Joy in Learning

I want to return to this idea of joyful learning and to dispel misunderstandings - like shadows from the corners, or abandoned spiderwebs in forgotten cellars.

Joy in the classroom is not smiles, although those are excellent symptoms of joy. Having fun is an important part of joy: a day of class that has no jokes, stories, or mischief is a sad day. Exam days are like this - and they should be done away because assessment should not mean tying students to a chair and flogging out how much they know. Fun is important, not the core of joy.

The foundation (an old metaphor that says IDEAS ARE BUILDINGS) of joy in learning, as I see it, is a far more serious thing. It relates to what joy is in everyday life. In everyday life, joy requires three attitudes:

1. That Life, as opposed to non-life is worth it. Living is worth the ache, the "slings and arrows."
2. The present is more important than the past or future. The present is where we live.
3. Creating balance between your soul and the outside world is mandatory. Another way of saying this is contentment with what you have and what you are, even as you improve your world and yourself. You can want more, or less; joy, however, does not depend on what you have or are, but on the relationship that you create between the what you have and what you want.. Another way of saying this how the Rolling Stones put it: "You can't always get what you want, but...you get what you need." Another way is what C. S. N. & Y. sang, "If you can't be with the X you love, love the X you're with."
This maps quite nicely onto learning with joy:

1. Joyous learning takes hard work.

2. Joyous learning happens right now.

3. Joyous learning is about responding to yourself, not adding to/fixing/correcting yourself.

Its important to realize that teachers create or destroy an environment for joy; they don't create/destroy it directly for their students. Some people refuse joy even when it is there for the taking; others relish it despite the void in which they learn.

Joy is the satisfaction of solving a hard problem, discovering something new, writing a really good sentence, building a solid house, turning over the key on an engine you rebuilt yourself and listening to those turbos wind up.

Joy is also defiance in the face of failure, what others have called dignity in defeat.

When Job had everything, he continually said "Blessed be the name of the Lord," and when he lost everything, he said "Blessed be the name of the Lord." Having the same, optimistic and life-embracing response to every situation is what joy is about.

Joy is how we choose to live, not merely react to stimulus. It can be that way in the classroom too, given encouragement and room.

Nothing Secret

On the last Friday, while writing paragraphs on the topic "(An/The most) important person in my life", one of my students asked for spelling confirmation on the word 'secret'.

I teach English as Second Language, mostly writing and grammar, to fourteen students at Richland Community College in Dallas, Texas. One of my goals in teaching is to share joy. This can be accomplished in many ways: by having lots of parties, by celebrating each other and each other's culture, by telling jokes, and by doing most of the boring work in groups. My mantra in this is something that my teacher, Haj Ross, said to me. He was explaining his take on the above ideas when he said that "it's easier to learn with friends." This may seem to be a simple or obvious point, or a silly one, but it really is quite foundational to co-creating a classroom that has joy in it.

I don't know if "It's easier to learn with friends" is Haj's mantra; I suspect that for him it is merely an everyday truth that needs no trumpet - something he said once and may say again, but bares no sacred meaning. I want to (trumpet/*saxophone/*trombone) it here.


Creating and Sharing Joy with your Students in the Classroom:
I. Teaching is easier when learning is easier.
II. Learning is easier with friends.
III. Joy in the classroom is derived from the success of friendship, not the success of the individual.


So what does this all have to do with writing paragraphs on something as deadening boring as "The most important person in my life" or the word 'secret'? The sentence that my student discovered, that she needed to make sure was spelled right, was this:

There is nothing secret between her and me.

The 'her and me' refers to my student and her mother, who was the most important person in her life. What amazed me was that I had given her such a lame prompt and drew up out of English, her second language, such an amazing sentence.

Initially, I read the sentence, confirmed her spelling, and moved on. As I circulated the room, helping students with this and that, little problems, the phrase was inside my mouth. Up and down my throat, behind my teeth, slavering across my tongue.

There is nothing secret between her and me. What brilliance of language, my own language in the mouth of a learner. We don't know how people learn their first language, we don't really know how they learn a second language. But here was this newbie flashing forth with a bit of my domain and it struck me a mighty blow.


So I wrote it on the board and together we explored some ways the thought might unfold:

1a. There is nothing secret between her and me.
1b. There is nothing secret between me and her.
1c. There is nothing secret between us.

2a. Nothing is secret between her and me.
2b. Nothing is secret between me and her.
2c. Nothing is secret between us.

3a. Between her and me, nothing is secret.
3b. Between me and her, nothing is secret.
3c. Between us, nothing is secret.

4a. Between her and me, there is nothing secret.
4b. Between me and her, there is nothing is secret.
4c. Between us, there is nothing secret.

Between a and b of every subset, the difference seems to be primarily in focus; c, however, collapses the difference of 'her' and 'me' and seems much better. The point of the sentence, after all, is to demonstrate the smallness of the gap between two humans, using a plural pronoun categorizes them much closer than two singular ones do.

I particularly like the sets in 1 and 4 with the phrase 'there is nothing secret' rather than 2 and 3's 'nothing is secret'. While they both seem to say the same thing, I think 'there is' emphasizes that a relationship exists and the sentence is therefore categorizing the relationship. 2 and 3 both seem to offer mere negation.

For instance, I could say "Nothing is secret between me and Genghis Khan" because there is nothing at all, secret or otherwise, between us. I could also say "Nothing is special..." or "Nothing is..."

