sustaining a teaching career

The ability to begin again is fundamental to sustaining a career in teaching. This means beginning again today, this hour and next hour, and it means beginning again four, seven, ten, twenty, thirty years later. For me it has been beginning again at 32, 36, 43, 47, and 51, to choose some times when I’ve made beginnings that are significant to me. All of them have to do with times I’ve made changes in my learning life. All of them have meant changes in my teaching life.

This doesn’t mean wholly starting over. We don’t lose what we’ve done. The new teacher isn’t really new. The new teacher has been taught, has observed teaching. The new teacher just needs to accomplish a shift of mind into teacher thinking rather than exclusively student thinking. That’s a kind of beginning. The long practicing teacher can benefit from the opposite: being a student while teaching can help return a teacher’s mind to student mind. That’s another kind of beginning, or renewal. The mix is salutary.

I started teaching at 21. It was a 53 year old student in my first term’s class who made me realize one day that thinking about teaching was really satisfying to me, as he talked about how much the class was satisfying to him. I paid attention to him. I realized I cared what he thought, how his existence was at that moment. His quality of life in my class mattered to me. This was an important realization. He didn’t finish the class; he died of a heart attack about two thirds of the way through the term. Part of his legacy is that he helped me realize that thinking as a teacher is a wonderful thing to do. That was thirty-two years ago. I’m 53 myself now, and I hope that part of my legacy is that I’ve helped others come to that same realization. Oh, and I hope to do that for a long time beyond now.

That was my first experience with losing a student to death. There have been more since. Often people going into teaching don’t think about that. One whole section of a memoir I wrote about my life in school is devoted to the idea that teachers need to teach with a consciousness of death, not as a means of depressing themselves but as a means of reminding themselves of how precious what we do–and those we do what we do for–are in the great scheme of things. That 53 year old man sobered me in my first two months of my career.

He died, and then we met in class and began again. I can’t over-stress how much I think that matters. Teaching is about living. It is an optimistic act. We begin again.

While I can speak of teaching as a career, and speak of making changes at stages of that career, always I come back to that which hit me so strongly one fall day in 1975, talking to a man in my class. It is right now that matters. Being with a student this hour, caring about how the moment is affecting that student, caring about what this student is bringing along to this moment, that is the primary sense of living the teacher’s life. That is always new. Each encounter is a beginning. Sounds trite, but it isn’t; each moment may matter; each is an occasion that might resonate thirty-two years later.

the pedantic optimist, or optimistic pedant

There is a timelessness in teaching. I do not know how this can be. In classes for teachers I preach the necessity of living in the moment, of teaching as being in the present tense, of teaching as “being with” students, as paying attention in the now, and yet there are moments in the classroom when a sense of eternity washes over me, that these precious people and I are a small part of an unending continuum of being and learning, that we are participating in an endless universal quest for making meaning of being, of being the makers of meaning, and that each day’s small writing and reading and speaking and listening is that day’s meditation or prayer or contribution to the universe, a timeless universe that accepts, or perhaps, I hope, welcomes those contributions, prayers, meditations with the same good will I feel when I offer a poem or song or essay or a classroom hour in the company of fellow aspirers sharing in the mutual quest to make today matter, eternally.

I feel this when I meet former students whose names I don’t remember, and realize that remembering their names is minor, because the learning we did in common is still there, the paragraphs still have been written, the discoveries were made and cannot be undone.

I feel this when I learn of the deaths of former students and contemplate my own, waiting out there for me. The classroom hours have happened, this classroom hour is happening, and those contributions, and this contribution, cannot be undone.

And so, teaching is now, but teaching is forever.

Opera scenes

On Friday evening I did my first operatic ensemble performance. Two years ago, doing such a thing would have been unthinkable. For one thing I didn’t have the requisite skill, but for another I still hadn’t done any performing that required individual singing while also acting with others–and singing with others, too. I’ve gone through some learning.

The first thing I learned is actually a re-learning, with additions. Performance–musical performance but especially dramatic performance–is a matter of being in the moment and only in the moment. It takes a focusing, a husbanding of mental energy into use of the body, the voice, gesture, step, turn of head, that is absorbing but also is choosing. It’s thinking about so many things simultaneously that other things have to go. I can’t think about my day or the war against Islamic terror or what to do with my tired old RV while I’m performing. Instead I thought about those things I just mentioned, and how to cover the memory lapse I had in the second scene and the one beat late entrance in the sixth without disturbing the audience and also reducing any negative impact on the other performers.

More. Acting in a play takes concentration. Acting in the one musical I’ve been in added a layer to the acting. Singing and acting was harder for me than just acting or just singing a solo. Acting in a opera (or opera scenes, as I did Friday) added another layer, because the singing was more difficult. I don’t have enough experience to say whether being in an opera is more challenging than being in a musical (I know, they’re related). I do know that in one iteration of each I’ve found the opera more so. It was difficult but doable work.

Another thing I’ve learned: I don’t do it for applause. I do it to do it. The audience helps me focus, but the motive behind this for me isn’t primarily to please audiences or earn praise (though I like both), it’s to achieve that sense of life in the moment, life being lived intensely and richly. Performance on stage is very much “is” and very little “was.” I’m glad to have done a reasonably good first-timer amateur performance, but the draw isn’t being able to look back on Friday night’s performance; it’s being in Friday night’s performance on Friday night.

