Neil Holm

A friend sent me a copy of a poem by Bruce Dawe called Living with Distant Relatives: a teacher reflects:

When the last text for the year disappears
in the distance you have the same sense of relief
you experience when the last of a series of
constantly demanding relatives drives off:
you can hardly believe your good fortune
as you plan the first of a number of excitingly
self-indulgent things you have planned to do . . .
But then, shortly afterwards, you put down the thriller,
switch off the suddenly silly movie, close that longed-for
escape-hatch, admitting to yourself that it seems, after all,
that you have been too well-trained in turn
by those same distant relatives and begin, instead,
framing a disgustingly obsequious letter inviting them
to return as soon as possible, hardly bothering to conceal
your deeply ingrained eagerness . . .

I don’t know if Dawe exactly catches my feelings as a teacher but there is a truth there that resonates. Perhaps it is the sense that despite the demands of teaching, there is a built-in renewal in the process. Perhaps teachers’ need to teach is a little like an addiction — we go “cold-turkey” but before too long we need a “fix” — and the “fix” comes not from exercising control and authority, not from manipulating minds, but from eagerly engaging with “relatives”.

Alison McGee in a blog titled Living Across Genres: The Work of the Artist Teacher reveals some related feelings. I’d like to quote her a little:

Our community colleges and state universities are not prestigious institutions, nor are they famous. They are not peopled by 18 22 year olds with prep school backgrounds, or by those who graduated valedictorian in their public schools. They are in many ways a reflection of the sort of people I write about ordinary people.

I have lived my life casting my glance to the periphery, absorbing the wisdom and beauty in the sidelong, the peripheral,the unknown and unnoticed. Many of my students at Metro come to a writing workshop having been silenced in
elementary school, or held back by a life with more than its share of burdens. Whatever circuitous paths they have taken to arrive in my classroom, they are finally able to act on the lifelong desire to make art.

As a Christian, I am drawn to her idea of casting glances to the periphery, absorbing wisdom and beauty in the sidelong, the unknown and the unnoticed. This is what Jesus hints at when he talks of the need to have eyes to see and ears to hear
Alison goes on:

But the relationship with my students means that I can’t withdraw. Teaching means I must remain grounded in this messy world. This position of teacher is a trust which I have been offered and accepted. The students will give me their best work, something from the privacy of their time and their lives, and I will give back to them my thoughts, as a writer, on how best to bring that work to its fullest self. . . . Because I’m aware that the faces they present to the class are only surface manifestations of their lives, and because I want to know who they truly are, the world opens up to me.

When she says this she reflects some of Dawe’s thoughts about “deeply ingrained eagerness”.