Rethink.

Did I Miss Any­thing? (from poetry 180)
Tom Way­man

Noth­ing. When we real­ized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Every­thing. I gave an exam worth
40 per­cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some read­ing due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Noth­ing. None of the con­tent of this course
has value or mean­ing
Take as many days off as you like:
any activ­i­ties we under­take as a class
I assure you will not mat­ter either to you or me
and are with­out purpose

Every­thing. A few min­utes after we began last time
a shaft of light sud­denly descended and an angel
or other heav­enly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wis­dom in this life and
the here­after
This is the last time the class will meet
before we dis­perse to bring the good news to all peo­ple
on earth.

Noth­ing. When you are not present
how could some­thing sig­nif­i­cant occur?

Every­thing. Con­tained in this class­room
is a micro­cosm of human expe­ri­ence
assem­bled for you to query and exam­ine and pon­der
This is not the only place such an oppor­tu­nity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

Com­ment:

The Library of Con­gress main­tains the poetry 180 project, and it is phe­nom­e­nal — nearly every poem I’ve read from there is a gem, and if a high school stu­dent could dis­cuss just one of them well, I would have absolutely no reser­va­tions about the future. One prob­lem with con­tin­ual rant­ing about lim­ited gov­ern­ment is that some­times gov­ern­ment does things spec­tac­u­larly well; I think poetry 180 is an exam­ple, I do know some schools use this in their cur­ric­ula (how well they use it, that’s another story). Some of you will imme­di­ately ask why a pri­vate foun­da­tion can’t pro­vide some­thing like this; it’s a good ques­tion and peo­ple who are [and more impor­tantly, those who aren’t] giv­ing money to edu­ca­tion pri­vately should be asked why they’re not fund­ing some­thing like that (ahem. this blog. *cough*). I sus­pect if we ask that last ques­tion in earnest we’re going to find that a lot of us con­fuse “free­dom” with “get­ting every­thing we want” and “instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion.” Even the way we con­ceive of our char­i­ta­ble giv­ing is shaped by our desires, our fears, and we don’t worry about read­ing well or think­ing through a prob­lem as much as secur­ing what one can as soon as possible.

Any­way, onto the poem. You’ll notice if you go to the poetry 180 site that the stan­zas which begin with “Every­thing” are indented; the poem seems to be a teacher mulling his response to an oft-asked ques­tion, and yeah, I’ve asked this of plenty of teach­ers. There are six stan­zas but var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions of which “Nothing/Everything” stan­zas go together. “Hands folded… in silence, for the full two hours” sounds like prayer and med­i­ta­tion; it goes more with an appear­ance of an angel than with the stanza imme­di­ately fol­low­ing it. Stan­zas 3 through 6 seem to be a heck of a lot deeper than the first two, though. The teacher’s dia­logue with him­self hits some­thing which causes him to think.

I’ll sug­gest that despite the almost-religious image of the first stanza, and the idea of 90% of a grade being “Every­thing,” what gets the teacher think­ing is the dis­tinc­tion between “value” and “mean­ing.” The first two stan­zas describe a student’s sense of value — Was I missed? What’s required of me to get out of this class once and for all? The teacher unwit­tingly, in describ­ing how he would respond to a stu­dent those first two stan­zas, brought up the ques­tion of mean­ing which is sep­a­rate from the ques­tion of value. We may attempt to say that a teacher has a dif­fer­ent set of val­ues than the stu­dent, and is impos­ing them on how he reads the student’s ques­tion: there is no ques­tion of “mean­ing,” it’s the same thing as “value.” I think the two are dis­tinct because we can eas­ily see a teacher in his own life respond­ing to neces­si­ties. He doesn’t want to be missed or fail the tests that life throws at him either. And we can go fur­ther and say that a teacher’s job is to be con­cerned that his stu­dents act prop­erly toward each other and enforce stan­dards directly rel­e­vant to the stu­dent. What sep­a­rates the teacher in this case is that the teacher can ask what things mean. But ask­ing what things mean is a sus­pen­sion of real­ity: “pur­pose” is now clouded. The teacher is lit­er­ally right to a degree in say­ing that the activ­i­ties of the class are “with­out pur­pose;” it took me a while to real­ize that the best classes are the ones you pre­pare for ahead of time. In other words, all the skills that would be use­ful are explored and mas­tered on one’s own, and then you come to class not only as a kind of check-up, but for some­thing more that you wouldn’t have dis­cov­ered on your own (I know, I know, there are dif­fer­ent sorts of classes with dif­fer­ent uses blah blah. Trust me on this one).

