Teaching to the Soul

Table of Contents

The Magic of Poetry

The Writer

The Reader

The Chess Player

Family Matters

The Preacher’s Kids

The Spiritual Child

The Shortstop

The Soldier

Fine Young Men

Afterword

Endnotes

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Bachhuber

North Loop Books

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Maitland, FL 32751

407.339.4217

www.NorthLoopBooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

ISBN-13: 9781635055412

LCCN: 2016958803

Distributed by Itasca Books

Edited by Beth Beaty

Cover art is a photograph of a painting by Doug Carlson

Printed in the United States of America

Preface

The Magic of Poetry

Just because the soul cannot be weighed or measured doesn’t mean that it cannot be touched. In this day of standards and standardized tests, of measuring outcomes and evaluating teacher and school performance, who even has time to care about a child’s soul? More important, why should we? We should because children, at their core, are vulnerable and they need to feel safe and cared for if they are to learn anything at all. They respond out of a sense of injury or love, of being neglected or attended to; they respond to anger or kindness, to stress or peace. These emotional and psychological conditions—not curriculum, not materials, not standards—are the real foundation of classroom life, and of learning itself.

Maria Montessori in her book, Spontaneous Activity in Education, compares the teacher to a scientist of the soul. He [the scientist] considers nothing too small to absorb all his powers…a microbe, an excretion, anything may interest the man of science…Thus, gradually, he purifies himself from error, and keeps his mind always fresh, always clear, naked as the Truth with which he desires to blend in sublime union…But how would it be if the master should seek the truth in the soul of the child? What an incomparable dignity would be his! The teacher, by means of his work with the child, discovers not only the Truth, but may also, Montessori says, experience the whole of life (Montessori 1971, 135)¹.

The teacher who advocates the importance of being a loving witness to the soul of children is also in the best position to encourage rigorous academics. In William Butler Yeats’s poem, Adam’s Curse, he ponders the noisy set of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen the martyrs call the world.² The martyrs in today’s educational culture push more standards while they fail to understand that effective education must be founded on how well teachers understand their students. Yeats’s poem posits the poet against the banker, the quiet work of the inner life against the competition for social status and money.

The inner work of the student is the work of the soul; it’s the vehicle of education itself, and it has less to do with what adults expect than we like to believe. Education is meaningful when students use learning to construct themselves—to enliven and enrich their souls. Maria Montessori called this auto-education or self-education.

Learning, Montessori said, is joy.

But the work is demanding, complex, intriguing and serious. For Yeats, the poet works harder than the scullery maid to articulate sweet sounds together, but is considered an idler. It is Adam’s curse that, we must labor to be beautiful. But the labor of those who build themselves internally, like the poet, is a far different and less stressful practice than those who labor only to pass a test, or to receive recognition, or to please an adult.

Poetry is an expression of, and a window to, the soul of children.

Poetry, for me, was a way of life before I started teaching. I was in a Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa from 1974 to 1976; my dissertation area was in contemporary poetry. I left the program to finish a Masters Degree in writing poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1980 while working as a school bus driver, and have since published a book of poems with New Rivers Press, Mozart’s Carriage, 2003.³

When I moved to Minneapolis in 1981, I found part-time work, with a few side jobs as a poet-in-residence at local elementary schools; one of them was St. Stephen’s in Anoka, Minnesota. After I finished a two-week residency, the classroom teacher said, It’s easy to make a big splash when you’re only here for two weeks, but it’s the classroom teacher who really matters to children in the long run.

I couldn’t forget her comment. Within two years my wife and I traveled to Bergamo, Italy, where I received my A.M.I. Montessori training for grades first through sixth, and two years after that I earned my Minnesota state certification for elementary teaching at St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul. By that time I had also found a professional home at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet in the St. Paul Public Schools, from which I’ve retired after twenty-five years of service. I became a classroom teacher because I wanted to do more than make a big splash; I wanted to matter.

I took my love of poetry with me.

Cardinal

There are probably ten

Chirping in the trees

I sit there watching

Them with my binoculars

Males, bright red

Females, treelike hues

They are like two

Different books waiting to be read.

