *

FREELY GIVEN, FREELY GIVING

I don’t do much community service work, but I do often have a feeling of “giving back” when I’m teaching. I’m not sure where it all came from or why it keeps flowing forward to me, but I have been on the receiving end, over sixty-nine years, of a free-flowing river of gifts. In each of the numberless waking moments of my life, I have been given the gift of astonishing thoughts and feelings. I know now that I don’t make these thoughts and feelings, but rather they unfold of their own accord and cascade toward me in a timeless manner. Just sitting here now, holding my hands to the keyboard, countless ideas from somewhere show me what words to type. Since all these inner gifts have been so freely given to me, I take pleasure, as I’m teaching, in freely re-giving them to my students. They’re not mine to keep and care for; they belong to the limitless universe of thoughts and feelings, and sending them straight on to my students seems like the instinctive next step. I sometimes picture myself as a strange kind of Santa Claus, coming to class with a big bag of inspirations which came my way by some mysterious and magical good fortune, and which I distribute among my students with the satisfaction of an old man making merry.

* * * * *

PICKING UP SCRAPS

     I stooped to pick up a scrap of paper this morning – a small act in a nondescript day – and it caused me to pause and wonder why I don’t truly notice more of the millions of small acts I carry out each day. The fact is that I’m doing something at every waking moment, whether walking down the hall to class, carrying a cart of trash to the road, or simply sitting down at my desk for some work – and the sad fact is that I rarely pay attention to any of these tasks.  They turn my life in new directions each moment, but my mind is usually too immersed in musings and wonderings to notice them. What’s really unlucky is that these little nameless acts – all of them – have forces inside them that might remodel my life in small ways, if only I showed some honest interest in them. They are little miracles that might make me see the wonder that works its magic each moment. Picking up a scrap of paper, while apparently insignificant, requires the nimble movement of many muscles and bones, and the sunlight shining on the paper when I picked it up was flawless in its glows and colors. It was a tiny task done in a moment, but a miracle nonetheless—one of countless marvels I bring about each day with hardly a notice.  Typing on a keyboard, glancing up on a gray day, doing the dishes in a silver sink – all are wonders I wish I could appreciate and praise more often.

* * * * *

SPEEDERS AND DRIFTERS

In my fairly long drive to school each morning, I am joined on the roads by both speeders and drifters, the same kinds of travelers I see in my classroom each day – and there’s surely room for both. On the interstate and back roads, some drivers obviously like the graceful feelings that come with cruising along at lightning speeds, while others employ – and take pleasure in—the slow pace of clouds coming and going down the roads of the sky. I used to get exasperated with both sets of drivers – the speeders for recklessly governing the roads with their speed, the drifters for doing everything possible to prevent me from getting where I’m going – but now I see a proper place for both. As long as they are law-abiding, both groups of drivers deserve their place on the highways, and the same is true of the speeders and drifters in English class. Some of my students can cruise through assignments effortlessly, like the guys in the get-up-and-go cars that race past me, but other kids carry their thoughts like heavy weights and work longer minutes and hours than the speeders – but both can bring a lot of light to my classes. In my teaching, there’s a necessary place for all kinds of students  – the sharp and the stumbling, the fast and the unsure – just as there’s the right place on the roads for those who rush and those who roll slowly along.

* * * * *

RAISING THE SHADES

It’s an old story, the one about the man who made himself miserable by living in a house with all the shades pulled down, and it sometimes comes to mind when I’m teaching. It occurs to me, now and again, that my only significant task as a teacher is to help the students raise the shades in their own lives. It’s not so much that I should give them new knowledge, but that I should simply help them throw open their inner doors and windows so they see what’s always been there. Sure, I can offer them crumbs and scraps of information – novel ideas, feelings they may be unfamiliar with—but somehow I sense that all they need to know sits hidden inside them, and the teacher’s important job is to cheer them on toward slowly but surely uncovering it all.  When I teach about the themes in Of Mice and Men, I don’t think of myself as setting small truths down in their minds like so many gifts; rather, I feel like I’m making it more possible for them to think thoughts that have always been inside them, but that have never risen to the surface. I’m more of an assistant discoverer than a giver of gifts. The sun of wisdom is always shining inside the teenagers I teach, and I like, most of all, to make it easy for the shades to be lifted so they see that sun.

* * * * *

POLISHED CASUALNESS

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

* * * * *

REJOICING IN AFFLUENCE

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

* * * * *

TUNING IN

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

RUNNING WITH PATIENCE

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

RIDING – AND READING—BACKWARDS

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

MY LUCKY LIFE

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

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

TAKING OFF THE WEIGHTS

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

THOUGHTS IN STYLISH RIBBONS

When I discovered this morning that the word “finish” derives from the same Latin root that gives us “fine”, it got me thinking about all the fine finish lines my students and I cross in each class. We create thoughts by the thousands as we think our way through the assignments, lessons, and literature we’re working with, and all those thoughts are fine just as they are. They may not be the thoughts that “deep thinkers” think, or that college professors praise, or that produce a perfect set of grades for class, but they are the thoughts that came to us, and therefore they are fine just as they are. They are finished, you might say—as sensible and polished as possible at this particular moment. Can they shift and transform and become thoroughly different thoughts? Of course, but that doesn’t mean the new thoughts are any better or brighter or finer—just newer. Each of our English class thoughts comes wrapped in the stylish ribbons of the present moment, and each, in a sense, crosses the finish line of thinking in celebratory triumph. It’s like our minds during English class are playing-fields where robust and successful thoughts—which is all of them—are finishing races with a fine kind of flair.

GETTING ABOARD

At the start of each English class, I feel like I’m climbing aboard the big, bright train that takes my students and me for refreshing rides each day. I plan precise lessons for each class, but I can’t help but believe that something besides my brain brings us through the good land of learning. I feel like some kind of colossal engine far ahead of us is always working with smoothness and muscle to make the learning happen. All the kids and I have to do is get aboard and watch for the wonders.

STANDING AND WAITING

“Thousands […] speed, /

[…] o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also [live] who only stand and wait.”

-- John Milton, “On His Blindness”

     As the years have passed, I have become far more interested in standing and waiting than in speeding and dashing and rushing hither and yon. All my speeding around over the first many years of my life yielded little more than partially busted plans, headaches from hell, and a slowly disappearing sense of success. I lived in a relentless and insistent way, working ferociously against any and all obstacles to pursue my private goals, giving little heed to the need for some silence and peace every so often. I was a rusher and dasher of the first order, flinging myself along the roads of my life “without rest”, as Milton puts it. In my late 40’s, however, something happened that slowed me down and spoke to me about the importance of simply waiting and watching. I grew weary and bored with the high-speed pace of my life, and, instead of always racing around, I began to allow the wide world to work on me in its gracious ways. “Allow” is the special word there, for my life did, in fact, begin to be more about allowing—or letting—than doing and getting. I began to take pleasure in simply standing and observing the surprises that happened around me—and more and more, all things seem to me to be surprises. Waiting has become a sort of way of life for me – just waiting to see what wonders will happen next. I guess, now, I’m rather finished with speeding around. It brought me no blessings that I know of, and standing and waiting, at least now and then, has become a worthwhile way to live.

* * * * *

DOING NOTHING IN ENGLISH CLASS

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

THE SETTLING OF A STREAM AND A LIFE

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

PERFECT CLOUDS, PERFECT KIDS

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

POWER THAN CAN’T BE LOST

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

CONSTANT OPPORTUNITY

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

THE MUSIC OF WRITING

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

THE DEAREST FRESHNESS

“Nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

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

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

POPPIES AND PREPOSITIONS

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

MADE IN SECRET

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

* * * * *

THE CHILDREN OF ROOM 2

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

* * * * *

RAISING THE WHITE FLAG

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

COMFORT ON ALL SIDES

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

* * * * *

CLEANING TABLES AND MINDS

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

JOICING

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

THE BEAUTIFUL CLASS

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

SHOPPING IN ROOM 2

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

SPEAKING THE TRUTH

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

     -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Harvard Divinity School Address”

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

* * * * *

BARBAROUS IN BEAUTY

“[N]ow, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise […]”

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest” 

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

* * * * *

BEING CONTENT, AND WAITING

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

As a teacher, I often force my students to be busily ambitious, always bringing new and more serious assignments their way, but I also try to temper that with the knowledge that satisfaction and patience plays a powerful role in learning. In their often furiously busy lives, my young students need to know that I treasure those times in English class when we can all “sit content” for a couple of moments, just welcoming what knowledge we’ve already gained, and giving thanks for all our thoughts, both the wee and the wonderful ones.  As Whitman suggests, the only person a student has a chance of knowing is herself or himself , and it’s a vast and puzzling person indeed, as vast, I truly believe, as the scattered stars above us – and isn’t it important to provide time to it back and be satisfied with that marvelous person?

 * * * * *

INEFFABLENESS IN ROOM 2

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

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

* * * *

CURRENTS

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

* * * * *

THE GENTLE SPIRIT

“… the gentle spirit of moving words …”

-- Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

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

* * * * *

SURGERY AND ENGLISH CLASS

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

* * * * *

IN THE PRESENCE

Every so often, as I’m standing before my young students of English, it comes to me that I’m in the presence of several kinds of magnificence. It may seem strange to use the word “magnificence” when speaking about a simple 9^th grade English class in an unexceptional classroom out in the Connecticut countryside, but I do see magnificence on all sides as I’m instructing the students. I’m simply standing in front of often forlorn and disheveled teens, but sometimes they seem surrounded by halos of brilliance. They often think in unmanageable ways, but occasionally their thoughts throw out a luster like lights. Of course, I’m also in the presence of just plain presence – the astonishing sparkle of each present moment. No matter how wearisome my lessons might be or how tedious my teaching becomes or how lackluster the students might seem, there’s always the present moment making its unspoiled miracles. There’s always new breath bringing life to each of our lives, always the marvel of feelings flowing through all of us, always some sort of sunlight outside to show us the splendor of the outdoors. Indeed, it’s impossible to not be in the presence of irrepressible power, because that’s what each present moment is – pure, newfangled, and everlasting power – and it’s always in the classroom with my rosy, refreshing students and their wholehearted senior-citizen teacher.

POOR OR LUCKY?

My mother often used to say, speaking about people who were suffering in some way, that they were “poor things”, but I’ve slowly come to see them as lucky things. I don’t mean to suggest that suffering is some kind of satisfying or innocuous experience, just that it can bring the gift of greater resilience and wisdom to a person. When we suffer, it is possible to see, if we’re fortunate enough, the farther distances of kindness, the vast spaciousness of friendship, the open wonders of tenderness. Through suffering, we can sometimes be shown how breathtaking our bravery really is. I once knew a man who seemed almost pleased that he was given the sickness called rheumatoid arthritis. He seemed to celebrate his illness, as if it was a bestowal from the universe that gave him great powers of kindness and courage. He made merry in his ability to be stronger than his sickness. When we visited him, he smiled from his sickbed as though his suffering was simply an excuse to praise the surprises that life offers. In no way was he “poor Mr. Euler”, for his illness had made him, in his mind, the luckiest man alive. Does this mean we should praise suffering, or give it a warm welcome? Of course not, but it might mean that we should make room for the miracles it brings – for the courage it can carry in its gnarled arms, for the sweetness it sometimes brings in its hands as hard as swollen bones.  

* * * * *

BACK-AND-FORTHING

A friend sometimes speaks disparagingly of what she calls “back-and-forthing”, and while I agree that changing one’s mind can create confusion in lives, I also have seen its usefulness, even when it’s done quixotically and suddenly. I see this tendency in nature, the way winds work one way and then another, the way the weather does its raining one day and then dries things out with some waterless days – and if it’s a good way for nature, then it might make sense for me. After all, when I make a decision, it’s based on the smallest evidence conceivable – the slight ideas in my very slight mind – so why shouldn’t I change my mind when new ideas materialize? The weather works that way, shifting smoothly when conditions change, so why shouldn’t I? Truth is, our minds are continuously changing, whether we realize it or not. Like leaves in the fall, thoughts are everlastingly falling through us, transforming our minds as comprehensively as autumn leaves transform the countryside. Our minds naturally participate in “back-and-forthing” from moment to moment, and so do winds and weather, and so do I, fairly intuitively and (lucky for me) cheerfully. 

LEARNING LESSONS

BIANCA:

“Gentlemen, you do me double wrong

To strive for that which resteth in my choice.

I am no breeching scholar in the schools,

I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times,

But learn my lessons as I please myself.”

-- Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew 

These words of Bianca’s could easily have been spoken by my youthful students as they struggle with my “’pointed times” and painstaking, fussy lessons. Perhaps it occasionally (or always) seems strange to the students that something as magnificent as learning should be squeezed into 48-minute classes and step-by-step exercises. Perhaps it seems as silly as striving to stuff a breeze into a suitcase, or saying the word “sky” and thinking you’ve seized the truth about the measureless spaces above us. Bianca was scolding her tutors for thinking knowledge comes in convenient containers, and not in always rolling rivers of learning that we can take pleasure in as we please. She knows she’s not simply a name and number in a teacher’s class, but a participant in an everlasting process that pushes out past all finicky academic boundaries. Her tutors taught like automatons, but she knew she wasn’t “tied” to that kind of learning. The world looked wide and wonderful to young Bianca, just as it does to my restless, aspiring students as they sit in my 48-minute-classes trying to untangle the significance of lessons that may seem senseless when likened to the boundless wisdom always awaiting them in their unlimited lives.  

BLESSINGS IN ROOM 2

Thumbing through a dictionary this morning, I came upon this definition for blessing – “a beneficial thing for which one is grateful; something that brings well-being” – and I instantly wished that my English classes could be a blessing for my students. I even wished, as wistful as it sounds, that my students might some day say, as they leave my classroom, “This class was a real blessing, Mr. Salsich” – meaning, maybe, that this class brought some gifts they were sincerely grateful for  -- brought some true light for their lives. I can picture it, the modest teacher suddenly made glad by the goodwill of students who have seen some wisdom softly shining in his small classroom.  The dictionary I was using said the word could also mean “a person’s sanction or approval”, as in “Mr. Salsich gave the students’ work his blessing”, and I thought, no, not always their work, but always their lives. All my students are made of the finest materials the universe has to offer – far-traveling thoughts, feelings that go anywhere with daring, and hearts than hold more than anyone knows.  These are young people with boundless powers, students whose future is as immeasurable as the sky that spreads above them – and so, yes, I give them my blessing, liberally and for as long as I teach.

SOME WONDROUS THING

… like a gentle whispering

Of all the secrets of some wondrous thing

That breathes about us in the vacant air.

-- John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry”

I almost always feel “some wondrous thing” surrounding my students and me in the classroom, but it by no means implies that I am being a wondrous, or even tolerable, teacher. Even when I am stumbling through a totally bewildering and lackluster lesson, I can still sense something special working its way among us. Even if students are sitting like dazed prisoners, I can always feel the flowing of some shadowy force in our midst. This is no fanciful or surreal force, nothing that makes my classroom some kind of loftier place of learning than others, but simply the same shifting of thoughts and feelings that is found wherever there are people. It’s as if my students and I, in any English class, are standing or sitting on invisible tectonic plates made of endlessly active ideas and emotions, which are constantly sliding and colliding and sometimes crashing. What’s wondrous about this is that I have no reasonable idea where any of these ideas or emotions come from, or what patterns their shiftings and changings will follow. They’re like the weather—always something disparate and surprising as the moments pass, always a fresh design.  It actually seems to have little to do with what the students or I choose to think or feel during class. It’s like the lifting and pushing of plates beneath the earth’s surface – just something we live with and learn to better understand and appreciate, these wondrous movements of our inner lives in my little classroom.

RIGOROUS, BUT ALSO RIGOROUSLY ORIGINAL

“As [Degas] relentlessly copied the nudes of the Old Masters and drew from live models, he developed a desire to be rigorous, but also rigorously original.”

