I'm trying to shape this up for The Chronicle. Any comments on the truth etc. would be helpful:
The Art of Not Leaving
by Sean Chapman
approx 1100 words
For many students, from the moment I open my mouth on that first fall day, the class becomes about leaving, about getting out with a letter which symbolizes their understanding of the material (or, some believe, their understanding of my views on the material). But for some students with loftier goals, the next several weeks are about becoming better and more complicated human beings, about coming in contact with ideas and thoughts they can’t yet put into words, and they thrill to the task, actually worried that it will end too soon. I worry about the ending as well because it has become a regular reminder of my own stasis.
My belief going into my first teaching job was that it was an honest way to make money without waiting tables, a way to exchange ideas, energize tired minds and grow and develop as a person. What I found at the end of that first semester was much more complicated than human development, although I think that happened too. What I found was a deep sorrow and helplessness that I hadn’t felt since an older kid swam me out to a raft at Lake Weddington, and I couldn’t swim back. I just sat on that raft staring through tears at all the kids, screaming and running on the beach.
I had assumed, during those weeks of training that graduate students undergo before being allowed in the classroom, that the main problem with teaching was much more simple, that a teacher’s biggest pitfall was becoming too complacent in the classroom. I had a teacher in college who was so predictable that often the class would know his jokes and mannerisms related to specific poems before we walked into the room, and I didn’t want to become him.
I had the impression that each year I would be facing a revolving roomful of kids, each with a different name and face, but that they would basically stay the same—they’d come from the same schools, have the same wishes, want the same things. I would be changing, growing, coming to understand the intricacies of the human mind, the human condition. I would be changing into an almost unrecognizable person—more complicated and sensitive and wise.
During my first fall in front of the classroom, I got so attached to one of my freshman composition classes and they to me, that by Halloween, the class came dressed as me—khaki pants, white t-shirt. When the semester suddenly ended a month and a half later, in many ways I had become one of them, sharing their jokes and joys and sorrows, and when they filed out with a promise to stay in touch, I had a feeling that I’d been left by my classmates to stick it out alone in this big room, to quietly watch them disperse into the great wooded campus of Carbondale, Illinois. Maybe I was just being too sensitive I thought; this feeling will wear off by next semester, but in the spring it was still there. I was trapped in the amber light of the classroom, and they were free to wander off. Opposite of what I’d expected, I stayed the same; the students kept changing.
It wasn’t complacency in my teaching that was the problem. I kept trying to find new ways to make the material current and engaging. I tried to make The Odyssey exciting to these kids who’ve been inundated with high-budget films since they were babies. I tried to make the poems of Blake spark with the same electrical energy that drew me to them. So I have managed so far to avoid becoming a books-on-tape teacher, mindlessly restating past lectures, but what I haven’t avoided is becoming my own tragic character, trapped on an urn, silently watching the world change around him.
Occasionally, I run into former students out on the town with their parents celebrating their graduation, and it seems to me that I just had them in class, could still remember their alarmed faces when I explained my absence policy. I shake their hands, tell their parents a pleasant story about their children and walk them to their car. I find a big part of me wanting to jump into the leaving car, to see what this world has to offer. One of the most difficult elements of teaching for me is learning to separate my students (on their way to finding their lives) from myself (having found my life).
I get too close, get too caught up in their lives. When my students leave, I am learning that many of them are heading to where I already am. I know what I want from my life, have decided part of my future already.
In the last several years, I have been teaching young poets down at Arkansas Governor’s School—a six week intensive school where eleventh graders come to learn about the history of thought, the complications of life, and line-breaks. The summer starts with nervous introductions and quiet readings, but by the end, we’re hugging each other goodbye, trading poems, and quoting lines of verse; I’ve taught there for five years now, and I can hardly speak by the end of that final day when I have to wish them well in the world. But I’m not choked up now by sorrow at my inertness, I am choked up by a joy and a thrill that I was able to affect such wonderful students and that I am lucky enough to meet students who in turn affect me. So, I’m getting better, learning each year how better to deal with the feeling of non-movement.
Perhaps there’s a professional distance that I haven’t yet learned—I was horrified to hear from a doctor friend that MDs have a term for someone hovering near death in the hospital: they’re “circling the drain.” This terminology, this distance, is needed in the hospital where attachment can be a weight which can affect your work. And maybe that’s what you develop as you teach—after years of working at a school, you get used to the ebb and flow of wonderful, funny and talented people. You develop that necessary distance. And when that final day of the semester comes, you just get in your car, drive home and begin thinking what you’ll do differently next time you teach that class.
