A to B: Why I Got into Education

Posted January 27, 2009
By Ken Templeton

Music to My Ears

Sam turns the pages with skeptical distaste. "We're gonna read all this by the end of class?" Friday afternoon in May, senior English, reading T.S. Eliot: recipe for disinterest. We take turns, reading in a circle, voices passing the poem to one another -- "Let us go, then, you and I" -- voices lingering on unexpected rhymes -- "Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" . . . hesitance and confidence commingling around the words; the sounds of the poem are foreign and familiar, echoing the paradox Sam shared with me about Auden: "I understand the words," he said, "but I have no idea what this poem says."

There would be no discussion today; the poem would just be read and allowed to settle in our minds over the weekend. Sam, usually frustrated by the labyrinthine paths to meaning in poetry, was unusually alert, straight-backed, attentive, and energetic. He read the final line. "Till human voices wake us," his voice rose, and paused here, before hammering the last three words in three measured beats: "and we drown."

If I am honest, it started for me, not with Eliot or Auden, Shakespeare or Shelley, but a different sort of poetry: the songs in my parents' collection of 33s and 45s -- Jimi, Joni, and Janis. Saturday mornings spent laying the vinyl on the turntable and nervously, carefully dropping the needle onto the grooves, hearing the satisfying hush and crackle before its spare rhythm was gently subsumed by Paul Butterfield's harmonica or Nina Simone's lonesome, lovely voice. Although the music drew me in, it was the lyrics that stuck.

I sat and learned those words without any deliberate determination to do so, committing whole libraries of lyrics to memory, wanting to hear what I knew was coming because it was so satisfying to hear these important words captured perfectly and with such variety. Bob Dylan cooing, "I like your smile and your fingertips, / I like the way that you move your hips, / I like the cool way you look at me. / Everything about you is bringin' me misery." I didn't know what that meant then at age 12, and maybe I still don't. T.S. Eliot argued, "Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood." The eagerness to lose myself in those songs, the cousins of the poems I now teach, an ear pressed to the hi-fi, gave me access to the knowledge and self-knowledge I now possess. Thinking about the first experiences that told me unequivocally that words matter, my memory conjures an image of a boy sitting on the floor by the phonograph, eyes closed, singing along; a stack of records waiting their turn.

Last January, my mother called to deliver good news and bad news: the good news was that everyone was safe; the bad that a fire had started in the apartment next door and spread to my parents' attic and, due to smoke, fire, and water damage, my parents had to move. The fire department said that large numbers of books in my parents' townhouse accelerated the fire. Not three weeks earlier, I had stood in the hallway upstairs, fingering the spines on the shelves my father had crudely installed years ago, pulling out a collection of Sylvia Plath, with "Emmy Woodcock" written in blue ink on the first page -- my mother's maiden name, the name old friends called her when we'd go back to Maine. It wasn't the books, though, that evoked feelings of loss, permanent and irreparable. Tears first came to my eyes when my mother said in a smoke-induced whisper, "We lost the records."

Out of nowhere, songs came to mind, one after another, songs I hadn't heard in years, songs I would have never thought to play again. Dave Van Ronk, singing in his playful, gravelly baritone about a poor man's 15-cent dinner, "The little man felt ill at ease, / 'Could I have some bread, sir, if you please.' / The waiter shouted down the hall, / 'Ya gets no bread with one meatball!'" Pete Seeger leading a Carnegie Hall audience in a sing-along, climbing the highest notes over the steady chorus of "We Shall Overcome." The songs returned in nostalgic perfection, with no scratches on the vinyl to cause a skip or stutter through the best part, singing to me that they could never be lost.

The bell rang and my students filed out, but Sam remained in his seat, looking stunned. "You all right?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, getting out of his chair. "I just didn't know you could do that." With his backpack open, he went to slide the poem in between two neat binders, but stopped and zipped his bag with the poem still in his hand. "Didn't know what?" I asked. Sam read: "'Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.' . . . That," he said. He shook his head and walked out to a world that must have looked and felt slightly different than the one he'd known a scant few minutes before.

Teaching English is about the moments when a student is caught and held by what he reads or hears, like a child noticing his shadow for the first time. Sam would never call himself a reader and often complained about the books we read in class. "Shakespeare," he said, "doesn't do it for me." Reading for pleasure was "stupid," and his most common question about poetry was, "if that's what it means, why didn't the poet just write that?"

I have long prided myself on my ability to explain the complexities of English to students who were baffled by them. Even as a high school student, I was a writing tutor who could demystify the bane of many students' lives, the argumentative essay. When my classmates rubbed their foreheads in frustration and said, "I just wish I got writing," I would gesture to the diagram of five neat boxes, each representing a paragraph, and say, "You've got the ideas. Just plug 'em in." As a teacher, I have brought this same approach, offering diagrams, acronyms, and organizers. And despite having built many a bridge to literature for my students, they have been, at best, temporary structures, sturdy enough only to pass a test, score a bit higher on the SAT, or write an argument in a predictable form.

I chatted recently with a former student who has trouble playing the game of high school. Derek had his sweatshirt hood pulled over his head and turned off his iPod to hear me ask how things were going. And then we spoke for 20 minutes about his small engine repair class at the vocational high school in Portland, Maine. For the first time, I saw this young man speak passionately about his education. I asked him how he'd decided to enter the program. "Ever since I was a little kid, I've been tinkering around with this stuff," he said. "Lawnmowers, outboard motors, dirt bikes. Couldn't keep my hands off them." We said goodbye, but I have not yet shaken the image of Derek as a boy, turning over an engine in his hands, secure in something he loves. I felt an affinity for that kind of investment; recalling my own obsession with records, and subsequently with literature, helped me understand his attraction to machines.

When deciding what to teach and how to teach it, teachers often look for "enduring understandings" and ask themselves the question, if you meet your students in 50 years, what is the one thing you hope they have retained from your classroom? One thing to keep, to possess, to own, to hold, when all else is lost. Most of what I learned as a student has drifted into time and oblivion. Even English class is full of loss -- though I read Moby-Dick in high school, rereading it this year was l
ike coming to it for the first time. Losing my parents' records showed me what I would like my students to know 50 years from now. Sam's wonder and Derek's passion extended this notion beyond my own immediate frame of reference. Knowledge leans toward loss: It is unpredictably tenuous, ephemeral, and prone to dissolution. But what you love, through all destruction, remains.

-- Ken Templeton, Ed.M.'08, teaches English at Gorham High School in Gorham, Maine.

illustration by Jeff Hopkins