-- Richard Friswell, in ARTES Magazine, December 21, 2011

I admire Degas and his desire to be “rigorous, but also rigorously original”, and it is precisely the desire I wish to instill in the students in my English classes. Degas obviously saw a curious and essential connection between being rigorous and being original, and I hope the students can eventually see it also. The artist gave his unreserved concentration to copying the Old Masters’ nudes over and over again, but the eventual result was a series of unprecedented paintings. He labored, you might say, like a perfectionist, but also like a pioneer. This seems to run contrary to the contention that meticulousness and inventiveness cannot cooperate – that you can’t be precise and ingenious at the same time – but Degas proved it is possible, and I hope the same for my students. I hope to show them that careful attention to precision and correctness can work well with a wildness of spirit and a willingness to test new trails in their writing. I want them to see the good sense in combining exactness with inspiration, mixing strictness with pizzazz and elegance. When I saw Degas’ elegant finished paintings of nudes, and realized they were the result of scrupulous devotion to detail, I couldn’t wait to work with my young writers to help them be both staunchly rigorous and bigheartedly original.

CALM GRANDEUR

“In the calm grandeur of a sober line,

We see the waving of the mountain pine.” 

-- John Keats, “I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill”

When I read these lines this morning, I thought of thoughtful and ingenious writing, the kind I hope my young students can produce fairly steadily. I want their writing to definitely be “sober”, in the sense of serious and sensible, but I also expect their sentences to have some spirit in them, some liveliness and pizzazz, perhaps like “the waving of the mountain pine”. It’s well and good to give a reader paragraphs that present organized arguments, but it’s also essential to show some flares and explosions of stylishness. It’s fine to unfold sentences that are “calm” with clarity and good sense, but let there also be, I tell the students, some “grandeur” befitting the writing of enlightened and openhearted teenagers.

* * * * *

DIVINING IN ROOM 2

January 1, 2012

divine ² |diˈvīn|

verb [ with obj. ]

discover (something) by guesswork or intuition

According to the above definition, I definitely do some “divining” in my classroom. Intuition is my handiest tool, really – that strange inner sense that makes certain words seem sensible to say and certain actions the precisely suitable ones. I don’t carefully consider each and every word, several seconds before I speak, nor do I cautiously design each gesture I make. Most of my speaking and moving during class is a consequence of sheer guesswork, the work of an intuition that loves to leap into words and actions. Somehow I “divine” what to do and say during class. It’s as if bolts from the blue bring about everything that happens. Of course I do plan my lessons, I’m proud to say, with significant care, but once a class gets started, the guessing, and I might say wizardry, take over. I usually cover each part of my plans, but it seems like some transcendent influence is causing the lesson to flow along. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m in some special correspondence with the universe – just that things happen in such an eccentric, accidental manner that they all seem made by some far-off force. It’s as if I’m a puppet being operated by powers I’ve never known – powers that produce thoughts and actions with the smoothness of sorcerers. Lest this seem an admission of helplessness and despair, let me add that I’m an enormously contented and grateful puppet. 

* * * * *

DISAPPEARING IN THE CLASSROOM

     “As to the poetical Character itself … it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet…. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, The Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity.”

     -- John Keats, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818)

I have always loved Keats’ idea that a poet must make himself melt away in his poetry, and I think the same is true for a teacher. As the years of my career have passed, I have held it more and more imperative that a teacher take himself or herself as far out of the picture as possible – that the “self” of the teacher grow gradually smaller and less significant. That sounds strange, I’m sure, to those who think of teachers as trailblazers or captains or spectacular performers, but it makes sense to me, especially as I recall the few captivating teachers I had as a student. These were teachers who took me, not into the world of their own personal interests and beliefs, but into vast realms of literature and ideas, where their personalities seemed to disappear. I remember these teachers being not like bright beams of light that blinded us to all but their radiance and brilliance, but more like soft, unassertive lamps lighting the way. The personalities of these magnificent teachers sort of vanished in the brightness of the literature they taught and loved. You might say the teachers disappeared so the learning could arise in their place. My humble hope is to disappear in a similar way, day after day among my ever-blossoming students.

* * * * *

BEING STARTLED IN ENGLISH CLASS

“Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” 

-- John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey

Every so often, something startles me in English class, and it is usually nothing more spectacular than the soft look of a student’s expression, or the shine the sunlight places on someone’s shirt, or –occasionally – a “sparrow […] before [the] window” working to get some food at the feeder.  Like Keats, almost “nothing startles me beyond the [m]oment” – beyond the commonplace happenings that life lets us come across moment by moment. I make big plans for each class, hoping, I guess, to be given great rewards in the form of energized students and a satisfied self-image, but most often the rewards come in modest, usually disregarded forms – a fervent look from a girl, the song of a boy’s voice, a sudden wind beside the windows.  I even pause, now and then, to admire the birds at the feeder just outside the classroom – even in the midst of a convoluted lesson. I find the birds startling, sometimes, and so I take the time to “take part in [their] existence”. It’s just a few seconds of silent appreciation, and I’m convinced it helps me make my lesson, as I return to it, a little less wearisome and perhaps a little more startling.

* * * *

NEVER A BETTER DAY

“The air that floated by me seem’d to say,

‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day.’”

--- John Keats, “To Charles Cowden Clarke”

Sometimes, when I’m in the midst of teaching a tiresome lesson, I often wish it was tomorrow or yesterday or any chance day besides this one, but occasionally I recall these lines by Keats, and then the day usually develops into, not an unblemished one, but at least the very best one for now. I’m sure I’ve spent thousands of minutes in my life wishing it was a better day for teaching or writing or thinking or hiking or holding a hot cup of coffee in my hand, when the fact is that any day is the best day it can possibly be. As the saying goes, any day is just what it is, and my teaching on any day is just what it is – just me making the best of whatever is given me, be it gold or god-awful mud. I recall an old Bible line about a furnace making gold from garbage, which makes me think I’ll always “never have a better day”, even on a so-called bad day of evidently feeble teaching, for there may be a furnace in the day’s midst, silently making something precious underneath the rubbish.

* * * * *

GOING ON

There’s always a lot “going on” in my classes, and, even if some of the goings-on have more to do with student daydreams than with English, I’m happy to know that nothing stands still in my classes. In fact, nothing stands still anywhere at anytime, and so my always lively English classes simply share in the customary business of the universe. If my students and I are constantly “going” somewhere during class, it’s only because it’s what all of life does.  We are part of an ever-energetic cosmos, so we have no choice but to go, go, and go.  Bear in mind that my “lively” classes are not necessarily fascinating or successful, and may even fall into the doldrums of sheer dreariness, but still, something is always going on. Thoughts, for one, can’t help but going on, moment after moment after moment. If the number and variety of our thoughts during class could somehow be portrayed on a screen, it would show something like the flashing and signaling of the endless stars above us.  True, our thoughts might be far off course from the lesson and may be bizarre and even crazy-sounding, but they’re definitely “going on” – easily and ingeniously, from second to second for the full 48 minutes.  Of course, along with our steady streams of thoughts, our bodies are also sharing in the incessant goings-on of the classroom. Our blood is reborn with new oxygen with each passing second, new air steadily enlivens our lungs, and our skin’s cells are replaced by fresh ones almost constantly.  We have no choice. It’s not up to us. As we sit or stand in English class, everything is going on, continuously and refreshingly—and, for us, fortunately.  

* * * * *

SPREADING ROOTS

There is a serious amount of silence during my classes, which I guess I should be grateful for, since roots always spread in silence. My young students make a habit of holding their thoughts inside, and, as exasperating as it sometimes is for me, perhaps this is what allows the thoughts to slowly send out roots. Gardeners gradually come to see that plants cannot be pressured into growing, and teachers must likewise discover that neither can ideas, especially those of students who are just starting to rise to the surface of their lives. In the sometimes resounding silence of my English class, the freshly-made thoughts of the students are, I like to think, slowly distributing their roots out and down into the depths of insight and wisdom. It makes me wonder if I should actually foster more silence in my classes, reasoning that this would support the expansion and emergence of the students’ newest ideas. Maybe I should make an occasional announcement that we will now hold our silence for 60 seconds so our thoughts can come closer to the surface.  

* * * * *

ON NOT BEING CAREFUL

If we have confidence, in one sense we can stop being so careful about everything. If my students and I truly see the strength and diversity of our own thoughts, and the indestructability of them, and the fact that they flow through our lives with irresistible steadiness, then the need for caution and carefulness drops away.  We know that nothing can prevent us from presenting ourselves to the world as thinkers of thoughts that are bursting with freshness. In a way, we have no choice in the matter. Our make-up is that of free-flowing rivers of ideas. All we have to do is put aside diffidence and faint-heartedness, and let the flow pour on.  This sort of reckless confidence in the classroom seems contrary to the usual suggestion that students should think and write with unreserved caution, always selecting their thoughts and words with the utmost  restraint, but I guess what I’m wanting in my students’ work in English class, at least some of the time, is less self-discipline and more looseness and even rowdiness. Why all the diffidence and hesitancy about our capacity to think astonishing thoughts? Does not our blood flow freely and liberally? Do not our lungs let in grand drafts of refreshing air without our fretting and being careful about it?

* * * * *

BEING AMAZED

I’m sometimes amazed during my classes, but the amazement comes too seldom, considering that I’m always in the presence of astonishing events. There are so many startling occurrences during my classes that I should be shocked, in a sense, second after second. Each of my classes is miraculous – literally. No, there are no sudden shafts of light landing on my students and me, and no, no one is raised up from sickness during my classes, and yes, some students learn zippo in their 48 minutes in my classroom—but still, there are absolute miracles made in our midst moment by moment. Consider this: oxygen atoms that may have been in Borneo or France a few days ago are given to our bloodstreams all during class. And this: my students and I each have 50 trillion cells in our bodies making pure magic for the full 48 minutes. And this: breezes that have never blown before in the history of the universe are constantly sailing past the classroom windows. And this: sunlight that has traveled 93 million miles takes its place silently on the windows while we’re working in class. Are not these miracles enough to make us amazed? Should we not stand in silence every so often during English class, out of respect for the spectacles unfolding before us?

LOOSENING UP (or ANALYZING)

When I surprisingly discovered yesterday that the word “analyze” derives from the Greek word for “loosen up”, I suddenly pictured my youthful students of literature disentangling themselves from their worries about their academic abilities, and simply unwinding a little among the pages of the books we read for class.  Perhaps I’ve had the wrong notion about literary analysis – that it’s a matter of major concentration and intensity. Perhaps the best way for my students and me to appreciate the artistry of a novel or poem is to actually ease up among the sentences, perhaps “put our feet up” among the words and phrases and just see what happens. If we really want to analyze some pages in a story, possibly we should make ourselves less uptight about the process and sort of sprawl among the sentences—sort of lounge around and idly look for the lights of meaning the author might have placed here and there.  Perhaps, going back to the Greek, we should analyze literature by “loosening up” the words on a page—figuratively shaking them, turning them all upside down, or dropping them out of a third-story window and watching what happens.  I get the feeling from the Greek origins that analysis has more to do with amusement than meticulousness, more to do with games than grim obligations.

THE FOUNTAINS OF LEARNING

When I feel like learning is simply not arising in my classes, I’m sometimes lucky enough to recall that, essentially, it has no choice in the matter.  Learning, by its very nature, can never stop happening, never stop bringing its skills and transformations to the surface of our lives. It’s likeLike the blood in our bodies that constantly supplies us with renewalrestoration and even rebirth without any assistance from usour assistance, learning lets itself unfold in our midst moment by moment. Whether a student is making an annotation in the margin of a book, or bothering the student beside him, or simply staring at birds among the trees outside, he or she is participatingsharing in the ongoing process of learning. There’s a fountain always flowing up among all of us, whether we sense it or not – a fountain made for revitalizing our lives with learning.  

AN ELEGANT PROOF

I’ve seen countless “elegant proofs” in my classroom, which makes me think serious mathematicians might enjoy visiting with me and my students. As I understand it, in mathematics an “elegant proof” is a verification of the rightness correctness of a formula that is so smooth and unimpeachableunassailable that it’s said to be literally beautifulstunning, and I have seen thata kind of beauty I’ve seen in my classroom on almost a daily basis. We don’t use math formulas in my classes, but we do try to solve the “problems” presented in poems and stories, and sometimes the solutions are strangelyextraordinarily beautifulstriking.  Just the other day, a student spoke about the sentences at the end of a chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, and her thoughts seemed thoroughly absolutely lovelyexquisite, and somehow totally true.  She was just a teenager trying to decipher unscramble a book that has stymied scholars for decades, but somehow her words seemed as perfectflawless as a circle, as beautifulgorgeous and right as any rainbow. For that moment, what she said about those sentences from Dickens was as perfectpicture-perfect an analysis as I had ever heard. Of course, I know that on other days other students of Dickens will share different thoughts about those same sentences,. and their thoughts may shine with a similar eleganceclassiness – and but that’s the beauty of elegant proofs, at least when it comes to literature. The light of elegantsophisticated and deep reading is always shining, wherever there are readers ready to see it.

* * * * *

WE ARE NOT ALONE

Since I’m sure my students sometimes feel very alone in my English classes, as if they are solitary travelers in some wilderness of writing and reading, I remind them occasionally that being alone in the study and use of words is actually impossible. Words themselves, after all, are never alone, but live, we  you might say, in a universe of endless numbers of brother and sister words, all working with and  influencing and transforming each other. The meanings and pronunciations of words are constantly changing shifting as they mix and mingle circulate and stir with each other around the world. Linguists even speak of “families” of words, suggesting the vast intertwining interlacings and friendship alliances, so to speak, of words.  I occasionally remind my students of this, and suggest that they are also members of a family – the family of readers and users of the countless families of words. When my students are reading Shakespeare’s words, they are joining with the endless numbers of readers who have had that privilegepleasure over the centuries. When they share their interpretations of sentences from A Tale of Two Cities, they are figuratively establishing a friendship with his countless loyal steadfast commentators of the past and present. In a very significant sense, my students’ thoughts about the books we study are the offspring of all the thoughts of past readers – the children, so to speak, of earlier students of these authors. We are all together in partnership as a family of serious readers, even when we sit silently in our classroom, studying a passage by ourselves, or when we are at home hoping for some sudden inspiration. It will come, I say to my students.  It will come because we readers are connected to all readers, even when we sit by ourselves with a mysterious  thoroughly puzzling page before us.   

* * * * *

MULTIPLE READERS, MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS

“We now have multiple authors rather than single solitary geniuses. We now acknowledge the existence of multiple versions of important works rather than just one text per work.  Instead of a single real or ideal reader, we have multiple readers all over the place-classrooms full of individual readers in our college and high school literature courses, journals and books full of readers in our academic libraries, auditoriums full of readers at our conferences. And all of these readers are constructing interpretations as fast as they read. As one might imagine, when it is a complex work that is being read, the interpretations differ from one another as much as the readers do. It is not possible that only one of the interpretations is correct and all the others are wrong.”

                   -- Jack Stillinger, “Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats”

Professor Jack Stillinger of the University of Illinois is one of my heroes, for he stands for the same rebellious approach approach to reading to literature that I have learned to love.  He believes that all readers bring their different minds and hearts to the books they read, and that these readers, all of them, have wholehearted thoughts and feelings about what they read, and that these thoughts and feelings should be respected by other readers, especially teachers. To take some sentences from A Tale of Two Cities and say that I, the teacher, and only I, can tell the true story of what those sentences mean, makes about as much sense as saying only a teacher can understand the sky. Hundreds of thousands of readers have read Dickens’ novel, and each one was stirred in a special way, and each one walked away from the book with some fresh and special feeling in her or his heart. I have always thought it strange that certain people presume to understand books better than others, which seems as silly as saying the meanings of swirling ripples in a river are open only to certain superior somebodies. All of us, my young students included, have the right to see what perhaps only we see in the books we read, and no one should want to dissuade us, or deter us from following the trails of our own irreplaceable impressions. Professor Stillinger sees that truth, which surely has made his students the fortunate onesfeel fairly well-off in his classroom.      

