Nitty-Gritty

Okay, you’ve got your first job. I was there, 30 years ago, but— unfortunately—there was nobody around to write me the sort of letter I’m writing to you. I don’t even know you, but I feel a certain responsibility, mostly because I want to spare you some of the mistakes I made, to make your life in the classroom, in the academic village, a little easier. Like all advice, you can take it or leave it. One of the main things I can say to you is that every teacher, like every person, is different. You have to teach out of who you are. That is the only way you will succeed, as a professional, as a teacher and scholar, as a member of the community of scholars. You will have to adapt anything I say here to your own private vision, to some version of yourself. The essential journey in this profession is toward self-knowledge; this will involve getting lost in order to get found, losing your thread, having to revise your sense of reality over and over, frequently adjusting to new information, new contexts. In modeling this revisionary path, you will help your students to learn how to forge their own paths. I will assume that you went into the teaching profession because you thought you had a gift for teaching or scholarship—or both. You liked a few teachers along the way and you thought you could emulate their success. Perhaps you were just fascinated by the field: literature, physics, whatever. You wanted to spend your life around people fascinated by this field, who take their work in a given subject seriously. You liked, perhaps, the smell of the lab or library, the feel of scholarly journals in your hands. You enjoyed hearing intelligent people argue. That is probably as good a place to begin as anywhere, but you nevertheless have to make your way in the profession: among students and among your colleagues, some of whom will vote on your tenure. Again I will return to the basic advice: be yourself, but build on that notion, adding to yourself, amplifying yourself.

The Teaching Life

Nobody just walks into a classroom and begins to teach without some consideration of self-presentation, much as nobody sits down to write a poem, an essay, or a novel without considering the voice behind the words, its tone and texture, and the traditions of writing within a particular genre. Voice is everything in literature, playing in the mind of the writer, the ear of the reader; the search for authenticity in that voice is the writer’s work of a lifetime. What I want to suggest here is that teachers, like writers, also need to invent and cultivate a voice, one that serves their personal needs as well as the material at hand, one that feels authentic. It should also take into account the nature of the students who are being addressed, their background in the subject and their disposition as a class, which is not always easy to gauge. It takes a good deal of time, as well as experimentation, to find this voice, in teaching as in writing. For the most part, the invention of a teaching persona is a fairly conscious act. Teachers who are unconscious of their teaching self might get lucky; that is, they might adopt or adapt something familiar—a manner, a voice—that actually works in the classroom from the beginning. Dumb luck happens. But most of the successful teachers I have known have been deeply aware that their selfpresentation involves, or has involved at some point, the donning of a mask. This taking on of a mask, or persona (from the Latin word implying that a voice is something discovered by “sounding through” a mask, as in per/sona), is no simple process. It involves artifice, and the art of teaching is no less complicated than any other art form. It is not something “natural,” i.e., “found in nature.” A beginning teacher will have to try on countless masks before finding one that fits, that seems appropriate, that works to organize and embody a teaching voice. In most cases, a teacher will have a whole closet full of masks to try on for size.

My Life in School

For over 30 years I’ve made a life of teaching. Now that I’m within sight of the end of this occupation, or preoccupation, I find it alluring to think about what I did or didn’t accomplish, what I might have done better, what I might like to do in the years left to me in the classroom. I find myself thinking, too, about my early teachers, wondering what they taught me, and what I found useful—or definitely unhelpful—in their examples. Having become aware of how little decent writing exists on the art of teaching, I’ve got some hope that my reflections will help those at the beginning of their work in the profession. It still seems odd to me that I wound up in teaching. As a student in high school and college, I often felt that a teacher was someone who got between me and my reading. I used to believe that teachers unfairly attempted to control the nature and pace of my work, my rate and quality of retention, the ultimate direction of my thoughts. I considered these things private matters, and still do. (If a book was listed on a syllabus, I naturally veered away from it, not toward it.) Fortunately for me, a few teachers seemed different from the rest. They were genuinely and deeply interested in what they taught, and I knew they would be focused on the material before them even if the class suddenly dissolved before their eyes. This material, this subject, was their life. And they never tried to control my thinking; rather, they led me with considerable subtlety in directions I found challenging, if not always congenial. In short, for reasons too difficult to explain, or impossible to explain, I needed a light touch, and they provided it. I was always suspicious of the classroom as a testing ground for intelligence, a place for sorting the “good” from the “bad” students. The idea of the academic world as a place of competition repelled me. To be frank, it still does, and I never feel happy with students or colleagues who seem excessively interested in grading, in putting up barriers to jump across.

Endings

It’s spring in the academic village, with blossoming fruit trees all over campus, the ground smelling of fresh mud, and once again my thoughts turn to summer. I think of those long, delicious months when, without the telephone ringing and student papers sitting on my desk ungraded, without faculty meetings and office hours, without classes to prepare, I’m free again to work exclusively on my own writing. My e-mails will dwindle to communications with a few good friends. Some mornings, I might even sleep in. But spring also brings with it a small feeling of dread. “April is the crudest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot—a memorable line. I think of it again as lawn mowers drone outside the open windows of my classroom, a sweet wind blows papers off my desk, and I begin to anticipate the end of another school year, with the many losses that inevitably attend that moment, marked so vividly by the graduation ceremony, when half a dozen kids I had really come to like, even love, wave to me from the platform as they proceed into their adult life, diplomas in hand. I’m aware that one or two from each class will remain friends forever, but I know as well that there will be many— the majority of those whom I genuinely considered friends—who won’t. It’s not their fault, I tell myself. They will get busy. Soon spouses and children will lay claim to their attention. I’m just a passing figure in their lives; they know this, and I know it. It’s not as bad as it sounds, given the demands I feel myself toward spouse and family, toward a circle of friends that has widened decade by decade. There is only so much attention to go around. I begin to feel this little dread coming on in late March, when the spring snows in Vermont begin to thaw. Huge piles of the stuff grow wet at the edges, melting slowly, so that by the middle of April there are puddles everywhere, and I have for the first time to wear my waders to school.

Beginnings

Beginnings. One of the things I have most prized about working in the academy is the sense of beginnings. There is always a fresh start, with new students, new colleagues, new courses. Even old colleagues somehow look new in September, when the light of the sun seems especially bright, gearing up for a final summery blast before the inevitable decline, what Robert Frost in “The Oven Bird” called “that other fall we name the fall.” It has always seemed ironic to me that one begins anything in the fall, or that a sense of starting over should connect, visually, with the blood-bright failure of so much greenery. Emotionally, the school year ought to open in springtime, when the buds do: there would be a feeling in the air of everything starting over. But it doesn’t work that way. Somewhere, long ago, somebody thought up the notion that academic terms should begin in the fall: probably when the work of harvesting was over, so that farm boys could study with impunity. I often think of “Spring and Fall,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In it, the narrator happens upon a young girl, Margaret, who stands amid a typical autumn scene, with the golden leaves tumbling around her. For unknown reasons, she is weeping. The poet, more to himself than to the girl, concludes: . . . Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow’s springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. . . . In other words, Margaret (like the narrator as well as the poem’s readers) must go the way of all leaves, whether or not she consciously knows it. When we feel sorry in the autumn, we are mourning our own mutability. On the other hand, the rhythm of the academic world runs counter to this natural grieving, so aptly symbolized by the seasons.