Teaching is an art, not a science

Defending a Romantic view of the classroom

Jul 05, 2022

From time to time I am asked by well-meaning friends and family if I might want to pick up a class here and there to scratch my itch for teaching. I do, in fact, hope to find my way back to a classroom in some form. But it’s hard to explain why just any old class won’t do. You can say, after leaving an unhealthy relationship, that you hopes to find love again. But that doesn’t mean leaping at every dating opportunity that comes along.

I am characteristically bad at saying what I mean in the moment. This is partly why I write: as Hemingway said, to get the words right. For those who have asked if I’d like to get back to teaching, the short answer is yes. The long answer takes me back to when I first discovered what teaching meant to me.

In December, 1999, as the world braced itself for the Y2K crisis that never came, I caught a flight to Uruguay. I was 24 years old and had just completed a master’s degree in literature. I needed a gap year to think about whether I wanted to go back for a Ph.D., and a college friend offered an opportunity to teach at the bilingual school where she worked.

The full story is a chapter in my memoir, which appeared in earlier form here. A lot happened that year. My friend battled mental illness, I turned to running to cope with burnout and culture shock, and ultimately I realized that I no longer believed in God.

One reviewer found this last part especially blasé. A young person goes to college, sees the world, loses his faith. Yawn. But memory is a waterfall. Time keeps beating down into the pool, and the past keeps bubbling back up, and the light keeps changing under cloud cover, sun, and ice. If I were to write that chapter again, seeing what I see now, I might show how the loss of one faith gave way to another.

I was still a Christian when I completed a master’s degree. But I felt that my faith was fundamentally at odds with life as a professional academic. It was the difference that Jim Burden describes in My Ántonia between himself and his Latin professor, Gaston Cleric: “Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things.”

That was it, exactly. Scholarship felt impersonal. I wanted it to feel intimate. I never had trouble finding ideas for seminar papers, and I wrote many of them the night before they were due in a white heat of focus. But most of that work felt like a trick I’d performed rather than an honest expression of my inner life.

So it was more that the way I approached faith — as a lifelong pilgrimage, as a source of mystery and beauty, as an anchor of meaning between myself and others — felt alien to a cynical process of making scholarly arguments, publishing them, and building a resume that could run the gauntlet of a job search. This fundamental contradiction remained unresolved at the end of my master’s program, and I carried it with me to Uruguay.

St. Catherine’s School initially hired me to teach sixth grade in the afternoons. The school did not care that I had no teaching experience. I was a native English speaker, and they wanted half the day to be taught in English. There was no curriculum. No set of lesson plans or worksheets. There was simply a stack of textbooks and four hours a day that I was to fill, somehow, by teaching them. When my friend had to take a medical leave, the school assigned her morning hours at the high school to me in addition to my other duties. I suppose they assumed that I’d figure it out. Or perhaps I just had a good poker face and they didn’t know how out of my depth I really was.

This is not how college students typically test the waters as teachers. There are baby steps. Classes on teaching methods and how to manage behaviors and dispositions. Shadowing a full-time teacher for an entire semester. Then another semester of student teaching (which, even then, is supervised). By the time my former students faced a classroom all on their own, they had over a hundred hours of experience to draw from.

By contrast, I understood only that my work day would begin around 7:30 each morning and end around 5:00 every afternoon. Monday through Friday. I had no idea what was supposed to happen in between.

I suppose that some teachers control this kind of fear by hiding behind the material. Pedantry can be a kind of shield. A poor teacher knows that what they are doing is tedious yet still clings to the lecture or outline as a way to get through the hour. I had many teachers like that. One of them kept a little sign behind his desk that said, “Your failure to prepare does not constitute an emergency on my part.” The teachers that I loved made a personal connection, built a relationship that could transform the material from a dead thing on the page into something alive in both the teacher and in me. My success or failure, they made me understand, would also be theirs.

My friends often tell me that I set my standards too high. And that might well be a character flaw. But I know for a fact that good teaching depends on it.