* * * * *

A NEW WAY

          This morning my shower showed me something new about teaching. For years I have usually entered the shower at the front, by the faucets and the shower head, but this morning, for some reason, I decided to enter from the back, and what happened will help me be a better teacher today. As I stepped in, I realized—ta-da! -- that the spray from the shower head was not hitting me, and that therefore I could gradually get myself under the strong spray of the water, instead of  being assaulted in a sudden and disagreeable way from the front of the shower. It was the kind of instant understanding that makes you wonder why you’ve been such a simplelton all these years of showering. I thought about this incident later, and it began to look like a small light to shine on my teaching. How many times, I wondered, have I done something in my classroom simply because I’ve always done it that way, like always stepping into the shower from the front and being instantly soaked with water? How many fresh and simple truths about teaching are sitting in front of me, waiting to be discovered, like this morning when I went into the shower from one end instead of the other and found a more fitting and perfect way?

* * * * *

A FRIEND

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ 

-- John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

I haven’t often thought of the books we read in English class as “friends”, but rereading Keats’ poem this morning makes me see some sense in the thought. The poet presents the idea that, in the midst of all  the reworkings and ups-and-downs of our lives, all the occasional “woe[s]” and disillusionments, something “shal[l] remain” to remind us of what’s truly essential in life – and for Keats, this something is the kind of flawless magnificence represented by the Grecian urn. There’s something stunning in all of our lives, Keats suggests, and it’s not just in museums, but directly in front of us in the most commonplace loveliness – in the shape of a pencil on a table, in a window with a wide view of a town’s lights, in orange peels in a flower-patterned bowl, and certainly in some lines from Shakespeare or Keats. When my students come to class with their usual cares and distresses, I can comfort them, perhaps, with a paragraph from A Tale of Two Cities. I can show them that the sense of well-being they so badly need is possibly waiting in just a few words working together to make something distinctive on a page in a book. A book is just a “silent form”, a “cold” collection of words, but it can carry a splendor inside it that can comfort even the most fretful teenager. Perhaps all my students “need to know” is that something lovely – a poem, a sentence well structured, or just a bird at the bird-feeder outside the classroom—can always lead them out of worries into the simple truth that life is basically a beautiful thing.  

* * * * *

57,000 BRAND NEW THOUGHTS

Every so often the astounding thought occurs to me that approximately 57,000 of these thoughts work their way into my life every day. Day after day, iIn sixteen hours of wakefulness each day, the wonder is that I’m not overwhelmed constantly stunned by the sheer numbers and newness of this tideflood of thoughts that flows through me. It can’t be stopped, but constantlyrelentlessly keeps takes good care of me by bringing me ideas that didn’t exist the second before they come to me. It’s my good fortune to be part of such a powerful and influential force each day—the spectacle of the endless stream of ideas. What’s especially fascinating to me is that these thoughts are not under my control. I can’t create thoughts the way I might make something with a saw and hammer; the thoughts seem to think themselves into being, bringing something shining and fresh for me each moment. If I’m sitting in my classroom before class, swift and unforeseen ideas will be getting born by themselves by the dozens as the seconds pass. If I’m walking down the walkway at school, stray ideas will pass through me faster than I can follow them. It truly is a striking display, this profusion of thoughts second after second, hour after hour.  In the early morning, perhaps I should make myself ready, prepare myself for the surge of garden-fresh thoughts, this stream of absolute newness that will never stop.

* * * * *

Saturday, January 21, 2012

EVERY DAY IS SUCCESSFUL

One day recently, toward evening, I said to a dear friend that I thought it had been a “successful” day, but almost as soon as I had said it, the thought came to me that every day is successful. When I was thinking the day had been a success, I was thinking from the smallest possible perspective, that of a tiny,  infinitesimal, isolated person called “me”, who presumably can judge whether a day has been what it should have been. It’s as if I was a sitting in a judge’s seat chair in some vast, world-wide courtroom, solemnly passing down my decision to the waiting universe: “This day has been successful.” It became more ridiculous the more I thought about it. Who am I, this tiny small speck of a soul in an endless cosmos, to pass judgment on the worthiness praiseworthiness of a day? Can I know whether the sunshine spread itself around in the proper appropriate manner? Am I to decide whether the thousands of cars in Connecticut crossed from one place to another in the most perfect way possible the proper way? Is it up to little me to judge the rightness or wrongness of an entire winter day? The more I thought about it, the more clearly I remembered a simple truth: from the largest perspective, that of the sprawling  measureless universe itself, every day, every hour, every instant, is precisely what it has to be and should be. Total Absolute success is built into each passing second of time. Stars shine as they should, totally successfully as magnificently as possible, and shoes scrape along a sidewalk the same way with a similar impressiveness, just as they must at any given second in this marvelously successful universe.

* * * * *

Sunday, January 22, 2012

LETTING IT RISE

I occasionally bake a few loaves of bread, and seeing the dough slowly rise in the bowl sometimes puts me in mind of my young students and their quietly  secretly rising lives. A few grains of yeast puts a mysterious, transformative power into bread dough, and there’s a similar force transforming my students moment by moment as they sit before me. The dough seems like a sleepy  lifeless blob as it sits silently in the bowl, and my students, to be honest, are often more like lumps clusters of sleepiness drowsiness than growing boys and girls emergent human beings, but there are great good works going on inside both.  Somehow the dough gradually grows largermore expansive, more resilient, and, you might say, more full of the power forces of life – and the same, I know, is happening to my students all the while they are in my classroom.  The dough, before long, will become brown and beautiful loaves of bread, and my sometimes drowsy and lethargic lackluster students will, each day, see fresh ideas flowing toward them, and new horizons in their young lives, and lighthearted, unbelievable possibilities for themselves.

* * * * *

Monday, January 23, 2012

LIGHTER AND STRONGER

     Yesterday, when I heard someone say their single goal for this year is to become lighter and stronger, I said to myself, “Yes, and that’s my single goal for my students.” The kids in my classes often come drooping slumping into my room as though they are bearing the burdens of heavy cares and concerns, and I would love to lighten that load. I’m supposed to simply teach my English curriculum, but certainly that must include caring for my students, and to care for someone is to seek to help them find how light life can feel. I want to show the students how to compose successful essays, yes, but in the process I hope to help them “lighten up” so they can float sail and soar in my class instead of droop wilt and drag sag. Surprisingly, this lightness, this nimbleness and buoyancy I want them to feel, also implies a certain kind of strength. If they are feeling buoyant, then chances are they are feeling lighthearted, which suggests they will find the strength necessary to move through serious works of literature with ease and grace suppleness. If their lives feel light to them, the tasks they undertake for me may feel light as well – light and interesting  alluring and perhaps even enjoyable pleasurable, easy jobs for someone who has feels both lightness limber and strength well-made.   

* * * * *

Tuesday, January 24, 12

AMAZING GRACE

In religious circles, it’s usually agreed that grace is considered to be a gift from God, but in my English classes it seems to come more from caring hearts and strong minds, more from some super-force all around us than from what I usually think of as God. It is truly “amazing” to sit with my students and feel their hearts unfolding a little as we read and discuss a chapter in Dickens, or to listen as the students’ say what their young minds have suddenly or slowly brought to the surface. There’s no explaining where these thoughts or feelings come from, except to say they are somehow “given” to us, my students and me, moment by moment in every class. We don’t consciously create the fresh ideas that unfold  evolve in each class. We don’t say, “Now I am going to make this specific thought”, but rather the thoughts seem to think themselves up, sort of the way the weather works out its patterns in its own mysterious ways. We are all under the jurisdiction  sway of the sunshine and cloudy skies that come our way, and the same is true of the ideas and emotions that seem to be made especially for my youthful students and me as we sit in my classroom and pay attention to the powerful voices of our hearts and minds.  

Wednesday, January 25, 12

COVENANT

When I learned recently that the word “covenant” can be used as a verb, as in “We covenant on Wednesday evenings”, it occurred to me that, in fact, my students and I covenant in my classroom each day. Used in this way, you might say the word means “come together voluntarily to make an agreement”, which describes, fairly truthfully, what happens in my English classes. Of course, in one sense, the kids don’t come to my classroom voluntarily, but in another sense, I think they do, because I think they sincerely wish to grow become brighter smarter and more sophisticated, to to become better able to understand their puzzlingbewildering world. They might not rush eagerly wholeheartedly to get to my classroom, but I believe they bring a real willingness to work hard for wisdom. I think they throw themselves into learning, in their own youthful adolescent ways, as thoroughly as I throw myself into teaching. You could say we “covenant” each day because we agree, each in our special way, that it’s good to grow and give the good gift of education to ourselves – that being able to see the significance of the world around us is better than being blind. 14-year-olds and old men like me are equally in favor of finding learning wherever we can, which is why we covenant, five days each week, with care and accord.

Thursday, January 26, 12

A LUCKY GUY

I’ve known this for years, but it’s always worth saying again: I am a lucky guy. Here are a few proofs: I’m sitting, at this moment, in a pleasantly snug house on a frosty morning, a lamp is lighting the room in a warm way, my best friend is near and never far away, my classroom in a kindhearted school is waiting for me, the students will shower me with the blessings of their extraordinary lives, breezes will bend the trees outside my classroom, birds will find what they need at the feeder, far-off towns and cities will send their high-spiriteds to the skies, distant stars will always shine, while I’m in a welcoming room walking coolheadedly through books with my students.  Again: I am a lucky guy.

* * * * *

Friday, January 27, 2012

THERE’S NO ALONENESS ANYWHERE

“The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown”

-- John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale 

In the classroom, I am sometimes suddenly filled with the feeling of unison and solidarity with all the teachers and students of the past and present. Perhaps it’s the same feeling Keats had when he realized that the songs of nightingales, in a sense, last forever – that inside the moment of his joyous listening to the bird’s song were concealed all the countless times others had listened to the same song. There was a strange timelessness and even everlastingness in Keats’s experience, as though he was in unison with the immeasurable numbers of people, be they emperors or clowns, who had heard and will hear those sweet songs in other gardens. Now and then, fortunately for me, I feel something similar, for there are moments in my classroom when I feel completely connected to the endless family of teachers and students from all times and places. I’m presenting lessons on poems or punctuation rules, and all the teachers and students from the limitless years of the past are there with me, presenting lessons and learning how to learn. It’s as if I’m in the center of a vast and crowded classroom, filled with all those who think deeply and don’t want to stay blind and dumb, and we’re all sort of holding hands as we work our way toward new knowledge. Keats was alone in a lonely garden and I teach alone in a tiny classroom, but in another and real way, there’s no aloneness anywhere, not when nightingales are singing or when kids and teachers take on the task of teaching each other. The universe itself sits and studies with my students and me, the same everlasting universe that sat with Keats and listened.

* * * * *

CARE IN PLACINGA BAND AND A BROTHERHOOD

“The problem of pause or cæsura had been a large one in eighteenth-century verse, and care in cæsural placing had in general been as much exercised by the poets as it had been preached by the prosodists.”

-- Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats. London: Oxford University Press, 1945.

When I read the above quote, I could easily see in my mind the poet John Keats and his friends, some 200 years ago, taking great “care in” putting into their poems, not just caesuras (pauses), but even the smallest words, and it makes me more determined than ever to teach my young students to use a similar kind of precision as they are prepareing their essays. To a serious writer, words are as precious prized as jewels, and should be joined in a sentence with as much attention as a jeweler chooses pieces for a chain. I picture the jeweler leaning over a collection an assortment of jewels, sorting and studying them, thinking of always considering what the finest possible positioning might be, and I encourage my student writerss to work in a similar way. You could say tThey are working with beautiful and strong priceless forces objects (words) and so they need to place them in precisely the proper places so they can shine and function perform in the best foremost ways.  Keats and his friends helped each other stay devoted to doing their absolute best in each poetic endeavor on each poem, and my students and I can help each other in a similar way. Like the poets, we can suggest stronger words in certain places, or advise a rearrangement reshuffling of words to work out a smoother rhythm in a sentence, or recommend a thorough reworking of a paragraph. We can be a band of “literary jewelers” joining words with the care and precision of artists – with the devotionconsecration and seriousness earnestness of a band brotherhood of young poets in England.

* * * * *

Friday, February 3, 2012

A CLASSROOM CONVENIENCE

Perhaps I should think of myself as a convenience for my students—an appliance, perhaps, that assists them in building a passably satisfying academic life for themselves. Just as a laptop computer is seen as a convenience for the traveling executive, making her or him a more effective and efficient manager of the company’s affairs, I might consider myself – and I’m completely serious—as a sort of utensil for my students to utilize as they pursue their studies. Don’t we surround ourselves with conveniences, and aren’t some of these conveniences of special and necessary importance to us? If I want to read at night, I have lamps suitably ready to glow and give good light for my eyes. If I want a drink of water, I have the convenience of the faucet and its trustworthy flow. Conveniences make it easier for us to do essential tasks, and isn’t that what a teacher does? The students want to learn – need to learn—and Mr. Salsich is there to make the task easier, more convenient, for them. Similar to a stapler or a pencil sharpener or a laptop, I’m ready to assist the young people as they prepare themselves for their futures. The word “convenience” derives from the Latin word meaning “to come together”, and I guess what I’m doing as an English teacher is helping my students come together in the classroom to discover and prosper, helping their individual talents come together to write and read with wisdom, and helping their faith and confidence in themselves come together so they can simply smile a little more often.

* * * * *

Saturday, February 4, 2012

GRACEFUL LEARNING AND TEACHING

Yesterday, as I was watching some birds break away from a far-off tree and float off, I thought, for some reason, of my young students and me. I saw, in my mind’s eyes, all of us gracefully giving our best to the study of English, working as partners with politeness and poise. Gracefulness, to me, is a gift that all of us have been given, but that few of us find and develop in ourselves. We live among the graceful things of this world, from the smooth meanderings of clouds to the unruffled movement of our blood to the flowing traffic of highways, and yet we often feel more strain than gracefulness, more pressure than lightness and ease.  My students and I, even as we sit in my comfortable, homelike classroom, probably carry more concerns with us than joys. Strange, that such a spectacularly supple universe, a place overflowing with elegance, should produce so much apprehension in my students and me. Strange, that we can’t carry on our scholarly classroom duties with a bit more ebullience and a bit less trepidation, seeing as we are lucky enough to be learning and teaching on a planet that’s constantly performing miracles, spinning and shooting along in space at indescribable speeds. Even in my small classroom, there’s gracefulness all around us – in the electricity that passes easily through the wires, in the heat that hums up through the vents with steadiness, in our breathing that brings fresh air to our bodies with wonderful evenness – so why shouldn’t there be a studious kind of gracefulness in our studies as we pursue more of the pleasing wisdom that waits for all of us?

* * * * *

Monday, February 5, 2012

THE STREAM OF UNDERSTANDING

After a colleague stopped in to visit one of my classes recently and said, “There’s a lot of intelligence in this room,” I began to wonder exactly where that intelligence exists. The easy answer is that it exists in the brains of the students and me, but that’s like saying the sunshine on my windowsill exists in the windowsill. I guess, like most of us, I pretend to accept the conventional view that thoughts are made by the small series of ashen tissues inside my skull, but I hold in my heart a wonderful and irrefutable fact – that intelligence is far too vast to reside inside any small space, or in any space whatsoever. Intelligence, to me, seems as widespread as the stars above us, as immeasurable as the winds around the earth. Intelligence isn’t just minuscule thoughts thrown together by a brain; it’s the unceasing force that fashions all things – thoughts, brains, and the beautiful sky I saw yesterday at sunset. Sometimes, when I’m startled by the ideas my students share in class (which is almost constantly), I feel as though some powerful influence has just passed among us – as if we’re afloat on a stream of understanding. During class I often wonder, “Where did that idea come from?” and the answer that usually comes to me is something like “Somewhere distant and close beside us, somewhere immense and as small as the sounds of our spoken words in class.”

