An Idea for Math Teachers: Learning Logs

Image taken from a Guardian article

It’s been a busy summer for me, and I’m just getting into the swing of the school year. Some of my readers may recall that last year, for some strange reason, I decided to send myself back to school to acquire the math knowledge I never managed to master as a young adult. It’s been a struggle, but I haven’t given up yet, probably for three reasons: first, I’m a non-traditional (old) student, so I have a lot of experience being a student as well as a teacher; second, I have more patience than I did as a young person; and third, I have a lingering professional interest in how students learn. It occurred to me today, after a particularly frustrating experience which involved a trigonometry test and my concomitant inability to answer what seemed to be the most basic questions, that one thing math teachers could do is something we writing teachers have been doing for quite a few years now: asking our students to submit journals on their learning experiences. I actually think this is a somewhat brilliant idea, so, to test it out, I decided to try it out here, on my blog. So from here on out, I guess I should consider this my first entry in my math learning log.

But before I get started, a brief warning. I am horrifically bad at keeping journals. I am probably even worse at journaling than I am at math, and that’s saying a lot. From the outset, I warn any reader of this math learning log that there will huge lacunae here, because I often start a journal and then completely forget about it. Nevertheless, I am going to forge ahead with this journaling idea, because one of the reasons I started this whole math learning process in the first place was to see what happened when a person of normal intelligence but sparse math knowledge attempts to learn enough math to get to calculus. Is such a progression–from basic College Algebra to Calculus I–possible? Today, after my test this morning, I have serious doubts. But I have to set those doubts and my growing frustration aside, and remember to regard myself not as a frustrated and humbled learner who knows she should have been able to do better on this test, but as a subject in an experiment. In a sense, I’m like that scientist in a black-and-white film who decides to test out a vaccine, or an antivenom, on himself. I need to maintain a sense of calm detachment, even while knowing that the results of this test could be disastrous. And, getting back to the journaling idea, documenting my journey through writing may well be more instructive than documenting it through grades.

For the moment, I will not mention my other reason for taking math courses–the existential, ideological, philosophical, or, if you like, the religious reason for this foray into mathemaltical studies. However, I write about it here.

Now, on to the subject at hand: the trig test on basic functions. I thought I had mastered about 2/3 of the concepts for this test, but I was wrong. Even those concepts I felt sure of slipped away from me as I began the test, in exactly the same way the memory of a dream evaporates upon our waking. By the end of the test, working frantically against the clock (and I have to add here that although I’ve always been a relatively fast test-taker, today I worked up to the last second), I was both frustrated and ashamed. Yet, to be fair, my poor performance (I do expect to pass the test, but only because of partial credit and because I wrote down everything I thought that could be pertinent to each problem), is due neither to laziness nor to disinterest. I had to miss four classes because I was taking care of my grandson in a different city (okay, so that was a delightful experience, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, to be honest). I did go to the tutoring center when I got back, but after an hour or so there, I deluded myself into thinking that I actually understood what had been covered. I also watched about three hours total of various YouTube videos (Khan Academy, Organic Chemistry Tutor, Dennis Davis’s series) about the trig concepts covered, but in the end, I think they might have hurt me, making me think I understood things when I really didn’t.

The frustration is real. At my age (62), learning something new can be unfamiliar, and it’s easy to see why this is so. We oldsters found out what we are good at and what we like long ago, and we have kept doing those things for decades, getting better and better at them through the years. We tend to forget how hard it is to learn, how much energy and commitment it takes, and most of all, how very frustrating and embarrassing it can be. In other words, learning something new from scratch, without any context to fit things into, is not only intellectually challenging but also emotionally draining. I suspect young people learn more easily not only because they are quicker and more resilient, but also because they don’t know any better. Because they don’t know yet what it feels like to have actually mastered something, not mastering or “getting” concepts doesn’t produce as much cognitive dissonance in them as it does in us oldsters.

Whatever my grade on the test this morning, and I don’t expect it to be good, I have to say that I don’t think studying more would have helped me, because I know I wasn’t studying the right things in the right ways. (That’s probably where that missed week of classes hurt me.) And although I was incredibly frustrated when I turned in the test, I feel less so now, a couple of hours later, because I realize that I don’t have to pass this class to obtain knowledge from it. In fact, I know I can take the class over next semester whatever grade I get this time, and that doing so is no great dishonor or waste of time. I have the luxury of taking my time with this, and although that’s really hard to remember when I’m in the throes of studying and test-taking, it’s the way all learning, in a perfect world, should be.

