The Good Word

But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore he says,
"Awake, O sleeper,
   and arise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."

- Ephesians 5:13-14

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To begin (again), I’m a natural lake-dweller, but I’m not beginning my third year of living and teaching in Colorado.

Being an English teacher is, I think, an especially difficult job – I won’t say vocation, because that has yet to be determined.

There are times when I feel that my instruction is inadequate or, to a degree, even deceitful. To get past the hows and on to the whys seems to be the province of this subject alone, and, to impart of a knowledge of the big truths, you must always be coming at them by half-truths – I must shout down the grotesque sensuality of the people of Huxley’s Brave New World one day and critique Puritanism in The Scarlet Letter the next.  

(NB: It is a shame that English class must take the place of Philosophy, Theology, Elementary Ethics, and Remedial History.)

When I teach grammar, spelling, vocabulary, or the occasional Latin class, I see that there is a comfort about teaching certainties. Either a noun is the direct object or it isn’t; either that is the way the word is spelled or it is not – the knowledge imparted has the inflexibility of brick.

The problem comes when you ask the student to take the raw materials of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and etymology and undertake to build something new with them.

Perhaps it is harder yet to ask them to assess the relative merit of an existing structure.

You would think then, to trample the metaphor, that the minimalist structure of Thoreau’s four-walled cabin on Walden Pond might be a good place to begin.

I found myself though, once again, caught between two truths (which, as always, were really legion). I wanted to show the virtue of Thoreau’s experiment while questioning his motives and conclusions to encourage critical thinking.

I was impressed to find my students able to find the logical flaw in his argument for the divinity of solitude (his false premise that God himself is lonely). They were similarly able to find merit in his argument for vegetarianism (the natural repugnance to the shedding of blood). They were even able to intelligently discuss the way in which transcendentalism departs from a traditional understanding of the relationship between body and soul.

However, there was one significant impediment to my feeling satisfied with the unit, and that was my own seeming hypocrisy.

The hypocrisy of my attempt to teach them about a true love and relentless pursuit of wisdom while I was spending fourteen hours every day in front of a computer screen, grading and preparing for the next day’s lessons.

The hypocrisy too of my answering their objection to Thoreau’s seeming idleness by reminding them that “Mary chose the better part”.

I felt like a white-washed academic tomb as I found myself wearing a tie from 5:30am until 8:30 and sometimes nearly weeping for nostalgia on my planning periods while reviewing passages like Thoreau’s rowboat-games with the loon.  (NB: None of my students knew what this fantastic creature was without Googling it and discovering one of the most prodigious living waterfowl.)

So, was this feeling more nostalgia or more moral conviction?

As of yet I’m not sure, but I find, like Thoreau, that there is something much more cold and inhuman about the naked peaks and the red-dust valleys than the thrilling knee-deep snow of a New England winter.

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

- Henry David Thoreau

It’s been a long week. Not so much because I’ve had a lot on my plate, but because it’s the first five-day work week I’ve had since January.

It’s also been a good week. A nice dinner on Monday, happy hour on Fat Tuesday, Joshua Radin on Wednesday, Carraba’s Night (school fundraiser) last night, and who knows what lies ahead of me yet this evening.

I’ve been re-reading O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather this past week. I never finished it the first time around because I so tragically left it on the plane when I flew here last spring to interview. So it’s fitting that I’ve returned to it in preparation for my trip to Hillsdale next week (I’ll be in Michigan next Friday to interview potential teachers for next year).

It’s also fitting that I read it now because Cather spends so much time in her novels (especially My Antonia and O Pioneers!) discussing “home.”

So, today I’d just like to share a short passage and see what you all think of it, if anything.

It’s a dialogue from O Pioneers! between Alexandra, a farmer on the plains of Nebraska and the heroine of the novel, and her childhood friend Carl, a Chicagoan passing through his old homeland on his way to Seattle.

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a puzzled, thoughtful gesture. “You see,” he went on calmly, “measured by your standards here, I’m a failure. I couldn’t buy even one of your cornfields. I’ve enjoyed a great many things, but I’ve got nothing to show for it all.”

“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.” Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, we leave nothing behind us but frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at hundred of our own kind and shudder.”

Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He know that she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worth while to work…

…Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men……her folks sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been perfectly cheerful…

…She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”

It’s been a long week. Not so much because I’ve had a lot on my plate, but because it’s the first five-day work week I’ve had since January.

It’s also been a good week. A nice dinner on Monday, happy hour on Fat Tuesday, Joshua Radin on Wednesday, Carraba’s Night (school fundraiser) last night, and who knows what lies ahead of me yet this evening.

I’ve been re-reading O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather this past week. I never finished it the first time around because I so tragically left it on the plane when I flew here last spring to interview. So it’s fitting that I’ve returned to it in preparation for my trip to Hillsdale next week (I’ll be in Michigan next Friday to interview potential teachers for next year).

