Note After A Department Meeting
(After siting in on a meeting of a writing department where I briefly taught and learning kids now use "drip" as some form of cool/hot I wrote the following to the department members.)
When Chairperson Morake makes reference to his taking over my class after my guest term was up and there being a kind of rebellion, his kind memory is slanted in the extreme. He does not mention the sense of relief most students had on his arrival, the feeling of "yes, now finally we will actually do something for real." I am an odd presence in a classroom, but not much of a teacher in any sense that serves most kids. My “meet people well” mantra becomes “meet them on my terms” pretty quickly.
Any cred I get as a teacher can be summed up in the line from David Bowie: “We were so turned on by your lack of confusions.”
There is also the line from Howard Nemerov: “Everyone says I am a great teacher except my students.”
Though it is true that from the class Mr. M took over I got my favorite review teacher ever: “Mr. Ted is very, very, . . . I don’t know.”
If you don't mind, I want to address Miss T's question, "Why the F am I here?" Because my over 50 self wants to say how jealous I am of even the pain lodged there. "Unfortunately,” I thought, “it has been a year of answers." For while, yes, some 'later in life answers' do decrease the temperature of "why the F?" when your answers include words like "never" (as in, "I will never again . . .) or "always" (as in I will now always be . . . ") you find yourself longing for old struggles. It is nice to know you can wear goofy old-man shorts and no one cares but it is no compensation for being in the thick of life.
Why the F? Because we are here to struggle and suffer and come to provisional answers that help others suffer less, even though--especially as teachers who dream of a year without marking--most of our provisional answers will be ignored or discarded by those focused on achieving exactly the wrong things. That so few listen or believe, and that we are so unsure ourselves is what makes the work holy.
And as frustrating and difficult as it can be to live with disillusionment, is embracing illusion really an option? It would be nice if the world and everyone in it would live up to the promises it, and they, make. But since that will never happen, we may as well laugh at the disappointments and fight the injustices as best we can, with as much humility, love and openness as the spirit can muster.
All of which is easy for me to say because I am old, don't mind pontificating, and have not made a unit plan in forever.
On the subject of Mr Dash’s "Hope Against The Machine" and whether or not "the kids" will get that reference, I thought of a professor, John Morris, I had in graduate school. Long since dead, he was a moderately well known poet and seriously old school. He had a poem about a film being loaded in the projector the wrong way. It was called "Running It Backward," I think and is about watching your life go from age to youth. Would that reference make sense to anyone in an age of entirely digital video?
I went looking for the poem, to no avail. (If a poem is still only available in books, and not on line, does that mean your work is major or minor?) Anyway, that poem, or some other, had the line: "It is a kind of Connecticut not to be twenty-five anymore." Does that line translate if you are under forty or don't have an American's association with that small New England state?
In my search, however, I did find another poem which may speak to some of the above, the last line in particular.
Yours in dripitude,
—
For Julia, In the Deep Water
The instructor we hire
because she does not love you
Leads you into the deep water,
The deep end
Where the water is darker—
Her open, encouraging arms
That never get nearer
Are merciless for your sake.
You will dream this water always
Where nothing draws nearer,
Wasting your valuable breath
You will scream for your mother—
Only your mother is drowning
Forever in the thin air
Down at the deep end.
She is doing nothing,
She never did anything harder.
And I am beside her.
I am beside her in this imagination.
We are waiting
Where the water is darker.
You are over your head,
Screaming, you are learning
Your way toward us,
You are learning how
In the helpless water
It is with our skill
We live in what kills us.
—John N. Morris