Dream Novels

Communardes, Wikimedia

I’ve now been keeping this blog for about a decade, and I have to admit that I feel a sense of accomplishment for some degree of consistency in writing. True, I haven’t been consistent about my posts–indeed, sometimes long gaps stretch between them–but I have so far always returned to this site to write yet another mini-essay on a subject of my own choosing. It all began, I recall, when I realized that it wasn’t exactly fair of me as a composition instructor to ask my students to write on-demand essays for me when I wasn’t at least prepared to produce my own essays. So I set myself the task of writing, in a sort of public way, to honor the commitment I’d hoped my students would feel for their writing classes. After all, as Daniel Stern (the writer, not the actor) once told me, “A writer is someone who conducts their education in public.”

Over the last few years I have been doing that on steroids, so to speak. I’ve tested out strange and new ideas I’ve had here, and I’ve revealed my determination to put myself back to school in order to complete, or at least to remedy, what I consider a half-hearted education. (Hence my decision to take a math class at the local community college where I once taught English and Speech–a decision which accounts for my inconsistency in posting [as if I need an excuse!]. Algebra, it turns out, is quite time-consuming–but more on that and what I’m learning in a future post.)

Perhaps part of my original motivation in starting this blog was to try to garner readers for my self-published novels. Yet that motivation has fallen by the wayside; I’m no longer interested in trying to expand my reader base, and in fact, I’m not sure I actually want to write any more novels. I say this not from any kind of pique or bitterness, but more from laziness. If I can outline the story, in other words, and tell it to myself, what need have I to write it down and spoil it all? Yet there’s also an element of humility playing into this. The older I get, the less I feel compelled to throw in my two cents. Moreover, the older I get, the less certain I feel of anything, particularly my potential to contribute to the vast array of written works already out there. It seems just as good a use of my time to read more stories, stories that people have forgotten by obscure authors who haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve. (Perhaps this deserves a future post as well!)

And yet….

And yet there are stories I’ve thought of and have sketched out in my mind, and I hold them dear. They’re like unfinished sweaters I’ve knitted. I think I know what they’d look like if I finished them, but I’m not sure about all the intricate details. I don’t know how exactly they’d fit, either. So when I think of these “dream novels” (I’m adapting a term from the essayist Charles Lamb, from his essay “Dream Children: A Reverie,” a lovely piece of old-fashioned writing), it’s with a certain degree of wistfulness as well as some real curiosity, to see what they would become if I ever did write them. After all, as most writers know, one can never know exactly what one thinks until one sees what one has written.

Anyway, the rest of this post will be spent in listing my Dream Novels and sketching out their plots, just so that someday, when I have too much time on my hands and more confidence in my possession, I can consider coming back to one or two of these ideas. They are listed in no particular order below.

1. A novel about Princess Charlotte–not the present one, but rather the daughter of George IV (1796-1817), the heir to the throne of England, whose early death in childbirth (along with her infant son) precipitated the hereditary crisis that would result in the the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne a generation later. Her death changed history. But she was also a really interesting character, and she married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who would later, long after her death, become the first king of the Belgians. He was a huge influence on European politics, despite being a relatively unknown and unimportant German prince. And he was incredibly handsome, and was, to all appearances, heartbroken at the death of Charlotte. My twist on the narrative, however, would be that Charlotte’s life story is narrated by Cornelia Knight, who served as Princess Charlotte’s companion/governess, and who saw a great deal of the world, especially for a spinster in the early nineteenth century.
2. A novel about one of the survivors of the the Paris Commune, an historical interlude about which most Americans know very little, if anything at all. At the end of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (disastrous for the French, that is), the victorious Germans were set to enter into Paris, but the citizens revolted against their own government and refused to surrender, at which point the French government declared war against the Parisians, who had decided to rule themselves. From March until May, 1871, Paris was under siege and existed as a Commune–an experiment in democracy that bears, at least for Americans, an unfortunate name. Women were essential to this experiment, and when it was defeated by the government, they were blamed for much of it. My story follows one of these women into anonymous exile in London, where she gets involved in another political movement, all while a journalist and his sister attempt to identify the mysterious French teacher who lives down the street from them in Bloomsbury.
3. On the lighter side, a murder mystery involving a community band in a small town. One of the musicians gets himself murdered–it would be the first chair trumpet player, for obvious reasons. (If you don’t know what obvious reasons I’m referring to, then you have clearly never played in a community band.) The detective would be, naturally, a woodwind player (I’m partial to clarinets), and would weave in and out of the idiosyncrasies of the various musicians in order to solve the mystery.

