Over the weekend I went to International Falls with a group of members of the St. Cloud Elks Lodge, where I participated in a curling bonspiel. None of us had ever curled before. We won the first game, got thoroughly drubbed in the two following.

This experience reminded me of something I've noticed in other physical endeavors. Sometimes the first attempt works fairly well because I haven't learned enough to get in my own way. It's the thinking I learn to do that makes me move away from whatever comes most naturally and so make the process more difficult. That is the way I am. I get worse at physical things before I get better--if I get better. The psychology of this is fascinating. It's as though I have only so much computing power available, so I need to develop habits that I don't have to think about, leaving enough mind to think through strategies without thinking about mechanics. I'll let you know when I accomplish this with golf.

I came back with a world class allergy attack. I don't think my nose liked the curling rink.

Sharon asks how the recital went. To quote my teacher in an e-mail later that evening, "Fine singing today. Excellent technique." The audience response was warm. I discovered that putting myself inside a character covered the nervousness to the point that it was no longer an issue. Just enough to keep me sharp, not so much as to interfere. That was another lesson from that teacher, given just two days before the performance. Another first, as none of my singing has been done as anyone but myself prior to this. I have no drama training whatever, so wouldn't have thought of anything so obvious.

Perhaps I should think about studying a little drama to color my singing.

Obviously I have much to learn.

The study of singing is the study of breathing. This is useful in the rest of life. A new teacher has brought me to renewed consciousness of this breathing business. I used to study it as a meditation technique. Recently I've returned to that, too. Imagine a life built around breath. Physical breath; metaphorical breath.

Imagine writing for the sake of breathing easily. Imagine a first draft as a long exhalation, the surprise of discovery offering a sudden, sharp diaphragmatic contraction. Imagine polishing a draft as riding lightly on a stream of breath, elevated, drawn in to the core, sent out to the very atmosphere. Imagine calm delight.

Imagine teaching writing as teaching breathing. What could be a more natural gift? What could offer any greater well-being?

Late this afternoon I will perform an aria in the role of Zorastro, the high priest bass in Mozart's The Magic Flute, for the assembled music majors and faculty. This will be my first solo performance using the techniques of my new teacher. It will be my first formal solo performance in a long time--two years, I think.

I'm reminded of other first performances. My very first as a teacher was in the fall of 1975, teaching Freshman English at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. I was nearly sick with fear that time. I had no teaching experience whatever and was supposed to teach people nearly my age, or, in one instance, my father's age. I wasn't at all sure I knew anything. I remember nothing about that first class meeting. Nothing. Three weeks into that term the retired Air Force colonel in my class told me he was enjoying the course and, after thinking about that for a moment, I realized I was too. That one course--and maybe that colonel--ruined me for any other career. Medicine's loss, I guess, though the medical field seems to be surviving without me.

Another was my first day as a high school teacher in Cromwell, Minnesota in the fall of 1980. My predecessor at that school, as its only high school English teacher, had resigned to take another job at another school only twenty miles away. When he found out his replacement had been hired he then investigated to find out who the fool was who had taken the job and actually came to my house to warn me: Cromwell was a terrible place with an administration that wouldn't support me and students who would make it their goal in life to run me out. I was about to be the 21st person to hold that single position in fifteen years. They ate English teachers. One previous one was gone before Thanksgiving.

He was right. They tried to take me out, but it didn't work. Their misbehaviors tended to make me laugh, which made it hard for them to resent me when I immediately followed with whatever consequence seemed fitting. They knew I was enjoying them, so reluctantly they started to like me. I was the English Department for seven years, left only out of a sense of mission, and continue to go back to visit.

Since then I've had other teaching firsts at the U of Minnesota, UW-Superior, Northland College in Wisconsin's Ashland (how many Ashlands are there, anyway?), Plymouth State in New Hampshire, and here at Bemidji, and none of them have been traumatic, all of them have been rewarding. Each time I get nervous; each time I relish the experience.

I expect to do the same this afternoon.

I am about to go to class. Tuesday morning. Nothing unusual planned. Three papers to talk over, which is the norm for this workshop.

And yet I'm excited. Anticipating. Hoping.