It’s also fitting that I read it now because Cather spends so much time in her novels (especially My Antonia and O Pioneers!) discussing “home.”

So, today I’d just like to share a short passage and see what you all think of it, if anything.

It’s a dialogue from O Pioneers! between Alexandra, a farmer on the plains of Nebraska and the heroine of the novel, and her childhood friend Carl, a Chicagoan passing through his old homeland on his way to Seattle.

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a puzzled, thoughtful gesture. “You see,” he went on calmly, “measured by your standards here, I’m a failure. I couldn’t buy even one of your cornfields. I’ve enjoyed a great many things, but I’ve got nothing to show for it all.”

“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.” Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, we leave nothing behind us but frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at hundred of our own kind and shudder.”

Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He know that she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worth while to work…

…Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men……her folks sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been perfectly cheerful…

…She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”

Words matter. They always have.

They are the only hope that a concept or idea has of making the transition from one human brain to another.

Lives are sometimes dependent on a single word. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Tom Robinson is convicted of rape, not because he’s guilty, but because he tells the jury that he “felt sorry for a white woman.”

Many people’s jobs hinge on semantics. Right to bear arms? Well, you don’t mean in public, do you? Surely you don’t mean fully-automatic weapons?

Was Jesus “the way, the truth, the life”? Or just “a way, a truth, a life”? For many of you, your entire way of life depends on the use of the definite article (the) instead of the indefinite article (a/an). (Just thank God the New Testament was written in Greek and not Latin)

I majored in English and Classical Languages, I love words. But do I? Or do I just like words, but I love my friends? The problem is that in English I’ve only got two choices: like or love.

Project Gutenberg (via Wiktionary) says that “love” is the 179th most common word in the English language, falling right between “whom” and “far”.

But, if we use words like “love” just as often as we use the word “because,” shouldn’t it mean less?

Look what happened to “awesome”. At first it was reserved for talking about waterfalls, the Grand Canyon, and God. Now the fact that you’ve already got your taxes done this year is “awesome”.

Can we say “I love you” hundreds of times to the same person and have it still mean anything? What about saying it to multiple people? We speak thousands of words every day. If 1 out of every 500 is “love”, then you’ve likely already said it in excess of 1,000,000 times (I’ve already used it seven times in this post).

Well, the best wordsmiths like to avoid it entirely. Here are, in my opinion, three of the best depictions of love I have ever come across. Notice how never saying “love” and avoiding everything but the peripheral qualities of a person is a devastatingly effective way to say “I love you.”

Please listen.

Joshua Radin - “Vegetable Car”

Robert Herrick - “Upon Julia’s Clothes”

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,

Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows,

That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see

That brave vibration, each way free,

O, how that glittering taketh me.

And, sincerely, my favorite love song:

Motion City Soundtrack - “My Antonia”

So all: Don’t let your relationships hang on so worn and shabby a hook as “I love you”.

Could there be a more beautiful compliment than “and when the little lady grows up, I hope that she will be just like her mother”?

I contend not.

Today was great. Maybe it was the two-hour delay. Maybe it was the fact that I knew I would be buying my first gun after school (I’ll talk about this in comments if anyone has questions). Maybe it was eating a healthy breakfast of pumpkin bread courtesy of Karen.

All I know is that I was an awesome teacher today.

Some days I feel like the kids are so unwilling to learn that my prep work is for nothing. There are times, too, when I feel like the kids showed up and I didn’t quite deliver. For once though I think I was *on* enough for all of us.

Today we finished reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In my class we read Shakespeare during class time rather than assigning it as homework, but still it’s impressive that these eighth-graders are reading such a complex play at all.

MSND is full of such diverse and heavy subject-matter (love gone awry, the impetuosity of youth, dark comedy, etc.) that it’s difficult for even Shakespearean scholars to determine how it fits in with the rest of his works. Today though, as we read the last few lines and began our discussion of themes and recurring symbols, they got it. They really got it.

I opened class by reading the last lines of the play, recited by the character Puck to the audience:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I'm an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call:
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

We talked about the inconstancy of the characters, the dream-like feeling throughout the play, the over-whelming influence attributed to the moon, and the parallels between the larger drama and the play-within-a-play.

Then, at the end of class, I read the same lines again and showed them how within a few lines Shakespeare not only has Puck break character and address the audience, but as the curtains close he actually changes our entire understanding of the play’s title.

At that point I could see the shiver go up my students' spines, the look of understanding come into their faces, and when the carpool numbers came on over the PA in my last hour class no one made a move to get up or gather their things, and for about five minutes they were all completely silent.

That is why I was an English major. That is why sometimes I think I might be fit to be a teacher.

I know most of you probably haven’t read MSND, but if you’ve never had that spine-tingling, goosebump inducing, life-changing moment in learning, then you need to enroll yourself in a course on Shakespeare and prepare to be human in a way you never knew you weren’t.