A Poem for Teachers

Teaching is hard at the best of times. It can be hard for different people, for different reasons. As an introvert, I used to assume that more visibly outgoing people had it easier standing in front of a classroom but then I realised a) being visibly outgoing is an unreliable indicator of extroversion and b) teaching is just hard.

I've found online teaching to be, unexpectedly, a lot easier, at least for some aspects of my shyness. For one thing, I'm not visibly front and centre of the room in the same way. I know that some people love chatting with their students before and after class--online teaching is the first environment where I've found this easy and natural. In person I was never quite sure what to do or say, but in an online classroom I can send chats, or unmute and greet people by name. (I have a horrible memory for names, especially names I've learned aurally, so being able to see everyone's name all the time is the best). I probably overuse the smiley face emoji, but sometimes in an online classroom I actually do feel that smiley. 😄 I like tools such as whiteboards for sharing ideas and analysis, I like how the chat feature in the online classroom enhances communication; I'm even fond of the raised hand function. While teaching online can be incredibly difficult, there are aspects of it I've grown to enjoy.

But teaching during a pandemic has had its share of frustrations. As the poet Stephanie Burt says, we're all 'going to smolder inside sometimes'. One of my favourite things about Stephanie Burt's Callimachus translation (a translation that sits somewhere between Sean Heaney's Beowulf and Sonnet L’Abbé’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare in its adherence to the source text), is the way the ancient poet's language and imagery have been updated for a modern audience. This sometimes has some jarring moments but in poems like this one, it works perfectly:

Try to hold your horses,

rather than chasing them more than once

    around their own track. You'll just end up cracking your skull

on the first tight curve.

I don't read Greek, but if we use the Loeb translation as a comparison:

Hold back from their running the wild horses, and do not race a second time round the course, lest they should shatter your chariot on the turning-post, and you tumble forth headlong. (Callimachus, Musaeus. Aetia, Iambi, Hecale and Other Fragments. Hero and Leander. Edited and translated by C. A. Trypanis, T. Gelzer, Cedric H. Whitman. L (Cambridge, 1973), p. 129)

we can see just how well this works. I love the contrast between the literal translation and the literary one.

Here's hoping there's relatively little in the way of archaic frustrations in your classroom this week...

"fire" by celine nadeau is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Iamb 5, frag, 195

 

You've been my friend for a while. You know you can trust me.

    You know I consider education worthwhile.

And now that you're teaching middle school

    for who knows how long. I'd like to help you see in it

something more than divine punishment.

    You're going to smolder inside sometimes, I know.

We all have. It's an archaic frustration. But if the

    the fire inside you isn't a firestorm, won't

burn forests to charcoal, and needs to be put down,

    just tamp it down yourself. Try to hold your horses,

rather than chasing them more than once

    around their own track. You'll just end up cracking your skull

on the first tight curve. Some lesson that would be,

    and nothing new.

Don't laugh at me and I won't laugh at you.

~Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus (Princeton, 2020), p. 104.

A Diptych for the Golden Crows of Academia

My pandemic reading has involved a lot of poetry.  For one, I've studied it for over eight years and am presently writing a book about it; for another, I find it challenging to pay attention for any great length of time these days. I need reading that makes space for my focus to fracture. Poetry is perfect for this--even long poems have line breaks, allowing my mind to wander and then return.

I wrote in my New Year's resolutions that I wanted to

Celebrate other people's good news. I sometimes feel that academic has a toxic culture of always finding fault, rather than celebrating achievements. Some of my most joyful moments as a historian last year came from celebrating others' achievements or having them celebrate mine. I want to be the kind of person who enjoys a colleague's article or book, hears about their grant or job success, and sends them a note of congratulation.

And then, in my poetry reading over the past month, I came across two poems which for me perfectly talked back to academia's culture of fault-finding. There are so many beautiful phrases in these poems--for example, Jaqypbek's description of people who are rude to those they perceive to be their inferiors

those men

who, like overfed lice and swine,

are rude to the servants sweeping courtyards,

desperate to marry a king's daughter.

has the magic and incisiveness of a fairytale. I hope you enjoy these poems as much as I did.