Of skorts, skirts and pants

Not a day has gone by in my 200-level Latin American and U.S. Latin@ literature class titled Beyond Borders that we haven't mentioned Britney Spears.

One of my students even argued that she is a "transborder" personality, meaning (I guess) that she is now beyond any restraint or limit. But I disagreed, especially because Ms. Spears doesn't in any way, shape or form, that I can think of, fit the transborder framework, at least not within the context of my class.

And while I'm not particularly interested in Ms. Spear's public train-wreck of a life, a part of me is glad that the students feel they can make connections between the theoretical constructs we discuss in class and issues of public interest to them today.

That's one of the main points of the whole exercise of my teaching. I want my students to see literature and literary theory (well, some of it) as applicable to their lives, not as something esoteric or alien or over their heads. I want the students to learn about life through the literature. After all, that's one of the greatest gifts a book can give us.

I'll likely never visit Chile, and I definitely wasn't there before or after the 1973 military coup that changed that country's history forever, but I "live" through that time everytime I re-read and re-teach Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits.

The funniest and most recent example of how the students make connections between the literature and the theory and their lives, was when one student suggested that Allende's novel vacillated between giving women "pants" (metaphorically speaking, he stressed) and keeping them "in skirts."

"It's like skort literature," he ventured.

"Skort?" the rest of the class snorted, "What's that?"

He proceeded to explain, quite informedly, that the skort was half a pant and half a skirt.

"We could see it as a transitional phase," I ventured.

"But what's wrong with pants, why can't women just wear pants?!" one of my more feminist students demanded.

And so it went, as the whole class got into a discussion of gender roles through the metaphors of pants, skirts and skorts, and of how the novel, while written by a clearly feminist writer, reflects an ambivalence about gender roles.

This ambivalence is clear in the fact that while the women play very significant roles in the novel, which tells the story of a family in Chile before and after the coup, it is the men who wield most of the power.

I wondered what a visitor would have thought of my class. Would they perceive that as a pedagogically rich moment in which the students were trying to make sense of the literature in their own terms? Or would they see it as too simplistic an analytical move?

Personally, I had a ball, as I do each and every day I teach. When people ask me: "How did your class go?" I always have to answer: "Great!" Because it's always great for me.

I remember one student a few years back who said she loved coming to my class because there was always a laughing moment and she always left smiling. That's exactly why I love my class, too. I always leave with a smile on my face, and invariably, we all end up laughing about something, somehow. It's great therapy, let me tell you.

I have class in a few minutes and God knows what the metaphor-of-the-day will be as we move from Allende's novel to Pablo Neruda's poetry. I hope I do justice to The Poet, who marked the beginning of the end of my own career as a poet. As I tell my students, I used to write poetry once upon a time, but then I read Neruda and never wrote again because all the great poetry has already been written.

While I may have given up on poetry, I haven't given up on writing. And I hope that I have many, many more years of teaching left in me. When it comes to writing, that's one of the greatest things about this blog. I don't have to compete with Neruda to enjoy it.

Pride and humility

"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.

Unbound

Last night, I took a break from dissertating to take a class at Harvard, from my very comfy seat here in my basement study.

In a true stroke of genius and technological wizardry, my Alma Mater has made available to alumni, free of charge, online access to the understandably famous undergraduate class by Prof. Michael J. Sandel, titled "Justice."

Facing hundreds of students at the dark and medieval Sanders Theater, Prof. Sandel looked more like an actor delivering a Shakespearean soliloquy than a professor trying to keep his students awake. And he had no trouble doing that.

Cameras panned through his audience, who was riveted and spellbound by Prof. Sandel's engaging teaching style and commanding presence (Oh, what a good suit and tie will do for a man, too!). Plus, they were taking frantic notes, which is always a good sign.

I also was spellbound and taking notes. And not just notes about what he was saying but how he was saying it. That's because I could imagine myself sometime in the future delivering a lecture like that (although at my college on the hill I'll likely never have more than 30 or 40 students in a lecture). But the art of lecturing to an overflowing auditorium is one I saw in action many times at Harvard, and one which I would like to try my hand at sometime in the future.

Listening to Prof. Sandel for about 30 minutes, I learned about consequential and categorical moral philosophy and about the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's belief in "the restlessness of reason." In explaining to the students the style and purpose of his course, Prof. Sandel inadvertently explained to me the political philosophy that undergirds my own teaching.

I'm not saying I'm at the level of Prof. Sandel by any stretch of the imagination. And that's totally cool with me. I know I have miles to go before I sleep on my laurels and I like that feeling. I don't ever want to feel arrived. I always want to be in mental motion, learning, changing, being challenged and stretched beyond my boundaries and capabilities.

I inherit not only the love of teaching but that unquenchable thirst for knowledge and that appreciation for being an eternal student from my parents. My father reads book after book after book every day of his life and my mother is also always reading and surfing the web and finding new things she wants to learn about and do.

Like Sandel, I believe that education (although he was referring to political philosophy in particular) should be an "exercise in self-knowledge" and one that "unsettles us." I also agree with Prof. Sandel that once we've been unsettled by knowledge, we can never go back to the moment of innocence, we can never unknow what we know.

Frederick Douglass said it best when he noted how he sometimes felt that learning to read "had been a curse rather than a blessing." For Douglass, reading:

had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit [of slavery], but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

That's exactly how unsettling learning should be, it should give us all an irreversible taste of what freedom of the mind feels like. This thirst for freedom in thought (and, consequentially, in body as well) should be, to paraphrase Douglass, something that looks at us from every star and smiles at us in every calm; something that we feel breathing in every wind and moving in every storm.

Way back when I was a rookie at this I started my teaching philosophy by stating that "I teach freedom in my classroom." Snickering a bit unkindly, my graduate professor told me to take that out because it could be misinterpreted politically since "freedom" has so many connotations and denotations in U.S. culture. I did as she suggested but the feeling behind the statement remains fundamentally true.

Like Prof. Sandel, I set out to rock my students' world, to give them the tools to unbind their minds from any shackles that may keep them bound. But I also seek to rock my own world through them, through what my students learn and teach me in the process.

I can't wait to be unsettled and unbound and to have the map of my world expanded in the coming weeks as I sit in this chair and watch Prof. Sandel ignite the hearts and minds of his students, including mine.