Kevin McIntosh: Lessons from a Veteran Teacher....

 My fellow Bagel Bard Kevin McIntosh has shared this essay with the BASPPS he published in https://theeducatorsroom.com/ about the art of teaching and the building of a rep...


Kevin M. McIntosh’s short stories have appeared in the American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Potomac Review, Chicago Tribune and have been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. He has had fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation and Blue Mountain Center. His novel Class Dismissed (Regal House Publishing, July 2021) is informed by his thirty years of teaching English in New York City, Oakland, and Greater Boston. Visit him at kevinmmcintosh.com.

Teaching is a humbling profession. The occupation that it comes closest to is parenting. And, like parenting, you never master it; it’s never a done deal. Sure, there are books on how to do these things, but they never cover the hard stuff, the real stuff––the survival stuff. So much our parents never taught us, that our professors never taught us in education school.

As a new teacher, I spent many prep periods observing experienced faculty members at work. They came in all shapes, sizes, genders, orientations, colors, ages.

But, unlike me, they all had command of their classes. What was their secret sauce, I wanted to know. They were all so different in the presentation: Marty, the former wrestler––a gentle giant––who never spoke above the level of conversation, made kids lean in; Shelly, a tiny woman, brash New Yorker, flip but demanding, made kids laugh; Judy, formal, intense, unafraid to use endless wait time following a question, made her students want to learn. How they taught was so distinctive, yet, in every case, so effective. What was their mojo? And, more importantly, where could I get mine?

Turned out they all had one thing in common, they had a Teacher Rep. When students entered their classrooms, they knew something worthwhile was about to happen. Students entered alert but relaxed in the knowledge that their time was not about to be wasted. They were ready to learn. Unfortunately, as I discovered, you can’t begin your teaching career with a Rep. It has to be earned––it has to be built.






Two decades later, a younger colleague was grading papers in the back of the room we shared. When the bell rang and my class trickled out, she looked up from her papers, disgruntled.

“What’s wrong, Jennifer?”

“I begin every class shouting my kids to attention. And you . . . you just say, ‘Welcome writers and lovers of literature.’ And––boom!––out come their notebooks, they’re all listening.”

“Well,” I smiled, “I paid for this gravitas. Believe me.” I had a Rep. And the scars to prove my point. Then I realized: I had become that teacher I envied.

Welcome, writers and lovers of literature: a mantra I stumbled on midway through my career. Every class from then on began with this greeting, this invocation. Some of my eighth graders, dubious at the proposition, giggled nervously on first hearing it. But they soon expected and cherished this greeting. It was inclusive and held out the possibility––the expectation––that all could be writers, that there was literature all could embrace, with passion. We were embarked on a special mission: when you entered room 224, you were standing on holy ground, not just the next classroom on your schedule. In my writing workshop we spent many hours writing––that’s what writers do––but we once spent part of a class period watching a squirrel find creative ways to assault a bird feeder because writers do that too. The mundane and the magical––that’s a writer’s life, and a teacher’s.

And finding your place on that mundane-magical scale is key to building Rep. When I was a new teacher––in the Reagan Era––they told us in Ed School, be the Guide on the Side, not the Sage on the Stage. But this is a false choice: to succeed over the long haul, to build Rep that lasts a career, you need to be both, alternating modes depending on what, when, and whom you are teaching. This is where self-awareness comes in, taking a clear hard look in the mirror: are you a natural magician or logician? How can you make the most of your in-born gift, how to shore up your weak side?

Before I became an educator, I worked in the theater. And, unsurprisingly, as a struggling new teacher, I fell back, hard, into my performing comfort zone. The bell would ring and Mr. McIntosh would be off on his––sometimes literal––song and dance. And my students loved it. One mother showed up after school to pick up her sick daughter’s homework and said she had to talk her girl into staying home because she didn’t want to miss my class. I was worth the price of admission. But I was only two years in and could feel myself burning out. And, though I was only dimly aware of it, I was also taking up all the oxygen in the room, leaving my students less space for creativity and risk-taking. I was doing that for them.