I woke up at 4:30 with 8:00 in mind. That's weird, but wonderful.

I had the pleasure of watching a master teacher at his finest during the warm-up and then the actual concert we, the Bemidji Choir, gave at the Minneapolis Convention Center for an audience of music teachers. Curiously, it was during the warm-up that he really got us.

We had a half hour period on the stage, before they opened the hall to the audience, when we could try brief starts and get a feel for the sound of the room. He talked to us about the beginnings. The talk was the best of the year. All year he speaks with precision, showing meticulous planning of every lesson. This time the planning was clear--he had a couple of pages of notes prepared--but added to it was controlled emotion. Perhaps that is what we mean when we speak of teaching with passion. It is emotion, but not raw emotion. Directed emotion. He so wanted to let us in on the music and how to let it work. He wanted us to have that magic experience that can happen in a choir when you pull together while using your bodies and minds, striving for some approach to perfection in the execution of thought and feeling. His desire for our accomplishing that joy was so evident that he stirred our response.

In the actual concert, his face went through gradations of pleasure and welcome. The beginnings he'd demonstrated set up the middles which pulled us to starled realizations of having finished this song and then that one. There were moments when we got so lost in each other and the sound that the audience could have been on another continent as far as we were concerned. The music, our bodies and breath, the sounds around us, and his face and hands replaced the world.

Passionate commitment to the creation of art--that's what a fine teacher in his richest moments can inspire.

Tomorrow morning I leave with the choir for a performance at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Our choir has won the honor of giving the opening concert at the annual convention of the Midwest Music Educators Association. This is the fourth time in as many years that our director has brought us to one prestigious venue or another (Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Rothenburg International Choral Festival) through his stunning capacity to teach.

As a teacher, it is a rare privilege to watch a superb fellow teacher at work. It is also a rare privilege to be a student learning from that same fellow teacher at work. So many of my peers, once having reached teacher status, stop taking classes. They keep learning, but stop taking classes. There is no substitute for being in student status to inform our teaching. Taking classes makes me think about how to offer classes.

I also am taking private lessons in voice. My teacher for that endeavor is a retired fellow teacher who came out of retirement to work part time. He is also teaching me things about how to support students in one to one situations. This is another example of how instruction informs teaching; being instructed informs my tutorials.

Receiving the teaching of others helps me work on being a receptive teacher of my students. Perhaps if I taught subjects of a different nature this wouldn't matter so much, but teaching English is best done as a receptive process. Student readings and student writings are best encouraged by attentive teachers. Lead and receive.

My sister, a teacher in a rural Minnesota high school, can't read my blog. Her school blocks them, and she doesn't have net access at home. I'm not enough of a computer guy to know how the school district does that, but I'm interested that administrators choose to put up the blocks.

People like me must be dangerous, or maybe it's the high school teachers that the administrators don't trust.

An observation I made while walking through our university's industrial technology building:

On this hallway's walls
are intricately etched designs
of classic cars future and past,
lovingly wrought drawings
of guitars and saxophones
so detailed that rock and jazz echo,
do you hear? and see
the glass cases displaying
models of cars
and guitars and buildings
and even whole towns
in three dimensional wonder
and notice in the corner
stands a gray, plastic
model of a wastebasket,
two molded handles just below the lip,
and it even has a model bag liner inside,
and notice some artist has inscribed
in bold black marker
across the belly of that basket
the telling label:
"Industrial Design."

In this morning's writing class I had them write about a location and a sound that they remembered sharply. This is what came out of me.

On helplessness:

At sixteen he had a stroke. By nineteen he'd had six. He was in a nursing home by then. His father built a ramp at the farmhouse, bought an old van and rigged it with a lift, and each weekend drove the twelve miles to the nursing home, put him in the wheelchair, boosted him into the van, wheeled him up the ramp, and loved him.

In the first ten years he could move the chair. Then one hand was gone. Then there was only thumb and forefinger of the other hand. His father lifted him onto the toilet, held the urinal, fed him. At forty he could no longer hold his head up.

He got sicker. He couldn't leave the nursing home. His father had a heart attack. My wife, Caroline, and I were at his father's side as their father died.