The fourth stanza’s reli­gious imper­a­tive is a response to the sense of value of the first two stan­zas and not as cyn­i­cal as it seems. It’s actu­ally a descrip­tion of what every stu­dent and teacher wants: united in pur­pose, all of us now have the truth and there is no need for any other exams. “Divine wis­dom” lies out­side the class­room but the class­room gave the indis­pens­able means to achiev­ing it. What was learned was obvi­ously so valu­able that the class itself is an obsta­cle. It must dis­perse; every­thing that could be learned in this set­ting was learned.

Our teacher’s thoughts have to move away from the myth of the fourth stanza; even if one is reli­gious, one has to admit that noth­ing given in that stanza was real, even though it describes our expec­ta­tions exactly. It describes our expec­ta­tions per­fectly because of its unre­al­ity: it promises imme­di­ate ful­fill­ment in a task, and therein lies another trap mod­ern edu­ca­tion has fallen into. We think work and busy­ness alone are admirable; the truth has been revealed by the fact of the United States (“the land of oppor­tu­nity”). We for­get that a lot of peo­ple get jobs to get other peo­ple off their case; some of the most ambi­tious peo­ple I know aren’t employed but are work­ing in other senses. We also for­get that intel­lec­tual mas­tery is an entirely dif­fer­ent sort of work than work itself.

The fifth stanza sounds almost Zen — a con­cep­tion of reli­gion alien to many of us in the U.S. If the fourth stanza is a Chris­t­ian “Every­thing,” the fifth seems to be an East­ern “Noth­ing.” It marks the first time the teacher is think­ing about the actual work the stu­dent does, and what the stu­dent brings to it and gets out of it. I don’t think there’s any knock on reli­gion or Chris­tian­ity here: the point is sim­pler. Con­fronta­tion with the Other pushes us to ask what we don’t know. The ques­tion of “mean­ing” is now divorced from that of “truth:” what is sig­nif­i­cant involves “pres­ence,” but whether or not any­one will arrive at the truth is an open question.

Finally, a makeshift answer, a “90% is every­thing” sort — the last stanza empha­sizes the lim­i­ta­tion of the class­room (“mir­co­cosm,” “assem­bled,” “not the only place”). “Query”/“examine”/“ponder” — the move­ment from ques­tions to won­der occurs because of knowl­edge; this is a belief, a sense of the classroom’s value. We arrive at the teacher’s sense of value pre­cisely because the teacher does not know every­thing but is curi­ous what things mean. Know­ing what things mean involves set­tling for the truth one can get: the whole is out­side of one’s scope, note that ques­tions can only be asked where there are lim­its. But that “truth” doesn’t yield “mean­ing” imme­di­ately, if ever. One uses “value” to bridge that gap, and “value” is per­haps even more lim­ited. Does this mean the stu­dent is cor­rect? Absolutely not — his “value” reduces life to being missed (Strauss’ “Restate­ment on Xenophon’s Hiero:” what char­ac­ter­izes the tyrant is his want to be loved) and get­ting grades. The value of the class­room is an aware­ness of its lim­i­ta­tion. Pre­cisely because there are other places — the whole of life — the class­room is all the more impor­tant. Peo­ple mock the­o­rists as utterly imprac­ti­cal: in doing this, they advance one the­ory and see only one side of life.

• My New Addic­tion: Mak­ing Mini-Tours of the Internet
• The For­ma­tion of the Soul: On Dickinson’s “The Soul selects her own Soci­ety…” (303)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “Away from Home are some and I” (821)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “How well I knew Her not” (837)
• Mar­vin Bell, “Mars Being Red” (h/t Mar­garet Soltan)

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