A Life in School. What the Teacher Learned
Jane Tompkins
TEACHER’S JOB
(Remarks about practice and Profession)
POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE
Dear Fellow Teachers,
What do you do when silence breaks out in your class, the times when you suddenly forget everything you were going to say, or you ask a question no one answers, and you sit there wishing you were dead, blush rising from the throat, face hot, throat clenched?
Last semester when I tried to hand authority over to my students, we had many such moments. Often we just sat there looking at each other. I nearly died, and so did they.
Yet living through those silences taught me something. They had a bonding effect, like living through a war. As a result of this experience I’ve come to think pain and embarrassment are not the worst things for a class. At least the moments are real. At least everyone feels intensely. At least everyone is there.
What do you think?
Jane
Poem Postcard
No monuments record the bravery of teachers,
Or tell our conquered fears,
There is no Tomb of the Unknown Teacher,
No surgery for our scars.
All our injuries are internal.
No one counts the pain,
Least of all the teachers.
We go sightless on.
To teach is to be battered,
Scrutinized, and drained,
Day after day. We know this.
Still, it is never said.
What it is to be up there
Exposed to the hostile gaze
Will never be told by teachers –
The knowledge is too much.
Dear All-wise, Imagined Mentor,
My class had suffered together. Its members had gotten to know each other. People had taken risks. Something like authenticity had begun to mark the level of exchange. But whenever we tried to talk about literature, authenticity would fly out the window. Our talk seemed forced, desultory.
One day, to break the ice (again), we played Pictionary, a game like charades, only you draw instead of acting. We screamed, we jumped up and down, laughed, were intensely quiet. There was total concentration, participation, self-forgetfulness.
Then we switched gears. For the last twenty minutes people read aloud their assignments – what they thought Holden Caulfield did after the end of Catcher in the Rye. Silence descended; it was the living and the dead. This happened over and over. It was as if, given the opportunity to choose between literature and life, or rather, between literature and each other, we chose each other. The class never did learn how to discuss a literary text, though we fell into a habit of reading poetry aloud from time to time.
What could we have done to avoid this quandary?
Should it have been avoided?
Wondering, in Durham
[To Parker Palmer, a leader in higher education reform and author of To Know as We Are Known:
A Spirituality of Education]:
Dear Parker,
When I began paying attention to students, I stopped caring about knowledge. Knowledge, for me, became something “over there – Behind the Shelf,” as in the line from the Dickinson poem:
I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf
If knowledge is “over there – Behind the Shelf,” life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.
I think the thing I’m aiming for is a sense of the classroom as sacramental. The class experience itself becomes the end and aim of education. Not something learned that you can take away from the class, not a skill, or even a perspective on the world, but an experience worth having as it goes by, moment by moment. I’m really looking for somebody to give me permission to think these things. Will you do it?
Love,
Jane
Dear Students,
When I pay attention to the subject matter in class, instead of to you, I get excited, think of an idea that just has to be said, blurt it out, and, more often than not, kill something. As in the Dickinson poem
My life had stood
A loaded gun
In corners
When I speak the report is so loud it deafens. No one can hear anything but what I’ve said. Discussion dies. It seems it’s either you or me, my authority or your power to speak. What do I do that shuts people up? Or is this a false dilemma? Help!
Sincerely,
Jane
To I Don’t Know Who:
Sometimes the feelings I have toward my students are romantic. It’s like being in love. You know how when you’re in love or have a crush on somebody, you’re always looking forward to the next meeting with desire and trepidation – will he or she be glad to see me? Will he or she be late? not come at all? Will she or he think I’m smart? good-looking? a nice person? It’s the roller-coaster of love – up one day and down the next – no two classes the same. How soon will we be going steady? Will our love be true? Do you love me like I love you? Am I the only person who feels this way about teaching?
