Teaching Over the Long Haul

NOTE TO READERS.  I have been working on this blog for a while, trying to meet my end-of-May deadline, but now I am hesitant to post it, given the urgent anguish that surrounds us. I have tried to write about this moment, but I am a slow writer and was unable to produce for you anything that has not already been written, and written with more knowledge and wisdom than I have about the thick layers of pain radiating from the murder of George Floyd and so many before him.

I finally decided to go ahead and post the blog and leave it up to my readers if and when the time is right to read it. I hope it reflects, in its way, the human regard being called for by those raising their voices for equality and justice. 

 Here is the blog for May.

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There is a lot of talk these days about teaching. Continually, it seems, someone on broadcast media, or via an internet platform, or informally through Facebook, Instagram, and the rest, someone is expressing with appreciative surprise how difficult teaching is. The terrible COVID-19 pandemic has brought the demands – but only some of the demands – of the classroom into countless parents’ homes. I’m not seeing the cliched pop-culture portrayals of the teacher as unsympathetically uptight or clueless, and thankfully not hearing riffs on the tiresome adage claiming that those who can’t do, teach. 

It’s nice to have the pause button pushed on this stuff, for teaching is extraordinary work. Since my earliest days as an intern in Vi Christian’s wonderful kindergarten classroom (when I actually was pretty clueless) to the present, teaching has been a source of intellectual challenge, endless learning, humor, and self-discovery. And it is the kind of work that leads to reflection. 

I try to capture one small plane of my development as a teacher in the following, written for “Practitioner to Practitioner,” the journal of The National Organization of Student Success. I hope you enjoy it, and, if you teach, that it rings true to you. 

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When I was a young teacher starting out many moons ago, I would hear older teachers at conferences or professional development sessions talk about all they learn from their students. I didn’t buy it. I mean, come on, after studying mathematics or literature for four years in college and then in graduate school, you’re telling me that a middle schooler or tenth grader or college freshman can enlighten you about solving for unknowns in algebra or how metaphor works? That sounded like happy talk to me. 

But as I explained and illustrated metaphor with different groups of students, in reference to different poems, I found myself going back to my college notes, to reference books, to other, more experienced teachers. I began to be more articulate in my explanations and more supple in my responses to questions—in fact, was starting to anticipate questions, which led to reading more poetry, looking for just the right examples. And then there were those times when the meaning of a metaphor in a given poem—let’s say an abandoned house, or a clock, or a storm forming in the distance—was well established by critics. We know what the metaphor means and how it functions—and then a student comes up with a credible different take on the poem. Maybe its meaning isn’t so settled after all. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t learning something about metaphor, though not in the way I had naively imagined when I was beginning my career—not simply acquiring more factual information. I was learning about metaphor through interacting with others, trying to help them understanding how literature works and, in the process, coming to better understand and appreciate literature myself, literature as a living thing. Teaching was affording me a dynamic way of knowing.

The longer I do this work, the more I’ve come to appreciate the range of what teaching enables us to know, the wide scope of human experience it opens up to us. Think of all those times in classrooms or student conferences or even in a casual encounter on campus when something revelatory happens: A student has an insight, makes a connection, thinks her or his way into and through a problem, confronts a limitation, discovers something new about a subject, discovers something about him or herself. These experiences are so much a part of the work we do that we might not pay much attention to them in the moment, and semester by semester they likely fade from memory. But the fact is we are witnesses to something remarkable that our teaching helped foster. I can say now with a little more humility but, paradoxically, a little more wisdom than I had at the beginning of my career that, yes, we do learn from our students… and learn about them, learn about each other and learn about ourselves. Our work gives us a line of sight into what makes us human: exploration, challenge, courage, and growth. 

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The Tawdry President: Donald Trump, the Public Library, and COVID 19

During the last week that has included President Trump's daily updates on COVID 19, I have been watching Frederick Wiseman’s three-hour-and-seventeen-minute documentary on The New York Public Library, Ex Libris. If you’ve never seen a Wiseman film, and if you’re stuck indoors, this might be a good time to start. 

Wiseman has been making documentaries for 50 years —he was 87 when Ex Libris was released in 2017— that cover everything from an asylum for the criminally insane, to a ballet company, to a boxing gym, to the University of California at Berkeley. His films are long (Belfast, Maine runs just over four hours) and the camera lingers, sometimes for quite a while, on mostly everyday scenes, with no voice-over narration, visual cues, or musical score. There is great craft at work here; Wiseman doesn’t simply turn on a camera and leave. His films are the result of careful scene selection and editing, and his genius lies in the way he quietly renders the richness and drama of everyday human reality, often within institutions —such as a library. Though there might well be scenes that shock —in the asylum, a hospital, a public housing project— the overall pacing and feel of a Wiseman film is the slow passing of ordinary events, which, admittedly, can be in a location foreign to most of us. 

Mercifully, Donald Trump’s stints at the podium during the COVID briefings are shorter than Wiseman’s films, and they couldn’t be more different with their disjointed rush of bombast, preening, assault, and mendacity —and the lurch from a middle-school thespian’s impersonation of somber leadership to hot blasts of id. It’s all political theater, of course, to distract and grasp advantage out of chaos, but it is also a compulsive act of self-creation, a vulgar stream of advertisements for himself (he demands, for example, his signature on the federal relief checks), a creation of tinsel and needy hate. 

