The Classroom and Election 2024

Dear Readers:

I want to apologize for how scattered this blog has been recently. I'm really proud of my entries on Jane Hirshfield's "I sat in the sun" and Rae Armantrout's "Djinn" because I dug around, found some time, then dug around some more and found some coffee. I am, of course, even more grateful that you put up with whatever degree of sense those reflections made. It's hard, when writing on poetry, to understand what sticks in your reader's ears. Only with that can clarity be achieved.

Still, I thought I hit on some crucial themes. What does the everydayness of sacred space imply? What does it mean if we spin a landscape of lies for the sake of survival? Those are themes I've certainly been thinking about, but there's one in particular I have not explicitly discussed. I'm teaching a number of classes right now and in the middle of this election, it's hard not for me to feel like the classroom represents something more than it ever has.

I hear you. This is too corny for a Hallmark movie. Who cares about the classroom being a special place? Isn't it where Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw fight for points? We've got things which matter so much more, have to matter so much more – our families, friends, teams, co-workers, relationships. Again, who cares about a room where someone yells a lot, we hear "blah blah blah," then we get on with our lives? When looked at that way, libraries are infinitely more useful because they are places where we see our children grow up. The classroom is where you take a test, get a grade, and are out.

The devaluation of the classroom isn't an accident. The problem for a society addicted to cable news and endless phone scrolling is that anyone else might have authority. I've often wondered what the response would be from certain groups if they were shown how much any given teacher tries to teach the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration, the three branches. I'm pretty sure the response will be "you're still teaching Communism." The problem isn't what is taught. It isn't even the teacher. The problem is that there is a classroom at all, a locus of authority that exists outside the screen.

Which makes everything I'm saying sound ridiculous. There's a room with desks, bad lighting, and a not-even-that-clean board. How could anyone look at that as a threat? But I routinely get people who hear I'm a teacher and immediately begin a sermon on why college is a waste.

I believe it's imperative to take a little time and paint a picture of the classroom as transformative. Yeah, it runs the risk of sounding deranged. There were plenty of classrooms I was in which were mindless misery. For example, I would love to never do high school physics again. The class realized that if they asked the same questions over and over we would never move past the first chapter, and that's what happened.

But then there was American Literature the year before. I remember loving Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro". I didn't do anything with it that year. I was still relentlessly told that the only subjects which mattered were math and science and that everything else was useless. It took years to free myself from the effects of that haranguing. However, the idea that I should be free, that I deserved to be free, was reinforced by that small moment in a lecture on Imagism. We were just chatting about what "The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough" could mean, and someone said that someone looking from in the train saw the faces flying by this way. I'm partial to that reading, one provided by a 15 or 16 year old. It really hits home how little time we have with each other, how the smallest moments are even smaller than we think.

My own teaching style is a variant of how I've seen a counselor run a classroom. Building trust, buy-in, getting everyone to participate their own way, creating an active, social, fun learning environment where the whole class is in conversation. I say variant because while I want my classes to form a cohort, I also want people to share real moments of their lives when they're comfortable and bring this to bear on things like Aristotle and theories of rights. I'm aiming for an academic as well as humane spirit. It works. I have no doubt some of my students will be Senators, if not much more. They're learning that difficult issues can be discussed in public for the sake of the greater good.

It isn't just that some want to steal classrooms from us. They want to steal that incredible feeling which comes when you've learned something new and want to do more. I'm thinking primarily about people who watch TV for 8 hours straight to yell at their family about what they watched. No, you say, this is too harsh. We have homeschoolers who believe in the joy of learning, no? Some do, sure. A number, though, are adamant about what they reject in society. What they're angry at and scared of. I like to think that my classroom can be grim given the subjects we must discuss, but also that it points to the discipline of hope. You've got to believe because you know something, because you made the effort, that something else can be better. That the classroom can't do for you, but, my god, the amount it can do.