Dead Poets Society

We are all food for worms.

Dead Poets Society bemoans bad parenting and a failed preparatory school model and the loss of one great teacher as a scapegoat, but one can extrapolate. The film works as a requiem for our youthful flirtation with idealism, teachers and students alike.

We're shown the culture of the school. Rigorous academic standards. Expectations of excellence defined by people too old to understand what excellent looks like at 18 — what the world looks like at 18 — and the fogeys' cynicism/realism becomes their substitute for idealism once they realize their own dreams have fled. Their fire has died, the embers now as cool as the distance between them and the students whose best interests they purport to serve.

And then John Keating enters a classroom, whistling "The 1812 Overture," walks right out the back door, and beckons his new students to follow. He urges them to make their lives extraordinary..."gather ye rosebuds while ye may." We are all food for worms. He connects on the first day. He doesn't need a syllabus. He doesn't need a diagnostic, a pre-test, some kind of yardstick. He has something greater. The students don't realize this at first: "That was weird." Yet Keating reaches them, through mild acts of rebellion and encouraging them to embrace self-determination.

Good teachers want to do just one thing: connect. You connect, and you can teach anybody anything. For some, that connection with students is through mutual passions: a love for literature, art, science, math, history. For others, that connection comes from kindred spirits — a similar sense of humor, a similar personality, similar pet peeves, identification with someone older...maybe a role model, a template by which we combat the unknown. We don't need treats; our students aren't pets. We don't need recognition. We just need to make consistent connections in order to feel that we're making a difference through the miasma.

I have a lot to learn about teaching, but in less than a decade of experience, I've had more than my share of students stick around after class to talk. I've had plenty follow me back to my office to continue a conversation started in class, or just to talk about whatever. I get people who thank me, years on, for something I barely remember saying in class. I have the benefit of youthfulness and (fleeting) relevance despite my increasing age — I'm now almost twice the age of the typical incoming freshman. Somehow I can still do this.

I did the math recently. I started teaching in 1999, and aside from a year or so here and there, I've been teaching ever since. In that time, I've taught something like 80 class sections of at least 20 students. That's more than 1,000 students (conservative estimate). Not all of them liked my class or even me for that matter. Some thought I was a wanker. Most returning students, ages 40 and up, usually female, can't stand me, and I've never known why (I've stopped wondering). You can't please everybody, and frankly, my job is not to please people.

Sometimes, though, a student or batch of students stands out. They bring their passion to class — passion, how refreshing in a sea of apathy — they want to learn, want to read, want to work, see the point, and most of all, they don't make excuses. They just kick ass.

Those people keep me going. They challenge me to be better.

My high school creative writing teacher, Mr. Williams, was my John Keating. He saw in me a passion for words, and he encouraged me when I wanted to write but didn't know how — when I needed an outlet and had nothing. He let me use his typewriter, a great electric with a correcting ribbon, years before computers were in the classroom. I wrote poems then. I also filled five notebooks with experimental fiction, or at least that's the only thing I can call the stuff now (better than "misguided tripe"). All I wanted to do was write, and maybe someday reach people.

I never stood on a desk and shouted, "O Captain! My Captain!" but Mr. Williams, at last check, was still teaching at my high school, some 17 years after I left. We haven't seen each other in several years, but the last time, he invited me over for tea and we talked about writing. As I sit here on the couch, tapping this out, I look up at the home around me and realize that my house and his house have nearly identical floor plans. I don't know what this means, but I can't help but wonder if this is relevant somehow. Kindred spirits need kindred dwellings?

Such is the parallel with Dead Poets Society, when Keating's students ask him about the club and he tells them. His students go to the same cavern, and in the best tradition of misreading (nodding to Harold Bloom, and my former colleague Fred Johnson here), the students tell each other scary stories at first, but slowly they turn to poetry, and something in them finds flight.

Unfortunately, in this age, and in every age, those who do not teach, who do not understand teaching, get to make decisions that affect teachers. They are taxpayers, politicians, boosters, spouses of important people in the community, owners of corporations that make voting machines, and, yes, the occasional misguided administrator who lost his/her soul in the name of upward mobility. Teaching is plagued by budget cuts, insufficient materials, outdated textbooks, bad hires, forced fires, poor methods of evaluation, simple forgetfulness of what life was like in the classroom, and the crushing pressure we take home at night, and we must bear all of this with relatively little complaint in order to keep our dream job. Socrates was sentenced to die. John Keating was fired. We know.

Now teaching is an unending list of expectations. Teach overcrowded classes with the same verve as we would teach individuals. Inspire like we have an unending supply, like we don't go home tonight with our own dreams in addition to our dream of effective teaching. Educate increasingly specialized people in general subjects: "We're _____ students. We don't read/write/study/take notes/take tests/listen/follow directions." Design courses to accommodate all learning styles, all disabilities, all cultures, because we have absolutely no idea who will show up next term. Teach subjects you are not quite qualified to teach because the school has no choice. Lose weekends and weeknights to piles of grading and class prep. Somehow, on a teacher's salary, scrape together money for a professional wardrobe that is not entirely comprised of corduroy coated in chalk dust. I'm just getting started.

We are, in essence, expected to be superheroes working at the behest of an unsympathetic, overworked, under-budgeted administration.

The best teachers keep their capes out of sight.

Because if we're too good at our jobs, we're asked to leave.

I like to believe that all teachers share a common hope, that on the day we leave our classroom, either at the end of the year or in the twilight of our careers, we can turn around to see a handful of faces — maybe not standing on their desks, in angular formation like birds — but at least looking back at us from a higher plane of view than where we started with them.

I lose sleep over nothing else.