The last day of class

It feels quite surreal that today was the last day of classes. I don't want to say goodbye to the classroom. I'll miss the continuous challenge, surprise and delight of what these students bring to the table. I'll miss the way they turn to the class in discussion and say "Shu yani..." ("how do you say...") and conduct a five second discussion to find the right English word before continuing their thoughts. I love that they have this entirely teacher-less process, to which I am witness but cannot be privy, since I don't speak Arabic. I love that it's their thing - that it's an opportunity to practice the concept "It's ok not to know" and it's an opportunity for other students to be directly involved in their classmates' thoughts and responses. Usually, the students that have been listening, know exactly what word the person is looking for, even when several words could be synonyms.

I'll miss that. I'll miss how active this class is about learning - how they so willingly become invested in the story and characters. I recall that moment in Macbeth when Seyton comes on stage in Act V after Macbeth observes that he has "supped full of horrors" and has "forgotten the taste of fears", and Seyton states, simply: "The queen, my lord, is dead."

The class was up in arms. "Miss! Lady Macbeth dies? When? Why? Where? WHY? MISS!" It was fantastic. I don't dare hope that all classes will be similarly willing to thrust themselves into literature so fully.

Today continued their inventive and magnificent comments. I posed this question at the beginning of class for discussion in pairs.

Think of a moment from Macbeth and a moment from the Ted Hughes poetry that seem, to you, somehow related.

Here are some of the notes, and I'll explain what each student said.

Things once normal become strange: Z and M talked about how in "The Owl" the speaker's world is at first normal, but seen through the eyes of the owl (depending on your interpretation), the world takes on a foreign and bizarre, otherworldly quality. They connected that moment to the night after Macbeth kills King Duncan, when weak owls attack strong falcons, where night continues into the day time, and horses rebel against their owners and eat each other. Things suddenly are bizarre and unnatural.

Building on the idea of chaos in nature, Y and D had great ideas comparing this distortion of natural systems in nature with the distortion of nature in "Wind". Y said, in "Wind," the chaos and wild events taking place during the storm are scary and threatening, but still, it's just nature going about it's normal course. In Macbeth, the chaos in nature is unnatural, and truly disturbing, as opposed to just scary. One gets the sense in Macbeth that the chaos represents a true violation of nature, not just a violent side of nature. It was so excellent!

N built even more on this point, saying, the chaos in "Wind" is created by nature, and it makes the humans afraid. In Macbeth, the chaos is caused by a human. She pointed out that we are afraid and uncomfortable with chaos and lack of calm when it's caused by something outside of us (nature) but we are apt to create chaos ourselves in the human world. I was so impressed.

The other great point made was about being encaged, and being unable to escape. J spoke quite coherently about how the Jaguar is encaged by outer oppressors, and cannot escape because of the physical bars around him. Macbeth, though, is also unable to escape, but the thing keeping him trapped is his own past, his own sinful actions. He is also lonely because of the secret that he's trying to keep hidden (that he killed the king) while the Jaguar is lonely because he seems to be the only animal who knows about freedom - the apes, parrots, and lion and tiger seem to have forgotten. So his "secret" ("there's more to life than this zoo") also keeps him lonely.

I will miss this. I will miss beaming at them during such conversations, thrilled to be hearing their brains in action.

Sitting here, at this cafe, drinking arabic coffee, swatting the dozen flies that seem to have chosen my table while leaving all others untouched, holding my breath as clouds of argila smoke engulf my table every 20 seconds, I am very glad that I'll be back in the classroom soon. Well, I'm also terrified of starting again in a new class. My current students are like extended family that I can joke with and push just the right amount for them; whose writing I know well, and can say as I did in a writing conference this morning, "A, you're a straight forward guy. You like things to be clear and follow a predictable, logical order. Is that right?" and already know that I was right. That comfort is so comfortable. 

But the process of getting there has also been exciting too. I remember writing to my colleague William at the beginning of the year and exclaiming that the students that had moved from his tenth grade class into my eleventh grade class were wonderful. I gave my first impressions of them, and said how cool it was to have them in class. So even at that point, getting to know their personalities was rewarding. 

Still, the idea of standing in front of a new classroom and having to start from square 1 with expectations, classroom norms and attitudes toward literature, not knowing who in the class will be the kind of person to challenge my authority, to challenge my knowledge, to challenge my deadlines... is frightening. But it's the kind of frightening that also makes me smile. As in, ok, let's do it.