the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

Today was the culmination of a great semester, bittersweet.

I've mentioned before that I love my kids. (I'm a hopeless marshmallow. I admit it. No shame. It used to be an ongoing source of amusement to me that my course directors and my personally-assigned “mentor,” back when I was teaching at USAFA the first time, would comment after they sat in on my class, “Your cadets see right through your gruff exterior,” or something to that effect.) Well, this semester, I had another one of those classes.

I had great cadets in general—even the “teach me something, I dare you” seniors—but teachers live for the occasional one of those classes. Each class has its own personality, as any teacher who has been at it very long will tell you. The better teacher you are, the more you can influence the class's personality, but you never really overcome it (not that I'd want to, any more than I'd want to overcome an individual's personality). But once every two or three years, you get a class where everything clicks. The students have a great attitude. They work hard. They want to please you and they enjoy one another's company. The discussion is funny, intense, meaningful. The papers are thoughtful and when one of them turns in a paper they know isn't good, they apologize up front because they they don't want to let you down. They walk into the class and begin discussing the readings among themselves before class begins, and after they are dismissed, some will gather around your desk and continue to discuss the readings. And early in the semester, they themselves realize there's something very special about this class and thank whatever random forces threw us together for four short months.

My sixth period Introduction to Literature course was one of those.

The last day of school is hard anyway because I have to say goodbye, but the last class was the hardest. For a couple of reasons. I'll get back to that.

As of this morning, I'd done all my grading except for the six more speeches that my seniors had to deliver, so we still had class of sorts. I'm very proud of their progress in speechifying, incidentally.

I began the semester with a poetry performance. They had to memorize a poem (of a minimum length, pre-approved by me) and perform it. No notes. Some of them bowled me over with their interpretations and the power of their delivery. (Sometimes I think that the Academy is so painfully rectilinear that the tiniest opportunity to be creative gives them the opening they've been waiting for.)

For their second presentation, they had to work from notes on 3X5 note cards, but could stand behind the lectern, so long as they didn't lean on it. My focus was for them to learn to stand balanced—without leaning or shifting from foot to foot or such—with their backs straight and shoulders back, head up, they were to make eye contact, and speak. Learn to use gestures as appropriate. Behave as though they were confident, even if they were not.

For their third (and last) presentation, they got their note cards, but no lectern. Chase—one of my seniors who is as shy as he is bright—double checked to make sure he'd heard me right when I told the class they'd not even have the lectern for their final presentation. During his poetry presentation at the beginning of the semester, he was visibly trembling, and I could occasionally hear a tremor in his voice. He was stronger on his second speech, but he had the lectern. But today...let's just say he was not looking forward to doing his final speech with nothing to disguise his stage fright. But you know what? He knocked it out of the park. No tremor in his voice, no trembling. He stood and delivered. It was like he was standing in someone's parlor, telling them about something that interests him. He nailed it.

Yes. This post is about me bragging about how much I've seen my students grow and progress. I'm not better than the parent who corners you to show you all the pictures in her wallet of her babies, I suppose.

I also got to tell my seniors what an amazing job they did on their final papers.

As you may remember, this was not the situation mid-semester. Most of them had waited until the day before it was due to write that paper, which was worth 15-20% of their grade, and totally flubbed it. Thus, I mentored the writing process for their final papers. That is, I set up a timeline (starting five weeks ahead of time) wherein they had to submit the question they planned to research, then an annotated bibliography, then an outline, then bring in a rough draft for peer review, then submit the final paper. At every phase before the rough draft, I gave them copious feedback and had them revise their work until they got it right. It was a lot of work, but I will do this with every class I teach from here on out. Why? Because we teach them The Writing Process only in freshman English composition, then expect them to remember it and follow the model. Even if they do remember it (which most of them don't), they simply don't need it for most of the types of papers they write. So they forget, and they write really bad papers for subsequent English classes.

Well, I gave them a timeline and deadlines and put in all the required extra effort myself and WOW. Their papers, with about three exceptions, were fantastic. I even had three approach me on their own and tell me that they really enjoyed writing the paper—because it was about something that mattered and that they cared about—which was something they never thought they'd say.

Thus, I had the distinguished pleasure of telling them how they had knocked that ball out of the park, and how unabashedly proud I was of them.
Then I went to my afternoon sophomore Introduction to Literature courses. I had only two things in my plan, really: tell them what a stupendous job they'd done on their final papers (for largely the same reason my seniors had done so well), and to read them a poem. And then to say goodbye.

A word on my sophomore student papers: at least half of them were, in my opinion, worthy of graduate-level work. I've spoken before about some of the rules I hold my students to in their writing, but one I've found to be most effective is to forbid them to write any word or phrase or sentence that is vague or broad. Not a single one, ever.*

* The reasons are simple. Vague or broad statements essentially say nothing. You either use them to lead directly into the specific information you want to share, in which case the vague/broad statement is superfluous, or you aren't going to explain the vague/broad comment at all, in which case it is obvious and odious fluff. Thus, I ruthlessly mark any sentences or phrases that state the obvious or are vague or broad in any sense. By the end of the semester, the students have learned to spot these—and delete them—themselves, and the resulting improvement in writing is nothing short of astounding.

The final average on my sophomores' final papers was 89. I took a few minutes to give a shoutout to the students who had made As on their papers and to talk about the ideas they had explored, if I felt like it.

Then I read them my favorite poem.

I have a lot of favorites, so that doesn't really narrow it down, I suppose. This is probably my favorite to read to my students, or to anyone, for that matter. I posted it on Facebook last week, but for posterity, here it is. It gets better with time.  