That’s all I have for now. Any one of these stories could consume my creative life for the next several years, if I allowed it to do so, but I can’t quite convince myself that it’s worth the effort. After all, there’s so much to observe in this world, so much to study, so much to absorb, that I’m simply not sure that I should commit to work of this sort. And yet, while work of this sort is apparently self indulgent and ultimately pointless, I know well enough that the product of that work isn’t always the point, and it’s what one learns while undertaking it that matters.

There are so many ways of learning, and I find it sad that as a retired teacher I’m still learning so much about the whole process. Ultimately, when I’m ready for the learning that these projects offer–assuming I ever am–I’ll take a stab at it and perhaps come up with something worthy of posting here, in installments.

Until then, it’s back to studying Algebra!

On Finally Reading Paradise Lost

Illustration from Wikimedia

Although I’ve never been to a literary cocktail party, I have a certain game I imagine playing at one. (The truth is, I’ve never been to any kind of cocktail party, which is somewhat disappointing. As a youngster, I’d imagined that cocktail parties, like falling into a pit of quicksand, would be a regular part of adult life, and that I would be expected to know how to behave in both situations. Obviously, I was misinformed.)

At any rate, the game goes like this. A bunch of well-read people get together and confess what books they should have read but never have. It would, for those of us who teach literature for a living, be a daring game, one in which public humiliation might lie in wait for us. Who would want to admit, for example, that they had never actually read The Grapes of Wrath? Might the heavens open up, allowing peals of scandalized laughter to descend, if one were to admit, in public, that one’s copy of The Sound and the Fury had never actually been opened? It seemed to me an amusing game to play in my mind, something like Truth or Dare for grown-ups. In an alternate version of the game, I imagine myself going through life with a large deck of cards, each of which has a title printed in large, Gothic letters on its back declaring my inadequacy: Catch-22. Slaughterhouse Five. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ulysses. The list goes on and on.

The other day, I began to work at removing one of the cards from my deck of failure. This did not occur, however, as a determined plan at self-improvement. I am far beyond that stage in my life, having settled into a lazy, perhaps defeatist, sense of who I am and what I can do. Rather, it all began with an invitation to visit a friend’s high school classroom to discuss a play I’d written about C.S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. The class had been reading The Screwtape Letters, and, to prepare for my visit, I reread the book.

Lewis was a gifted satirist, there’s no doubt about it. His characterization of Screwtape, the devil who gives advice to his nephew Wormwood, instructing him on how to secure the soul of his “patient,” is brilliant, and I found myself wondering how he had been able to create such an enjoyable character out of a devil. The answer came quickly enough: Lewis had, after all written a short book called A Preface to Paradise Lost.  He must have known the poem intimately. And, although I’d never read Milton’s epic poem in its entirety, I’d read bits of it–enough to teach it to college sophomores in the British Literature survey classes I regularly taught. (Another guilty confession: I’ve taught the poem, yet never read all of it.) I guessed, and I think I’m right, that Lewis’s depiction of Screwtape owes a good deal to Milton’s depiction of Satan.

But the question remains: why had I never read Paradise Lost? After all, I’d been teaching it for decades. The omission is nothing short of scandalous. Actually, back in graduate school, I had tried to sign up for an entire class on Milton, but the class was oversubscribed, and we students were required to apply to take it by submitting a letter stating why we thought we should be allowed into it. My letter simply said I knew next to nothing about Milton, that I expected that I would have to teach his work, and that I thought that was a good enough reason to be admitted to the class.

It wasn’t.

And so I never read the whole poem. It turns out that I had gleaned enough information from my own undergraduate days to fumble through a few class days on Paradise Lost when I began to teach English literature, and so I just relied on that. Over the years, a colleague introduced me to a few of Milton’s poems (notably “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”), and then, much later, gave me his Milton texts when he retired and cleaned out his office, but they stayed on my shelf, treasured more because they reminded me of my colleague than for any interest I had in reading them.

And then one of my former students took a class on Milton, and suggested we read Paradise Lost together. Neither of us had the time, however, and the plan fell by the wayside. But apparently the idea stayed with me, because last week, as soon as I finished The Screwtape Letters, I dove into Paradise Lost, forcing myself to progress through it. I was helped by the fact that I was teaching Shakespeare, so the language wasn’t nearly as foreign as it could have been. When I found my attention wandering, bored by elaborate rhetorical constructions and erudite footnotes, I read Milton’s words out loud, and this kept me on track. I kept plodding through the poem, line by line, book by book, not worrying whether I was understanding all of it. I studiously ignored the footnotes, for the most part, but read my colleague’s hand-written marginal notes with affection.