Then Nancie Atwell––God bless her––saved me. An older, wiser English teacher plopped Atwell’s In the Middle on my desk, and––voila!––a writing workshop instructor was born. Ms. Atwell’s book helped me get out of the middle and turn much of my class time over to my students, sparing Mr. McIntosh from a future as a chalk-and-talk drone or performing seal, an aging, Rep-less pedagogue. Over time I found a balance, often leading with a zippy mini-lesson followed by a half-hour of writing accompanied by sotto voce conferences with individual students. Sage and Guide, in one class period.

But, vital to Rep-formation as self-awareness is, so too is an awareness of your students. Who are they, what’s going on for them at the moment? Sounds pretty basic, I know, but un-Repped teachers––and they are legion––plunge ahead with their preordained lesson plan, heedless of who they’re teaching and what’s happening in their lives. And I’m not just speaking of paying attention to the special needs of particular students––there’s already a very serious law regarding that.

I’m speaking of the time the young Mr. Mac spent an entire weekend polishing a multi-cultural, multi-modal, interdisciplinary gem of cooperative learning, only to show up to an uncooperative eighth grade Monday morning. Excited about my brilliant lesson plan, I ignored the more excited buzzing in my suburban homeroom. Friday night the grade’s alpha couple had had a spat at the Valentine’s Day Dance––Alpha Boy had slow-danced with the wrong girl––and the social hierarchy exploded. I grew angry as my carefully curated small groups refused to discuss anything else. Take out your textbooks, I finally barked at my kids, read chapter 17, answer the questions at the end. Shocked and sullen, my students did my bidding, working quietly for the rest of the period. But my victory was pyrrhic: I won the battle, damaged my Rep.

It didn’t have to go that way. The older me would have read the room, asked kids a few questions, and made a new plan. As an experienced teacher, I call more audibles than Tom Brady. Now I would save my masterpiece for later in the week and pull out a stack of practice sheets on dependent clauses. No problem with kicking it Old School on occasion. You have 180 days to work with, 900 classes; every play doesn’t have to end with a touchdown, just keep moving the ball downfield. And force-feeding an unwilling class is the worst possible Rep management. Students feel unseen and unheard and eventually, lose respect for their teacher. And getting angry helps no one.

I learned this first and best when I taught in Oakland and NYC, where my students had problems far more pressing than what had happened at the school dance. If your family has been evicted from your apartment or the grandmother who’s raising you is hospitalized, discussing chapter three of Of Mice and Men may be a non-starter. Some mornings, a quarter of a class showed up with problems on that scale. I didn’t become an effective teacher for these children until I learned to pay attention, ask questions, and have Plans B, C, and D ready for action.

Creating a Rep is about building a bigger, better classroom for you. Teaching isn’t just a performance, but it does require performing. The teacher with Rep is an authentic person in front of her class, but a persona too. The teachers we remember, the ones with lasting impact, were creative, quirky, in-the-moment presences. They were knowledgeable and prepared––that is the stuff of competence––but they had that x-factor that separates the good from the great. They could be counted on to present a solid, interesting lesson, but their moves were unpredictable, shaped by the needs of their students. And, as I learned from my masterful colleagues early on, Rep doesn’t have to come in a Robin Williams package; an exquisitely attuned introvert can be that teacher. Rep has a thousand faces. Young teacher, start building yours.

"The Crazy Lady" essay by Lawrence Kessenich

                                                                  The Crazy Lady

 essay by Lawrence Kessenich

When you are a child, the world of adults is so vague and mysterious that you tend to put particular adults, especially ones you don’t know that well, into categories that safely define them. For example, on the block where I grew up, in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, there was a small, sweet old woman who lived with her sister – spinsters they were called in those days. We knew nothing about her (including her first name) except that she told us stories, and hence she was dubbed, once and for all, the Story Lady. We could go to the door of her cream-colored brick house at any time of the day and be invited in to her dim, doily-laden living room. She would sit us down on her sagging sofa, pick out a storybook from the piles scattered about room, and read it to us. Sometimes she provided milk and cookies, too, but you couldn’t depend on that (or she might have been dubbed the Cookie Lady, instead), so kids only went there if they loved to hear stories.