So today I’ll go practice toward some other, next Friday night.

another kind of teaching

Later today I will have a lesson with my voice teacher. It’s fascinating to watch how he works. He’s 72 years old, limps badly, and is widely acknowledged among the music students and faculty as the very best there is. I’ve come to realize people think that of him in other places, too. New York City, for example, where his former students sing at the opera of the same name and at the Met.

His methods intrigue me. First, he’s cheerful. He greets me in a welcoming way, his voice lifting in a fashion that makes me feel like something good is coming next. He inquires about my life, listens, remembers things I’ve told him before. I know he’s paying attention to me, not just to business. Then he asks how the voice is coming this week, which signals a transition: he’s still asking about me, but also moving toward the work we’re about to do. And then he adapts the way the lesson is going to start to whatever I’ve just told him about how the voice has done since the last lesson.

Then the lesson. In it, his attention is wholly focused on me. I’m not sure he would notice a brass band starting up outside the studio door–as long as it didn’t interfere with his ability to hear me. From the beginning he gradually pulls me toward the something new he had planned before I ever came through his door. Fifty minutes later we emerge, startled that so much time has passed, to realize the lesson is over. Then he sends me on my way, happy, satisfied, and eager to get back to the practice room.

It feels effortless, though I’ve worked hard and am both exhausted and elated.

Bass contractions

I joined the college’s opera workshop this fall. Our first performance is coming up in a little over a week. We aren’t actually performing an opera; we’re performing scenes from two operas. I’m in two scenes: as Sarastro in a trio from The Magic Flute and as Bartolo in the Act II finale from the Marriage of Figaro.

This is another first for me. Last year at an introductory meeting of a committee on campus each member of the committee was asked to name something new he or she wanted to do in the next year. I said, “Sing in at least one scene of an opera.”

I’m about to do so.

I’ve been in a musical, once. That was early last spring. I had one song. I’ve done solo arias in recital settings. This is my first attempt at ensemble operatic singing. More learning to do. Later today we rehearse from memory (or “off book,” as I have now learned to call that) for the first time. That’s hard for me–memory always is harder for me than for many people–but clearly has to be done.

In the trio I have to be careful because my big-ass bass (take out the “ig” in big ass and what do you get? A bass contraction.) is stronger than the voices of the tenor and soprano, so I’m trying to build a balance for their sakes. In the other scene that doesn’t matter because there are so many people singing that a big voice doesn’t stand out–or if it does, it should.

I met a couple of the other students today, as well as our rehearsal accompanist. The singers are nervous about the rehearsal.

They’ll–we’ll–be more nervous in a week.

Santa Claus thoughts

Yesterday, Sunday, I was in the office because I’m a nerd and the Vikings game wasn’t on yet. All morning I spent building a graduation photo album for a young friend in her senior year of high school. We had done the photo shoot Saturday. While waiting for CDs to burn I read about the death of Don Murray, a writer and teacher of writing from the University of New Hampshire. He also was a journalist and Pulitzer prize winner.

Actually, I knew of his death some months ago. What I read was appreciations written about him in the May ‘07 English Journal, which is a professional magazine for English teachers. Here’s something I cooked up this morning as I thought about him and the lessons I’ve learned from him over the years:

He looked like Santa Claus. Round body, round face, full white beard, big smile. I never met him, but feel like I knew him because of reading his books about writing. His books are so clear and so self-revelatory that to read him is to know him. And like him. Both of the appreciations written to acknowledge his death and celebrate his life are themselves reflective of Murray’s personal generosity as writer and teacher.

Murray once wrote (and it’s quoted in one of the two articles) “I have apprenticed myself to two trades I can never learn, writing and teaching.” That was not a false modesty. That was realistic. We never master either, though our efforts at any one time can make that hour’s output, at either occupation, more productive than it would have been otherwise.

Reading Murray for all these years–I “discovered” him in the ’70s–has led me to this: transparency, or the illusion of it, is one factor that appeals to readers. I don’t mean mere clarity, conveying content without misunderstandings; I mean transparency, the absence of barriers between writer and reader. Murray lets you in, puts his inside on the outside, invites you to join him, allows you to watch his mind at work.

I try to do this as a writer of nonfiction and poetry. My poetry, at its best, is so simple and direct that it startles readers into contemplating larger things. I hope. Seeing big through seeing little. Similarly, in nonfiction I try, often, to use image to carry content as the poems do. The image, conveyed with enough skill, clears the way to concepts, even essences. Think Santa Claus with a bag full of essays and teacherly questions. What gifts.

There is teaching about teaching in this. In my own life, the very best teaching moments are those in which I feel no barriers between students and teacher. The best teaching, at least by English teachers, involves teachers letting students in, teachers putting their insides on the outside, teachers inviting students to join, allowing students to watch their own minds at work. Santa’s bag is full of goodies.

No wonder he smiles. He’s happy in his apprenticeships.

You had to like the guy.