Wondering, in Durham
[This postcard is addressed to the registrar at Duke University, whose name is Harry Demik]:
Dear Mr. Demik,
Last semester I stopped giving letter grades in my courses and got into trouble with your office. There were mix-ups regarding both classes, rules against what I was doing, but things got straightened out, and I didn’t have to give grades.
Grades, of course, are judgments. Judgments rendered by One Who Knows. The way I teach now, judgment seems inappropriate – judgment of the students by the instructor, or of the instructor by the students, or even of the whole course by all its members. I offered these courses Pass/Fail for a reason: you can’t grade a person’s soul.
Of course, toward the end of the semester, as the pressure from their other courses mounts, the students in my courses slack off, and then I feel put out. I have no solution for this problem.
Jane Tompkins
To Whom It May Concern:
I cleared a pile of newspapers from the kitchen table in order to write this postcard, but on top of the pile a section on hunger and homelessness caught my eye. There were terrible statistics, such as forty thousand children die in the world every day from starvation. The lead sentence in one article read: “The longest journey a person can take is the twelve inches from the head to the heart.” Who is helping our students to make this journey?
Wondering, in Durham
Nightmare Postcard
Dear Professor Tompkins,
I’ve read your article, and I think you’re fooling yourself. You’re cheating your students under the guise of liberating them. These students need guidance; they need a model. They need to hear books discussed boldly, rigorously, with discipline, and in a spirit of inquiry. They’re only eighteen or nineteen; they don’t know how to be intellectuals. It’s your job to show them, and you’re not doing it. You ought to be fired.
Disgusted
Dear Disgusted,
You may be right. But twisting in my seat, looking away in an agony of frustration, staring down at the desk, and taking deep breaths, I’ve learned to curb my impulse to correct the students, to show them the way, because when I do it shuts them up. Allowed to meander to its furthest most insignificant trickle, ending in a long moment of emptiness, or allowed to reach a pinnacle of disorderly, excited hilarity and confusion, a class discussion can give birth to the moment that changes the destiny of the course. The student too afraid to speak up at any other time may step into that moment of silence; or the giddiness of the atmosphere may produce an insight, a wild metaphorical leap of the imagination on someone’s part that crystallizes everything. Then there’s the silence that attends the recognition of an important event. To me that precarious path is more precious than all the modelling in the world. Besides, they get that from their other professors.
Jane Tompkins
Dear Jane,
Come on, now. You know this guy is onto something, but you’re afraid to admit it. You just can’t stand preparing for class anymore, so you get the students to do it. You can’t stand the responsibility of making discussions work, so you opt out. You hand responsibility over to the students as a way of pretending to teach while really doing something else. Why not just quit?
Your Conscience
To My Internalized Critic:
A class doesn’t get to know itself until it has been let go. People’s personalities won’t be visible, their feelings and opinions won’t surface, unless the teacher gets out of the way on a regular basis. You have to be willing to give up your authority, and the sense of identity and prestige that come with it, for the students to be able to feel their own authority. To get out of the students’ way, the teacher has to learn how to get out of her own way. To not let her ego call the shots all the time. This is incredibly difficult. But I think it is a true path for a teacher.
Jane
Dear С.,
Do you remember once we were having a telephone conversation about how busy we were? You were worrying about how you were ever going to finish the critical biography you’d been working like a dog on for years, we’d been talking about our families, when suddenly you burst out with: “I don’t know what I would do. If my parents should die, I wouldn’t have time.”
I’ll never forget that moment, or the sound of your voice.
Jane
Dear Friends,
I would have written you a letter instead of a postcard, but I didn’t have time.
I wanted to tell you about what’s happening in my life, but I didn’t have time.
I would have invited you to dinner, but I didn’t have time.
I would have done more reading before writing this paper, but I didn’t have time.
We never got to cover the end of the novel because we ran out of time.
I would have read your article more carefully, but I didn’t have time.
I didn’t have time to read your article.
I wanted to call you, but I was afraid it would take too much time.