* * * * *

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

OPENING A ROCK

Sometimes, when English class seems as uninteresting and stationary as a stone, I recall a friend telling me about a passage in the Bible where someone strikes a rock and water flows freely out through a wasteland like a stream. I think of this story occasionally, especially when my students are silent like stones and my lesson looks more like a lost trail than a street that leads to wisdom. There are days when daydreaming works more magic in my classroom than any teaching tricks I might use – days when mental darkness drops down upon my students and me, no matter how many meticulous plans I have made.  The sunshine can be magnificent outside, but in Room 2 there is sometimes a shadowy kind of world-weariness.  That is when I picture the rock being struck and something fresh and gratifying flowing out. I see solidness turning into liveliness, and boredom becoming the bright lights of curiosity and enthusiasm. I see mountains making rivers of lava, and dark days breaking open into sunshine. I dream of old ideas suddenly dancing, and dead words working with heartiness once again. It doesn’t always happen this way in English class – sometimes the tediousness is just too rock-solid – but there are moments when, yes, it seems like someone suddenly opens a rock and a river of thoughts start streaming through the classroom as we all sit stunned and pleased.

* * * * *

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

OPENING BLIND EYES

In a way, my task as a teacher is fairly easy: I simply have to help my students – and me – open our eyes. I actually don’t have to teach, instruct, guide, or enlighten – just join with the students in the marvelous enterprise of raising some eyelids so the miracles all around us might be seen.  The strange truth is that my students and I – and most of all of us, I would guess – consistently miss seeing the wonders that are always working their magic in our presence. For some reason, our inner eyes are closed to the unobtrusive blessings that are bestowed on us with the consistency of sunshine on the best summer days. Every one of the thousand of seconds in a school day is an absolute stunner in its freshness and fertility, and yet I’m afraid the boys and girls and I give little attention to this unceasing, everyday splendor, tied up as we are in the workings of our personal hopes and fears.  Every word in a poem is potentially a powerful force, as is every statement a student makes in a discussion, as is even every glance given across the room and all the ways the sunshine lights the windows – and all the students and I need to do is open our eyes and see it.  My task, in a sense, is as easy as raising the shades of windows. Each moment in class, we are called by a world full of wonders, and I simply have to help us answer.     

* * * * *

AN ASTONISHING KIND OF POWER

As I prepare what I hope will be powerful lessons for English class, I often forget that an astonishing kind of power is ceaselessly preparing me to prepare the next step in the lesson. It’s easy to get lost in the assumption that a separate individual called “me” makes things happen in my life, when the fact is that a far vaster force is pushing and pulling all things along. I set down words on the lesson plan page, but the power behind those words is wider than all the seas and more spacious than a thousand skies. Every thought that comes to me comes from far, far away, to find its place, for a few moments, in my life, and then leave for other lives. I sometimes sense this strange force in my classroom as I carry on my duties among the students. The light-hearted or solemn looks on their faces, the light that seems to shine in their earnest ways of saying things, their thoughts that sometimes spring out of them like spurts of brightness – behind all these I often feel a force at work that makes me wonder why I’m so privileged to be part of it. Sure, I stand in the center of the room and seem to be setting out the steps in the lesson, but somewhere unseen there’s a power that makes it possible for me to stand, for the classroom to stand where it does, for sunlight to look in the windows as my students and I are sent down so many surprising streets of learning.

* * * * *

February 14, 2012

UNDERSTANDING DUST

The other day, as I was consoling myself about my inability to understand my students, I recalled a colleague saying we might as well try to understand the dust as understand adolescents. I guess he was speaking of the scattered and infinitesimal aspect of dust and students, the way they both seem to constantly shift and never stay settled, never seem able to be studied and understood. Dust and students constantly surround me in the classroom, and yet they seem as mysterious to me as the world’s lights seen from a mountain’s summit. They are simple and commonplace, these kids and these ever-present specks of dust, yet they are both strangely secretive and incomprehensible. It might seem odd to compare the students I’m trying to teach with mere flecks of miniscule dust particles, but it’s the fact that both kids and dust are ordinary and at the same time astonishingly extraordinary that I’m thinking of. I almost never notice the dust in my classroom, and I often miss seeing my students in their absolute matchlessness. Like the dust, they are in the classroom everyday, seemingly the same as yesterday, and yet, like the dust, they are transforming and shifting second by second. If I had super hearing powers, I could surely hear the dust being reshaped in amazing ways as I’m teaching the students, those unpretentious but astounding persons who are made new every moment in my classroom.

February 14, 2012

VALENTINES AND STONES

Flowers come to mind when most of us think of Valentine’s Day, but today I will consider, instead, the magnificence of stones. Flowers are soft and pleasing and stand for things shared and cherished by friends, but stones are striking, too, especially in the way they stay silently in the center of wherever the universe places them. Stones are satisfied, it seems – pleased to unobtrusively persist just where they are. On this day when friendship and kindheartedness are acclaimed, isn’t it important to pay attention to the parts of our lives that let things happen the way they’re supposed to happen, like the stones that sit where they are as rain and winds and sunshine pass across them? Love, most of all, is about allowing the loveliness of all things to talk to us, to tell us the story of the abundance and beauty of our lives. Love, for me, is far more than magical moments between two people. It’s the summer grass giving us its best greenness, and the tires on cars carrying people with perfect ease, and trees twisting with style in breezes, and stones in ditches doing their best to be simply stones. A stone is a handsome something as it sits beside the street on my way to school, handsome because it’s modest and unassuming in this world where most of us slave away to be noticed and praised. I say my greetings today to stones, those simple things that know how to sit and stay in this unceasingly unsatisfied and rushing world.    

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February 16, 2012

A GREAT FACT

Sometimes, when my teaching seems lost among thousands of trivialities, I’m fortunate enough to find, again, a few great facts, and one of these is that I never have to help my students think deep thoughts, because they already are.  When they enter my classroom, they are carrying on, at that moment, the noble labor of thinking about life. Their thoughts may be of sleepovers and lost chances and shirts to wear on the weekend, but those are the indisputable delights at the center of their lives. Little, lighthearted things like what someone said on Saturday can signify the meaning of all of their lives. They always think deep thoughts because their lives look deeper to them than oceans.  My task, then, as one of their teachers is not to turn on their thoughts, but to simply find the force and magnificence in the thoughts they are already thinking. Perhaps listening would be a good lesson for me – just listening to hear in their earnest words the thoughts that move their minds and hearts in endless ways.  They are boys and girls who have been given the gift of unblemished and bottomless thinking, and I can learn a lot about teaching by simply appreciating their rather extraordinary everyday thoughts.

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February 16, 2012

TAKING IN, GIVING OUT

I sometimes seem to hear my classroom breathing, and it makes sense, since thoughts are consistently taken in and given out during class. It’s a seamless process, the giving and receiving of ideas as the students and I search through stories and poems and prepare sentences for essays. It’s a sharing that’s similar to the partnership seen in nature, where nothing survives by itself, but all is participation and synchronization. Winds pass among tree limbs and the limbs push the winds past, just as my thoughts make new thoughts for the students and their thoughts start new ones for me. We can’t make it alone in English class. I take in an idea from a student and somehow, perhaps in the slightest of ways, it reworks my ways of thinking, and then I give out the gifts of my own thoughts. We think thoughts for each other. We break open the beginnings of new knowledge together.

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BIG BEAUTY, SMALL BEAUTY

A friend and I were admiring an early morning scene recently, when she made the surprising observation that she saw both “big beauty and small beauty” in the scene.  She was speaking both of the spreading sunshine on the eastern hills and the minuscule specks of sunlight on the needles of some yew bushes outside the windows. She said she loved the greatness of the sun as it slowly showed itself, but she also took pleasure in the small signs of light in the trees and on the roofs and sides of houses. As I watched with her and thought about bigness and smallness and the numerous “sizes” of beauty, I thought back to some discussions I had with my students last week. They made several statements that I thought were surprisingly perceptive – filled with “big beauty”, you might say – but they also made some comments that carried the prestige of unobtrusiveness and modesty, what my friend might call “small beauty”. These were shy remarks made in passing by kids who didn’t care to show off their thoughts, but just wished to share some things they were thinking about. Their beauty broke through to their classmates the way winter sometimes works its way into autumn in indiscernible ways. Thinking about it, I guess I like the small beauties of classroom life best of all – the way the most insignificant words or actions can carry a class away to first-hand understanding, the way even a slight gesture can suggest a fresh way of finding truth in a story. I’ve seen it countless times, the soft sound of wisdom that’s heard even in the midst of the seemingly trivial talk that takes over, now and then, when teenagers talk literature with this somewhat bowed but blessed teacher.     

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LETTING THE SAW DO THE WORK

While I was sawing some old limbs in the yard this morning, I remembered something my dad told me years ago – that I should always let the tool take the burden of the work – and it brought back some old wisdom about teaching. I remembered being down in the basement sawing boards with Dad, exasperatingly pushing the saw back and forth, and he would occasionally say, in his tasteful and easygoing way, “Just let the saw do the work, Ham.” He was reminding me that saws are made to slide through wood with a certain ease and evenness, but they won’t work so well if we struggle and shove as we do the sawing. “Easy does it”, Dad would say, and then, if I loosened by grip and slackened my desire to be the boss of the saw, suddenly the work was easier and the slicing of the wood seemed to proceed almost effortlessly. As I’m struggling in the classroom to be the best teacher I can be, I sometimes recall those days in the basement with Dad. I can be shoving my way through a lesson or pestering my students to polish their essays, when suddenly Dad is by my side, softly suggesting a mellower way. “Let the ideas in the lesson take charge of the teaching,” he might say, or “Relax and allow the plans to point out the way.” Sometimes, after seeing some of my scuffles and defeats with the saw, he would take me outside to show me how clouds carried themselves across the sky with effortlessness, or how the winds worked among the trees with style and ease, not with struggles and confrontations. He said nature doesn’t know how to strive and wrestle, but only how to flow and follow the easiest way, and that’s what I should always do. Occasionally, after a series of setbacks in the classroom, I think of Dad and those carefree clouds above our house, and those winds that never seemed to work hard, but simply passed along their course with simplicity. I sit back in my chair and look out at the way the trees beside the school always let the sunlight land on their limbs the way it wants to, and I think, Yes, Dad, that’s the way I will teach tomorrow. 

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A RESONANT CLASSROOM

Resonate: “To evoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief. To correspond closely or harmoniously”

Resonant: “Strong and deep in tone; resounding: a resonant voice. Having a lasting presence or effect; enduring. Strongly reminiscent; evocative.”

When I recently read an article in which the author stated that, if a stringed instrument is vibrating, nearby instruments tuned to the same frequency will begin to vibrate, or resonate, in harmony with the original device, I began wondering whether my classroom was resonant in that sense. Could my students and I be thought of as stringed instruments, and could my goal be to get all of us tuned to the same frequency so we can resonate—be in harmony—together? It was an thought-provoking picture – a classroom resounding with insight and sentiment because it is filled with human learning instruments tuned to the same frequency. There are many ramifications of this idea, but one of the most fascinating is that any of the instruments can begin the vibrating. I could certainly be the tuning fork that sets the classroom resonating with ideas, but any student could, as well. If we’re all tuned to the same frequency, it doesn’t matter who “sets the tone”. We’re like the stringed instruments in an orchestra, all pausing to see if someone will start a string vibrating so we can all join in. As the definition above suggests, this can produce superb oneness and accord in the classroom, but, as the definition goes on to suggest, it also can create an enduring effect. A resonant classroom is one that stays in the memory – one that yields learning that lasts. Long after the students leave such a classroom, the “sounds” of the learning that befell them there will, perhaps, resound ever so softly in their lives. Decades later, perhaps a page from a book of poems discussed in my English class will still be resonating in a soft but significant way.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

THE OCEAN IS NEVER A MESS

Someone once said to me, as we were standing on the shore on a blustery day, that “the ocean is never a mess”, and I sometimes recall his statement on those occasional days when I’m struggling through a class that seems an unreserved and absolute mess. We were staring out at an ocean that seemed, from one perspective, to be in a state of total untidiness and disorder, with whitecaps crashing crazily into each other and winds working in every possible direction. It was not an especially pretty scene. It appeared to be simply a sea let loose and gone crazy. Few people would have praised its orderliness and efficiency, and yet my friend saw something else, and I try to see something else at school when my lesson plans appear to be pulling apart and crumpling. He helped me understand that whatever the sea seems to be doing is precisely what it should be doing, and I try to see the same truth in my collapsing lessons. There’s loveliness, he said, in even the wildest swells and breakers, and there’s loveliness, I know, in even the most disastrous days at school. My particular plans may not be breaking records for success, but beneath them, there’s always learning of some sort proceeding at a steady and perfect pace. The students may not be understanding what I want them to understand, but they’re surely understanding, in their youthful hearts and minds, some truths that will take them toward new and necessary knowledge. Surely there is the inescapable order of all things right where I’m seeing only academic disorder and disaster. I often feel thankful to my old friend for helping me see the splendor in even the stormiest days at the shore, for he also showed me, in an unforeseen way, that the failures of lesson plans can prepare the way for surprisingly prosperous learning.

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Thursday, February 23, 2012

BEING INFLUENTIAL

I used to aspire to be an influential teacher, but now, after these many decades in the classroom, I see that I have no choice in the matter, that I am always influential – as are all of us, as are all birds and winds and rivers and sunsets and stormy days and all things. The word derives from the Latin for “flow”, and flowing, you might say, is the foundation of everything. Flowing is what makes molecules and atoms the miracles they are as they constantly stream through the universe. All of the limitless cells in our bodies are continuously coursing through our bodies, sometimes crossing out into the widespread universe as we interlace with all things. Flowing is simply what happens – what has to happen, second by second by second. We are all part of the everlasting flow of everything, all as influential as the ever-flowing rivers and the surging stars above us. As I stand in my classroom during class, whatever wisdom has been bestowed on me is, of necessity, endlessly flooding out to the students, and, of course, the students’ high-spirited wisdom is streaming across to me. It’s not our choice. It’s just the way things are.

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Friday, February 24, 2012

THE TEACHER AS EMPEROR AND CLOWN

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!


No hungry generations tread thee down;


The voice I heard this passing night was heard


In ancient days by emperor and clown. . . .”

-- John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”

It’s always been interesting to me that Keats places an emperor and a clown side by side, and I’ve often thought of this unexpected pairing as I’ve paced around my classroom in my commanding yet strangely ridiculous manner. Keats suggests in his poem that there isn’t really much difference between emperor and clown, and I’ve gradually come to see that the same is true for teacher and fool.  The emperor pretends to be brave and sensible while in his heart he hears himself laughing at his own foolishness, and something similar happens to me when I’m teaching. I see myself standing before my students like some sort of sage or magistrate, but at the same time I see the clown in me, the jester who jokes with “Mr. Salsich” to help him see that he actually doesn’t know much about anything. For me, teaching has become a pleasant and sometimes joyous play-acting experience, in which the teacher-actor prances around the classroom to create the illusion of expertise and wisdom, while the prankster inside him, the one who wonders why all things are absolute mysteries, wanders around in merry amazement. I enthusiastically play the prince and pilot for my students, hoping to help them in significant ways, but the comic in my heart has the truth of things, and smiles and sits back.

