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Friday
Hard as it may be to believe, today is the first day of school in many parts of Tennessee. As I recall from my childhood, school was always sweltering at the beginning (no air conditioning then), but the compensation was ending the year in the freshness of May.
Here’s a rather grim poem to kick off the school year, written from the vantage point of a teacher who is feeling his age. He sees his own mortality in the chill of “another autumn morning,” which he contrasts with “the april faces” that “gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves.”
Brooding on death, “who carries off all the prizes,” the speaker has difficulty separating out “the dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes.” The chalk dust that has gotten into his lungs after all these years ominously presages more serious illnesses. He thinks that he “shall never reacquaint myself with joy.”
May I suggest that this individual is taking the wrong approach to his profession? Rather than find ways to excite his students, which would energize him as well, he sounds like the aptly named M’Choakumchild in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. This Scottish teacher aims to make learning as boring as possible:
So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
Dickens compares M’Choakumchld to Morgiana in the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” who pours boiling water into each of the large vessels containing a thief. Dickens asks ominously,
Say, good M’Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!
Scannell’s aging schoolmaster may be a little better in that he at least distinguishes between different students. But if you make teaching about yourself rather than your students, sooner or later your job will feel like one damn class after another.
Aging Schoolmaster
By Vernon ScannellAnd now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,
And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell
From which I gaze upon the april faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves,
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.
With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes,
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.
Speaking for myself, I can say that I was as excited about teaching at the end of my 36 years at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as I was at the beginning. That’s because I encouraged each student to find his or her way into a work, which meant that I myself was always gaining new insights into the works I taught. I have shared many of these insights on this blog and in my book.
Mortality did play some role in my decision to retire, with an infection picked up in a hospital leading to pericarditis and myocarditis. But I didn’t brood on death because I could see new horizons opening up for my students. Under my coaching, they took works they encountered in my courses and, through them, opened up new horizons for themselves.
In other words, enough with the self-pity. Teaching is a noble calling, a reward in and of itself, and should be regarded as such. If you can’t see that, then get out of the classroom.
