"You're a great teacher," the photographer said, as she packed her gear and got ready to leave my classroom this afternoon.
That's after she had spent an hour and 20 minutes shooting pictures of me and of my students, like a photojournalist takes pictures of a news event.
Earlier today, a friend in the Public Affairs Office had asked whether I would mind having a photographer visit the class. "It would be lovely," I said.
Having practically grown up around cameras of all kinds, thanks to my dad's profession first as a governor's aide and then his avocation as a politólogo, or political analyst, I just pretended she wasn't there and did as I always do twice a week: I gave it all I have to give.
"She's so loud and 'in your face' that it's hard to ignore her or to fall asleep in class," I remember one student saying once in an evaluation.
I'll never forget that comment. To me, it was a great compliment. In fact, my style of teaching - the loud part, especially - tends to be better suited for a large lecture hall (or a stage), rather than the smallish seminar rooms of my college on the hill.
I move around a lot, I cover the blackboard with scribbles that look like oddly drawn maps, I gesture purposefully and dramatically with my hands, I make my students laugh with goofy comparisons between the literature and TV reality shows or movies, and my voice, booming as it can be, resonates through the little wood houses in this century-old college like the aftershocks of an earthquake.
Last year, I taught in another small cottage-style building with a small seminar room and some of the professors with offices in the building would come and close the doors to my classroom, reminding me silently but eloquently that I was being a bit too loud.
I don't know if there are any professors in the building I teach now. I have heard no complaints about the noise or heard anyone coming to surreptitiously close the door.
What I know is that I love what I do with a passion and a glee that is impossible to describe. You have to experience it to understand it. I guess that's what the photographer felt today.
After getting up before 6:30 a.m. this morning and moving my household and the dogs back to the little apartment in the woods by 9 a.m., I was a little tired before class and wondered if I'd be at my best. But once I walked into the classroom and saw that all my students were there, books in hand and ready to rumble, any and all tiredness, any and all doubt, simply vanished.
It's not that I'm a great teacher since there's a lot about teaching that I'm still perfecting and hope to continue to perfect until my number comes up in God's lottery. But I do know that you can't be in my classroom without being tackled by my excitement, my enthusiasm, my absolute focus on and commitment to the learning and teaching moments, and my true-believer belief in the powerful synergy that erupts, like the bluest of flames, when teacher and students work in unison to decipher a puzzle.
In my world, there is no sweeter music than the symphony composed by minds learning, querying, grappling, together.
As we continued wrestling with Rushdie's Midnight's Children today, one of my favorite students said: "Because of his relativity and his ambiguity, Rushdie is a dangerous writer."
I wanted to hug him. Indeed, I agreed. Rushdie is a dangerous writer as should be all the reading and all the learning we do. Learning should be dangerous because it should rock our world, it should shake the very cimientos of our personal foundations.
That I know how to do and that I love doing. I live to rock my own world, and in so doing, I live to share those moments with my students. That love of telluric magnitude, that seismic episode, is what the photographer captured today. That's what she was praising me for.
Because, in reality, teaching is not about greatness. Every day has its rewards and its failures. Teaching is about cultivating the humility of knowing that it always takes two to tango well. And can I ask for more? My students at my small college on the hill, God bless them all, give me, measure by measure, as much as, or even more, than I give them.
1 comment:
Well, while all that you say is true, it is also that you're a great teacher -- the very fact that you know and can articulate all of these things is the true sign.
Regarding Rushdie as dangerous: If my copy of Satanic Verses is on the shelves in the flat, you might want to take it and show it to them. I have the paperback ed. that came out in the early 90s, when the fatwa was still very new, and the group of different publishers who worked together to bring it out identified themselves only as "The Consortium." Even at a young age, I knew that that was going to be a good edition to own. I can't remember, though, whether it's out or in storage.
You're going to be all over the new viewbook, you know. If you look at the old one, our friend S. is in almost every picture of a classroom. It's hilarious.
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