At the nursing home we first spoke of his illness. He had made a slight recovery. Then he slurred out "Enough about me. How's Dad?" The new chair of many motors had him tipped back far enough that his cradled face was open to us. She said, "Oh, Kevin, he's gone."

His face contracted. As I turned to leave them he uttered a sharp, strangled, high pitched tea kettle scream that rose and whistled. It penetrated the institutional door I closed behind me. It carried through the wall I leaned against, drilled through my sternum, freeze-dried my torso, stole my breath. The steady piercing made nurses aides, visitors, residents in their wheelchairs pass that door very quietly, respectfully, as though they feared they might draw that sound into themselves.

When Caroline emerged she fell face first into my frozen chest. I felt her shudders in my spine.

"Can you hear me knocking?"

You were writing a poem of love
and loneliness and question
as you courted your final love
the love you gave your last best
breath the final breath
of death

So tell me now
in your airless fashion
of how it is for you,
this breathless loving.

A couple of years ago while reading a blog written by a student I particularly admire I encountered an entry about a teacher she couldn't stand. The teacher she was announcing her dislike for was me. I was startled, in part because I thought (and still think) so highly of her, but then I also realized that my regard is no guarantee of reciprocation. Teachers need to invest in students; the reverse is not so. As I paid attention to her and her work I came to ever greater levels of respect for her work; the reverse was not so.

Students are free to dislike or disapprove of or disagree with their teachers. They also are free to announce these matters to the world, as she did on her blog. I'm not happy to be the teacher she described--I would rather be liked than not--but I know she isn't the only one who has felt as she did about me and about my work. That comes with the territory. Teaching is personal presentation, no matter how we cover it, just as writing is. Some receivers aren't going to care for the person who is presenting.

One of her complaints about her situation in my class was that I was the only person teaching that course, which she needed. This is a legitimate complaint that applies to the methods courses I offer. Nobody else teaches them unless I'm gone (in my career that has been through illness or sabbatical). To get through an English teaching degree at this university, people have to take at least two courses from me, whether they like me or not.

This isn't the best of arrangements. Despite my repeated requests the department has never been willing to hire another English Ed person to split those courses with me, allowing students both choice and variety. Some people in those courses have resented me, my views, my methods. In those instances we've had to figure out how to get by so their experience with me didn't block them in their careers. Most of the time we've succeeded.

In every instance where a student's personality clashes with mine and so the emotional interaction is painful, I have to remember my mission, which is to serve students; it is not the student's mission to serve or like or respect or speak well of me. My desire to be warmly received must never color my desire to behave with my students' welfare as my primary professional duty.

She and I never spoke of these matters. She took another class from me. I continued to admire her and appreciate her work. I have not returned to her blog.

Some team won the Super Bowl yesterday.

I don't know which; even though I like football, I only watched the first half. I was with people from the choir who were invited to a former choir member's home. Other former members showed up--a couple even brought their two little boys--and our director and another voice teacher came. It was fun and I would have stayed, but Sunday evenings my thoughts turn to Monday and going to class. I like to meet Monday rested and clear headed. I got up at 4:30, got on the elliptical trainer for a workout, cleaned up, breakfasted, and hit the road toward school.

And that team won the Super Bowl just the same without me.

An exposition of writing teacher knowledge:

Denim clad students slouched in a circle, solemn faced except for Becky, whose slouch is even closer to horizontal than usual and who laughed at the writing prompt, which is unlike her--she usually stares at me when I offer a prompt as though I am a creature foreign to her expeerience--these students stare into nowhere, which means looking vacant on the outside while they are intently searching inside, and gradually pens start to move--oh, look, Becky is writing, still nearly horizontal but her green pen progresses across the page--and Matt finds a focus and writes intently until he stops and looks over what he wrote and one knee starts jumping up and down and then stops and the other knee starts and stops and they go on in alternating spasms of energy as he re-reads and Jamie is bent over, her head cocked to one side and Ivy is staring and her pen is moving as though she's writing inside even though the pen itself isn't actually touching the the paper and while the room is nearly silent but for pages turning and pens scratching so much is going on, only Becky stopped and leaned back and stretched so it's probably time to stop and listen to them talk.