And now I can say that I have read Paradise Lost, and that it wasn’t all that bad. I enjoyed parts of it. I hated the parts that were clearly anti-feminist, wishing someone else–maybe Ursula LeGuin or Virginia Woolf?–had dared to write Eve’s side of the story, since Milton had covered Adam’s point of view so thoroughly and unfairly. But as for filling in this gap in my education, I don’t feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. The heavens did not open as I finished reading the last lines of the poem. The Angel Raphael did not come down and pat me on the back. Nor did the archangel Michael arrive with a flaming sword to celebrate my victory over the text. I simply read about Adam and Eve departing Eden, sighed, and closed the book.

Did I learn anything? Just this: those things we put off because they seem too difficult are often not that difficult after all. Perhaps other people want to make us feel that they are difficult so as to make themselves feel smarter, or more worthy, than we are. In all likelihood, they aren’t. But I realize now that reading is a skill that we must train for–much like long-distance running– and I believe that as a society our reading endurance is steadily declining. We are clearly losing the taste for, and consequently the ability to, read long and rambling texts, settling instead for shorter and easier ones, and this will have serious consequences for our intellectual and public life in the coming years. Nevertheless, I believe that if we tackle our reading with confidence and optimism–if we keep to our task, pushing forward one line, even one word, at a time–we can make it through even the densest of texts.

The best part of the whole experience is that I’m now ready to discuss Paradise Lost with my former student. And for this, rather than for finally reading the whole poem, I think C.S. Lewis would be proud of me.

On Becoming Professor Brulov

Image from www.aveleyman.com

There’s a part in one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, Spellbound (1945), in which Ingrid Bergman, a clinical psychologist, takes Gregory Peck, a man who has amnesia and may have commited a murder, to her former psychology professor’s house to hide out from the authorities. Professor Brulov is the epitome of a German academic: eccentric, kind, and highly intelligent, he is genuinely happy to see Ingrid Bergman, who, he says, was his best assistant. It’s a wonderful part of an interesting movie, but lately it’s taken on even greater significance for me.

I first watched the movie on television as a teenager, at which time I identified with Ingrid Bergman (of course I did–the movie is all about Freudian wish fulfillment, after all). Some years ago, as a middle-aged professor, I watched it again with my students when I taught a course on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and I realized with a rather unpleasant shock that I had evolved without realizing it from the young, attractive, and inquisitive Dr. Constance Peterson into the aged, almost-but-not-quite-grumpy Profesor Brulov. (In Mel Brooks’ hilarious spoof of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, High Anxiety [1977], Professor Brulov is transformed into Professor Lilloman, which the protagonist mistakenly pronounces as “Professor Little Old Man.”) And, while it has taken me a few years to accept this transformation, I’m now fairly comfortable with my new, much less glamorous, role as mentor to my former students.

The reason is simple. Constance Petersons are a dime a dozen. The world is filled with beautiful young people making their mark on the world. But Brulov–he’s different. In fact, he’s quite special. Think of it this way: When Peterson is in trouble, she seeks him out, and Brulov helps her without asking any difficult questions, despite the fact that he knows she’s lying to him. He trusts her even more than she trusts him, which is touching, in a way. And so one thing that this very complex movie does is set up the idea of a mentor relationship between Brulov and his former student. It’s an interesting side angle to the movie that I never really noticed before.

And, now, in my retirement, I am learning to embrace this new Brulovian stage of life. I have had very few, if any, mentors in my own career, so while I’m not too proficient at it yet, I hope to grow into the role in the years to come. The way I see it, we need more Professor Brulovs in this world; we can’t all be Ingrid Bergman or Gregory Peck, after all. I’m happy that my students remember me with something other than aversion, after all, and so becoming Professor Brulov is, at least for now, quite enough for me.

GettyImages

On Lost Voices

A few days ago, an article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Carlin Romano that discussed H.J. Jackson’s book Those Who Write for Immortality. Jackson’s book talks about literary fame and how it occurs, and Romano’s article introduces some interesting, and troubling, ideas. For example, what if, as Jackson suggests, we remember Wordsworth and Coleridge not because they are eminently good poets, but because their poetry is easier to anthologize and illustrate than the works of Robert Southey or Leigh Hunt? Many good writers fall by the wayside, Romano seems to argue, simply because they are not convenient to read.