* * * * *

Saturday, February 25, 2012

I CAN ALWAYS DO THIS

It’s comforting for me to remember, at those times when I don’t seem able to do anything correctly in the classroom, that there’s one things I can always do with distinction – notice what is happening. No matter how horrible a situation seems, no matter how many mistakes I seem to have made, I can always simply wait and watch – just stand back and dispassionately witness whatever situation is presenting itself.  It bears repeating: I can always do this. When I suddenly feel like a fool in front of the students for having forced a silly assignment upon them, I can always simply step away and observe my feelings of foolishness. If, in the midst of a lesson, I let myself fall into discouragement, there’s always the option of pulling back and quietly keeping my discouragement under observation. What’s intriguing – and comforting – about this is that I don’t have to actively do anything. Indeed, it’s the doing and manipulating and planning and presiding over that tends to totally tire me out, but simply noticing needs only alertness and sincerity, and actually leaves me less tired and more wide-awake than before. My life as a teacher is an endless parade of episodes, each one full of fascinations and bombshells, and truly taking pleasure in it – all of it – is simply a matter of making it something to notice, and perhaps stare at, with amazement.

* * * * *

DIAMONDS IN THE CLASSROOM

       When my teaching seems dull and lack-luster, when there seems to be no polish or flash in my classroom, I think sometimes of a useful analogy: students as diamonds. Years ago, someone explained to me that a diamond reveals its countless facets only when it is slowly spun in the light. If it always sits at one angle to the light, a diamond can actually appear almost uninteresting. Only by spinning it in as many ways as possible can an observer begin to appreciate the almost endless faces of its loveliness. It often helps me to think of my students as “diamonds” in that sense, and to imagine that it’s my task to keep “turning” them in the light. After all, if a diamond has a thousand facets to its beauty, each of my students must have a zillion. Far more than a diamond, a human being – any human being—is a magnificent display of talents and class, and I see several dozen of them in my classroom each day. I’m surrounded by living diamonds from 8:30 to 3:00. However, I won’t notice much of their splendor unless I constantly spin them in the light. By planning scholarly and stimulating lessons, I must turn each of my students so they are able to show off another talent – another aspect of their magnificence. I must help them reveal their sometimes concealed brilliance, hour by hour, day by day. When visitors enter my classroom, I want them to be just as impressed as they would be if they were in the presence of a necklace of flawless diamonds.

