From “Two Ways of Seeing a River” by Marky Mark:

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: "This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?"

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.”

Ditto, except now substitute conflict for the sunset, metaphor for that slant mark on the water, character change for one of those tumbling boils.

I can no longer read without a second voice inside my head. There are two sets of eyes in my head, one looking to be entertained and learned from a story, the other screaming “Metaphor! Did you see that one?! Did you analyze what it meant in your head? What lexile level do you think it’s on? Would the kids get it?”

It’s strange to have my education as an English major butt up against my education as a teacher and my student’s education as readers. At the college level, majoring in English is little more than majoring in thinking and history, philosophy for people who enjoy thinking but are scared about job prospects and thus study something that will at least look good on a resume to 3% of jobs in the world, rather than the five philosophy positions opening up next year. But what’s significant to me is how much my life as a reader is most deeply connected to thinking and learning, while my students learn skills skills and more skills.

There’s research enough to fill a cruise ship that backs up why this approach works, and yet I can’t remember a time when I was ever conscious of identifying cause and effect or character change in a novel. I learned to read by reading.

I don’t doubt this approach works with my kids. I do doubt that it could ever foster a love for literature. It’s impossible to lose yourself in a story when in the back of your head all you are looking for are keys to foreshadowing. I’m not sure you can fall in love with a character if you analyze the every piece of figurative language centering around her. I fear that my kids might never learn to love books. I fear just as much that I will no longer be able to see them for stories, that by page ten, twenty, one hundred, I still won’t be looking at the picture as it’s been completed so far, but at the way the jigsaw pieces fit together. My students are now always reading over my shoulder, and I’m too obsessed with them to tell them to go away.

There were two metaphors right there. Did you see them? Copy them down in your notebooks and analyze their meanings. Be sure to note the atmosphere they give to the piece. What’s the deeper meaning the author was trying to accomplish?

For their sake, I hope my students forget everything I teach them the minute they leave the class, and then remember it the moment the pass the threshold of my door the next day, as I can’t see how one could enjoy a book without putting out of their minds all that we do. Hopefully, being so young, they can. Myself, so engrossed in this job, I cannot.

-----------------------

In more exciting news, Jake Malcomb stopped by for a night this week on his way out to California. Reminiscing about our travels together was a needed reprieve from the monotony of school life. By luck, happenstance, and some keen directional sense on Jake’s part, we were able to find one of our homestays with the Maasai on Google Earth.

Finding the area was an accomplishment in itself; the fact that such tiny bomas in a forgotten corner of the arid rangelands in Kenya even show up on Google Earth seems just as fantastic (in the original sense of the word). To see for yourself: 2˚53’16.30 S, 37˚35’11.67 E. Debate goes on over which exact boma was ours. Difficulties in such a task include that at least one house was made of mud, thereby being quite portable.

Teaching is at least getting easier. What began as a struggle to find a voice every day and a constant gnawing at the back of my head that the lesson was failing was evolved into a confidence in the classroom whereby any lesson can be saved, any issue can somehow be tackle. Half of teaching is theatrics, and therefore half of it grows far easier once you lose self consciousness. So many times I’ve found myself lecturing in the back of the room without being conscious of how I got there or what I was talking about. It’s an odd sensation that I’ve not really experienced before save for some times at summer camp. I hesitate to call it losing myself in work. More so it’s that teaching quickly falls into the automaticity of everyday life. I’m always tripped up by TSA agents wishing me a good flight. You too, I say, before shaking my head that that’s not quite right. And yet teaching becomes almost more automatic, like waking up from some deep daydream to forget where you are and what you’ve been doing.

All this is good I suppose in that the stresses of the beginning of the year are beginning to slip away. And yet it seems that in their places has crept a lack of consciousness – which I’m not sure is better or worse.

Did you catch that personification there? Can a lack of consciousness actually creep? Does it have feet? What do you picture, then? What does it mean?