Time and the Teacher

Examiner column for April 2.

    If it’s Saturday, I must be writing my school column. I have written hundreds of them, and occasionally have a déjà vu sense that I might have already written this one before. Is that called “déjà écrit”?

    Each year is predictable:  there is a beginning when students and teachers look forward, then there are momentous events, and then there’s settling into the reality of test preparation, then there is (for teachers of seniors) the inevitable battle with the existential condition “senioritis,” and then there is the end.

    Like life, the stages proceed inexorably. Unlike life, teachers have a chance to relive each beginning and end, learning something new each time.

    Writing a column traces that cycle. Each time I enter a new stage, there are few surprises as it arrives, but what takes place can be totally unexpected.  Each year I bring students to productions by The Shakespeare Theatre, and most reactions--- “ I’m only doing this for the extra credit”---are largely predictable.

    But a few are thunderstruck by the power of a live performance of Shakespeare, and it is for those few that I continue to reserve 60 student seats year after year.

    Senior ennui is also inevitable, but surprising exceptions turn up to lend unpredictability to that phenomenon. The children of recent immigrants usually keep their focus right up to the end, for they realize success is a family enterprise. And students who began the year badly cannot afford to come down with senioritis in the spring.

    My columns may have the same topic, yet be different each time I write. Back-to-school night, for example, always starts at 7:30 p.m. and gives teachers and families only a few minutes together, but each year it is totally different.

    The words that come out of my mouth may be similar to the previous year’s, but the other people in the room are entirely new, and their reactions will reflect who they are as much as what I say. Back-to-school night is the same, yet it’s different.

    I have written several columns about the teaching of “Hamlet,” and certainly his words are reliably the same year after year. My lectures on his words, likewise, are nearly the same. But students react in radically different ways.

    This year they were full of  “ewwwwwws” as we spoke of his first soliloquy when we discover that a month after Hamlet’s father’s death, his mother married her brother-in-law. Ewwww indeed.

    The magic of teaching and of writing about teaching is that, year after year, we cheat time. Beginnings, middles, and endings only happen once in life. But for teachers and writers, they happen again and again. The rest of the world grows old and dies, yet in my senior classroom the age is always 17, and every year they have yet to meet Hamlet. I can freeze-frame my class in print. The subjects are the same, yet they’re different.

    My column changes each week, even though I sometimes write on the same subject. Maybe I can’t really cheat time, but sometimes I think I glimpse past its inexorable march into its permanent core. Déjà écrit? It’s the same, yet different.