This makes me question my own work as a teacher in years past. One of the things I’m proud of is my attempt to help my students understand Romantic poetry and feel comfortable with it. Of course, I emphasized Wordsworth and Coleridge, because they are so accessible and so easy to identify with, considering their love of simplicity and Nature with a capital “N.” What’s not to like about that, after all? But recently, while reading the letters of Charles Lamb, a literary figure who was once loved for his essays and is now only known for his pseudonym (any crossword addict knows that “Lamb’s alias” is “ELIA”), I discovered a rebuttal of all the nature-worship perpetrated by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Charles Lamb

Of course, any student of Romantic literature will remember lines like “Henceforth I shall know / That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure; / No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, /…and keep the heart / Awake to Love and beauty!” (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” by S.T. Coleridge). This is also the poem in which Coleridge addresses Lamb himself (much to Lamb’s chagrin) not once but three times as “My gentle-hearted Charles,” telling him at one point, “thou has pined  / And hungered after Nature, many a year, / In the great City pent, winning thy way / With sad and patient soul…” (28-31). Lovely as those lines are, there was at least one reader who was unimpressed by them. Lamb himself wrote to Coleridge on August 6, 1800, “For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.” Apparently, Coleridge heeded Lamb’s plea, and never again addressed him in a poem.

Five months later, Lamb writes to William Wordsworth an interesting, chatty letter in which he brings up his view of nature, which runs counter to all Romantic ideology, ending in a paean to city life worthy of Dickens or Thackeray some fifty years later: “Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes–London itself a pantomime and a masquerade–all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me.” Lamb’s letter continues to contrast his view of the poetic with Wordsworth’s, ending, “So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city.”

Old Covent Garden Market, by Georg Johann Scharf, 1825 (source: Wikipedia)

This passage is more than striking; it’s a gobsmacking refutation of the Nature-worship that I have, for many years, erroneously taught was part and parcel of the literary landscape of early 19th century Britain. So here’s a public apology to all my students, with this little piece of cautionary advice: H.J. Jackson may well be right. Rather than teach the old stand-bys, we ought to be engaging in our own recovery projects to introduce more readers to the jewels that we’ve let slip through our fingers.

Postscript to Previous Post

Image from Wikipedia

Tolkien, the story goes, wrote the first words of The Hobbit in the pages of a student examination blue book. He had been grading examinations as a form of part-time work, and, exhausted by the monotony of the task, he celebrated his discovery of a blank page in the book, untouched by the student’s ink, by writing the words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

I am far luckier than Tolkien. I received the following essay from a student (who gave me permission to post it here) as a final exam. It is a lovely way to end my final semester at the community college where I teach. Thank you, Cari Griffin, for summing up my attitude towards the study of literature in such a humorous and appropriate way. Indeed, I am a very lucky teacher. After all, a doctor is only as good as his or her companions.

 

 

27 April 2015

“Doctor” Shumway:

For nearly two years, I have been your companion as we have traveled through space and time. Your Tardis is not a blue Police box; it is your classroom, and you are “The Doctor”; a madwoman with a YouTube account. Though there was never a fez involved, exploring foreign lands, examining history, and best of all, discussing literature has allowed for, myself, at least, great understanding of the space-time continuum as it pertains to the literary world.

There can be no question that our travels, having begun in September of 2013, frequently took us to England. I think we can both agree, it is our favorite stop. Whether it has been a visit with the Anglo-Saxons, an exploration of medieval England, several visits with our favorite playwright, William Shakespeare, or an extensive amount of time spent in 19th century Great Britain, each visit afforded us an opportunity to see British history and its inhabitants in a new way. We lacked only our tea while we observed an Abbey, paid a visit to Thornfield Hall, or grasped the devastation of World War I.

We were not always in England. We’ve been to France with a philosopher, to Spain within American, and Germany to witness the beginning of the Romantic Movement. We saw 17th century Turkey through the eyes of an English woman, visited Japan at the turn of the 20th century, and briefly stopped in Imperial Russia. The authors we have covered acted as conductors, providing the means for us to travel. Their voices allowed us to see into their worlds, to spend time in their society, to have a momentary glimpse of a fixed point in time. We have seen revolutions, oppression, and inequality in many of the places we have visited, but always, the voices of those authors who have guided us cried out for equality, rallied for peace, and asked us to question, alongside them, our purpose within our community, our country, and our society, just as they did the same in theirs. Together, on our journey, we have celebrated the individual, applauded the growth of the female author, recognized brilliance, and felt the influence of those long ago voices within our modern society.

