Oh Captain! My Captain! Rise Up and Hear the Bells.

Like most couples who have been together for a while, Dan and I have developed our own language and repertoire of childish, domestic games. One such game is called Falling Rock. Its premise is simple. Dan surprise attacks me. He hurls his 180 pound frame onto my weakling body yelling "Falling Rock!", at which point I must attempt to extricate myself from his dead weight. Because I have no upper body strength, and he tends to land on my arms, I usually just lie there. That's how you play Falling Rock.

My prolonged absence from the blogosphere (three months) has to do mostly with school, which initiated its own little game of Falling Rock in early August and never let up. I have to periodically take a hiatus from writing to appreciate my need for it -- words start to accumulate until I practically bloat from them, until my brain is so distended that one day I come home and say to myself "I think I'd rather write than watch Heidi Montag celebrate another birthday or New Years." (The only thing more pathetic than watching The Hills is watching reruns of The Hills).

This fall term was exhausting. For the first time in my teaching career, I visibly bored a majority of poetry students. With a room full of non-English majors fulfilling an elective, I shouldn't have expected Russian Acmeism to win out over a cellphone game of Bejeweled. But I did. I taught my heart out, over and over in a kind of lyric loop, and my reward was unmindful apathy. I'm careful to write "unmindful" because student texting isn't an aggressive affront. Indifference is default, almost sweet.

I made the mistake of showing Dead Poets Society the final week of class. I'm not sure what possessed me to give my students a Tinseltown example of professorial bravura, to reinforce the reality that they didn't form a secret society and meet up in an cave and read aloud to each other from Keats and worship me. While Meditations in an Emergency inspired only slight meditation, this film was of unparalleled interest. No one slept, no one texted. They arrived on time. Two boys in the front row cupped their chins in their hands like Precious Moments figurines. So I've been giving the Robin Williams phenomenon a lot of thought.



What exactly is my teaching style? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to describe what I don't do especially well: carpe diem, stand on my desk, rip out anthology pages, teach motivational phrases via kickball, touch shy students on the face to encourage spontaneous public composition. When we spent a week on "Song of Myself," we didn't sound our barbaric yawps. My approach was to, well, read the poem. All of it, not just the lines that lend themselves to email signatures. Rogert Ebert, in his 1989 review of Dead Poets Society (he only gave it 2 stars) writes "at the end of a great teacher's course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher's semester, all they really love is the teacher." He's right. When I paused the movie, and asked my class who penned "I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world," no one could tell me. No one really cared.

In my freshman rhetoric class, I teach a 1997 Harper's essay by Mark Edmundson called "On the Uses of a Liberal Arts Education." In it, he argues that college is an extension of consumer culture -- that students purchase their education and therefore demand to be enlightened and entertained. But like Edmundson, I don't want to entertain. At least not all the time. I resent relying on stories of working fast food service at Disney to make a point about Billy Collins, or impersonating John Berryman.



Most days, I just want the poems to speak for themselves. Is that possible? I want to be jovial and approachable but not have to compete with cellphones for attention. Our class would have been a whole lot better off if I hadn't felt the need to coddle them with media, to screen that Whitman documentary that culminated in a two minute homo-erotic scene with blousy shirts (note to self: pre-view!). Edmundson writes:

I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says that she "enjoyed" the course -- and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations -- somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind.

I'm so hard on my teacherly self, choosing to focus on those I don't reach, ignoring the thank you letters on the fridge. It's hypocritical to resist performance and still wish to be someone's Captain, but there you have it.