In haste,
Jane
Dear Fellow Teachers:
In the classroom we say over and over that there’s not enough time to do what we really want. But it’s a lie. Listen to Mary Rose O’Reilley’s reflection on this:
Sister Teresa was past her prime, getting eccentric. She was supposed to teach us Art History from Prehistory to the Present. We spent weeks on primitive cave painting, then stalled on Giotto. Day after day, we sat in a dark classroom, looking at the confusion of spears and torches in “The Kiss of Judas” – until we knew it. Knew it. Later, lurking morosely in the positivist pews of Johns Hopkins University, where I read the Gospel of John in first year Greek, it was Giotto that rose before my eyes. That confusion of spears, and that alone, opened the Greek text to me. Now I knew two things.
This nun having done her work, art stops short for me in the early fourteenth century. Somewhere, filed in some Platonic syllabus, lie Raphael’s fat madonnas, but they are not for me: I do not know them. I suppose that is a loss. But I know two things.
So you see, whether or not you have enough time depends on what your conception of learning is.
Jane
Dear Colleagues:
Here’s a joke I remember from junior high school, or maybe it was college. A woman went to the doctor and said, “Doctor, I have this enormous desire to eat pancakes. I just can’t get enough of them. What can I do?” “Well,” said the doctor, “that doesn’t sound too serious. How many pancakes are we talking about?” “Oh,” said the woman, “at home I have sixteen chests full.”
When it comes to knowledge, we are like that woman. At home we have sixteen chests full, and we’re dying to get our hands on sixteen more. But since even one cold pancake is too many, why are we doing this?
Jane
[This postcard is to John Orr, my meditation teacher]:
Dear John,
I’ve begun to realize lately that I read as a reflex, to stuff my mind. It’s too painful to remain conscious for very long at a time, attention free; even a fraction of the day is too much. So I read or write, talk or listen, watch TV, do a task that requires some degree of concentration; that way I can avoid the unpleasantness of open attention. Mainly it’s reading I use to stanch the flow of unwanted mental events.
Love,
Jane
[To my husband, Stanley Fish, a famous Milton scholar]:
Dear Stan,
Remember the other day when I wanted you to spend time with me, and you said you had to work? I thought of Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, and in particular, of this line: “God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts.” “God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts,” I wanted to shout at you. “His state is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed and post o’er land and ocean without rest,” so what the fuck are you doing working on your paper?
My whole life I never remembered these lines when I was busy. But still, I hope you take my point.
Love,
Jane
[This postcard was written to the Ford Foundation Scholars at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida]:
Dear Ford Foundation Scholars:
In the Political Correctness wars, where we fight over whether to teach The Color Purple, or what the First Amendment really means, we forget the weather. People’s feelings get hurt; resentments build.
A friend of mine whose marriage was breaking up told me that how you deal with the problems that come up in a relationship is more important than what the problems are. It’s the same in intellectual life. But we, your professors, do not know how to conduct ourselves when there is real conflict, inside the classroom or out. We fumble around. Sometimes we tear each other apart, or, afraid of doing that, we avoid speaking. I for one could use some instruction in how to disagree fruitfully. And in how to listen constructively to an opponent. I wish your generation would learn these skills and then teach them to us.
Hopefully,
Jane Tompkins
Dear Teachers,
In school, it’s students not books that are the important things. And the students are growing. And like other growing things, they need the right atmosphere to grow in. The atmosphere is what determines whether or not they will flourish. Of this atmosphere, books are only one part. What about the rest?
Do students get the sunshine of love and attention from their instructors? Do they receive the rain of affection and intimate exchange from one another? Do they have time and space to grow in?
J.T.
[To Myself (from the future)]:
Dear Jane,
Try not to worry so much about teaching. As you become more at peace with yourself, your classroom will become more peaceful. What is important is to carry your students in your heart, as you have begun to do.
Your inner guide