stirring it up

On Monday evenings I have a class of 15 graduate preservice teachers in an "advanced" teaching methods course. About half are elementary education majors and the rest are future science teachers. This latter group are my advisees and were in my basic methods class last fall. This creates an interesting dynamic because it comes close to having an in-group and out-group arrangment. But we seem to be navigating it okay. As we finished class last night, I read a poem from Pablo Neruda, an excerpt of which appears below:

He or she who abandons a project before starting it,
who fail to ask questions on subjects he or she doesn’t know,
he or she who don’t reply when they are asked something they do know,
dies slowly.

~ from Pablo Neruda's "Die Slowly"

I explained as I prefaced this poem that I would also be using it with the Intro to Teaching juniors the following night. A secondary major joked that I should be careful what I was doing. By reading this poem I might create more like them. I interpreted this to mean individuals who advocate for themselves and aren't afraid to disclose their ambitions. The spirit of her comment was that I might have to suffer from additional strong-willed future teachers. My retort was that not only might that create problems for me but I would be sharing such problem-makers with my colleagues. They seemed delighted by the prospects. Not only would there be more in the pipeline like them but that the current group's spirit would leak out and soak into other classrooms beyond the ones in which I was the instructor.

Part of this shows is what happens when a teacher is explicit about the decision-making. I continue to find that when I describe the reasons, or even the thought processes, I use when thinking about teaching, it strikes a resonant chord with my students. Furthermore, when I confess to my uncertainties those are received with relief and joy. This situation also illustrates not only the power of poetry to inform and inspire but also that the use of poems can become a thread that ties together people and becomes a defining feature of ongoing conversations. If someone in my past had encouraged me to use poetry within a graduate class, I would never have believed it. It still is not a natural part of my work … but without my being fully aware, it has become a defining feature.