The Cardinal is an example of poetry I’ve seen from students over the years, and it provides an example of why I think the soul of children matters educationally. The writer’s mothers are lesbians, two women I happen to know. Once a classmate teased Mac about being raised by two women, and the boy burst into tears.

In his poem, he refers to the males as bright red, (the color of his own hair), and females as having, treelike hues. The females in his life are the tree in whose branches he finds a home. They are not as vivid as he, not because they are female and he is male, but because, I believe, they assume a supportive role. They focus on the child, not themselves.

How beautifully he sees his future. In this safe environment, he can view his own sexuality as a subject of open exploration, of discovery, like two books, male and female, waiting to be read.

I was stunned by a moment in which the boy learned for himself, I believe, that having two mothers, although ‘different,’ will not prevent happiness or healthy development, a moment in which darkness emerged into light. I exclaimed, Oh, Mac. That’s beautiful! but the force behind my praise was based on everything I already knew about him. I understood the poem as the resolution of a private struggle, which I had observed. At the moment of my praise, Mac’s face was beaming.

A beam means exactly that, a light from an internal source. The boy had used poetry to address a private dilemma and made his solution part of his conscious fullness. This is an example of auto-education, in which the environment of the classroom allows for soul-work, for a process of self-construction supported but not predetermined by a caring, attentive adult. For me the art of teaching effectively is always more about releasing pressure than imposing it. It’s no accident that a student’s work gains authority and quality the more it reflects his soul. The power of student work gains authority in all areas, mathematics, reading, social studies and science, when children experience in the classroom a level of freedom and respect that supports their inner work. Such children hold the golden key to learning, which is the capacity to concentrate.

My use of poetry in the classroom was no accident. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Jim Hazard was my favorite teacher. And my favorite class was the one he taught, Teaching Creative Writing to Children. There, I learned about two books by Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, and, Rose: How Did you Get that Red?⁴, a groundbreaking work that became my Bible for teaching poetry to children. Koch’s premise was to take great poetry, such as William Blake’s The Tyger, and use it to examine vocabulary and structure in order to develop a writing idea for children to use. Writing instruction often fails for lack of sufficient structure. But Koch found that great poetry—Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams—provides a structure complex enough for the child to gather his inner world and bring it forward into his life. Magic happens when children see for the first time the beauty and forcefulness of what was hidden inside of them. Using poetry in the classroom helps fill the well of the self. In a culture driven by interactive computer activities, children lose a sense of who they are because the focus is external. And that affects their capacity to learn well.

A favorite poem of mine to teach is Rainer Maria Rilke’s, The Panther.⁵ Rilke’s poem gives a dramatic description of a wild and graceful animal who is trapped in a cage, and whose energy is wasted by endless circling. Sometimes children feel trapped by school, sometimes they feel trapped at home, sometimes they feel trapped because the culture bombards them with external stimuli, or they lack sufficient time to play outdoors. And sometimes, they can feel trapped by their peer or sibling relationships. The point is that every child, in one way or another, can identify with the feeling of being trapped, of spinning his wheels, of giving effort and going nowhere.

We read the poem together and discuss its meaning. Next, I ask the students to help me brainstorm a list of their favorite animals, as well as a list of situations where we might find these animals. Rilke’s animal is in the zoo, but the children will choose many settings: the rain forest, a tree, a birdhouse, the desert—the location matters only in terms of providing a physical context for description. Finally, we choose a stylistic element from the poem. What does the author do well? Rilke is an expert at using visual description to create a sense of movement.

Once we’ve discussed the poem, and done our brainstorming, we do what’s called a ‘class collaboration.’ Taking an animal at random from our list, I’ll say, Let’s look at Rilke’s first line so that we can get some help from a master as to how to enter this poem.

His vision, from constantly passing the bars…

Let’s say the animal I chose is a rabbit. I will say out loud: I think I’ll substitute the sense of smell for vision, and tulip leaves for bars. Therefore, the first line that I write might be, His nose, from constantly passing the tulip leaves…

Once we have the first line, things go more easily. Children look to the Rilke poem for a model, but they spontaneously contribute