* * * * *

DETACHMENT IN ENGLISH CLASS

In school, we teachers often encourage our students to be “committed” to the particular goals of a class or an assignment, but it might also be useful to remind the students that un-commitment, or detachment, can be just as essential. To use an analogy, if a sports team is unswerving in using a specific strategy during a game, they might not notice when changed conditions in the game necessitate an adjustment in the strategy. They might be so focused on using their plan that they miss opportunities to make modifications and thus better break apart the opponent’s defense. Their complete commitment might actually make for their demise. The same thing can happen to students. A young writer might be so focused on following her prearranged framework for an essay that she fails to notice, as she’s writing, a wonderful new direction she could take. Similarly, a student might be so devoted to finding out “what happens” in a novel that he misses much of the magnificence of the writing. It might be helpful if we teachers encouraged our students to practice the art of detachment – the art, I might say, of going after goals but not being held back by them. If they get the ‘A’ they have set their sights on, fine, but if they don’t, they must be able to detach themselves – free themselves – from that goal and notice the useful results that came from the ‘B’. If they commit themselves to travel certain roads, fine, but they must foster in themselves the freedom to take different roads if the conditions call for it. There may be some golden coins at the end of one road, but there may be a true treasure at the end of another. * * * * * Tuesday, March 12, 2012 DISCRETION AND GOOD MANNERS      “Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater, indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.”      -- Henry Fowler      We teachers sometimes start thinking we have some type of superior knowledge, which, as the above quote suggests, can set us off on the path to something like vulgarity. By this I don’t mean we start using swear words or saying offensive jokes, but simply that we act in an academically rude manner – sort of riding roughshod over our students because of our supposed more upscale and worthier wisdom. Even if it’s in small and unnoticed ways, this kind of scholarly snobbery can set a mood of standoffishness in the classroom – an atmosphere with the cultured, erudite teacher on one side and his amateurish students on the other. I’ve seen more than my share of this kind of classroom, which is why Fowler’s statement seemed so significant when I came across it recently. I must remember, when I’m in the classroom, that whatever knowledge has been bestowed on me must be shared with my students with the utmost “discretion and good manners”. There’s a certain sensitivity that should keep company with understanding and so-called expertise – the sensitivity that allows me to be mindful of my immense ignorance even as I am taking pleasure in some new knowledge. There are certain good manners that go along with the parceling out of education in the classroom –manners that make it possible for me to be both knowledgeable and gracious with my students, both scholarly and courteous. I may have superior knowledge about participles and poetry, but the civility and politeness with which I instruct my students will shine more brightly, and bring more awareness their way, than any ostentatious display of learning.  * * * * * Wednesday, March 14, 2012 SMOOTHLY STEERING “I’ll smoothly steer My little boat, for many quiet hours, With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.”      -- John Keats, “Endymion”      I like the fact that Keats sees the boat of his poetry as sailing in streams that always, in due course, “deepen freshly into bowers”, and I see my teaching in much the same way. There’s a confidence, a coolness and buoyancy, in Keats’ words, as if he is absolutely certain that all will be well with whatever he writes, and I feel similarly self-assured. I don’t mean that I know I will be a winning teacher every day – just that I know that nothing will happen in my classes that won’t somehow cause learning to be let loose among us. Like Keats when he’s writing, I feel myself sailing somewhere special in every class, even when the waters seem strange and stormy. I’m not so much a teacher as a fellow passenger in a ship that always brings my students and me to curious destinations, some that I planned for and some that surge up out of somewhere mysterious as I’m teaching. There’s always depth in even the most lackluster classes – always some “bowers”, if we can see them, where the learning is as large and calming as we could wish it. Like the poet, we simply have to put our trust in the ship of our minds and hearts, sit back, and see what waits ahead. * * * * * Thursday, March 15, 2012 INTO THE WILDERNESS “And now at once, adventuresome, I send My herald thought into a wilderness.”      -- John Keats, “Endymion”            Reading these lines this morning brought back to my mind my old desire to be an “adventuresome” teacher, one who isn’t afraid to send his classroom lessons into the wide “wilderness” of learning. On the one hand, I try to teach lessons that students can learn with as little struggle as possible, but surprisingly, I also want them to wander a little, to roam and drift among poems and stories, to search by themselves the wilds of writing first-rate sentences and essays. Like Keats when he was writing his fearless, probing poems, I want my English lessons to lead the students out past the limits of their previous knowledge, out beyond even common sense and the so-called right answers, out to where wisdom always waits with its tools for transforming lives. Keats says his thoughts are “herald[s]” – messengers, emissaries, announcers of uncommon news – and perhaps my lessons can do something similar. Maybe my classes can call out like couriers carrying news of new trails to take, trails even I, perhaps, have not fully traveled. It takes bravery to make poems that shine like lights in the darkness, and it takes a similar boldness to bring the kind of lesson to students that will send them off on journeys  of realization and fulfillment.  * * * * * Friday, March 15, 2012 CLOSE AND CARING ATTENTION      Occasionally there is widespread inattentiveness in my classes, and I want to do my best to diminish that tendency. In thinking about it this morning, I checked a dictionary and found that one of the definitions for “attend” is “to accompany or wait upon someone as a companion or servant.” I like that, because it suggests that paying attention during class should be something we do not just out of some humdrum habit, but because we sincerely care about everyone in the class. We want to be a proper companion for our classmates, and so we attend to their needs by giving them our attention. We take care of them by being attentive when they have something they want to say. There are many important duties I have as my students’ English teacher, but surely none is more important than teaching them how to care for each other. Where to put commas and participles in a paragraph are relatively insignificant skills when compared to the skill of being decent to the people around them. I want to show my students how to be serious readers and writers, but I am far more concerned about helping them become seriously caring people. Being kind to others, being attentive to their needs, is not an easy skill to learn. Much more than learning how to use participles, attending to other people when they want to share an idea or a feeling requires tireless industry. My students and I have to push ourselves, day after day, to practice this essential skill of paying close and caring attention to others. * * * * * BEING COMFORTABLE      Today, as usual, I would like to be comfortable – and actually, I have no choice in the matter. The word, at its root, means “able to be with power”, and I will be with limitless power all day, whether I’m always conscious of it or not. We feel comfortable when we feel secure – and today, since I will always be part of the measureless power of the universe, I should feel unreservedly secure. There will never be any force capable of doing what we call “harm”, because all the force in the universe is constantly present with me, and working harmoniously, precisely where I am at each moment. (It may not always feel harmonious to me personally, but in the biggest picture, it is always so.) What I would like to do today is be aware of that power, thoroughly feel it exerting itself in its steady, resolute manner. Even if I sometimes take no notice of it, this vast and peaceful force will still be working, still be making all things in the universe, including me, utterly comfortable. * * * * * OPENING UP HEAVEN “See if I don’t open up heaven itself to you and pour out blessings beyond your wildest dreams.”      -- God, in Malachi 3:10 (The Message, Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible)      I don’t usually stand and stare during English class, giving appreciative thanks, but perhaps I should every so often. After all, “heaven”, which, to me, is just the infinitely supportive and benevolent universe, is bringing me and my students inexpressible blessings second by second. It’s as if we are working beneath some kind of cosmic airship full of gifts for all of us, gifts that are given with lavishness as my classes and I carry on our academic duties. We get the gifts of good thoughts, innovative feelings, surprising wonderings and musings, the greatest of reveries and notions and bright-shining beliefs, even stray, skittish thoughts that skip through our minds and are away again. My classes may sometimes seem like silent ships on a sea of dullness, but there are blessings always born anew in the midst of them. Even the changing sky outside, and the birds bringing their sparkle to the feeder, and the seed falling sometimes to the grass, and the old, exhausted, but now newly-growing grass, which some students by the windows can see – even these are presents for us from every present moment. And if all these are absent, my students and I always have sunlight of some sort looking in at us, smiling in its bright or gray way, giving us again a reminder that we live lives of the most implausible splendor and fullness, even when we are working our way through the gloomiest of grammar lessons. * * * * * SILENT WORKINGS Wednesday, March 28, 2012 “…the silent workings of the dawn…”       -- John Keats, Endymion           When I read these lines this morning, moments before sunrise, for some reason I thought of my students and I and the noiseless, secret actions – “the silent workings” – that are constantly taking place in our minds and hearts during English class. As I was reading the poem, the universe was working silently to start a new day around my small house – spreading the stars as they should be, spinning the sun and the planets, setting winds to work in certain ways. I thought all that was happening was my reading the words on the pages, but in fact, wonderful forces were forming, almost soundlessly, a sunrise and a stretch of daylight hours that had never previously existed. While I  was simply turning pages, the universe was, in its always unobtrusive way, spiraling and spinning a fresh start for Mystic, Connecticut.  I should remember this when I’m teaching today, especially when nothing fresh or special seems to be happening in class. Under all the surface nonevents and yawns, there are “the silent workings” of miraculous lives. Each of us in the classroom carries within us the power to prepare thoughts and feelings that have never before existed, and the power is always discreetly at work. While I am sharing some thoughts on the rules for semicolons, forces far stronger than I can imagine are making themselves felt in our minds and hearts in a small classroom on a quiet country road. * * * * * CHANGING MINDS Thursday, March 29, 2012      I have often “changed my mind” about something, but this morning that phrase made extra-special sense. The words brought to mind someone changing a tire – replacing a road-worn, useless wheel with one that wears the look of newness and strength – or the way the weather sometimes changes in a flash, from the best sunshine to a blustery storm in what seems like seconds. Changing my mind might be a process as all-embracing as darkness changing to daylight. Perhaps when I say “I changed my mind” I really mean my life was somehow made absolutely new.  My students and I, in this sense, are made new in a non-stop sort of way during English class. We are always “changing our minds”. As we sit together in the classroom, fresh thoughts are continuously refurbishing our lives, although in the most private of ways.  Whether we wish to be or not, we are the recipients, second by second, of ideas that didn’t exist one second before – ideas that are as new as any night is when it spreads its darkness around us. We literally change our minds – get new minds—moment by moment the way every new breath brings newness to our bodies. Our blood is born again and again as we work with each other to understand Shakespeare, and so are our minds and lives. * * * * * BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE Friday, March 30, 2012 An old idiom speaks of “blessings in disguise”, the kinds of blessings I feel are fully present in my English classes. They’re usually in disguise because they don’t seem sparkling and shining with good news – don’t appear to be obvious presents from the universe for my students and me. These blessings usually hide from us as we work on our classroom tasks, somewhat the way the stars are concealed among clouds on stormy nights.  As we discuss stories and poems and ways to write paragraphs, these blessings – these boons, benefits, strokes of luck, windfalls – are quietly wishing us well and waiting to help. They most often come, to put it simply, in the form of the resilient and lighthearted wisdom of the students. The kids don’t realize it, but they come to class with cartloads of understanding, and all of it unfolds, usually secretly, at various points in the school year. Like secret stashes of dollars, their youthful intelligence generates wealth in unobtrusive ways from day to day and week to week. I can sometimes sense it all around me in the classroom – this lavish wisdom of adolescence that usually comes disguised as either silliness or indifference. I’m still learning, after 4+ decades, to see through the disguises to the blessings. * * * * * ON NOT SHINING SO WELL Sunday, April 1, 2012      Recently, on a dull-looking day, I heard someone say that the sun wasn’t shining so well, and I immediately thought of the days in the classroom when my students and I don’t seem to be shining especially brightly. Those are the days when the wear-and-tear of academic life seems to let the life out of the classroom, and only quiet and tranquility are in the room, not delight or elation. Those are days – and they are not as unusual as I would wish – when a sort of winter freeze folds all of us up in muteness, and nothing is shining but the fluorescent lights overhead. On those days, the intelligence of all of us seems to be of a dismal kind, like the sun seems dismal on overcast days. What I want to remember, though, is that, like the sun that is always shining at its best and brightest no matter how much mist or cloudiness is present, my students and I have minds that constantly make light, moment by moment, whether we are aware of it or not. Obliviousness and distractions may seem to cover over the thoughts we think, but, behind our inattentiveness, they are as bright as rising suns every second of the day.  In a sense, English class is always a clear and sunny experience, given the shining thoughts we all bring to it. We just have to see through our unawareness to the light.   * * * * * CASTING OFF CHAINS Tuesday, April 3, 2012 “Never did captive with a freer heart Cast off his chains of bondage and embrace His golden uncontroll’d enfranchisement, More than my dancing soul doth celebrate This feast of battle with mine adversary.”           -- Shakespeare, Richard II             In a strange sort of way, I was a “captive” for most of my teaching career, in bondage to a broken-down way of thinking about this most prestigious of professions. I guess I considered a teacher to be more a policeman than an imparter of knowledge, more a swaggering actor than an unassuming partner in the pursuit of wisdom. For twenty years or so, I was wrapped up in the notion that nothing in the classroom was more important than me, not even the students.  I was a sort of inmate of a very mistaken idea about this wonderful work I’m involved in.  About halfway through my career, however, a helpful thought came to me – that teaching actually had nothing to do with whether I could set up a great “show” for the students each day. It wasn’t about acting or pronouncing or performing. What it was about, I realized over the course of several months, was simply standing subserviently aside and allowing the learning to be liberated among my students and me. The learning was there along; all I had to do was wait quietly as it quietly went about its transforming work. It was a time of true deliverance for me. I felt like some shackles had dropped away. I realized that, while I still had to work very diligently if I wished to be a good teacher, there was a force afoot in my classroom that actually did all the work  -- a force we could call “learning” or “wisdom”. It was like learning was the wind, and I was steering a sailboat with my students aboard, simply shifting course now and then to catch the best of the breeze. It made, and still makes, teaching to be more full of fun than effort, more a liberating exploration than a confining chore.   * * * * * BELIEVING      Sometimes, when I’m working with my students in the classroom, I’m struck, once again, by the immense power of our beliefs. It’s as if I’m surrounded by a force stronger than winds and waves, a force that makes our lives what they are, moment by moment. I occasionally am lucky enough to create inspired lessons, but all the lessons in the universe won’t work as forcefully as the beliefs about life that are moving and mixing inside us. I teach stories and essay writing and grammar rules, but I wish I could teach my students about the vast influence of their beliefs.  I wish I could convince them that what they believe about themselves brings more muscle to their English studies than their ability to think up good sentences or say smart things about a story. Their beliefs can be lights that light up any darkness, but they can also be blinds that always bring darkness. If they believe they will discover success at school today, there will be small wonders awaiting them, but the opposite is also true. It’s the same for me. A belief in my failure to teach well will make it happen, but a belief in the brightness and wisdom we bring to class will work miracles made just for my students and me.       * * * * * A VAST POWER Thursday, April 5, 2012      This morning I found a thought-provoking definition and history of the word “assertive”, which may help me devise ways of  supporting this characteristic in my classroom. One definition says that being assertive is simply “stating or expressing positively”, as in “He asserted his innocence”. Certainly I want to stir up this spirit in my classrom – the capacity to show precisely who we are in a positive and purposeful manner. The definition doesn’t imply brashness or hostility, but simply suggests that people like my students and I should be able to cool-headedly display our true selves each moment in the classroom. What I found especially interesting is that the word “assertive” derives from the Latin word for “join”, suggesting that a person who is assertive – who demonstrates in a positive way who he or she is – is doing so in order to “join” more completely with the rest of the human family. When my students and I are assertive, we are stating in a self-assured manner that we do, indeed, belong – in the classroom and everywhere else.  * * * * * A CORDIAL COMFORT Monday, April 9, 2012 “This affliction has a taste as sweet As any cordial comfort.”      -- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale       There are many “afflictions” that might muddle a teacher’s work in the classroom, but all of them, I have found, can be as reassuring and bolstering as a “cordial comfort”, if only I see them in the best light. There are times when I totter through a lesson like something set to collapse, times when all that seems reassuring is the realization that the period will soon end—but even then some strange power usually arises to remind me how blessed I am to be standing in this classroom with these splendid kids.  These are students who shine with an inner light that can let my classroom come to life, if only I take off the blinders. Any inconvenience that comes my way when I’m teaching should only serve to remind me of how, almost always,  my classroom work is as easy and painless as any. A cordial is a drink that supposedly brings a sense of warm-heartedness to an after dinner occasion, and any seeming disaster in the classroom can do the same. When things fall apart, I often find myself smiling and thinking how fortunate I am that such small adversities are so thoroughly overshadowed by the enormous satisfactions of teaching teenagers. * * * * * THOUGHTS FROM NOWHERE      I often wonder, when I’m working with my students, where our thoughts come from. Each moment, more ideas than my students and I can keep track of make their appearance in my classroom, clashing and combining and causing all kinds of new creations of thoughts and feelings, and yet we can see no source for the thoughts, no place we can point to and say, Yes, here is where this idea began.  In a way, we are part of a fast-flowing river as we sit in English class, a river of ideas that doesn’t seem to start anywhere and is impossible to stop. When I’m teaching, I sometimes imagine myself sitting on the shore of this river, scanning the thoughts as they flow past, and realizing again that it would never be possible to isolate one thought and trace it back to its source somewhere far upstream, just as a single ripple in a river doesn’t have its beginning in some separate spot above it. Thoughts and rivers flow, in a sense, from nowhere, or from everywhere. A single drop of moisture in the air beside me this morning might have been in the making for many years, and this thought that’s making this sentence might have started, somehow, in the mind of someone I met many years ago, and been passed along to me on this morning in April as I prepare for classes which will surprise me with thoughts and words from some mysterious nowhere. * * * * * LAUGHING AT MYSELF “Honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.”      -- George Eliot, Middlemarch      After school, a passer-by might be mystified by the laughter coming from my classroom, especially when they see that I am by myself. It’s not an uncommon occurrence. I often find myself almost folded over in laughter at the end of a school day, and it’s usually directed at myself. When the day is done, I often cannot believe some of the silly, self-promoting, and completely incomprehensible things I said and did.  It’s as if I’m sitting in the audience at a comedy show, and my strange capers in the classroom that day make up the show.  I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m a catastrophe as a teacher, because I’m not – but I know how silly I can seem when I’m pridefully prancing around the classroom like some remarkable mastermind. It’s so easy to see myself as some sort of savior for my students – their long-looked-for liberator from bad grammar and broken-down reading skills—and that’s when it helps to have a good laugh at my foolishness. My students are sensitive, sharp, and promising young people, and what they don’t need is a teacher who treats them like substandard, malfunctioning machines. They are made of the finest materials in the universe, and when I forget that fundamental fact, the best medicine is some fun-loving, finger-pointing laughter at myself.   * * * * * WEAVING A LITTLE FUTURE Thursday, April 12, 2012 “She had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning.”      -- George Eliot, Middlemarch       I occasionally think of teaching and learning as a process of, to rephrase George Eliot, weaving a little future. I picture my students and I sitting in the classroom with make-believe looms, making small pieces of our futures by following the themes in a novel or knowing, at last, what Shakespeare means in certain lines from The Tempest.  We might just be joining each other, say, in a conversation about the use of participles in essays, but perhaps even that seemingly inconsequential conversation creates a small strand in our future lives. Every sentence we say in class can contribute, in a small way, to the lives that lie ahead of us – can fashion a few more miniscule designs for the upcoming years. When we’re wondering together what some lines in a poem might mean, we’re designing, if just to a infinitesimal degree, the way our days will develop in the weeks and years ahead.   * * * * * TRANSPLANTING DAFFODILS AND THOUGHTS Friday, April 13, 2012      Over the years, my fiancé has found pleasure in finding places for her beloved perennial flowers as she moved from home to home, and it sometimes brings to my mind the movement of ideas in my young students’ lives. The kids carry all sorts of mental luggage with them as they work their way up through the grades, and I guess, in a sense, they find new places to set down their favorite thoughts when they start a new school year. My fiancé found the best places for her old daffodils in our new yard, and my students are slowly starting to see their best 7th grade thoughts getting comfortable in my 8th grade classes. It’s a transplanting process – planting old bulbs and old opinions in new places and hoping for the bursting open of new flowers and beliefs.  