High standards require more risk taking, which translates into more failure. I have taught my share of classes that not only never got off the ground, but just kept on digging deeper into the dirt. There’s not much that feels worse. But this is the botched canvas that gets tossed out, the chord progression that the songwriter abandons before trying again, the valley of the shadow of death that the pilgrim must endure.

I knew, even as a novice teacher, that I wanted my students to experience the kind of rapt absorption that had always defined real learning for me. Spitballs and kicks under the table are rife in sixth grade, and my students often drove me mad with their pranks. But I also discovered that when a class threatened to veer into the ditch, I had the right instincts to steer us back on course. Often this meant making the impersonal personal again, speaking to a student as an individual, diffusing conflict with humor, resorting to firmness only when kindness had failed. Soft tissue stuff. But it makes all the difference in practicing teaching as an art.

Necessity is the mother of invention. But teachers with high standards always feel that way, even when they are not in crisis. Necessity is the obligation to go beyond the rubric, to strive for more than competencies. To bring dead material alive.

My main task as a sixth-grade teacher in Uruguay was to teach language arts. The textbooks I’d been given were deathly dull, and it did not take me long to abandon them. I needed activities to fill time, but I wanted the time to be purposeful.

Even in the year 2000 the Internet was filled with resources, and I found many reading comprehension worksheets for teaching English as a second language. My class circled the words they did not understand, then wrote those words on notecards which we organized in a pocket chart with a pouch for each letter. My students were the ones who came up with the idea to decorate the cards, to give each word a personality that might help them remember its meaning. When we had accumulated enough notecards, we began class in pairs. Each pair chose five vocabulary words at random and then constructed a dialogue using those words. To wrap up, each team set the scene for the rest of the class and performed its dialogue.

It is possible that each of these steps might fit into a rubric and map neatly onto learning outcomes that someone has codified. Some of what my class and I discovered by instinct and improvisation maps onto newish language about evidence-based teaching. But this was years before the phrase “experiential learning” had become commonplace. Long before neuroscience had caught up with the principle that children understand instinctively: that the mind is the body.

My students knew what they needed to help them learn. They asked for a whole body experience with language, and I knew that if their success or failure was to be my own, I had to incorporate their ownership of it. Decorating a word, giving it human attributes, then imagining a place and time when that word might be used and then performing the scene — this was how my students transformed English from words in a grammatically perfect line into English as their own personal language, English as it felt to them, English with color and laughter and emotional truth.

One pair even imagined a scenario in which a man sat on a park bench contemplating suicide, and a stranger convinced him to go on living. What stakes could be higher for language arts than embracing English as a way to save a life?

I do not remember much of my time in Uruguay as happy, and the crush of work coupled with loneliness pushed me to a breaking point. I discovered that the prayers I’d been taught were empty, that the real sources of strength lay within myself. Reality was closer to Stephen Crane’s “A Man Said to the Universe”:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Crane believed that the individual struggled in vain against a vast indifference. A fleck of bran in the cosmic muffin. But I also discovered that teaching could forge meaning between people that the indifferent universe did not acknowledge. A man could say to his class, “Children, you exist,” and they could respond with illustrations and corny voices and theatrical skits. A man could create the conditions for discovery, stand back and watch his students create their own epiphanies.

I have held this Romantic view of teaching for nearly thirty years. When I left the classroom, I knew very well that my definition of excellence jangled with the standard metrics for assessing student learning. What really mattered to me also had little to do with what prospective students and parents wanted to know, which was how I could demonstrate that my classes would yield a Return On Investment.

Some argue that idealism is the problem and that the solution is simply to lower personal expectations for work. There is a stoicism about this mindset that I recognize from my socialization as a Western man. Suffer in silence. Stop being a prima donna. Indeed, thinking this way can sidestep the trap of an all-consuming calling. On the other hand, who can say that excellence ever comes from “good enough”? One form that reduced expectations for work can take is that cynical sign behind my teacher’s desk that said, in effect, I don’t give a damn about you.

