Patience, Grasshopper

I have two sections of American lit this semester.  Each class has a distinct personality, with the night class dominated by a very smart and well-read girl who has some boundary issues; she does not know when she shouldn’t wave her hand wildly and digress to show off how much she knows.  I can deal with her, though.  I gently tease her:  “No,” I say.  “I’m not calling on you again until someone else says something.”  The day class has a completely different vibe, as we used to say in California.  So far, I had been feeling a little down about them–they had no spark, no kick, no interest.  Getting them to talk was like lugging a huge load of cold, wet blankets up a dark, narrow staircase.

Today, though, they came alive, thanks to my good friend, Ralph Waldo.  We rocked and rolled on “The Poet,” and for about twenty minutes, I had to do virtually nothing but point at the next hand that was in the air.  One girl in particular got it.  She is a multiply-pierced goth chick, and I had been getting especially frustrated with her, because I sensed there was something literary burning behind the dark mascara and dyed hair.  She herself writes poetry, and when she raised her hand before I even finished my introductory remarks, I thought, Finally–she’s going to show how smart she really is.  When she made a point on her own that I thought I would have to sweat over for half an hour before I could make the class understand, I wanted to hug her.  Without too much prodding, people were drawing connections between Nature and today’s reading, seeing that because words are symbols of natural facts and natural facts are symbols of spiritual facts, the poet, the namer and sayer, must be guiding us through the path from word to nature to spirit.  Wild.  When Emerson proclaims that the poet is a liberating god (a liberating god!!) we jumped back to “man is a god in ruins” and we ran with it.  We were liberated ourselves.

Patience.  I sometimes try to force things, but every class cannot be golden.  Some groups need to slop through the muck before enjoying the sunshine. Set the stage, prime the pump, cue the music, mercilessly mix your metaphors as Ralph Waldo teaches, and let it happen.  Don’t force it.  Patience.