Body and Soul

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend's father begins
to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story
about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.
These were men's teams, grown men, some in their thirties
and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,
sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music
whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to
where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores
and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul
in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep
lay in bed stroking their husband's wrist tattoo and smoking
Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.
Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,
another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say, we're one man short, but can we use this boy,
he's only fifteen years old, and at least he'll make a game.
They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing
the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,
the thick neck, but then with that boy's face under
a clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,
let's play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,
joking about the fat catcher's sex life, it's so bad
last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,
pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into
throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging
into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,
and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,
talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little
angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter
and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead
and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs
right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two
but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure
that they pause a moment before turning around to watch
the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond
the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.
They're pretty quiet watching him round the bases,
but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball,
so what, let's play some goddamned baseball here.
And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look
at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one
is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chalmers,
high and big and sweet. The left field just stands there, frozen.
As if this isn't enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.
They can't believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced
man from Okarche who just doesn't give a shit anyway
because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with
three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,
leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch
who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something
out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something
that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards
the kid's elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed
and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field
where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt
dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,
the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher
is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours
into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised
Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,
Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets
and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them
though it should to you when they are told the boy's name is
Mickey Mantle. And that's the story, and those are the facts.
But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan
the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,
it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers
just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh
why in hell didn't they just throw around the kid, walk him,
after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,
especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks
and diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything
meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,
who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer
who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could go home
with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house
singing If You've Got the Money, Honey, I've Got the Time
with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab
Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum
as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not
And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.
And they did not because sometimes after making love,
after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and
listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,
so distant, they glanced over at their wives and noticed the lines
growing heavier around the eyes and mouth, felt what their wives
felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing couples
and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness
were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon
ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there
in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary
that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves
looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not
because they had gone through a depression and a war that had left
them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers
and everyone else had cost them just too goddamn much to lay it
at the feet of a fifteen year-old-boy. And so they did not walk him,
and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves
to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not
a fact. When I see my friend's father staring hard into the bottomless
well of home plate as Mantle's fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,
I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
worthless Dodge has also encountered for the first and possibly
only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen
as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde
and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven.

B H Fairchild

After I finished reading this to my special class, the one student who has told me all semester that he struggles with English and just doesn't see stuff in it until he hears us talking about the things we see, raised his hand. “Yes, Franco?” I said. He said, “Ma'am...had I just read that poem, I wouldn't have gotten it. But when you read it, I...I get it.”

I said thank you, of course. Then told them I learned this skill—this art, really—from my father, who read to us (and still will, given half a chance). What I didn't tell them was the story Daddy told when I was very young. He was the manager of the college cafeteria, and the women who worked for him were students themselves. They were taking an English course and had been assigned a poem to explicate (or to do something with, but that's my best guess). They were reading it but were, as is often the case, slaves to the rhythm and rhyme. As a result, they didn't understand the poem at all and it had no impact. Daddy asked to see the poem, then he read it to them. By the time he finished, they were crying. Such is the power of my father's performance of literature. I hope someday to be worthy.

Here is tonight's effort to read it, but understand: it's hard to perform freely when you're holding your own camera and trying to keep it steady, and I tend to be more animated--if not emotional--when I read it to someone. But anyway (link). 

Two days ago, I got an email from one of my 6th period students, Takeshi. He'd told me at the beginning of the semester, when I ask them to tell me something about themselves, that he and Ayana (another of my students in that class) dance. At that point, he said they'd dance for me at some point if I like. I said I'd love that.

I had forgotten, but he hadn't. In his email, he asked if I still wanted them to dance on the last day of class. I wrote back immediately with “ABSOLUTELY!”

So today, after my comments and my performance, they changed into their physical training gear (I'm not sure why...they were in flight suits which would have probably worked just fine, except maybe for the boots....), and they performed two numbers for us. They graciously allowed me to record it on my phone, and gave their permission for me to post the video online (link).

After the first number, Ayana came over to her desk near where I was sitting. I asked if they competed. She said no. This is just something they do when they really should be doing homework. :)

And so. I said goodbye. One of my students--a brilliant young man I taught composition last year, too--called to me as I was leaving. He wanted to know how I'd liked being enlisted. 

I told him that I'd chosen a job—computer programming—that was challenging enough to make the job rewarding. And...why was he asking? He said he's being disenrolled. Underage drinking in the dorms. This breaks my heart, frankly. He's not just brilliant, but articulate, quietly respectful, studious, and pretty much the epitome of the sort of officer the Air Force hopes to produce. He made a mistake. A common mistake for kids that age, no less. I see this as an opportunity to mentor—not as a chance to punish, but maybe that's just me. It bothers me now and will for some time, no doubt, that he is leaving the Academy. At the same time, I understand the power and meaning of the gesture in his taking the time to tell me. 

I gave him some basic advice about enlisting and told him to be in touch with me if he has any questions or concerns. And also...there are other ways to be commissioned. This young man is, in my opinion, too smart and talented to be happy on the enlisted side.

I told him what a pleasure it's always been having him in my class. He said—as he often has—that this is the only class he looks forward to, because of the discussions we have. I shook his hand, wished him luck.

It hurts to see such a promising young man go, but you might say I have faith (?) that he'll be fine no matter what he chooses. I just hope he chooses something that challenges him, because I don't think he'll be happy otherwise.

And with that, my grades were all submitted. My work was done.

I'm now off work for 16 days. It was a good day.

d