Human nature predisposes us to laziness. Learning requires effort. There will be days when students are grieving the death of a loved one or a breakup or come to class nursing a hangover. It is impossible for every class to reach the mountaintop. These are the same conditions that the artist struggles against: dullness, malaise, self-doubt. The path to salvation or nirvana or enlightenment sometimes passes through a Slough of Despond. And yet, the teacher, the artist, and the pilgrim all labor toward epiphany: the electric breakthrough, the pleasure of the “AHA.”

In this regard, I sympathize with Willa Cather’s character Claude Wheeler, the perpetually frustrated Romantic of One of Ours. Claude is a misfit in the modern world. He cannot muster much enthusiasm for farming, he doesn’t care about money, and he is blinded by fantasies about marriage and war. Yet the trouble with Claude is not that he hungers for beauty and meaning; it’s that he has no method for sating his needs. Like Jim Burden, Claude feels that he would be more of a man if he could stop caring so much, lower his expectations, just be happy with his nose to the grindstone. But he just can’t do it:

“Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,—the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!”

Claude Wheeler is based on Willa Cather’s cousin, G.P. Cather, pictured behind the “Nebraska” sign above. From The Cather Archive.

Good teachers share that hunger for “something splendid,” and they satisfy it thousands of times over the course of a career. But the conditions must be such that others have come to want that flash of comprehension, too, perhaps despite their initial reluctance. The pleasure for a teacher who imagines his craft as an art is seeing the idea come alive in another. This is evidence that the impersonal has been made personal. As the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards once explained, it is the difference between being told all your life that honey is sweet and then knowing it for a fact — possessing that knowledge in your body — by tasting the honey for yourself.

I think, for instance, of a young man — a wrestler — who came to class angry with me for nearly two weeks because he had no idea what I was asking for in a lyric essay. Lyricism is an elusive concept, and we kept taking swings at it like blindfolded party guests hacking at a piñata. We read Debra Marquart’s haunting essay, “Some Things About That Day,” which reveals its subject without ever stating it explicitly. We asked how Lee Martin is able to flip the meaning of profanity from bravado to fear in “Talk Big.” We traced the subtle effects of tone and metaphor in John McPhee’s “The Silk Parachute,” which ought to be required reading every Mother’s Day.

We relived Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series, which I described as a lyrical moment between myself and my father, a lifelong Dodgers fan. Television was forbidden in our home, but my father made an exception for the World Series, and we watched Gibson’s miraculous feat on a little black and white set with rabbit ears. In that moment, my father and I forgot the anger that usually simmered between us and high-fived each other so hard that the dishes rattled in the cupboard.

We watched Kseniya Simonova’s prizewinning sand animation (even more poignant for Ukranians now) and considered how it was that we could feel emotional about a story told in a language that we could not understand. And we discussed Derek Redmond’s injury in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, how the power of the scene hinges on the startling reversal of meaning from physical dominance to tenderness between a father and son.

It must have been the last two examples that clicked for my student, because he went on to write one of the most moving lyric essays I’ve read, in print or in class. The scene was a Metallica concert, and it began with the view of the stage before the narrative swung back to the crowd in a series of close-ups: of my student’s former best friend (they later grew estranged), of a young woman with combat boots and a score of face piercings who had found a place to belong, of an old man who became young again under the spell of the music. It was a master class in the art of reversal. My student carried Simonova and Redmond into his own memories, saw those experiences differently, and as a result made it impossible for me and possibly for him to ever think of Metallica in the same way again.

Over more than twenty years of teaching, I have measured my success by those moments when I have seen or felt them. My neuroscience research has taught me that personal feeling is not an impediment to learning, as Jim Burden assumed, but the vehicle for it. Feeling can be evidence that a cognitive breakthrough has occurred. But it is easier to explain how not to destroy the conditions that make epiphany possible than it is to articulate how to make that magic happen. Like an artist or a spiritual pilgrim, a good teacher sticks with it, keeps trying to give voice to ideas without obstructing them, trusting that the work will come alive.

So, do I want to get back into teaching? Yes, if I can bring all of my idealism with me.