It occurs to me lately that I don’t blog very much about my own experience teaching specific classes. I’m not sure why. Part of it may be because teaching at its best is such a rush for me that I risk sounding even more trippy and wiggy than I already do. That wouldn’t bother me so much, but it might make it harder to connect with the story. 🙂 Or it may be because the stories feel so intimate to me. I don’t mean the routine stuff. The usual kerfuffles and complaints are tired and predictable–the papers to grade, the disengaged yawners and watch-checkers, and worst of all, the days when I feel empty and flat and uninspired, indeed a bear of very little brain and no fresh ideas to catalyze the students into following the traces of their own engagement. No, I mean those days when the magic happens. When the big bell rings and a sudden, wild surmise seizes half the class, and me, with an idea or insight or epiphany that leaves us breathless. I assure you I do not exaggerate. Nor do I boast: I have some part to play in all this, but my experience is that great classes achieve greatness because of the students. When they come off the blocks from the first challenging or puzzling thing I say, when they fill the discussion forums with a burning intensity, passionate curiosity, and even a committed playfulness (Lewis’s phrase “solemn romp” comes to mind), when they work and work and work at an idea until they have not only understood it but extended it and taught me things I never suspected, then that’s a great class. To that festival of making I bring expertise, commitment to the conversation, strategies to keep the conversation going and the answers complex, and most of all, a desire to keep us all ready for the magic. That’s certainly not nothing. That’s necessary–but not sufficient.

There was some magic yesterday, and while I don’t like to single out one bit and privilege it over another (I also have a commitment to welcoming magic in disguise, and to avoid making up my mind too early about it), I feel compelled to record two instances. One moved me deeply. One intrigued me mightily. I can’t capture either for you–in the first instance, you really did have to be there–but I feel I should set them down, if only as a reminder for me.

In my Sixteenth-Century British Literature class, truly one of the most invigorating classes I’ve ever been part of (read: almost every day I am Just Blown Away), we’re working our way through Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I. This is an almost unbearably complicated work, but it’s also almost unbearably compelling, for the richness of its imaginary landscape, the beauty and care of its poetic craft, and the intensity of its observations regarding the tangle of human experience at every level. Yesterday we lighted on the topic of despair, one of Spenser’s great concerns. There in the middle of talking about Una’s despair over the Red Cross Knight’s abandonment of her, I was trying hard to push at the largest sphere of human concern in the context of Spenser’s allegory, namely, the utter certainty that, to quote C. S. Lewis once more, if you “give your heart to anything it will most certainly be wrung and quite possibly be broken.” Leaving aside the question of betrayal and misunderstanding, we must finally confront the Great Betrayer, death itself. Unless we are Baucis and Philemon and blessed by the gods with simultaneous deaths, we will always be either abandoned or abandoning. At that point, one very serious student who sits near the front raised her hand and told the story of having to put to sleep their family’s beloved dog of fourteen years. As she told the story, she got to the point of telling us about the anguish her child in particular felt over the dog’s death. And then she took it a step farther, weeping as she did, and at the same time doing beautiful justice to the depth of Spenser’s great poem. She told us that she knew her child would eventually want another dog, and that she would indeed get her another dog, knowing as she did so that she was getting another inevitable death to wring their hearts.

That may sound as if a maudlin, personal, pass-the-orange-and-discuss-your-feelings moment interrupted the scholarly flow in that class. It may sound as if an “I can relate to that” took over the work of analysis. That’s exactly my point; that’s exactly what didn’t happen. What did happen was a breathtaking, absolute commitment to sounding the depths of Spenser’s work, a moment that took us right back to the work itself with utmost answerability. The class, in short, had decided long ago–how, I do not know, but I wish I could bottle it and carry it around with me always–that it was ready. Ready for what? It’s in the nature of things in education that the “what” reveals itself only after the readiness is demonstrated. “Readiness is all.”

The second thing I need to record is a moment growing out of an afternoon class that is never quite so intense as the morning class, though it has its own sneaky rewards. Yesterday we were to discuss Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” part 1. When I got to class, I sensed that some folks probably hadn’t done the reading, and that that might be partially my own fault given that I had had to cancel class on Thursday but didn’t send a message out to say “we’re still on track on the syllabus.” So that was the wobbliness at the outset. My strategy, given the wobbliness I at least was feeling, was to get at the big questions Pope is asking about critical judgment. Are there standards? Does it all come down to personal taste, and if so, what justification does any professor have for the selections on her or his syllabus? If it’s all taste, why should we learn about that? If it’s not all taste, how can we know what is and what isn’t? The discussion soon got into the wonders of canonicity, grading papers, improving as a writer (if it’s all taste, what does it mean to “improve as a writer”? is it all a popularity contest? etc.), and a host of other considerations. I won’t say the class was on the edge of their seats–I would be lying if I did–but several students were engaged to the point of speaking out quite a bit, including at least one who rarely speaks but, as it turns out, writes her own poetry and would like it to be good, not just popular, so that it might live on after her.

Here’s the hook, though, for me anyway: after I got back to my office and started my round of afternoon attempted catch-up (I didn’t make it, again), one student came by to continue the conversation. It got interrupted, of course, and alas. I feared that the readiness I seek would evaporate as the student found the prof too busy to keep getting after these vexing questions now that class was over. (I hate thinking that anyone would ever think I would every be too busy to keep getting after these vexing questions, but the truth of course is that the work piles up and as a half-time admin I am committed to those responsibilities, and by choice.)

I shouldn’t have worried. Readiness is all. And this student was ready. I know this because she later sent me an email inviting me to look at her continued efforts to think through the questions. Those efforts were on her blog, in LiveJournal, and they amounted to a dogged, insightful, and inspiring 1000+ word essay that simply poured out of her four hours after class was over.

I was honored by the invitation to look at these musings, and struck once again by how valuable (and rare) it is to have such a view of the learner’s mind. If I can see the cognition happening, I can have a much more powerful and sophisticated understanding of what I can contribute as an advanced learner (i.e., as a teacher). If I were a music teacher, or a golf pro, I could watch the fingering, or the swing, and say “ah, I see that you’re doing this, or that, or forgetting this, or that.” But as a professor, I have a hard time seeing the fingering or the swing. Instead, I see bits of cognition happening in class, and some more-or-less ossified traces of cognition in papers. Often, I see the cognition happening in discussion forums, and those moments are crucial to me. But to see an essay–for that’s what it was–that really was an essay–an attempt–was particularly valuable to me as I consider the shape and needs of this learner’s quest. And the serendipity of it all made it feel more authentic, more like what happens when the mind begins to understand the scope of the question, the contours of the problem space. Those beginnings are rarely the result of connecting dots. They’re more in the way of a wild surmise.

Can these moments be scaled? Can they be assessed? I am haunted by these questions. All I know is that both these moments, and the others like them that make teaching such an addictive profession, are at the heart of what I call education. Real school. Any answers or theories of education that don’t at some level speak to this heart will not satisfy me.

Readiness is all.