It’s inspiring to think of education that way – not as an infusion of wholly new thoughts into the students, but as a re-blossoming of their own finest thoughts from past years. I’ve often thought of the similarity between teaching and gardening, and here it is again – the teacher and the gardener giving their best efforts to promote the prospering of life, both in rising students and in resettled flowers. My fiancé fostered the growth, this spring, of venerable daffodils, and, as usual, I showed my students’ some suitable places to plant and nourish their youthful but hallowed 14-year-old thoughts. * * * * * TEACHING WITH EQUANIMITY      I’ve grown to love the word “equanimity”, and the quietness and calmness it conveys has become one of my main goals as a teacher. Years ago, I was anything but calm in the classroom. There was a sort of restrained chaos in my classroom conduct, as though some storm was always fizzing just under the surface. I was respectful to my students, yes, but they surely could always sense the inspired disorder at the center of most of my actions. Now, though, there’s something else there – a quietness and calmness that has come to me as slowly and inescapably as the years have passed. Now, at the age of 70, I see that nothing in the classroom is cause for concern or despair – that all things somehow work as one for the success of all of us. I’ve seen countless situations where some seeming misbehavior by a student has shown us the way to a kind of fresh understanding, or where a mistaken reading has made it possible to prepare a whole new appreciation of a story or poem. The years have shown me that stillness and acceptance is the best way to work with anything that occurs in the classroom. I always hope I can pass along this attitude to my students. I hope they leave my classroom each day with a deeper awareness of the stillness at the center of any learning experience. I hope they see that storms and confusion are best brought to bay by a level-headedness that simply cannot be shaken. * * * * * DOING NO HARM “If he did not do much active good, he never did any harm.”      -- Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers      It seems to me, more and more, that doing no harm should be the highest aspiration of a teacher. I sometimes see myself, when I’m teaching, as someone sitting beside a smoothly-moving, constantly shifting stream – and the last thing I want to do is step in and try to alter its course. The rivers of my students’ lives are flowing with a wonderful steadiness and inventiveness, and who am I to suppose I can enhance them? Can I make mountains be more majestic? Can I shift the winds from the east to the west? I sometimes wonder at the audacity of we teachers, supposing we can transform children’s lives, when it is no more possible than transforming the way caterpillars become butterflies. It would be a better approach to praise, at least to ourselves, the utter rightness of the students’ lives, the absolute appropriateness of each of them as they sit before me in class. Then, having embraced their intrinsic excellence, perhaps I can help them discover it for themselves. * * * * * FRESH RUNNING WATERS  “… the fresh running waters of his mind’s fountain.”           -- Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers      The above quote, which I came across yesterday after several freshly-flowing classes with my students, showed me once again why I feel so fortunate to be a teacher. You can try to find a vocation that feels more like living in the midst of the refreshing waters of healthy thoughts, but I doubt you will be successful. My students and I share ideas all day the way a river shares its countless drops and streams of water. We don’t so much sit in the classroom as flow, all out thoughts and feelings coursing and surging along for 48 minutes per class. Of course, the mystery is that there sometimes seems to be no flow at all, as though all streams have stopped in stillness and slumber. A class of kids can quietly convince a teacher that trying to teach them is about as useless as trying to teach tables or empty boxes. I’ve sat among students who appear more like motionless stones in rivers than the rivers themselves. This, though, is just the usual illusion that fools so many of us teachers – that makes us miss the mighty flow of feelings and thoughts that’s always present when kids come together. Under the sometimes sleepy surface of English class, my students are streaming along with their always lively minds and hearts. Rivers of youthful thoughts are rolling along, even when my carefully planned lesson, say, on the life of Charles Dickens, is slowly dying away in dullness. * * * * * A PERFECT CLASS           I have always been taught that trying to be a “perfect” teacher is a prescription for disillusionment, but in the last few years I have come to see it as the road to understanding the real nature of my work. It seems clear to me now that perfection is everywhere, including my classroom. It’s the foundation of everything, the start and finish, the final and irrefutable fact. This moment, this sentence I’m setting down, the words I will speak to my students today, the thoughts the kids will think during class – all is perfection, precision, accomplishment, and excellence. Of course, this completely opposes the widespread belief that perfection is nowhere, is never possible, is nothing but a dream – but still, I stand by my belief in it. I guess it’s a question, for me, of simple humility. Who am I, after all, to pass judgment on the various defects of this or that?  Where do I get the authority and expertise to say that this moment is defective, or that what a student said today is slightly off base, or that what happened in my classroom yesterday was a misfortune? Do I have the universal perspective necessary to say, for certain, that any particular moment is a mistake?  In fact, do I possess the comprehensive wisdom to pass judgment about the inadequacy of anything? Since my answer to the last two questions is a simple No, I have stopped searching for flaws and failures and have started accepting the simple rightness, or perfection, of whatever happens. This doesn’t mean I always like what happens – just that I understand that it is what is, and therefore is flawless just as it is. This somewhat simple view of reality – a view that makes the best sense to me – has made me a better teacher. I see the correctness in the commonplace things in my classroom – the way a certain student slurs his words, the unpredictable interpretation a girl gives with when discussing a story, the peaceful feeling of just following a student’s words as he tries to describe his ideas. What happens in my classroom is not always what I want, but it seems to me it’s what the universe wants – and so it needs to be not only accepted but embraced.  I may not always give students A’s on their essays and tests, but they always get A’s from me for the plain and simple suitability of their lives just as they are.   * * * * * Monday, April 23, 2012 THE KINGDOM OF ROOM 2           As a boy, I treasured the stories that spoke of kingdoms of various kinds, and, incredibly, it turns out that I’ve lived in a thoroughly enchanting kingdom for the past 46 years. My classroom is a conventional one, a small, plain space with tables and chairs, and yet it occasionally lends a feeling, for me, of something surprising and very special. The windows are simply windows, and yet, in daydreams, they sometimes seem like windows in a castle where wizardry regularly occurs. All we do in class is talk of literature and the tools of writing, and yet our words work, for me at least, a strange and superior magic. The princes and princesses in this kingdom are the valiant students who, like knights, endure the trials and tests set up by the age-old, wrinkled king, who, lucky for me, is me. Each day there are rituals which require the students to show their mettle and might, and in each class the king gets to care for his knights in new and honorable ways. There are honors bestowed and gifts given, and sometimes ovations and acclaims are heard coming from the room. It’s just a simple space, just a classroom on a country road in Connecticut, but it’s the kingdom I count myself lucky to come to each morning. * * * * * THIS IS THE WAY      When I’m teaching, I often wonder what is the best way to go in the lesson, what is the appropriate next step, and sometimes I have to trust simple intuitiveness. It seems there’s a sensitivity inside all of us that instinctively understands situations and suggests what we should do, and I have learned to let it have its way, to let it lead. I often look in articles and books for bright ideas about teaching, but the best ones seem to whisper to me from inside. It’s impossible to describe, except to say there’s something in the heart that has the truth and tells it simply and unmistakably. I can’t count the number of times I have taught a lesson and utterly lost my way, when a voice inside said precisely what I needed to know, and I never looked back. It has brought me the ease and assurance all teachers try to find, the self-confidence that says the best ideas are always being born inside us. It’s like living beside a springing source of useful thoughts, and all I have to do is hold out my hands. The right way in the classroom is always right ahead of me, if only I make use of the free and easy wisdom that’s rightfully all of ours.  * * * * * Wednesday, April 25, 2012 HIGHER POWERS      In A.A. groups, members speak of “higher powers” – forces that are somehow larger than our own lives and that can care for us in ways beyond our limited abilities -- and I sometimes sense a similar power at work in my classroom. There’s only so much I can make happen in my teaching -- I with my relatively limited years of study and practice, and with a mind that often makes more confusion for myself than clearness. I stumble in my teaching at least as often as I triumph, and my many mistakes each day definitely don’t make me feel like an all-triumphant teacher. I take help wherever I can find it, and I often find it in a place that I can’t exactly put my finger on. Perhaps it’s the same nameless place where people get comfort when life crashes in front of them, or where wisdom arises when we need it most. Maybe it’s the place where ideas first develop, especially the ideas that hold us up and help us see the light in times of serious darkness. When I’m wandering around in a lesson, looking for ways to work some magic on my students, I sometimes slow down, stop, and simply listen to my thoughts – and usually some of them start seeming stronger than anything I could make by myself. Some of them, it seems, were sent from somewhere I’ve never seen – from a power that sometimes finds me in the classroom when I can scarcely find myself. * * * * * Thursday, April 26, 2012 ALWAYS WITH ME      There are times in the classroom when all my get-up-and-go seems to have gone, times when only little ideas are coming and all creativity has long since left. These are times when, try as I might, I can’t make heads or tail of this whole teaching business. It’s like a bright light has been dimmed down to almost darkness, and there I am, thinking the most meager thoughts and hoping for a fast end to the class period. Those are thoroughly discouraging times, but the bright side is that, almost always, the understanding returns to me that what I need – the power to produce refreshing ideas -- is actually always with me. Just as water is always waiting inside a faucet, so are stimulating thoughts standing ready to support and inspire me whenever I ask. My mind may sometimes seem blank as I stand before the students, but that’s like saying the mighty Mississippi has no water, or the sky has lost its air. All I have to do is settle myself down and see, once again, the great gathering of ideas inside me, the crowds of useful thoughts that only need my acceptance to start their wonderful work. * * * * * Friday, April 27, 2012 KEYS TO THE KINGDOM      In my work as a teacher, I sometimes see myself as a keeper of thousands of keys that can unlock learning of all kinds for my students. I see the keys hanging in bunches from my belt as I make my way among the kids, calling out the names of different doors they can open with the assistance of my keys. The classroom, in this vision, is a place of countless doors to inexpressible lands of good learning, and I hold the keys to all of them. When I’m seeing teaching like this, a  48-minute class period is composed of continuous unfastening and swinging open and seeing truths the students have never seen before.  Of course, my work is not always as fairy-tale-like as this, but there’s some truth in the keeper-of-keys scenario. School is, or should be, a land of never-ending closed doors, all of which can be swung open with a simple turn of a key, and a good teacher takes a truckload of them into every class.  There’s no magic in it, really. The keys are made of the modest confidence that we, as teachers, can take students to truths they’ve never seen, to places of the mind and heart where wisdom is waiting. If we are both self-effacing and solicitous in our work with students, we will surely see new doors day after day, and will happily do the work of unlocking and letting them open for all of us.   * * * * * BEHOLDING Monday, 30 April 2012      I used to love the old Bible translations that used the word “behold”, and I still think of it sometimes when I’m working with my students. When we behold something – this is how I think of the word – we step back in astonishment, and when we ask someone to behold, we’re asking for full attention to something that might amaze and startle. We don’t behold in a laidback way; when we behold, our customary routines come to a stop and life suddenly looks, at least in some way, miraculous. Thinking of the word in this way, when I’m teaching I should be “beholding” almost always, since what I’m surrounded by are miracles. Each of us – students and teacher -- shares in the miraculous spectacle of life as we breathe in and out and bring new ideas to birth. The blood in our bodies is refreshed each second of class, and fresh cells are formed moment by moment. Even the sunshine outside the windows is something to behold as it brightens and dims and transforms itself during class. As I’m teaching, what I should say – or shout -- to myself as often as possible is “Behold!” I should insist that I sometimes stop my incessant bustle and simply appreciate the wonders around me in my commonplace classroom. It might make me stand in complete surprise for a second or two.   WAKING UP Tuesday, May 1, 2012      Occasionally I softly scold my students with “Come on, folks, let’s wake up”, and just as often I say something similar to myself. There’s a strange drowsiness that settles upon me sometimes when I’m teaching, as though I’m half-asleep even while walking around the classroom, even while carrying out the particulars of a lesson. I can be bringing to light, for the students, the usefulness of participles in essays, and yet be slowly slipping across the borders of sleep.  It’s not a literal sleepiness, but a sleepiness of the soul – the kind of lassitude that makes it possible to perform duties without knowing why or what it all means. It’s similar, in some ways, to walking in a wilderness simply to see the end of the trail, all the while disregarding the beauties before my eyes. I teach in a small shangri-la called Room 2 – a place where work is more wonderful than play. My students and I share in the wealth of the world in our hearts and minds, and we make small miracles with the many thoughts and feelings that unfold within us in every class. What I want to do each day is be wide awake to this glory and greatness that’s so freely given in my small, commonplace classroom. * * * * * REMEMBERING WHO I AM Friday, May 4, 2012 “Comfort, my liege; remember who you are.”      -- Shakespeare, Richard II      When troubles take hold in my classroom – small failures in the lesson, some ill-timed levity, hesitancy and unassertiveness in some of us – I just try to pause and remember who I am. I often get lost in the pretend performance called “Mr. Salsich, Superteacher”, and it’s a pleasure to pull out of it and recall that, really, I’m simply a piece in an endless and pleasing puzzle called learning. The process of education is as boundless as the sea or sky, and just as inscrutable, and I am lucky to be a part of it, a small wave or a far-away star that’s barely seen. The burden of teaching is not on me but on the wisdom the universe bestows second by second, like breezes constantly blowing whether I wish them to or not.  I often get discouraged in my teaching because I bring a wrong understanding of who or what does the work. Do I get down if dawn today turns dreary, or if winds are from the west instead of the east? Do I fret and feel diffident if my pulse rate is 64 instead of 66? Of course not, since I know that forces far more powerful than me are moving all things in just the best ways and toward flawless destinations. I just show up in the classroom the way I awaken in the morning: behold, at 4:30 a.m., there’s my blood rolling through my body, as always, and at 8:45 a.m., there’s learning letting itself be free among my students, as always. I don’t do the teaching any more than I do the shining or shadowing on a sunny day. The sun is the sole bringer of any brightness across the earth, and an inexplicable and everlasting force called education does all the duties in Room 2. I am, fortuitously, simply a witness to this force, a partaker of it, a piece of something that started back when the sun first started shining.  * * * * * ALL THINGS FOR US Monday, May 7, 2012      During class, I sometimes find myself fretting because I’m missing something special in my lesson plan, but usually I settle down fairly quickly when I remember that everything is special, and at all times, and all I have to do is make use of the “specialness” that’s all around us in the classroom. For instance, if, in the midst of what I thought was a well-planned lesson on Romeo and Juliet, a drowsy lassitude lets itself down among the students, I can make use of the always-special look of the sunshine on the windows. “Shakespeare is like the light on the windows,” I can say. “His lines are not always intense and spectacular, but there’s always light among the words, like this ever-present sunshine on these windows. Let’s look for the light.” Or, if a lesson on commas comes to a tiresome standstill, I can point to the spaces between each student and say the spaces are like commas, places where I pause to notice the individuality of students in a classroom or phrases in a sentence. The world itself is made just for teachers – not just the world of my sometimes insufficient lesson plans, but the wide world of windows and spaces and carpets and cups of coffee on the teacher’s desk. If I use the world to work some occasional wizardry in my classes, I’m just making use of what’s freely offered in Room 2, moment by moment. * * * * * THIS YEAR Tuesday, May 8, 2012      This school year, as usual, has been a year of contraries. I’m sure I have learned as much as my students have learned, and I’m just as sure I have failed as often. I have flourished and diminished, seen failures and success, shown stubbornness and courage, deserved criticism and praise, endured difficulty and triumph. I have observed and pondered and wondered and worried. It’s been a year of greatness on some days and tedious dullness on others. The sunshine of inspiration has been bright on the best days, and done and gone on the worst days. It’s been a year like a little universe: whole galaxies of fresh ideas side by side with clusters of the silliest mistakes imaginable.   * * * * * SETTING THOUGHTS FREE Wednesday, May 9, 2012      It’s strange to say, but teaching seems to be a lot about taking off chains and unlocking locks. It’s not so much about me making learning happen, but all of us, teacher and students, setting ourselves free from self-imposed restrictions, the kind of mental prisons we often put ourselves in. It’s as if we walk into the classroom confined in psychological cages, and the correct task of each of us is to simply open our doors. Seen in this way, learning is a little work and a lot of delight. We might say it’s as satisfying as seeing innocent prisoners set free. Over the years of our lives, my young students and I have found ways to confine our thoughts in close-fitting forms, and my classroom should be the place where freedom is found – where thoughts can frolic instead of falling back into their plain, customary patterns. Room 2 should be a stronghold of liberated thinking, a refuge for free thinkers and feelers.  There’s enough captivity in the world without creating more in my classroom. A sign on my door should say, “Enter, and set your thoughts free.” WAITING He was waiting for the computer to boot up, but he was also waiting for wide-open ideas, and for the wildness of letting in whatever ideas come. The computer will come alive when it wants to, but ideas bring their insights second by second, and he needs to know how to hold the doors open and help them come in. Ideas don’t stay unless we welcome them, so his arms are always open, even as the computer is calling his name with its promising wisdom. * * * * * ALWAYS HARMONIOUS Thursday, May 10, 2012      No real music ever comes from my classroom, but there’s always the harmony of thoughts that seem to have the mysterious skill of appreciating and assisting each other. The thoughts my students and I think in a certain class period may show no superior wisdom – may, in fact, appear ordinary and undistinguished – but they always seem to mix and mingle in useful ways. They’re like the currents that carry rivers along, each one a separate stream yet each a part of the powerful river itself. I always sense this harmony in our thinking – this intermingling of thoughts into a thoroughly unified flow of intelligence. This may sound strange, even naïve and somewhat ridiculous, especially considering the differences among us as we sit in my classroom, but my years as a teacher have carried me to the conviction that thoughts – those supremely powerful forces of life – like to live together in agreement more than in argument. My students and I make countless thoughts in each of my classes, and under the surface of seeming confusion I sense an almost melodious stream of wisdom. I can almost hear it sometimes -- a musical movement of ideas that would rather flow together than fight. I sometimes sit back in my chair and listen as the thoughts of the students surge along in a discussion. It’s like sitting beside a stream and seeing, not various currents working against each other, but a single flowing force heading somewhere in harmony.   * * * * * TIES OF GLADNESS Friday, May 11, 2012      Each school day morning for the past many years, I have tied a brightly colored bow tie around my neck, knowing, I guess, that gladness sometimes goes along with color. I can come to my classes scowling or smiling, and since smiling makes more sense to me, I choose ties that might generate some joy – mine and maybe my students. I show I’m glad by the ties I wear – glad to be a teacher, glad to be teaching these certain and singular students, glad to be alive. Somewhere in the Bible St. Paul says we should put on the armor of God, but I also believe in the armor of bright bow ties. Being a teacher brings me into contact with the countless emissaries of discouragement and pessimism, but my lively ties look them in the eye and laugh. My ties tell my students I’m more interested in being joyful than miserable, more willing to whistle and sing than moan and groan. Kids get their fill of fear and distrust these days; I want to show them what poise and self-assurance looks like, and sometimes a brightly striped tie can do that. * * * * * WILLPOWER THAT WON’T HELP Wednesday, May 16, 2012      I was raised to respect the power of my will, but I’ve learned it can produce problems as well as prizes, especially in the classroom. I have sometimes shoved my way through whole school days, determined to do what my willpower wanted to do. On those days I wasted no time taking advice from intuitions, instincts, hunches, or short-lived feelings, for I knew what needed to be done, and I did it. My will power was the trailblazer. It told me I could take on any task, and that whatever I did – and did well and with a strong will -- would do some good for the students. Over the past years, though, I have learned of a different and superior power – the power, you might say, of simply stepping back. I have learned to stay silent more often and just listen to the little ideas that don’t shout like willpower, but quietly call out useful and sometimes surprising suggestions. It’s like sailing, perhaps, when you stop struggling with the wind and just settle back and see where it takes you. There’s a wind that works like that in teaching, but I have to tell my willpower to wait in the corner in order to see where this wind wants to go.  * * * * * MAKING FRIENDS WITH SPEED Thursday, May 17, 2012 “Make friends with speed.”      --- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2              I don’t usually push for speed in my classes, but there is a place for it, for sure. My students and I need the kind of friendly speed that comes from a feeling of confidence, a feeling of being bold readers and writers who can race among written words the way winds race effortlessly through miles of trees.  Making ourselves into swift thinkers is the first step, and from there we become the kind of brash writers who want their words to take off across the computer screen like sleek horses, and who want to sprint through the pages of books like runners in a festive race.  We learn to love the light-heartedness that comes from doing something with both swiftness and affection.  This doesn’t mean that I want my students to write and read in reckless ways. Written words are sacred things, but sacred in the same way that open roads are sacred to runners. I sometimes want my students to sense the same high-spiritedness as they reads and write that runners feel when they find themselves free and comfortable in the midst of a long run.  I want them to feel as fortunate when they’re reading and writing as bicyclists feel when they follow each other in fast-paced lines on clear and limitless roads. There’s a joy in speed that all of us know, and there’s almost nothing like the happiness of seeing your written words race out ahead of you, or feeling the flow of ideas as you dash through the sentences of a story.  