Evan Clary: Classroom Vigil

Much of the satisfaction that teaching provides, as has been well reported, is in the sense of empowerment we teachers experience:  after all, we have a charge no less awesome than the shaping of young minds, and, for better and for worse, the children tend to do as we say, and believe what we tell them is true.  We  all enjoy this feeling, at one time or another.   But sometimes the satisfaction of teaching is in finding yourself superfluous, in recognizing that your students have learned so well that they can, in effect, educate themselves, no longer requiring that you hold them by the hand and show them the meaning, not just of a particular idea, but of meaning itself.  When they arrive independently at this precipice, and when the abyss returns their pointed stare, they see why education matters.  
 
The other day in one of my English classes, the juniors were discussing a poem by Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” (read it at: http://www.bartleby.com/142/122.html). I began the conversation by pointing out some of the oddities of the poem: syntactical inversions, apostrophe directed at a corpse, the ambiguous relationship between the speaker and the dead soldier.   I asked why the moment was ‘wondrous and sweet,’ rather than doleful and solemn.  The students thought it was both.  They argued, at first to me and then to each other, that the problematic, unresolved nature of the speaker’s relationship with the dead soldier meant that his feelings about the meaning of the moment were similarly unresolved.  From this the students volleyed, back and forth across the room, allusions to other war poems and stories they had read in their Newman career, from Tennyson to Wilfred Owen to Tim O’Brien.  I listened.  They began to debate whether it’s possible to honor soldiers without supporting the war that fells them, and ultimately, whether there are good wars, and whether the two in which this country is presently engaged qualify as such.  At no moment did their conversation escape the confines of civility, even though the students appreciated the gravitas of the subject, and they constantly referred their remarks back to literature they’d experienced at Newman.  At the end of class, nothing had been resolved, but the students had moved from analysis of an abstruse, 19th century poem into discussion of a contemporary issue of burning relevance.  The educational theorist in me applauded the students’ inductive logic and wanted to spell it out for them; the teacher in me said “game, set, match,” and called it a day.
 
I was made to wonder, as I packed up my things, how often similar conversations carry on at home, around the dinner table or in the tv room?  How often do students’ seem to integrate their lessons into their development as young people, beyond the confines of the classroom walls and the motive of the good grade?