Student Koan #3

Sometimes my students make statements or ask questions to which there is no response beyond contemplation.

Be enlightened.

December 10, 2009: I feel like all I’m getting from this school is an education.

Student Koan #2

Sometimes my students make statements or ask questions to which there is no response beyond contemplation.

Be enlightened.

March 15, 2009: What if I’m curious about what it feels like to be swindled, so I pay you $25 and ask you to swindle me, but then you just keep the money and walk away? Have I been swindled or not?

Monsters

These pages rustle with the stealthy movements of strictly orthodox, old-fashioned monsters: werewolves and horrors spawned by the great deep; quasi-humans and robots, vampires and fearsome survivors from the dark abysm of the remote past, abortions from the scientist’s laboratory. Such creatures present a wholesome, indeed a cheerful contrast to the psychological deformities of contemporary sick humor, the pretentious sadism of the latest modern Gothic tale, the revolting hokum of television.

– Clifton Fadiman in the introduction to Basil Davenport’s Famous Monster Tales

Student Koan #1

Sometimes my students make statements or ask questions to which there is no response beyond contemplation. Be enlightened.

December 3, 2009: What ice cream flavor would you choose to eat if eating it would certainly kill you?

Heaven

What follows is (mostly) hyperbole, and was inspired by a genius bit of writing from a kid in my German class in college. He once published an essay claiming to be smarter than Socrates.  He also pointed out that all math is basically long division.

Before I gave this speech three years ago, I had my sister and my future wife play a few tunes to open up chapel.  They sounded a bit like this.

The first reading is actually a poem I use quite often in class. It’s by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I was reminded of it by a young woman who used it in her end-of-year essay.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else.

Snow

The hope of education is satin,
calm, and undefiled. Its innocence knows
no tire treads.  Nor does it contemplate an
intrusion by the grey salt that yellows
into dashes and borders on the path
to revelation. It waits like manna,
silent, unburdened by wisdom or math,
and hopes, not for knowledge, but escape. When a
landscape begins to prickle with grassy
arrogance, all teachers shiver in fear.
An onslaught murmurs in the trickling
gutters, insidious, haughty, and clear.
Only the blank expanse, still unbroken,
brings peace, for anything can be written.

Irate

Circumstances should never alter principles — Gertrude Chiltern in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband

When I started teaching, other teachers told me all sorts of horror stories about the crazy things they accidentally did in class.  Students had been hit in the head with yardsticks, glued to tables, burnt by science experiments, and other mishaps.  They laughed and assured me something like that would happen to me. Teachers have to talk all day and make it look natural and improvised.  Every once in a while the wrong word comes out, or the students respond in an unexpected or rude way and teachers immediately do and say things they regret. One never knows how a teacher will respond to the pressure of controlling a group of students. There’s a fascinating episode of This American Life that talks about this phenomenon in the New York City public school system.

But I was pretty sure I would avoid any of those traps.

Consequences

First, know that the members of Film Club have inspired much of what follows through their wisdom, imagination, and conversation. Second, thanks to a young lady who bet me they would never make a Saw VI but managed to be gracious, even after losing. And last, thanks to someone whose name isn’t really Lee Wimberly: his speech at a benefit dinner reminded me that, like David Foster Wallace said, a successful education does not teach one how to think, but what to think about.

My dad was there when I first gave this speech, and he’d never really heard me teach before. It’s kind of funny, I’m thirty years old and still nervous what he thinks. He raised me with such wisdom that I still care more about his opinion than anyone else’s.

Before you read this, I suggest you get prepared like my students have to.  Would you all please stand up for a minute? Can you guys make sure you’re squared away and looking sharp? Shirts tucked in and buttoned up, non uniform hoodies off. Ties straight. Everyone squared away? Good. Take a seat.

I’m going to speak about the nature of rules and the consequences that come from mistaking them, a subject that most people misunderstand. To start, because I am an English teacher, I have two stories to tell.

Islands v. 1.2

I love my honors ninth grade class. They’re so eager.  Last class, I didn’t even have to give them the lecture.  They just came in and started asking questions.  My answers were the lecture I had intended to give.  The narrator from the previous experiment spoke up and delivered the corundate revelation that the determinism with which the Lord of the Flies tempts Simon is the opposite of the virtue espoused by Atticus Finch and demonstrated by Beowulf in the first two books we read this semester.

Afterwards, they went on their ways thinking that the class is fun or aimless, but that alchemy that arises from the enthusiasm of students who have read and carefully considered the assignments is a wonderful thing; if they think it’s accidental, that’s okay with me.

This essay question for class as we’re studying Lord of the Flies produced even more fun: What one object would you give the boys so that they could survive on the island?

Ground rules: just one object, though if things come in sets, like a toolbox, that’s okay. The object has to help the boys on the island.  Giving the boys a helicopter avoids the question at hand, namely why the boys turn to murder and mayhem. What would you give them?

The ingenuity and imagination with which they attack these problems, while sometimes loopily applied, is always exciting.  Some of the students tried to circumvent the rules.  Some suggested things that were bizarre and even a bit terrifying.  Some were elegantly simple. Here are the responses:

Paper

The student felt that if he stared at the paper hard enough he would certainly succeed. This was never a question of innate skill or practice, but rather of focus and steely determination tempered by affability. He was not tense. His wrists lay in his lap, palms turned slightly upward, hands lying like sheets of paper, but he did not move his fingers. He imagined that his hands were so light they might be blown away from him by a quiet breeze, or that they might lift up of their own accord. He was not afraid of itches or sudden discomforts as he had lost the habit of noticing such things while working on a project. His heels barely touched the floor, and his shoulders rounded only slightly as he leaned forward and focused on the paper that rested lightly upon the pressboard surface of his desk. He carefully ignored the pen that rested to the right of the paper.