And I come out of my trance of classroom receiving. How I love to watch a room full of people writing.

I watch and read a first year teacher and marvel both at how similar we are in how much we don't know and how different we are in how we feel about that. English teachers, except when teaching linguistics/grammar, don't need to know. They need to know that they don't need to know in the sense of fact accumulated and repeated.

They need the endurance to keep getting their students started. Students need to read and write and talk and listen. Teachers need to get them started and offer paths for that language to explore. Teachers don't know what those students are going to discover. Teachers start them and wait and pay attention when Becky comes out of her slouch and Matt's knees start bouncing and pens scratch and pages turn. Teachers' knowledge is the next revelation from Becky and Matt.

When we walk into the writing classroom, we don't know much. On a good day, we walk out a whole lot richer.

I wonder what Ivy was writing while she wasn't writing. Another thing I don't know.

Such is the knowledge of the writing teacher.

I'm taking singing lessons from a new teacher this term. I've had three lessons and they must be working because I now can hardly sing at all. The things I've learned in previous years from previous teachers are no longer of use except in certain specialized situations. I am being taught to produce my basic tone in a new way, so all the physical and mental markers I associate with producing pitch and line and phrase are now useless.

Because I now must think radically differently, my actual performance of songs I've known and performed in the past is now pitiful. I no longer can trust my breathing or even my pitch accuracy because I don't yet have control of this new world of tone production. This leaves me trying a lot harder than I have in a while.

This is analogous to how students tend to look at me when they encounter me for the first time. Students in first year composition see me asking them to produce writing in ways that high school may well have overtly denied. The recipes they are used to and comfortable with get them no where, except in "certain specialized situations." They are left trying to find their voices.

My teacher says he is freeing my voice; I say to my students that I am trying to free their voices. My debut performing a song in this new milieu was yesterday afternoon. My teacher gave me the song Monday, called me Wednesday at 11:00 to tell me I was performing it in his master class at 4:00, and then I did. I got through. It was painfully uncertain singing. Prior to his lessons I would have performed it confidently and with a certain sense of mastery.

I tend to have students write the first day. I tell them to write freely. I have them read aloud the first and second day. Their pieces are painfully uncertain. Prior to my lesson they would have written as they had been taught. They probably would have done so with a "certain sense of mastery."

Teachers are aggravating creatures.

I don't know how to iron. I don't own an iron, other than a set of golf clubs which I also don't know how to use very well. My clothes handling method is to fold, or hang and tug. My mother ironed; my father didn't. Ironing is for girls.

But I teach, as did my father. That's women's work too. Even now, teaching is overwhelmingly dominated by women. What's more, I seem to remember reading that in secondary school only home ec has a greater proportion of female teachers than than English does, and most of the home ec programs have disappeared. The motherly types are English teachers now.

In my career, my methods courses for prospective English teachers have been at least two to one female in every instance but two. My current course has one man among nine women.

Why?

I think it's because preK-12 teaching, done well, demands the best of our nature, and that best is identified as characteristic of women: caring, intuition, selfless service. Mothering. Teaching done well with children of those ages is like mothering--especially in Home Ec and English. Men can do these things, but tend to go where the other things we think of when we think of men are more likely to be honored. The man on the street isn't likely to think of men when he thinks of someone teaching kids about putting their hearts into poems.

When I taught high school English my best friend on the faculty was the Home Ec teacher. She went on to become a counselor, after which she had a breakdown and left the field. Too much caring. Too much service. Collapse.

In this I think she was an anomaly. I tend to think of women as exemplars of survival. They've had to be such in a man's world; they've had to be such as the primary carriers of the burden of this terrible and wonderful profession. Teaching is hard.

I admired her example and I fear her example. She is or was the model of a beautiful new teacher radiating love. I want to be that, though "new" is long since impossible and "beautiful" would have to be confined to special moments of unusual classroom electricity. She is also the model of the teacher who crashes. When I reach exhaustion or approach it, I think of her and get careful about how much more I agree to take on.

Even the best teachers have to survive in order to do the good work. The need to survive is not gender specific. I probably will not bother to take on learning to iron, but in another kind of women's work, teaching, I will take important lessons from a loved and loving woman who left.