Icarus in the Classroom

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer says "Many of us become teachers for reasons of the heart, animated by a passion for some subject and for helping people learn."

Palmer goes on to say that because of its personal and public nature, teaching is a "daily exercise in vulnerability," which can lead us to "lose heart." Thus we become poisoned by the wine that initially intoxicated us. The lamp we thought would help illuminate the world either blows up in our face or is extinguished far too soon.

I know exactly what Palmer is talking about and I'd like to expand on his observations a bit to make them more tangible, especially for beginning teachers. For certain kinds of teachers, I think it is critical to think very carefully about this topic.

Let's begin with "animated by a passion for some subject." As I noted in an earlier post, my passion for reading transformed me into a person awfully susceptible to an English major. Once I was a sophomore in college, the flames of my passion were fanned by the venerable Mr. Byrne, my British lit professor.

At that point, the English major chose me. Brought up in something of an evangelical environment probably contributed to my considering this process a Calling, a beckoning from and toward something higher.

It took me seven years to get from Mr. Byrne to my doctorate, and not once during that time did I look back. Not once did I hesitate to fulfill every nickel-and-dime, chicken-shit requirement for every major and degree I conquered or earned along the way.

I did all of this -- like thousands of others -- knowing there would be no material reward. I labored early and late for love and not for money. This is how I was fueled by my "passion for some subject."

So . . .  at the end of it I am anointed Dr. Starling and am sent in a chariot of fire to my first classroom, in my case, fortunately, at a somewhat selective four-year college. "Intoxication" may be one of the nice ways to describe the good days when my students seemed to share my passion, and ideas flew and grew around the room, and the conversations soared far beyond those we tend to have with grown-ups at meet-and-greets and cocktail parties and receptions and such.

Someone should have made me reread the Icarus story.

I began to think it was about me. I thought that if I went away, the magic would go away.

Some days, though, the magic vanished while I was still right there in the classroom. My students hadn't read, or did read and didn't like it, or they found something offensive in what they read or in what I said about what they read. Some days they were sullen and withdrawn. Some days they were high and/or hungover. Some days they talked and laughed as if I didn't exist. Some days, no matter how shrill my appreciation or penetrating my insights or evocative my questions, they simply didn't care.

This was no way to respond to my Calling!

One time one of them actually picked her head up off her desk and looked at me, smiling, and said, "Doc, we really don't care."

All these things happened in 1981 and again in 2012 and in every year in between. This is when Icarus plummets seaward and "everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster."

Teachers' responses to this rejection can be placed on a spectrum that runs from vampirism to detachment, but they almost all result in a loss of heart, burnout and a failure to teach. And, there's still no material reward!

Teach with Your Heart, But Don't Lose It

Reliable studies indicate that somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of new teachers will leave the profession after only five years, and one of the reasons for this is the rather broad term burnout. I suppose that word covers the roughly 423 reasons I felt compelled to give up teaching forever (I thought) after 15 years as a professor at a liberal-arts college.

Roughly two years after that decision I found in Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach a fairly accurate description – much better than “burnout” – of what happened to me there. Palmer believes most teachers choose the profession for reasons of the heart, but after a few years they begin to lose heart. That sounds right to me, and my next few posts will address some reasons for this process, especially the problem of taking our work too personally.

I hope what I say will help new teachers keep their hearts a little longer, and help experienced ones understand why their hearts may be beginning to feel heavy and hardened.

Sometimes it happens that a student who is clearly a good, decent, kind, lovable human being writes a paper with little support or focus and plenty of lousy sentences and a small sprinkling of major grammatical errors. I have to give the paper a low grade, but I want to tell the student not to take it personally, it’s not about her, it’s just, you know, we have these standards that have been around for a few centuries and you’re not quite meeting them right now, so here’s a D, even though you’re certainly not a D person.

The student is likely to respond with a weak smile and leave the classroom to melt into the bedlam of the hall. But how can she not be thinking, “I wrote that essay. I used my own personal brain and my personal imagination and used the words and syntactical structures that are accessible to a person such as I. How can I not take this D personally?”

Should the student have the nerve to ask me that question, I’d be tempted to respond, “Now you know how I feel all the time!” Teachers frequently take student responses personally, especially, I’d think, English teachers, especially when they’re teaching literature.

Take me, for example. Well before I grew up to be an English major, one of my personal hobbies was reading great books. Not that I knew they were great, or would have known why they were great if I did – I just knew they spoke to me, taught me stuff, made me feel as if my reading them was transforming me into a better human being. When I was very young, I became friends with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations and William Faulkner’s Light in August.

I was a college dropout and a reluctant member of the United States Air Force when I read and fell in love with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5.

 I do not use “became friends” and “fell in love” loosely. Before I knew how to analyze or interpret literature (and by extension, I guess, appreciate it), I pal’d around with Huck on the Mississippi and laughed at his observations; I pulled for and was embarrassed by Pip and his awkward and misguided reaching for respectability; I feared Boo Radley, and was much relieved to find him not only harmless but courageous.

By the time I read Catch-22, I was amazed that Heller could write something so absurd, convoluted and outrageous while still mirroring exactly what I was experiencing in the Air Force; and by the time I got to Vonnegut, my cold and distant father had passed away, and Vonnegut became my mentor, my literary dad. He seemed to speak directly into my ear and in so doing helped turn me into the frustrated subversive I am today. Thanks, Kurt!

Obviously, all of these works, and many more after them, have been integrated into my being. Put another way, they are the materials from which I’ve constructed a soul.  They have shaped my values and my language and become the lens through which I observe and interpret my fellow human beings.

And now, as a teacher of AP Literature, I have the honor to introduce these beloved literary friends to my beloved students.

Have you ever had two close friends who were so different you were afraid to introduce one to the other, afraid even to see them try to coexist in the same room? Have you ever had one close friend express contempt for another close friend? If so, you know what it’s like for me all the time!

So when students don’t like the books I’ve chosen or refuse to read them or resort to the Anti-Christ (Spark Notes), how can I not take that personally and eventually tell one old friend (Don DeLillo’s White Noise, for example), “Sorry, Bud. I gotta shelve you for a while. These people don’t like you, and I can not handle the rejection!”

We’re sneaking up on the problem here. We’re good teachers when we care so much that we make ourselves vulnerable to painful rejections, causing us to back off and care less and thus become less effective teachers because we are less of who we genuinely are.