            Two houses closer to mine from the Story Lady’s house lived another unmarried woman, who was much closer in age to my parents, which somehow made her strangeness more frightening. I knew no one her age that was single, except for my uncle, the Catholic priest, which made her peculiar in the first place. But what made her really strange, and earned her the nickname the Crazy Lady, was the elaborate process she went through every time she left her house.

            First of all, she never drove anywhere, which was odd enough. And when she set out on foot, sometimes with just her purse, sometimes pulling her metal grocery trolley behind her, it took her a good half hour to get away. First, she would come out the door, lock it, and then turn and walk down the three steps from her front porch to the sidewalk. There she would pause as if she’d forgotten something, turn around, go back up the steps, unlock the door, and go back in. But she would reappear within a few seconds, relock the door, go down the steps, walk half way out her walk, stop, think, and again return to the house. The next time, she would make it all the way to the end of her walk before going back in. The next, she would turn onto the public sidewalk and get to her driveway before returning. This process would be repeated, with her progressing ten or twenty yards further each time before returning, all the way around the block and across the street to the shopping center.

At that point, we would inevitably tire of watching her, so we never discovered if this process continued across the shopping center parking lot and into the stores. But until then, we were perversely fascinated. We had never seen an adult in the grip of obsessive-compulsive behavior – and, of course, at the time, we had no idea that that was what we were seeing. To us, she was simply crazy, and that made her terrifying as well as fascinating. When she appeared outside her front door, we would stop whatever we were doing – playing Home Run Derby with a Wiffle ball, or Pickle between two “bases” on the sidewalk, or Kick the Can in the street – and hide behind our hedge, peaking over or through it to watch her go through her unvarying routine. Not that she would have been likely to notice us, even if we had stood out in the open watching her. She was entirely focused on herself, on whatever it was that was going on in her mind. But we were afraid to find out what would happen if she did notice us staring at her.

Paradoxically, her totally predictable behavior, just because it was so strange, made her seem totally unpredictable to us. She did something that no other adult we knew did, so the possibility always existed that she was capable of other, more threatening behaviors that we’d never observed in an adult before. We wondered if breaking her routine would make her violent toward the people – us – who had caused her to break it. But we weren’t about to risk finding out.

This sense of the Crazy Lady being off-kilter and threatening made going near her house the focus of many dares. “I dare you to run up onto the Crazy Lady’s porch and ring her doorbell,” someone would say. It required at least a “double-dog dare you” to get anyone to respond, and then it was only the bravest among us – the most foolish, we thought – who would actually take the dare. The result was anticlimactic by any objective standard. She would simply open the door, look bewildered, and close it again. But simply getting the Crazy Lady to respond to our summons was enough. It connected us to her craziness directly. We were no longer just observers; we were part of her crazy life, and there was something deliciously weird about that.

I’ve seen many people with quirks and idiosyncrasies since then, of course – many much stranger and more disturbing than the Crazy Lady’s obsessive-compulsive trips back and forth from her house. But I will never forget the look on her heavily made-up face as she would pause, look inside herself, and find something there that compelled her turn around, once again, and go back. It was from the Crazy Lady that I learned just how deeply each of us is embedded in our own consciousness, and how little insight we have into the consciousness of the individuals who surround us. Though the Crazy Lady may have demonstrated it more dramatically than most of us do, we all have our quirks and idiosyncrasies, our little obsessions, that make no sense to anyone but ourselves.

https://www.lawrence-writer.com/biocontact.html

Red Letter Poem #221

 Red Letter Poem #221

 

 

 

 

 

Severity and Invention

 

 

What [A] finds so admirable about [S]

is his severity as well as his invention

of a technique that provides music

with an alternative to tonal harmony

and to classical inflection, color, rhythm.

 

                            ––Edward Said

 

 

 

 Severity and invention—

 how the v’s in the middle of those words yoke together

 opposing impulses

 how the yoked wings levitate and hover

 

 over inflection, color, rhythm

 like the revenant crows

 over the late v-ridden wheatfield of van Gogh’s:

 

 V after dark V darkly arriving, revving—

 making everything veer and waver:

 the vibrating grain, the brush, the path, the wind—

 making the visible reverberate

 and the buried invisible—

 the vanishing point—

 infused in the very canvas.