A SWEET SHADE “Never was monarch better feared and loved Than is your majesty: there’s not, I think, a subject That sits in heart-grief and uneasiness Under the sweet shade of your government.”      -- Shakespeare, Henry V      I am not a monarch in my classroom, and it’s certainly not a kingdom, just a quiet room for a small collection of kids and a sometimes shaky teacher, but still, something spoke to me in these words from Shakespeare when I read them yesterday. In a sense, I guess I am a monarch – a man who makes the rules for dozens of students and demands deference and obedience from them – and there is, you might say, an atmosphere of majesty in my room. I often speak to the students about the importance of dignity in our behavior during class – dignity and stateliness and even a sort of solemnity. We are special people performing special duties – teaching and learning – and thus we are obliged to behave in distinctive and occasionally solemn ways. There’s always room for comedy in my classes, but never silliness, for silliness and stateliness don’t stand side by side.  In this dignified atmosphere, then, I am what could be called the “king”, and, as such, I suppose my students fear me, to some extent, – but I hope it’s a fear that’s fused with love. I am the leader, yes, and I should be, but I hope I am a leader who seems both fearsome and affectionate. I am the captain in my classroom, but I hope I bring as much care and kindness to my leadership as dominance and strictness. The students must work under my supervision, but I hope they feel like they’re under a stern but “sweet shade” provided by a leader who feels lucky to be with them. * * * * * THURSDAY, JUNE 07, 2012 STEELED SINEWS AND HOPE “So service shall with steeled sinews toil, And labour shall refresh itself with hope.”      Shakespeare, Henry V      When I’m toiling along in a lesson, say, on commas in compound sentences, I need “steeled sinews”, and it would sure help if hope was refreshing me. My classroom labor is not the exhausting work of weightlifters or world-class runners, but  there does sometimes seem to be no end to the tiring challenges of teaching teenagers English. Since I sometimes seem to be sweating in a gym when I’m showing the students the particulars of good writing, the muscles of my teaching have to be hardened – steeled, as Shakespeare says. Surely gentleness should play a part in my teaching, but I hope the sinews of my gentleness are stout and hard-wearing, for then the work will be constantly recharged with hope. If that were the case, I might grow weary when I’m working through a chapter in Dickens with the students, but the weariness, surprisingly, would be silently producing strength and confidence. The more fatigued I became, the better I would teach, for buoyancy and coolness would be created by the very exhaustion I was feeling. Teaching, then, would be like being a fountain, in which water is always falling, but precisely because it falls, it seems to rise higher and higher. SOOONER OR LATER      Sitting silently and looking out over the misty skies above Mystic this morning, I thought of the many times when a mist seems to make its way across my teaching – times when all I can see as I’m standing before my students is the smog of imprecise lesson plans and sleepy students. These are the days when doing my job seems similar to searching for a certain stone in a vast and hazy forest. Try as I might, on those confused classroom days I see no signals ahead to help me make the most out of whatever lesson plan I had prepared.  All is confusion and indecision. I guess what I need to remember is that, like this misty day in Mystic, things will slowly sort themselves out and light will let itself through. By noon today, probably none of this mist will remain, and a restful but rousing sunshine will be spread around us. In its always leisurely way, nature will alter our world from gray to something closer to gold, and I’ll probably be walking a sunny beach by three. The lesson in all this? When I’m teaching this year, and a wearying, misty kind of confusion drops down upon my students and me, I need to simply sit back and be patient and prepare for some eventual and inevitable mental sunshine. It always comes, just like the sun always shows itself, sooner or later, in my small town beside the shore. * * * * * THE LIGHT OF THE MORNING      This morning, as always, the sunlight returned at its reliable and leisurely pace, reminding me that orderliness will always return to my classroom, even after minutes and perhaps days of seeming disarray. I sat beside the window this morning as the darkness slowly disappeared and a new day dawned, and I couldn't help but recall (as I did in yesterday’s post) some of the days in the classroom when whatever I did seemed devoid of direction or insight – days when I felt like I was following a vague trail in a wilderness rather than a well-prepared lesson plan. On those occasions, I could always pretend I that knew where I was going, that each step in the lesson was lit up clearly for me, but the truth told a different tale. My lessons then were more like lurching than leading, had more obscurity in them than correctness. However, like this morning, the darkness in those dreary lessons (which continue to come along periodically) is always, after all, replaced by some kind of increasing light for all of us.  If my students and I persevere and simply stay still and alert, some small insights will start to sparkle. They may not make us new people, but they will surely make us shine in different and noteworthy ways, like this brand new day on Burrows Street.  * * * * * THE CLASSROOM OF THE OPEN DOOR      When I was a boy, there was a church near our house called “The Church of the Open Door”, and I recalled it recently when I was working in my classroom preparing for the coming year. Both doors to my room were wide open, with breezes and occasional voices coming in, and, for some reason, the church back in my childhood came to mind. With those open doors on that recent summer morning, my classroom felt open and free, fully accessible and unrestricted, and perhaps that was why the church chose that name. Perhaps they wanted people to know they would find freedom inside the church, a chance to choose whatever thoughts they wished, whatever feelings flowed into them.  Perhaps they wished their church to be a place of welcome and cordiality instead of constraint and strictness. As I puttered around the classroom, sorting things out for the upcoming school year, I thought of the freedom I want the students to feel when they walk through the open doors – the freedom to find their own special truths, their own singular responses to literature, their own uncommon voices in their written words and sentences. I don’t want them to see works of literature as tamper-proof treasures accessible only to serious, unsmiling scholars, but as vast worlds with no walls and no required PINS or passwords.  My classroom, I hope, will hold its arms out like an openhearted companion, calling to the kids to come in and discover the best wisdom for each of them.  There will be rules, yes, and I will be the host and master in this house of English, but for sure there will be doors to open that I’ve never noticed, and the students will be free to do the opening. * * * * * A CLASSROOM RESTING ON A SEA      A church-going friend used to say that his faith was founded on a rock, and lately I’ve been looking at my classroom that way, as being built on a basis that can’t be shaken. I don’t mean to suggest that I am some type of super-teacher who never knows struggle or failure, just that what happens in my classes comes from a firmer foundation than I ever thought possible. Truly, my teaching is as full of flops and catastrophes as anyone’s, but still, no matter how disastrous a lesson seems to be, I know that nothing can disturb the steadfast foundation for learning that lies beneath my students and me. In the ocean, countless waves can crash, but the boundless waters beneath will be there forever. This foundation that rests below my teaching comes not from me and my meager abilities, nor from the type of “God” my friend was referring to, but rather from the far-flung universe itself.  Learning is as much a part of the cosmos as brightness is a part of sunshine. Whether we know it or not, new thoughts are being born in my students and me each moment, and it is these thoughts that spread out and sink down to depths to make the foundation for learning. Things may sometimes seem confused and even dysfunctional during my classes, but the vast sea of ideas is always spreading and progressing below us. All we need do is loosen ourselves and let this sea make itself felt, this limitless ocean of thoughts that keeps flowing for all of us all of the time. * * * * * THE MAD SCIENTIST ENGLISH TEACHER * * * * * A GREAT CALM      It often happens that a great calm follows the end of something exhilarating – when a storm stops and sunshine is suddenly everywhere, or when applause for a performance stops and just the shuffling of shoes toward exits is heard, or when songbirds in the woods wait for a few seconds of silence among the trees. This year I am coming to the end of 48 roller coaster, white-knuckle, nerve-racking, adrenaline-charged years as a teacher, and already I sense the telling signs of calmness.  My whole life looks lighter and easier to carry. The days, lately, seem unusually serene and still, like a pond’s surface after a storm has passed. This morning, for instance, the coffee-maker seemed to make its coffee in a casual and unruffled way, just bubbling along and then fading off and stopping in silence. The pendulum clock in the hall sounded its clicks with quiet composure, and even the crickets outside the window called to each other with a special kind of coolness and self-possession.  I recall, too, days in the past when grand storms suddenly sailed over the hills and nothing was left but a sky full of stars, something like what retirees might feel with a life full of fresh quests and escapades ahead of them. Yes, this year will be the end of something stirring and often breathtaking, but it will also be the beginning of something that might take my breath away in even better ways. The roller coaster will come to a stop next June, but a smooth and calm kind of adventure, and a different kind of delight, will be waiting in July. * * * * * FORGETTING WHO WE ARE August 29, 2012      This morning I was recalling an old film about a man who forgot who he was, and it brought to mind my students, who, I’m afraid, often have that problem. I don’t mean they forget their names or their friends or their homes, but rather, they forget something far more important – their real and rather astonishing identity, their unreserved distinctiveness and uniqueness as creations of a boundless universe.  They bring their unsure selves into my classroom each day, sometimes tousled and hesitant, as though their lives are disordered specks in a puzzling mess called life, and I want to shake them into seeing that they are nothing less than marvels in a universe of marvels. I want to show them a magic mirror that will display the immeasurable inner spaces of their lives. They are more majestic than mountains, deeper than the deepest waters, grander than all the grand canyons of the world – but they’ve simply forgotten. They’ve gone blind to the bright light their lives give off. They have eyes, but they don’t see the beauty they bring to the world – and to my classroom. I’m a teacher, but I guess I’m also a “remind-er” – someone who says to my students, over and over again, that there are stars in the sky that don’t shine as brightly as they do. * * * * * WONDROUS THINGS August 30, 2012      In the midst of an occasional tedious day in the classroom, it does me good to give some thought to the wonders that are working their charms.  For instance, there are my students and I, each of us a wonder of mushrooming, promising life – each of us more loaded with glories than a sunrise. There are atoms in us as old as the Big Bang, bringing billions of years of wisdom to our young and old bodies. In every boy and girl and their threadbare, tumbledown teacher, there are cells beyond measure making miracles every moment. There’s blood that transports strength second by second, and lungs that lift and fall without fail. Then there’s what’s around us – the air that’s been blowing across the world for centuries and happens to pass our way during class, and the sunshine that shares its softness with us whether we flourish or fail in our learning and teaching tasks. We do our English work, whether tiresome or stirring, in the midst of major miracles. Days may seem tedious, but wondrous things are waiting for us to see them. * * * * * GREAT TRUTHS Friday, August 31, 2012      I’m sure my students don’t usually think of English class as a place that produces great truths, but I do – and I dare to hope, as I prepare to start what is possibly my final of 48 years as a teacher, that the students might see some of these truths during class.  We just study words and rules about the use of words and how to help words come together in sharp and graceful sentences, but out of those studies can sometimes arise realizations that can transform lives. I’ve seen it in myself – a sudden understanding of what sorrow means while discussing a story with students, or a swift and new awareness of the significance of gladness while studying some lines from Shakespeare, or simply fresh thoughts flowing like a waterfall from listening to a student say what she likes in a poem.  I’ve seen a new truth take wing out of just a few short phrases from a story, and I’ve felt myself, countless times, turn into new person, if just for a few seconds, after searching through some sentences in a novel.  This has happened to my students, I’m sure. I’ve seen faces go flush with understanding during a discussion, and heads nod with delight after listening to a classmate clarify the meaning of a poem. I’ve heard words of wisdom on Wednesday from kids who were adrift in confusion on Tuesday. It can happen, yes. The truths of the universe can call out to any of us at anytime, even to teenagers and their timeworn teacher in a fairly conventional classroom on a quiet country lane.  I hope it happens in this possible last year of my grand classroom adventure. * * * * * Tuesday, September 4, 2012 WISDOM OR GOLD?      This morning my school starts, once again, to allow its students and teachers to get the gifts of wisdom, and I only hope that we can all keep in our minds the mighty power of that wisdom -- the wealth and prosperity it brings, the overflowing affluence and satisfaction.  Many of us parents and teachers start this day with concerns about finances – whether our lives are furnished with the funds we will need to be safe and secure – and those concerns are sometimes reasonable, but I hope we can see, at the same time, the security that waits for us and the students in the easygoing but persistent pursuit of wisdom. Money appears and then disappears in a flash, but wisdom will stay for all the years of our lives. Money makes its case with gold and glitz that comes and then always goes, but wisdom just waits forever for us to see and use it. My students, when they enter my classroom this morning, will carry with them the wealth of their young wisdom, wealth that makes them, in my mind, richer than princesses and princes – and my commonplace, unspectacular English class will create more wealth for us, day after day after day. New and prosperous ideas will dance in our pockets like coins. Flashy thoughts will wind themselves around us like necklaces and bracelets.  It will be classroom of abundance. We may as well bring bags to load up with the wisdom we will find.  I might make a sign for the door: “English Class Bank. Withdraw As Much As You Like”. * * * * * SALUTING IN ROOM 1 Wednesday, September 5, 2012      One dictionary defines “salute” as “a gesture of respect, polite recognition, and acknowledgment, especially one made to or by a person when arriving or departing” – which makes me think we should perhaps give some salutes to each other during English class. After all, part of my task as a teacher is to encourage courtesy and respectfulness among the students, especially since much of what we do demands consideration of each others’ thoughts and feelings. When we find ourselves in a serious discussion about a work of literature, we must let others feel the delight that comes from sharing their best thoughts. We must award our classmates the honor of speaking their minds, as well as the earnest promise that we will sincerely listen. We must graciously recognize their presence with us, their powers of feeling and thinking. We must acknowledge, now and always, that each of us – students and old-timer teacher – are creations of a universe of astounding magnificence and influence. In English class, we are in the presence of august and worthy people. An occasional salute of some sort would surely be a suitable gesture. * * * * * THE SANCTUARY OF ROOM 1 Thursday, September 6, 2012      A “sanctuary”, in one dictionary, is defined as “a place of refuge or safety”, which makes me think of my small classroom out in the countryside in Connecticut. It’s just a commonplace, unexceptional room in a school that’s hardly noticeable among the forests and fields, but it’s a place where young people can proceed with their learning in an atmosphere of safety and assurance.  It’s a shelter, you might say, from the storms of their young lives – the haste and anxiety they surely must feel in this mildly madcap world of 2012.  They don’t face physical enemies, but they face fears of all kinds each day, and my classroom, I hope, can help them hold off those fears so learning can let itself down among them in its tender way.  My classroom is a place of commitment and industry, yes, but it’s also a kindhearted place, a room where real respect can be felt the way you feel the softness of sunlight after a storm. The students know they are free to follow their thoughts wherever they lead them, and they are assured, day after day, that the dangers of disdain and ridicule have been removed from their lives, at least for these 48 minutes of English class.  Beleaguered people seek safety wherever its found, and these days, a few careworn kids come to my classroom for the quiet kind of safety that comes from studying superb writers in an atmosphere of peace and acceptance.   SECRET TREASURE Friday, September 6, 2012      Each of my students and I keep a secret treasure hidden in our hearts. It’s grander than the great treasures of antiquity, more precious than pearls, just as spectacular as a sky at sunrise. We carry it with us everywhere, and it sits in its shining silence in the midst of us in English class. It’s a treasure many of us have lost sight of, or perhaps have never seen or recognized or understood -- the treasure of our own thoughts and feelings. No one who has ever lived carried a fortune of feelings quite like ours, and no thoughts in all of history have sparkled like ours do. Each of us -- my insecure, unprecedented young students and their hesitant, silver-haired instructor -- holds thoughts and feelings that could carry the world in their currents, could create a new day every moment of every day. We are walking and sitting and sleeping treasure chests. When class starts, I see the wealth waiting in the room, and it’s dazzling. * * * * * WORKING WITH THE WIND … AND MISTAKES Monday, September 10, 2012      During the first week of school, several of my students seemed discouraged by their failure to give the correct answers to some of my questions, and, later, I thought of sailors and troublesome winds. When good mariners face forceful winds, they don’t get disheartened, as my young students did last week, but rather they work with the winds. They know, actually, that nothing is better for bringing a boat to its destination than spirited winds, and so they, in a sense, surrender to the winds, and in doing so are able, surprisingly, to use them to their benefit.  They realize – and I wish I my students could see this – that difficult conditions can create the occasion for unforeseen and sometimes startling success.  Wild winds at sea can be a blessing to seasoned sailors, and wrong answers can make unexpected magic for my students. After all – and I will explain this to the students again and again – learning lets itself into our lives most easily through our mistakes, just as the best sailing sometimes springs from seemingly opposing winds. Each time the kids came up with wrong answers last week, a little more wisdom worked its way into their lives, for – though they probably didn’t realize it -- they used their errors to learn something new, just like sailors use hostile winds to help them on their way.  Sailors aren’t dissuaded by gusts and squalls, and my students shouldn’t be discouraged by their mistakes. In fact, they should actually be grateful that they’re inexperienced enough to make mistakes, because mistakes, like stormy times at sea, can be turned into serious progress. ` * * * * * REVERENCE AND ENGLISH CLASS Tuesday, September 11, 2012           Since one dictionary gives this as a definition for “reverence” -- deep respect for someone or something -- its clear to me that my classroom could sometimes be called a place of reverence.  I say “sometimes”, because occasionally my students, like all kids, lose sight of sharing and sharing in a courteous manner, but usually there’s a sense of respect among my students, perhaps because I insist on it. If we can’t have genuine esteem for other in English class, then all the reading and writing makes no magic whatsoever. It’s a waste of precious time and a complete contradiction to talk about dignified works of literature while acting in a thoroughly ill-mannered way. I insist that the students show respect for each other for almost the same reason that we show respect for esteemed symbols like the American flag. When we promise our faithfulness to our country in the presence of the flag, we stay silent and place our hands over our hearts, and when we listen to each other in English class, we must be even more deferential and appreciative. The human beings beside us in class are countless times more extraordinary and imposing than a piece of cloth with stars and stripes on it, and therefore they deserve a higher kind of honor and regard. If we stand with reverence before our flag, we surely should sit up and lean a little forward when our classmates are giving us the gift of their thoughts. * * * * * LIFE-GIVING THOUGHT Wednesday, September 12, 2012      Every so often, my planning produces a sprightly, peppy lesson, one which seems to energize the students from start to finish, and I always realize, even as I’m teaching, that it’s thoughts that are bringing life to the lesson.  It’s not so much “me” that makes a good lesson and leads the class through it, but the thoughts that somehow settled inside me as I was planning. It’s as if, from the countless thoughts that are constantly flowing past all of us, a few special ones selected me and started constructing a lesson for English class.  They landed inside me and started beneficial fires that then fueled a fairly spirited 48-minute class.  I’ve puzzled over this mystery for years and years: where do thoughts come from, and how do they manage to make such brimful life for me and people around me?  At the center of a sparkling English class is always the passion of thoughts. Even the smallest thought in the shyest student can flare up like a flames among us and send us off in a new direction in the discussion.  I’ve seen classes of students completely set free with new ideas about a story or a poem, and it does seem, sometimes, like someone – or some thoughts – lit fires inside them. It makes me look forward to winter, when the weather sometimes turns unfriendly but the fires of thoughts in my classroom always give some kind of reviving life to my students and me. * * * * * TRAINING AN ENGLISH SCHOLAR Thursday, September 13, 2012      I often think of myself as a trainer as much as a teacher, and I’m training my students as much to be true believers in their abilities as to be bright scholars of English.  It’s a trying task to train young people to honor the gifts they have been given – to see clearly the skills and powers the universe has bestowed on them. Students in these times – at least in my experience – don’t seem to take their gifts seriously, and so day after day I do my best to remind them. I try to show them, in understated and subtle ways, that they, like all of us, are the wondrous works of a vast cosmos, and, as such, they possess the powers of that universe – the ability to expand and transform and be bright like a billion stars. It’s important that I prepare them for high school English class, but it seems just as important to me to prepare them to honor the magnificence they were made for.  It’s strange that they usually act more like hesitant namby-pambies than the warriors of the universe they actually are. They enter my class more often with shoulders slumped than standing straight and self-assured, and my job is to change that.  I want them to become better writers and readers, but more than that, I want them to wake up to the miracles their lives make each moment. They were made from the same stuff as stars and oceans, and they are every bit as splendid. I train them to take their magnificence seriously. * * * * * AND THE TEACHER WAS ASTONISHED Friday, September 14, 2012      It’s interesting that the word “astonish” derives from the Latin word for “thunder”, for I do seem to hear thunder in my mind a few times each school day when my students astonish me with their thoughts. It doesn’t happen constantly, since these are typical kids who get carried away more by daydreams during class than by the books we read, but sometimes there’s a spark of lightning in something they say, and it’s like a rumble of a new realization rolls through my mind. I’m sitting in the same classroom I sit in every day, but suddenly, when a student says something astounding, the room is a special place in a special world.  I’m 70 years old, but there I am, having wonders worked inside me by the sometimes resounding thoughts that kids can create so fast and so beautifully.