The New York Public Library is a vast, sprawling institution —92 locations— and it is closed. New York City is ravaged with illness. To my knowledge, the libraries in most states are closed. The virus closed them. The President has denied the virus, called it a hoax, finally acknowledged it, saying he had been handling it brilliantly all along. He effusively touts questionable drugs for it, the availability of tests for it (“Anybody who wants a test can get a test.”), the rapid production of gear to protect us from it —and predicts the imminent end of it, the economy rebounding with a “bang.” A woman speaking at a meeting filmed for Ex Libris says “Libraries are not about books… Libraries are about people who want to get knowledge.” There is barely a trace of knowledge in the President’s remarks —except the occasional fact provided by staff for his impersonation, a fact he will likely distort. 

As we linger with Wiseman in the main branch of The New York Public Library and travel to other branches in Manhattan and some of the boroughs we see public lectures ranging from Elvis Costello showing a rare clip of his father performing a kitschy song and dance routine to a scholar discussing conflict between royalty and Muslem clerics during the 18th Century African slave trade. We observe a piano recital and chamber music and a spoken-word artist riffing on Coltrane and Questlove leading to an appeal to his lover and a reflection on manhood —a baby in the audience cries intermittently as he performs. There are many children being tutored in after-school programs, selecting books, completing sentences, doing arithmetic, and in separate clips thoughtful young staff members discuss how best to reach them. At many points in Ex Libris, library administrators address the budget, community engagement, how to serve the homeless, the shift to digital books, the digital divide. In one scene a librarian is checking out mobile “hot spots” for Internet connection to a long line of patrons. There is a book club on Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and a job fair, and a visually impaired man holding a cane explaining options for housing assistance to a group of people with various disabilities. We watch as employees in a processing center sort returned books on a conveyer belt and listen in as reference librarians with headsets take calls from the public and watch as well as Wiseman’s camera scans slowly over patrons of many ages, many races and ethnicities sitting at computer terminals, searching everything from job information, to medical conditions, to esoterica of all stripes. Things people want to know. 

The President doesn’t want to know anything that doesn’t have immediate payoff for his self-regard. On April 15, Mr. Trump held conference calls with business leaders as part of his much-touted Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups initiative. What he was told was that expanded testing was necessary before Americans could safely return to work, but according to a source quoted on April 17 in The Los Angeles Times, “...the message was largely drowned out by Trump’s determination to solicit praise from the participants.” “It was a joke,” the source noted, “...a complete farce.” 

Throughout Ex Libris there are shots of reference books, encyclopedias and dictionaries, guidebooks and handbooks, rows and rows of them, still physically present but increasingly online. Rows of patrons sit before computers accessing digital words. An American Sign Language interpreter demonstrates for a hearing audience the emotion of signed words, the beautifully dramatic variation in tempo and gestural emphasis she brings to different readings. 

The President ignores words, distorts and mangles them, can’t hear them over the din of his own trumpeting voice. There are many words used to describe this president: ignorant, racist, autocratic, narcissist. A number of his former advisors have used more potent ones. The word that keeps coming to me this week as I toggle between Ex Libris and the President’s daily briefings is tawdry. Synonyms for tawdry: gaudy, brash, low, mean, base, garish, inferior, meretricious. Let’s look up meretricious: pretentious, fake, fraudulent, “…having in reality no value or integrity.” Vocabulary.com adds this: “Tawdry things often have a hint of desperation.” Last week the President falsely accused the World Health Organization of lying and neglect, deflected to them his own lying and neglect, and said he will cut their funding —an act that will contribute to the death of the world’s most vulnerable. Low, mean, base. The tawdry desperation of evil.  

The New York Public Library has its fair share of the brash and pretentious, and as Ex Libris progresses, vast social class and racial disparities among branches and events become evident. Opulent banquet rooms for board meetings or donor celebrations and small, crammed gatherings in poorer communities. And libraries as social institutions reflect the ugliness of their time and place —read Richard Wright’s account in Black Boy of the insult in trying to gain access to library books. Still, the public library is a grand ideal, and one of the virtues of Ex Libris is the way it puts so many faces on that ideal, animates and humanizes it. 

During the last hour of the film, the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture —a research division of the library— affirms “the public value of what we do,” how the work of the Center is “mind-building and soul-affirming.” He is talking specifically about the Center, but what he says applies, I think, to the public library generally. To that end, he quotes Toni Morrison, “libraries are the pillars of democracy.” Lofty words, to be sure, but given the Presidential miasma of cheap and dangerous language hanging low over our infected country, we need to aspire. A man in a small branch of The New York Public Library located in The Harlem River Houses complex says that because he was taking care of his kids, he couldn’t afford to go to film school, so learned the basics through his library. In a gentle and deliberate rhythm, Ex Libris offers us image after image of what a public institution can do —and in mid-April of our plague year, that is mind-building and soul-affirming.  

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