 

 Also, unhinged, set free:

 available if one is able

 

 to flutter over the void

 at eventide

 and find in the vanishing light

 some wavelength of necessity and delight.

 

 

                                      ––Jennifer Clarvoe

 

 

[Note: the epigraph is taken from Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.  “A” here is Adorno; “S” is Schoenberg.]

 

 

 

 

My commentary in Red Letter #218 was instigated by a question, posed to a small group of friends, by the estimable Askold Melnyczuk: novelist, editor, educator, activist.  He challenged us: “what role can poetry continue to play in a world so riven by violence?”  In my first consideration of the question, I found myself speaking about art-making as a confirmation of the very conception of we, the communality we cannot help but share (even when so much surrounding us seems hellbent on negating that perception.)  This week, I’ve been trying to come to terms with what I find so admirable in this new poem from Jennifer Clarvoe; and I realized her work was clarifying a second aspect of my thinking: the indomitable need to create, and the intrinsic power of beauty.  Even amid a world of widespread brutality, beauty ennobles us––and yes, I realize some will think that concept dated, revealing only my naiveté.  But beauty coaxes us to experience once again that primary delight we felt when we first came to understand that, despite our worst fears, we too are undeniably beautiful (within and without), derived from and embodying the nature of this marvelous existence.  How could we ever stop attempting to recreate that feeling?

 

Jennifer starts us out with an epigraph from Edward Said, the acclaimed Palestinian-American philosopher, literary critic, and political activist.  Said was writing about the late works of great artists and what they reveal about the tension between hard-earned knowledge and "intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”  Does the clear-eyed severity of the critic counter or support the persistent impulse to bring something new into being?  I sense Jennifer’s keen intellect wrestling with that idea––but almost immediately, once the pen is in hand, the creative part of the poet’s word-weaving brain latches onto what might seem at first a trivial perception: those two V’s within the contrasting concepts.  And when those “yoked wings levitate and hover/ over inflection, color, rhythm”, suddenly they morph into a vision of the crows in Van Gogh’s wheat field (yet another ‘late’ work of art, by the way), while the verse is seemingly animated by Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg’s liberating atonal and rhythmic experiments.  Now, V after fricative V begin to mount within the poet’s lines, like vigorous daubs of color on a canvas.  But they also feel like the aural representation of a psychic passageway, opening into the poet’s own memory––and don’t we all, at some point, remember contending with the mystery of visibility and invisibility?  The material nature of our world versus that daunting question about what exists beyond it?  After all, poems seem to arrive out of nowhere; and, taking shape (in the mind, on the page), we can be excused if we think we are participating in something (here comes that naiveté again) almost transcendent.

 

In case any are unfamiliar with this fine poet, let me mention briefly that Jennifer is Professor of English, Emerita, from Kenyon College; the author of two marvelous poetry collections, and scores of poems, essays and reviews featured in journals far and wide; and the recipient of more awards and honors than I’ve space to detail.  Today’s poem will appear in her forthcoming collection, PIANO PIANO.  And, if I may add a personal observation: having experienced the passionate intensity with which Jennifer speaks about poetry, she is the very sort of teacher each one of us dreamed of meeting in our classroom (if our literary stars were perfectly aligned.)  And so, with each reading of “Severity and Invention,” I could feel those countercurrents colliding within the poet’s consciousness––but I was delighted to sense how, in the end, the creative impulse seems to have assumed the upper hand.  What might have begun as a playful investigation––of how sound triggers thought which, in turn, conveys unexpected meaning––ends up feeling like a poet’s psalm.  Plucking V after V on her invisible harp (I counted no less than 27 instances within the body of the poem––and that’s not including the title nor that final bit-lip required to pronounce the poet’s name,) Ms. Clarvoe reflects on how poetic invention culminates in the sort of vigorous delight (now she’s got me doing it!) which, looking up from the page, makes even this ordinary Friday seem a Red Letter day (if you’ve the heart to embrace it.)