It was not just the authors that we met. We examined the world around them. We studied the era in which they lived: we viewed their art, heard their music, and, ultimately, questioned the validity of their place within the literary canon. Perhaps we did not always embrace them as friends, but we did not leave as foes. No. Our relationship with these authors, however brief, brought us a little closer to our fellow man, allowed us see into his or her own world through their eyes, and, to realize they are very much like us, though they lived in a far different world than the one we inhabit now.

As our journey nears its end, you ask, “why?” I interpret this as, “why take the journey? “My answer is quite simply this: we must. For anything less than a madman in a blue box landing in our backyard, we have no other way to reach across time and space, to look at a moment in man’s history, and have an opportunity to see that moment through a different set of eyes. Yes, Doctor Shumway, literature is our Tardis through space and time. We have an obligation to not only understand our place within our own culture, in history, but our fellow man’s place and his culture as well. After all, “We’re all stories, in the end” (The Eleventh Doctor).

The End of Something

My career as a full-time teacher is drawing to a close, and I’m having some trouble getting used to the idea.

Several weeks ago, I decided to take advantage of an early retirement program at my college, so I will be leaving at the end of this semester. Of course, I’m really excited about the prospect of having free time to read whatever I want, in whatever order I want to read it; to focus on my writing, music and knitting; and, most of all, to do a bit of traveling. Teaching, as I told one of my colleagues, was getting in the way of my own learning, and so I’m grateful to be able to step back from a career that, despite its frustrations, has been a central and valued part of my life. I have learned more about teaching in the dozen or so years I’ve spent at this small community college in rural Northern Michigan than I ever thought possible, which is part of the reason I have mixed feelings about leaving.

In some ways, I feel I’m at the top of my game as a teacher. I don’t have to take a lot of time to prepare for each class, and most classroom situations don’t really throw me. (Of course, there are a few that were pretty funny, and, once I retire, I look forward to sharing these stories, like the one about the time a speech student tried to bring a goat to class.) Grading papers, of course, is still a tremendous burden, and like most writing instructors, I greatly resent it. But it turns out that grading is not as heavy a burden for me as the human burden. By this, I mean that I try to see each of my students as an individual; everyone, I told myself as I began my teaching career, is someone’s child. I asked myself, how would I want my child treated by their professors? The answer was clear.  So I have always tried to be open, inviting, and encouraging with my students, and it’s made for some great moments as a teacher. But it’s also made it possible for me to see the real pain in my students’ lives. From the student who schleps her infant to class, no matter subzero temperatures, to the student whose grip on religion is ironclad because he’s found no other outlet or support, to the student who suffers from a laundry list of health problems as a result of serving in Afghanistan–each of these students has a claim on me, because I have always felt it’s more important to be a human being first and a professor second.

It’s a noble idea, but now, as I move towards my last days of teaching (at least full-time), I can see its flaws. In essence, teaching as a human being is like “hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat,” in the famous words of George Eliot in Middlemarch (Chapter 20), whose narrator predicts that those who can attend to such emotional minutiae are likely to “die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” I am not in danger of dying from being exposed to that roar, but I am pained by my work these days. I’m stricken by the sadness of seeing the eccentric student who has no friends, sitting alone in the cafeteria; I’m depressed by the difficulties facing young mothers and fathers as they try to gain an education to make life better for their children; and I’m overwhelmed by the challenges, and, yes, the tragedies, that lie behind the eyes of many of my students who stare up at me as I try to dish out some wisdom to help them in their journey through life.

It’s a tough job, and I’ve given it what I could over the years. One consolation I’ve always had, however, is that if I do a poor job one semester, I could always improve the next time around. This semester is different, though. There is no next time. Does that mean I’ll finally get it right and teach well this term? The answer has become clear over the past few weeks. This semester will be like all the other semesters I’ve had: some successes in the classroom, but many more failures. I’m satisfied that I’ve made the right decision, though. It’s time for someone else to step up and try their hand at this job. I’m ready to take my ball and go home, even if that means that I leave a career I love.

