Lots of grading to do in the next few days, but classes are over. It was in some ways a tough semester — I missed a week early on because of illness & the particular combination of large writing-intensive classes meant I had too much student writing to respond to — but overall it was a satisfying term. I was teaching one brand new class, The Literature of American Popular Music, & two large sections of another class, Introduction to Literature, that I hadn’t taught in ten years. So both were essentially new. Which means that I was disorganized. What made the semester successful was my students. I am, even in classes I have taught many times, an improviser. My method is to know the material well, but to walk into the class each day the way a jazz musician takes the stand — ready to see what happens. I realize this may sound a bit precious, but it’s true. I may have a chart, either in my head or on a scrap of paper, with the main things I want to cover, and there is of course a text that’s been assigned & listed on the syllabus & class blog, but after that I pretty much wing it. Now, there are things my students need to know & I try to slip that information in sideways, but the main thing I want to do is engage my students in a human process. I want to be a storyteller around an ancient fire. I want to be Bird on the stand, but that’s a level of genius that remains a far horizon of inspiration.

Given the nature of contemporary American higher education, I often feel guilty about my failure to be “rigorous.” Still, on the evidence of my last class meetings this week, students were mostly satisfied. I usually spend the last day of class talking about what I think went well & what I think was less successful. I spend some time critiquing my organization & management of the class, then ask for suggestions & responses. When I get home, I jot down notes & stick them in a folder so I can incorporate good ideas next time I teach the class. My final question to the class is: What are you going to take away from this class when you walk out the door today? I want students to reflect on what they have been doing, which, in the modern American university is highly routinized under the pressure of bureaucratic necessity. (All along, I try to subtly get students to ask the meta-questions, but on the last day I make it explicit.) I can’t of course escape the requirements of the institution. What I can do & what I try to do is offer students a way of understanding their education in a broader & less instrumental way than they might otherwise understand it. That all sounds very grand, but in practice it just means digging into texts, then stepping back to consider their value & the values they embody, along with they way that values get embodied.

So, anyway, on the second to the last day of class in my Literature of American Popular Music course — the last class with real “content” — I’d assigned Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” & Jack Spicer’s “Song for Bird and Myself” & the discussion of the O’Hara went well & the students could see what he was doing. I had told them when I handed out the copy of the poem during the previous class that they had to look up any words / references /allusions they didn’t understand & that helped drive the discussion. Then I turned to the Spicer poem, reading it aloud. (One of the great privileges of being a Professor of Literature is that I get to read poems aloud to a captive audience.) And as I was reading it, I was thinking, “this is the greatest fucking poem I’ve ever read” & “this catches Parker’s method exactly.” What mastery / undercutting of the Modernist poetic line. Obviously, I’d read the poem before, but I’d never read it out loud to an audience. I was also thinking, as I was reading, that the method was the method I have evolved for teaching. You can think about a lot while reading a poem to a class full of students. But here is the best thing: my students dug into that Spicer poem like a bunch of fully enlightened angel-headed beatniks. We’d listened to a bit of Bird & watched Eastwood’s movie, but this poem got through to the engineering & business majors as well as the hipsters in the class. Improvisation.