To say "There is nothing secret..." feels much more like a positive statement of the kind of relationship, rather than just negating secrets.


I'm not entirely sure the students knew how important this all was to me. We talked about the focus issues between a, b, and c; I explained my preference for 1c and 4c as above. The reason I submit this to the outside world is that this sort of honest exploration makes for much better learning, I think, than the exercises one finds in a book. There is joy and authenticity in it; even when there is failure, I feel as though we weren't drinking from the drip bottle but from a wild stream. And that is certainly a better gulp.

One important factor to note: you have to make yourself open to these sort of experiences ( events, happenings, occurrences, rabbit trails, tangents, vectors, ect.) for it to be authentic. If I had planned a few sentences the week before to try this with, I think it would have been far less joyful - unless my sentences happened to spark someone else's fire. The point is that you can't force it.

Another mantra, one I learned from my teacher Dr. Armstrong, at Stephen F. Austin State, goes thus:

Teach to the Teachable Moment.

Bull Elephants

We didn't know what to do with bull elephants, but here was this crazy barbarian, hands dusted white, telling us to sidle up from the back and from the left, until we could touch the cold skin of his flank. Just approach, he said, and get a feel for him. Try to notice the way he moves. As if something so massive had anything to offer but bulk and grandeur. There was nothing cached or hidden in his eyes, no small wonders in the crevices. Nothing secret to be shared between us - awe and mystery, but impenetrable.

Of course, back in the camp we had seen many of these creatures, shot between the eyes and carved. Laid out in neat blocks on the table for the anatomist, the vivisectionist. Here an eye, labeled an eye; there a tusk, labeled a tusk. Tail, intestine, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, lung left, lung right, cranium, skull cap, trunk sections, ears, feet, paws, tanned hide, teeth arranged in rows, spinal vertebrae, womb in one jar, phallus in another. Tidy Latin text on little sticky notes detailing the whole structure of an elephant.

The Scientists were perfect. Dispassionate, rigorous. Not just with the anatomy, but everything. Everything you ever wanted to know about elephants but didn't want to ask. A book of answers on every shelf. Grant money poured into whitewashed little huts with gasoline generators. Perfect.

We Tourists, we Safarists, we trembling explorers with six pairs of socks in ziplock bags, we watched the whole process of bull elephant disassembly with an appropriate mix of shock and appreciation. Look, dear! Look how he handles the knife, knows just where to cut. I wonder where he learned to do that. For we Tourists, the Scientists too were beyond our ken. Alien. Gods. Themselves impenetrable.

The Natives had little opinion in the matter. Elephantry was outside the scope of their survival, their everyday, their life, their ontology. The Scientists held magic to net and kill and dissect the monsters in the jungle - the Scientists were sorcerers and could do as they please; the Natives had no interest in letting the expedition intersect their lives.

So we Tourists and the Natives were not so different - except that the Natives didn't understand elephants and didn't want to; while we pretended to understand the Science that explained the elephants. But it was a lie. We didn't understand the Science or the elephants or even the Scientists themselves. Awe and mystery, impenetrable.

But here we were, tourists, now outside the camp and in that jungle with the monsters; and here was this madman, our guide, neither scientist nor native, showing us elephants directly. The scientists only came out to watch or capture, never approached the animals. Detect, observe, note, net, shoot, carve, label. But our friend the barbarian loved them. He watched and noticed without notepad, without recorder, without malice. He wanted elephants dangerous and in the wild, not pinned down and safe. And now it was my turn to sidle up and run my fingers along the biggest living thing I have ever touched. I approached, unsure. A little drunk (in my fear I had nipped at a bottle), I heard every crack and crunkle of twig and leaf beneath my boots.

Two yards. The madman behind me whispering, go on go on, it's no use living if you never touch life. This is big life, this is abundant life.

One yard. I think of how much blood must be running through those veins; veins the size of garden hoses. The toes are huge. All I can see is the toes. The little cracks in the toes. And I'm there, reaching out beyond my center of gravity so that I don't have to step closer; just get one little touch and I can be done with this and go back to the camp.

And he moves away, leaving my fingers brushing air. The mass of him just shifts and he takes a step. He's really not heavy on his feet but he's so big it seems like the earth is moving. I think of Moses' ten spies, terrified. There are giants in the land.

The world, the giant, takes another step away and I can't follow. Our insane guide grabs me by the shoulder, friendly, but white chalk from his hands clouds around my face and I try not to cough - still terrified of the size of the elephant.

Not the size. The impenetrability. That's really what I was afraid of, I think. It wasn't the possible injury or possible death or the strangeness of such a creature or really even my own ineptitude in dealing with it. I wasn't afraid of being the fool. There was just no approach to that sort a thing. I know now why the scientists had to shoot and carve to understand - it's easier to dissect than to love. But love is knowing life, dissection just shows us the bits after life.

My guide smiles at me, his own bulk showing through his sweater. Let's try a smaller one, he says, and leads our group to another herd. This one, he says, may look like a baby, but he has so much to offer - I've been making friends with him for years and I can't imagine how little I really know.

This time I go first, and though just as unsure and clumsy, I manage to touch it. Him. I feel that cold skin, and yes its cold - but with life underneath. Big Life, Life abundant. And this bull elephant, whose name is Digging, I myself have come back to again and again to notice and to make friends. To penetrate, not with bullets or scalpels or academia or dissertation proposals, but with love. Not to pierce the skin, but the heart of the thing.

Digging goes,

Between my finger and my thumb...