Ode to an Empty Classroom in June

In my 26 years of teaching literature, each June has been the same. The students go. I stay. I’m like Keats’ Joy: My hand is ever at my lips bidding adieu. Sometimes I want to cry out, “Stop! Come back! I have more things to tell you.” But they leave, and I never teach that final lesson.

I admit I haven’t always been a good teacher. Years ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school and well-crammed with facts, I was so eager to impart all I knew that I scarcely allowed the students to open their mouths. There was a lot of lecturing but not much learning. Later, I calmed down. I quit spilling information and trying to prove I was Superscholar but I never turned into Ms. Chips. I was always conscious of the chasm between what I felt about literature and what I could express.

There are still days when I realize that I’m teaching the course and not the kids, when I fumble and drone and the poem we are studying stays on the page, a lump of black letters. Yet there are other times when I bring light to the poetry, and the words and the students wake.

Teaching is one of the eternal mysteries. A colleague once told me that his mother, the best teacher in Bradford, Pa., had solved the riddle. “It’s how many hands go up,” she said, “out of how many children in the class.” That worked for her, but my teaching would fail by this quantitative measure. Perhaps there are no special tricks. My aim is to create in my students an awareness of what literature is and what it can give them. Of course, we’ve all heard the bromide that teachers don’t actually have any effect on students. “The bright ones learn no matter who teaches them. The others don’t.” Not true. Good teaching stirs and lousy teaching stifles. The results can last a lifetime.

I often think about my favorite professors from my undergraduate years at the University of Washington. The professor of Romantic poetry whose slight limp became pronounced when we studied the lame Lord Byron. The Shakespeare professor lumbering around the room like a caged bear. The poet who told us that a teacher is one who carries on his education in public. The scholar of Middle English who hid behind his lectern, but whose voice softened and deepened when he read a passage he loved. What I remember about these teachers is not so much what they taught as how they became joyously lost in their subjects. They made my mind buzz. They stretched and enriched my ears. They led me in ever widening circles.

Recently, I received a letter from a student who was in my class in 1970. “I hope you recall with some fondness my essay on Chaucer,” he writes. I search my memory, but I could paper the road from London to Canterbury with all the Chaucer essays I’ve read, and I don’t recollect his. But then he adds, “I know that I shall not forget the grass you tossed in my mouth when I had the effrontery to fall asleep during a poetry reading on the Olive Walk.” Suddenly, the spring afternoon comes back to me. The mellow sunlight. The warm air. One of my colleagues in the literature department is reading Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” How he rolls the vocables! And my student, young and easy, dozes under the olive boughs. Happy as the grass is green, I flick a few blades at him to rouse him to hear the rhythms. Teaching is one of the few professions that allow love.

A quarter of a century has darted away. Another academic quarter has ended. I stand in the classroom and look at the empty chairs. Is it chalk dust that makes my throat go dry? Maybe a few students have learned something they will value years hence. And there will be a new crop in the fall. I’ll do a better job then--as every teacher promises every spring.