Teaching a Text Twice

Ten years ago I taught a short poem to a group of second-years. Sixteen lines, plain diction, a single image of a field at evening. I did it badly. I arrived with a prepared reading and a neat handout, and I spent forty minutes steering the discussion toward the conclusion I had already reached. The students, kind people, nodded.

This term the poem came round again, in a different course, and I found my old handout in a drawer. It was an uncomfortable reunion. The pencilled notes were confident. Several were wrong.

What had not changed

The poem, obviously. Sixteen lines, the same field, the same odd stress on the penultimate word. That's the miracle of a text: it stays still, patiently, while everything around it moves. I read it aloud to the new group and it sounded exactly as it had before.

What had

Nearly everything else. I had lost a parent in the interval, and the line about the field going quiet no longer read as a landscape; it read as an event. The students, meanwhile, were not the same students. Ten years earlier they'd come to the poem through an inherited vocabulary of symbol and theme. This group came through sound. One of them, a quiet young man at the back, asked why the poet had made us wait so long for the verb.

I had never noticed the wait. I read the sentence again and there it was, a delay stretched across three lines, which shaped the whole feeling of the poem. It had been there all along.

The lesson I keep relearning

We speak of "teaching a text" as if we were delivering a finished thing. But what I did on both occasions was provide a place and a time for a poem to meet some people, and the meeting was different each time because the people were. The poem wasn't the variable. We were.

A text is a fixed point. The reading is the weather.

I put that on the board this term and then, because it sounded too neat, rubbed half of it off.

For colleagues who teach the same books year after year

I know the temptation to reuse your notes. I do it myself, and I don't want to be pious about it. But I have started to date my handouts and to keep the old ones. Before each new term I read my previous year's annotations and ask myself where I'd now disagree. The disagreement is a map of what's happened to me, and it makes a surprisingly good starting point for the next seminar.

I'm no longer embarrassed by the handout from ten years ago. It's a record of an earlier reader, who read in good faith and made mistakes. I would like to think I'll look back at this term's notes in the same spirit, with fondness and some alarm.