Image from http://caj.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/mediamag/awards2005/Pictures/1.%20Ball%20Thief.jpg

Guest Post from Kelly Suter, RN, Medical Relief Worker and Writer

I always say that I have the best students in the world, and it’s wonderful when they keep in touch with me after they leave my classroom. This holiday season, I’m extremely lucky to be able to present for you, my blog readers, a guest post by Kelly Suter, R.N., a former writing student (yes, nurses do have to know how to write!) and a nurse engaged in the battle against Ebola. Kelly has spent significant time doing medical relief work in Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Liberia and has been interviewed on 60 Minutes in the story “The Hot Zone” (to see the segment, just click on the link at the bottom of this page).  Moreover, Kelly is one of those rare, special people who, at a very young age, has found her Work.

Here are Kelly’s thoughts about writing and its importance in our world:

If you are like me,  English was one of your least favorite subjects growing up.  Language, in general, seemed cumbersome and inconsistent to my young and obstinate mind.  Despite my initial aversion, I would come to appreciate and respect language–especially in its written form. I gradually came to understand that the written word does not exist solely to act as an accessory to the spoken word; the written word is an art form unto itself.  In music, sounds and words are arranged in such a way to elicit a reaction deep within the human soul.   Similarly, in writing, words are arranged to the same effect. The more beautifully and carefully those words are arranged, the more powerful the effect–the deeper that message resonates and the more clearly it is understood by the human spirit. As I became more acquainted with writing, I also came to realize that the written word is a powerful tool.  A simple phrase can inspire great hope, courage and love.  Alternatively, it can also cause great pain, destruction and fear.  I decided early on that I would use any talent I possessed as a writer to inspire as much good in this world as possible. Writing has now become my faithful companion and weapon of choice in a world plagued by suffering.  In my years of medical relief work, writing has given me a means of sharing my experiences and–more importantly–the stories of those most of the world would rather forget. From the child that was buried under the rubble of his family home after the earthquake in Haiti to the elderly woman who walked for three days with her grandchild–sick with cholera–strapped to her back to find medical treatment in rural Haiti. From the malnourished twins in East Timor to the young student who was murdered by firing squad for simply being born of the wrong tribe in South Sudan. From the man who lost his five-year-old son to Ebola in Liberia to the gravedigger who wants to do his part to save his country from Ebola in Sierra Leone. Writing has allowed these experiences to be a positive motivating force in the lives of many, rather than in the life of only one.

The written word gives us the power to cross oceans, climb mountains, and break through barriers. It gives us the ability to inspire, create and encourage. Most importantly–it reminds us all that we are human and that we are all interconnected.

60 Minutes: “The Hot Zone”

The Best of All Possible Worlds

As I sit at my desk, waiting for papers to trickle in, I take a few minutes to contemplate the teaching life. Don’t worry–this won’t be a political post decrying the impossible demands placed on teachers in the United States, the lack of professional respect for them, or the very real difficulties involved in creating a career in teaching, although all of those topics do bear talking about. Today, rather than craft a careful argument about the demise of education and its consequences for our culture, I’m just going to indulge in some personal reflections on the teaching life, offered by a community college professor who is still in the trenches, hands dirtied with run-on sentences and flawed thesis statements, fingers wearied by clutching a rapidly fading red pen.

It’s at this point that I look back on the semester and consider all the work my students have done, reflect on all the goals I had for them and myself, consider where we are and how we’ve gotten here, and think: “What an awful job I’ve done! How miserably I’ve failed them!” The truth is, I always feel rotten, simply miserable, at the end of the semester. No matter how many students tell me what a good semester they’ve had, I always think about the fact that I could have helped them more: engaged them in more discussion, made more comments on their papers, asked more about their personal lives, and generally been more of a mensch and less of a schlemiel.

This is not a cry for sympathy, however, or a self-deprecating appeal for someone to contradict me. I’ve been teaching pretty much all of my adult life, and I’m not young anymore. I’m used to this feeling, and, like many other feelings I have that are not particularly productive, I acknowledge this one and pass it by, much as a man in the 1950s would tip his hat at a passing acquaintance on the street and continue walking down the block. Part of this refusal to give in to the feeling of desperate failure as a teacher comes from simple familiarity with it. I expect many, probably most, teachers feel this way. Part of it may come from simple inertia; but part of it comes from the knowledge that my students will have to survive many mediocre teachers throughout their academic career, and if I’ve been one of them this semester, it’s part of the experience that they will need to have in order to succeed as students. Like a refrain from Candide, I can say, “It’s all for the best. They need to learn to teach themselves, and if I’ve failed them this semester, perhaps they’ll learn how to do this all the more quickly.”

