Teaching to Stop

Poetry does not invite readers to consume the text as if it were a husk that contains a pithy truth. Poetry is not a window on the world. Poetry invites us to listen. Poetry is a site for dwelling, for holding up, for stopping. 

                                                                                                                 Carl Leggo 

I have been reading about pedagogies of abundance, the idea that education changes, now, when content and access to it is abundant; we are no longer bound to the school, to books, to teachers. We can access courses, journals and books online, now, peruse the blogs, videos and podcasts from world-renowned experts, connect with a network of others who have the same interests. What we need, in this abundance, isn’t a teacher in a classroom, but the capacity to organize, curate, connect, collaborate, keep up to date.

And yet where am I, where are you, dear reader, in this abundance, still swimming through our own lives, heartsore over the death of someone dear and feeling lonely, lonely, lonely, or juggling, juggling, juggling, because I said I’d get milk on the way home from work and I forgot and now I have to go back and that’s another twenty minutes tacked on to a day that’s already too long and I need to plan, still, for a lesson tomorrow, and must somehow inspire students who have come to believe that learning is something to eat and I’d better make it good.

Isn’t there something more than more about teaching and learning?

What would it mean to provide space in schools, not for consumption, but for stopping, for dwelling?

The Mystery of Trees and Teaching

Wading knee deep in snow, strange here on the west coast, summer suddenly returns as I pass the buried blackberry patch: their hot smell, the children, mouths purple, eating as fast I pick, boiling our meager gathering with sugar in the big jam pot to pour over ice cream. How simple, how sweet, the memory. It tugs on another and Mary Oliver’s poem of a green summer shifts the white landscape once again:

Answers

If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.

That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career:
So to please her I studied - but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year. 

I think of this long ago grandmother smiling at her granddaughter, purple-stained hands scarred from thorny picking, tidying sticky pots, spoiled fruit, the lines in her face evidence of who knows what: sleepless nights, quarrels over money, worries over a wild child who broke her heart, aching loneliness for the home of her childhood.

We long for these green summers of our imagined memories, the messiness blanketed like fresh snow, muffled, muted. We strain to build lives as tidy, to teach so that all confusion is poured out of our classrooms and the children, shining fruit, sitting straight, hands folded, neatly labeled, smile and nod.

Yet the mystery of trees, of grandmothers, of love, of teaching remains.

And it, too, is beautiful.

On Finishing

I work, now, with not-yet teachers at a university and the students often ask me questions as though I know the answer.

What do you do, one of them said one day, when a student isn’t finished?

Is it important that the student finish? I responded.

It was the strangest feeling. The sudden deep quiet. It was like I had set off a bomb in the classroom and everyone was staring in shock at the wreckage.

What did I wreck?

The student finally spoke into the hush. But, she said, isn’t finishing necessary? Won’t students just do nothing if we say they don’t have to finish?

A thousand words pushed forward, rushing to be said, but I settled at last on asking, is what they are doing worth finishing?

And suddenly the hush was gone. The room filled with a rising murmur, students thinking together about worksheets and projects, reports and assignments, about too hard and too easy, about perseverance and laziness, about anxiety and eagerness.

I was thinking about the small taken-for-granted ideas that have deep roots in our classrooms, that despite our planting new ideas, grow and flourish in the warm dark behind closed doors.

I think of all the children I have known who gave up entirely, who sat and did nothing at all, because they could never finish, or at least not in the way that was required in the time allotted.

Poet Rita Dove said, “What a poem does is open something up inside. This is also a good feeling. A poem is an experience, because when you experience, it allows you to become larger.” There is no poetry in closing, in making small, in turning invisible.

I don’t want students to finish; I want them to want to finish, that straining to reach the not quite-reachable summit, the ah, the awe of it, when after hours of cross-outs and almost giving up, a word slips suddenly into place, the sketch, offered with glowing eyes, because even though the tree leans drunkenly, the almost perfect house is perched, just as imagined, upon the hillside. The delight, even here, in this moment (so many deletions later), this small, “yes, that’s what I mean.” Almost.

You must change your life

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. 

You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. 

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms

Kafka, obviously, lived before Facebook, before Twitter, texts, Netflix.

Nobody waits anymore. Every shred of time is spent bent over our screens – in the grocery line, on a bus, in the restaurant, over our morning cup of coffee, at the lake, on our breaks.

Even now, thinking about this, waiting impatiently for the world to unmask itself, I barely resist the urge to click on Facebook just for a minute, to scroll through Instagram to see what’s new, to do anything, anything at all, but wait.

Even very small children are given a phone to play a game or watch videos to fill the smallest gap in activity.

What do we fill their minds with?

And what are we afraid of, we who choose distraction over contemplation? Perhaps we are afraid that we will hear the fires burning in Australia, the war trumpets across America, the cries of hunger in Zimbabwe, and closer to home and in our hearts, the sounds we cannot bear.

Or are we afraid of beauty? That the unmasked world might call to us as the Torso of Apollo called to Rilke.

                Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

                                                                    Rainer Maria Rilke

Stepping in tune with being

I’ve been thinking about “withitness,” that elusive necessary quality of teaching. It’s something more and deeper, I think, than merely having “eyes in the back of your head,” but closer to what Lil’wat elder Lorna Williams calls Kamúcwkalha: acknowledging the felt energy indicating group attunement and the emergence of a common group purpose.

I’ve been observing becoming-teachers, so beautiful in their earnestness, eagerness, teaching their first lessons. Their focus, for the most part, understandably, is on the lesson, on their own next step or misstep. They aren’t able yet to look up, to teach with, to move in tune, attuned.

And here? Is it possible to be attuned to Other online?

Perhaps this explains our ever-increasing focus on data mining and learning analytics, a practice that has spilled, now, into our classrooms, too. Without our students before us, we seek other markers to tell us how we are doing.

But what do we learn from our data? Only more about the virtual worlds we create, the spaces constructed by our ideas. Parsing the data we mine, we find myriad ways to get more clicks, more compliance, more control to perpetuate what we’ve made.

What has data to do with you? With me? With the children? With us?

Data keeps our head down, focused on our own next step or misstep.

How do poets look up to see, to touch, even across centuries? Robert Bringhurst writes:

Poetry is one among the many forms of knowing, and maybe it is knowing in the purest form we know. I would rather say that knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control – knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being – is what we mean by poetry. (Everywhere being is dancing, 2007)

How do we step in tune with being? Even here.

What is teaching and learning freed from possession and control?

The Alpha and the Omega

“To know psychology,” William James warned at the turn of the last century in his Talks to Teachers “is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers.”  He argues:

To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us.  That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

He continually admonished teachers to expect little from psychology, that the “’boom’ in psychology” has fomented “portentous ideas” and given what he called the docile nature of teachers, especially teachers of young children, they are too ready to put their faith in psychology.  

Today, we acquiesce routinely, unquestioningly, in the advice of experts around us: from psychology, still, with its increasing range of specializations, but now neuroscience, computer science, and even business have “portentous ideas” that offer “best practices” for teachers. Yet the amount of science that a teacher needs to know, James argued, “might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.”  This additional knowledge, he says, “fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles, — to get a stereoscopic view.”

We have looked at the world through the lens of science, monocularly, for so long, now, that it’s hard to even imagine different seeing.

When I was twelve, I went to the optometrist and was fitted with glasses.  I remember my astonishment, walking outside and seeing leaves on trees in sharp outline, not a blurry green, after all, but variegated, subtle, sharp, unspeakably beautiful.

What might come into focus for teaching if we viewed it stereoscopically?

What is the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, this happy tact, this ingenuity? Is it different now more than a century later when, increasingly, the student is not before us? How do we then know what definite things to say and do?

But connecting across distance is not new. How is it that a poet knows? How could John Milton, for example, at a distance even our latest technology has not yet been able to cross, pierce my heart in an instant and shake something in me that matters still.

“Every great poet,” William Wordsworth said, “is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing.”

This alpha and omega: to see the unspeakably beautiful other and to touch, somehow, the living connecting between us.

Why I am here

I am a teacher.

Yet despite more than twenty years of teaching at both secondary and elementary schools, as well as (with a great many reservations, because who am I, after all) teachers through professional development, and, now, in pre-service and post-degree programs (online and off) at university, I do not know how to teach. I seem to know less as the years go by.  I yearn, however, as the world changes at a dizzying pace and the range of diversity in the students before me expands beyond my grasp, and classrooms swell to include the until recently unimaginable online space, to find at last a (meaningful, loving) way (or ways) to teach (deeply, beautifully) in our (for a) changed (changing) world.

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. For years, I’ve turned toward evidence-based research, to the learning sciences, to neuroscience, to developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, to the possibilities unleashed by an ever-expanding array of tools that technology now offers. Yet despite conscientious effort on my own and in collaboration with many others, nothing has consistently worked, and the work only seems more and more exhausting, less joyful.  

Still, I have known success in small but important ways. Those successes, though – moments when eyes have lit up with learning, when a hush of deep thoughtfulness settled on the classroom, when a buzz of electrified conversation swept through it – have not been set off by evidence-based practice at all, but something else. The poetry of teaching, I’m calling it. I have begun to believe that this is the important foundation for beautiful teaching and learning. More, I worry that with our increasingly relentless focus on scientific approaches, particularly in these spaces created by technology, the poetic, this ineffable, inexplicable, mysterious, beautiful something else, risks being extinguished altogether.

This blog is an attempt to uncover the poetry of teaching, to make it, somehow, visible before it begins to fade from our memories like open meadows and clear running creeks in our crowded cities, like the steelhead salmon from the rivers of my youth, the sweet tang of fresh clean air, the flocks of birds that darkened spring skies.

Here in the open, sharing my tentative, unpolished and fragmentary thoughts, rather than thinking alone, burnishing my own ideas to a fierce sheen, a finished piece to set upon the mantle to gather dust, I hope to uncover poetry, or even something smaller, a burning shard, perhaps, that others could take up, or a lit sliver that might light up a way to see teaching and learning anew.

I imagine the possibility that you might join me here, that we might together fashion a torch and see something else for teachers, for learners. Something beautiful.

Let us start a conversation through comments here or via Twitter: @sbeleznay.