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.

Twelve

Last week during class:

Me: Okay guys for homework over the long weekend, I’d like you to read the first twelve chapters of Cry, the Beloved Country and complete the reading questions.

Student X: Twelve Chapters? Twelve? That’s going to take me a whole year!

Student Y: Twelve Chapters? How many pages is that?

Me: 117.  You have eight days to do it. That’s like fifteen pages a day.  You can handle that.

Student Z: You expect us to read all that and remember what we read? That’s impossible.

General Chorus: Yeah, that’s A LOT! We’re not the honors class, remember! This is really hard for us.

Me: Stop whining.

However, after class, I began to think that maybe the students had a point.  Maybe their performance on reading questions and quizzes and their general malaise during our last book were the result of genuine difficulty in reading comprehension.  Maybe The Merchant of Venice WAS too hard, and maybe this book will be, too.

I went to the next class prepared.

Palimpsest

The word of the day is:

Anyone who’s had the privilege of reading George Orwell’s 1984 should know the definition. It means a surface which can be overwritten many times. We use palimpsests in a number of different ways. This site is one. A person can write and write and write and leave layer after layer of words and meanings on top of it, then edit and erase and write something new. But somewhere, buried deep down where almost no one can find it, the older versions are still kept as little bits of information on some hard drive in a basement. Cities can be palimpsests: the deeper we dig, the more layers we discover. Some of my students are under the impression that the desks in my classroom are palimpsests.

The Ruthwell Cross

Some cultures treat books this way. In England a thousand years ago, people would rewrite each others’ poems. The Dream of the Rood appears carved in runes into an eighth century cross in Northumbria, but it was periodically revised for centuries following that. Today, we think a book is unchangeable once it’s been printed. I don’t even really like writing notes in my books. On the other hand, we use brick walls and overpasses that way all the time.

One of the wildly frightening things about being human is that our minds work the same way. They’re surfaces that can be written and rewritten as many times as we want. A man may have an argument or confrontation with someone and then spend the rest of the day going over and over the event in his mind. Perhaps he  recounts it to other people with certain incriminating details omitted until he’s convinced himself that he did the right thing. Immediately after the fight he was confused and angry and upset, but gradually, after repeating the story to himself over and over, he becomes pretty sure that he was nearly the victim of a verbal or social assault and that the teacher/loser/parent/policeman got what he deserved. At some point he even becomes unable to recall any insolence or insult he may have committed.

Islands

This week I covered chapter five of Lord of the Flies with my honors freshman English class. While Simon, Piggy and Ralph toil in the tropical sunlight, trying in vain to get the other children to help them build shelters, my students come to class expecting minor explanation, maybe some notes on applicable history or philosophy. They always want to debate whether Piggy or Simon is a better example of a Christ figure, even though it’s a strange topic at this point: both characters are still alive in chapter five.  The honors kids are sharp: they can smell the sacrifice coming.

Instead, every year I pull the same stunt.

First, before class, I find one student who takes good notes, is observant of the people around him, and is usually inconspicuous during discussions.  I tell that person to write down everything that happens in class that day. After the students have settled and I’ve got their attention, I begin.

• I tell the students I’m offering 10% extra credit on the next test to only one student.
• I pick a student.
• I tell that student he can earn the extra credit if he (1) draws an accurate map of the island, (2) completes a two paragraph summary of each chapter in the book, (3) writes a two paragraph summary of each of the six main characters in the book, along with illustrations of each character, and (4) provides a four paragraph analysis of the symbolic importance of the conch shell.
• I tell him he has 20 minutes to finish.
• I leave the room.

Mission

A few years ago our superintendent asked for help revising the mission statement of our school.  It used to say,

Our school, in partnership with Christian parents, engages students in a rigorous program of learning from a Biblical worldwiew to serve Jesus Christ faithfully in the world.

But I suggested this:

The world is all before you, where to choose
Your place of rest, and Providence your guide.
This having learned, you have attained the sum
Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars you
Knew by name, and all the ethereal Powers,
All secrets of the deep, all Nature’s works,
Or works of God in Heav’n, air, earth, or sea,
And all the riches of this world you enjoyed
And all the rule, one empire; only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.

Well, that didn’t make the cut, even though it’s probably the best thing ever to say at a graduation. Too much beauty and wisdom.  Too much Milton. Now we have this:

We engage students in an education of excellence enabling them to impact the world through a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.

I defy anyone to tell me what an “education of excellence” is.

Furthermore, Milton says the same thing as either of those other mission statements, just better, in about every conceivable way. Modern “educators” have such an obsession with abstract nouns that they’ve forgotten how to teach writing.

Like Chesterton tells us… words aren’t poetic, things are poetic.  Good writing involves giving things their proper names, and if there are better names for our academic departments than those Milton lists, I haven’t heard them.

From here on out, Science classes should be called “Nature’s Works,” or maybe “Works of God in Heaven, Air, Earth, or Sea.” Instead of studying “Bible” or “Theology” we should say we’re studying “Ethereal Powers.” And I am definitely referring to my English classes as “Secrets of the Deep.”

Statues

From a speech delivered to my students who were about to put on a stage adaptation of this book:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book I remember my father reading me, and it is dear to me.  I know mom read me books before this, like the Little Engine that Could or At the Back of the North Wind or those weirdly racist Richard Scary books.  But this is the first one that Dad read straight through by himself, to me.  I still see the exact volume sitting on their shelves, whenever I go over to visit.  I remember curling up on his lap in his dusty blue armchair next to my brother Joe and listening to Dad do all the voices. One chapter a night.

When I was old enough to start reading books for myself and to myself, this is what I chose.  I read the Chronicles of Narnia straight through. That was second grade, and I’ve loved them ever since.  I love all the animals: the diligent and wise beavers, the valiant mice, the loyal and ludicrous dogs, the fuzzybrained owl Glimfeather, and the pompous but naïve horses Bree and Hwin.  I loved the magical creatures like the centaurs whose danger came from wisdom and goodness, elegant Jewel the Unicorn, companion of the last king. I remember the excitement of Strawberry’s transformation into Fledge, and the dour, and stalwart marshwiggle Puddleglum [who thought himself too fanciful and silly in spite of his constant predictions of doom]. But mostly I loved the mythology and theology that folded into each other as two rivers that descend from the same mountain and run to the same valley.  They formed a dark, still lake where I could calm my rushing thoughts and understand the world more deeply.