Teaching project: On the road in New Hampshire

After an eleven-hour stretch in my own bed, I have woken up feeling pretty lively. For whatever reason, this teaching trip was fairly exhausting. Part of that was election residue: I stayed up way too late watching the returns and then never did quite catch up on any functional sleep. But also guest teaching is tiring: I don't know the students, I don't know the teachers, I don't know the venue, and this lack of predictability means that I'm always pushing myself to stay preternaturally alert. Nonetheless, I learn a lot from the pressures of the situation, not only about my own strengths and weaknesses as a teaching poet but also about the range of ways in which other teachers deal with their presence in the classroom--in particular, how they enact those flexibly defined teacher attributes known as classroom management skills.

So in today's summary of the week's teaching activities, I'm not going to lay out the "we did this and then we did that" story of my days. Instead, I'm going to muse about the varying behaviors of teachers who choose to invite an unknown guest poet into their classroom. And there are, strikingly, teachers who exude the confident belief that neither they nor their students will learn anything from my visit. In this week's case, an early-elementary-level teacher was given the option of a poetry session: no administrator or department head forced her to disrupt her schedule. She deliberately decided to invite me into her classroom, which one might have assumed meant that she was actually interested in having me there. But when I arrived, I was led into a circle of very antsy small children, and then the teacher went off into a corner of her classroom, turned her back, and left me to it. About ten minutes before the end of class an aide arrived, sat down outside the circle, and proceeded to daydream. When another faculty member appeared with a camera to take photos of the session, the teacher miraculously reappeared alongside her students. Otherwise, she might as well have been on Mars.

In short, I spent a classroom session learning to babysit eleven very young children whom I had never met before. This isn't to say we accomplished nothing. We read a poem; we wrote a poem. But the process was significantly marred by the teacher's entire disinterest in her students' actions or what they were learning. Moreover, she made it clear that she believed that I had nothing to share with her. She had no intention of following up on this lesson, borrowing from it to jumpstart her own ideas, or in any way putting the money her school had spent on my visit to any good use. My purpose, in her eyes, was to distract her students long enough so that she could get something else done. This is a harsh summary, and I mean it to be harsh. I have boundless sympathy for teachers who struggle with insecurities, mistakes, sidetracked good intentions, frustrations, distractions, and distresses. I have no sympathy for indifference.

Fortunately, this teacher was an anomaly. This week I worked with several teachers who were second-guessing their curricular approaches, unsure about what poetry might contribute to their classroom, inconsistent in how they dealt with student misbehavior, yet nonetheless eager and curious to watch how a poetry session might affect the classroom climate. I think that curious is the key word here: if a teacher is curious about learning, then anything is possible in the future of her classroom. If she's not, then nothing is.

I also had the good fortune to watch several master teachers at work in their classrooms. And when I say "at work," what I mean is "at ease." Some of these teachers simply sat in a chair during the entire session; some moved excitedly around the room. My definition of "at ease" refers not to body action but to the way in which a person can exude the consistent, relaxed message "I am here with you." I, the visiting writer, basked in that easeful gaze; the students, too, rested in the security of that teacher's care. And, in my view, that alert and tender care is one of the greatest gifts that humanity gives to humanity. It was a privilege to learn from these masters; it was a privilege to watch the students learn.