So, today, as the semester draws to a close, here’s to all the teachers, professors, GSAs, teaching assistants, and instructors who have done the best they could with what they had and emerged relatively unscathed from yet another semester. After all, the best thing about being a teacher is that, unlike the students we teach, we always get a chance next semester to do it right.

Everything You’ve Been Taught to Think about Shakespeare Is Probably Wrong

From poetryfoundation.org

After teaching an intensive Shakespeare class week, I have to admit it: Shakespeare is difficult. It’s hard to understand the plays and poems he wrote, but apparently, it’s of the utmost importance that we all do—after all, knowledge of Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar is what separates the educated from the uneducated in the United States. That’s why we make our high school students spend so much time on these plays: we want them to be educated and knowledgeable about their culture, and Shakespeare is about as cultured as you can get in high school.

There’s only one thing wrong with this picture, which is just about everything.

I’m not going to get into the argument that plagued higher education a generation ago, when scholars argued about whether it really was important for students to know and understand the plays of a dead white male that were written about a time long past. You can read about that debate here, if you’re interested in it. Today, I’m not concerned about whether we study Shakespeare at all, but rather about the ways in which Shakespeare is distorted to fit into the high school curriculum.

There are several reasons for this distortion. First of all, the study of Shakespeare in American high schools is fraught with shame, and this shame has nothing to do with the content of the plays (although we will talk more about that in a moment). Think back to your high school days–if you’re a high school teacher, think back to the last time you had to teach Shakespeare. In all likelihood, there were parts of the play you did not understand. Whether it was the difficult language or the confusing character names (really Shakespeare? Grumio and Gremio in the same play?), or the convoluted plot, there was something you just didn’t get. When this happens, as it does all the time, even with college professors and scholars, we tend to cover it up, ignore it, pray that no one asks questions about it. As far as Shakespeare goes, we are taught early on to play the emperor’s-new-clothes game. If we don’t advertise the fact that we don’t get the play, don’t understand the language, and don’t see why Shakespeare is so important, then maybe we can pass for a truly educated person. The problem with this is that while high school students aren’t incredibly quick to understand Shakespeare, they are very quick to identify our discomfort, and it distances them from the pleasure of reading and understanding Shakespeare.

Secondly, high school is apparently not a suitable place to study Shakespeare–hence the censorship that Shakespeare must undergo in order to make the plays fit for consumption. All of Shakespeare’s plays deal with sexuality in one form or another–every single one of them. We are hypocrites when we say that teenagers should understand Shakespeare all the better for this but refuse to identify the truly raunchy parts of the plays for them, passages which go unnoticed because of the archaic language and difficult references. A poem like Venus and Adonis is, after all, intensely erotic, pretty much soft-core porn, and would engender numerous complaints if it were placed on a high school syllabus. Until we can deal effectively with the problem of censorship in our high schools, Shakespeare will continue to be despised by our students. High school will continue to be, in the words of a wise student of mine, where Shakespeare goes to die. (Thanks, Jordan!)

But maybe you are one of the lucky ones. Maybe you made it through high school and even college without conceiving a distaste for Shakespeare. Congratulations! But even so, you may still face a serious problem with Shakespeare, and that’s that most of his plays are completely misunderstood today. Here are just a few examples: Julius Caesar, which we all suffered through in 10th or 11th grade, is not about Julius Caesar, a throw-away character who dies before the play is even half over. And Mark Anthony is not the hero of the play, as he is so often made out to be: he is a wretched opportunist who capitalizes on his patron’s murder. The play is really about Brutus; it’s about how difficult it is to respond to tyranny in a truly humane and civilized way. Likewise, Romeo and Juliet is not just a play about love; rather, it’s really about rebellion. I don’t think we are meant to feel heartsick about the ending of the play, as we do about its modern counterpart, West Side Story. The ending of the play should, if done correctly, make us feel angry at the insipid young lovers and the utter waste of life they leave scattered in their reckless–and rebellious–wake.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Shakespeare has been taught all wrong for too many years. Whether it’s worthwhile to study works from a period and a culture so distant from ours is up for debate, but surely  it cannot be right to study them in a way that distorts their true meaning, fostering disdain, shame, and disinterest among so many of us. As for me, I look forward to a time when we can openly admit our confusion about Shakespeare, when we can be honest about the raucous and delightfully filthy language in his plays, and when we can challenge the stale interpretations that have been handed down to us, replacing them with our own outrageously creative readings.