Teaching Sisyphus to Juggle

By Jim Burke

this essay originally appeared in Educational Leadership)

When I was a student teacher they held a luncheon for all the retiring teachers. It was one of the most academically prestigious public high schools in the country, a place people would be grateful to teach. After a nice lunch and the easy laughter that comes with the year's end, we gathered around to honor the retirees. I sat next to another student teacher who, like myself, had enjoyed a wonderful semester. Then they called Mr. Cragen to the front to give him a retirement gift. I had watched him every morning ham it up across the office to his messy desk where he ritually pulled down one of the many post-its on the wall. Each one had a day's number on it to help him track how few were left until he retired.

He grew very solemn at the luncheon as he thought about what to say to us. Without really looking up, he said, "I came to work here thirty-five years ago and remember going home that first day and thinking to myself that I didn't really like the experience." People cleared their throats, grew visibly awkward in the silence that followed these words. "And I feel like today I'm looking up and wondering where the last thirty-five years of my life have gone and why I stayed." With this he shuffled off to his table and finished his drink while the rest of us bathed in his misery. That is until Flossie Lewis, another retiree, leapt to the front. At sixty-five, she was a legend and still absolutely inspiring: she was retiring so she could pursue her doctorate and write her next book. She immediately set everything to right, talking about what an honor it had been to work with these people and the students of so many generations.

Ten years later this afternoon seems to embody the dilemma we all face: how to keep teaching fresh despite the many demands, inevitable difficulties, and cynical colleagues. Other factors, depending on local situations, further challenge teachers' good will and stamina as they feel, thanks to increased control through standardization of curriculum and state-imposed testing, a loss of power. Such power and professional independence remains crucial to teachers' ability to take risks, follow the class where it wants to go, and engage in the kind of inquiry that transforms a class into a community.

The Need for Community

We need different types of communities to sustain and inspire us, however. Our classroom is not enough. We are, after all, adults who also seek the community of like minds committed to learning and interested in discussing what we learn. We find these minds in various places, all of which nourish us at different times. Some of us take comfort in the printed conversations found in books, places where we enter into essential dialogues with authors we respect. Others seek out the community of colleagues through the Internet, creating through these online discussions their own virtual departments where they can escape the sarcasm and cynicism that might otherwise erode their enthusiasm for teaching. Finally, there remains the heart of our enterprise, the classroom, a place where we know we can drink deeply of the energy that our students offer if only we will grant them a place at the conversational table.

Extending the Invitation

While I draw profound strength and joy from my online community, those colleagues at work with whom I can share my enthusiasm, and all my reading, I want to focus here on one experience that transformed me in a lasting way. In my third year of teaching I faced a wall of indifference, even resistance to reading that stumped me. I did not know what to do, so I asked my students to tell me what they were thinking. This first step toward entering into negotiations with my students helped me to realize how much they could help me be a better teacher. Many of their attitudes are reflected in this one from a young man I liked very much but never knew how to reach:

I am not reading [The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. I do not know the last chapter I read. That is not important because I do not understand this book because this book is gibberish. I will not read this book for that reason. I do not think that your help will help. I would be willing to try once again in English once we get off this book. I was working before we started reading this book. I think Huck Finn is a dumb book that doesn't teach me anything. I would rather read the dictionary. I would value it a lot more. It is also easier to understand since it is written in English.

I read this late at night during Thanksgiving vacation. I felt utterly defeated. Keeping it fresh now seemed to be something I had to achieve not only for myself but for my students. But I taught 150 kids! All sizes and styles, all wonderful. Asking my students had yielded a pile of intelligence about what that they wanted, what they thought, what they needed as people, as students, as readers. But when you are new you have to learn to listen, to ask. That's when teaching gets real, gets live. And the kids can feel it, will respond to it.

So I wrote the following letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that night, the chorus of students' voices still ringing in my ears:

Dear Editor:

In an era of decreasing commitment to literacy--how else to explain the failure of the state, for example, to adequately fund the libraries?--it is no surprise that most students, too, are bypassing books.

Instead they look elsewhere for information, for entertainment, for experience. I would like to invite you to write to my high school students about your experiences with books, perhaps telling them what role books and literature have played in your life.

I would be just as interested in hearing from the six-year-old about her favorite book as the sixty-year-old whose life was changed by the reading of a book. Send your letters to me at Burlingame High School. Thank you, and keep reading.

Jim Burke

When I returned to school the following week, a river of words began to pour into my mail box and thus into my classroom. We received over 1000 pages of letters from people all over the country. We heard from a cattle rancher, third graders, felons, lawyers, soldiers, and musicians, and their voices forced their way into our classroom and my mind in a way I could not have imagined. Keeping it fresh, as I said, means looking after both ourselves and our students. As Donald Murray has written somewhere, if there is no surprise for the writer there can be none for the reader. So it is with students. The letters forced me to learn in the presence of my students, to enter into a real conversation with them through the letters, about what was important to me---and to them. Here is a sample of one letter written by a young woman new to the country whose teacher had her class respond to my letter:

Dear Mr. Burke:

For me a book is a big part of my life. It makes me feel good and while I'm reading a book, I want to know more and more about it. If you really want to have a really cool adventure read a book. But you need to pay attention and imagine that you are the character of the book and that the things that are happening in the book are happening to you.

My life have change since I started to read different kinds of books. One of them was When I Was Puerto Rican because before I read that book, I felt that I was the only person who thought that almost everybody around me didn't like me cause my skin's color and because I am Latina. That book taught me that the people has to like you for what you are not for what you have, don't have or because what you look like. I'm very proud of reading books and very pleased with them. My life is not so hard like when I got to the USA. Now the books are my friends, company, and they make me feel better when I'm sad or when I'm alone. This is how I feel about a book.

Helen Garcia

High school ESL student

This and the other letters came into our class like missives from the real world my students were preparing to enter. We began talking about passion, about what mattered to people. At sixteen many of my students realized they did not yet know what they cared about, realizing that a fascination with a particular band would not sustain them in adult life. Each day as I read the best of the letters, they marveled that people took the time to write to our class. They heard reading discussed in ways they had never heard before. The boys were especially moved by the letters from felons like Eddie Burnett, a man serving a life sentence for murder:

Books....I became fascinated with law books. Unfortunately, my introduction to those law books came about as the result of having broken the law, repeatedly. Had I discovered law books before breaking those laws, I would in all probability have become a successful lawyer.... I know for an absolute fact, based upon what I have read after it was too late, that I would have succeeded in some legal endeavor whatever it was. Hell, every time I read my monthly National Geographic I want to go to those wonderfully exotic far off places. With each issue of Smithsonian I want to visit the wondrous treasures that our museums hold.... From smashing the atom in a supercollider to the thoughtful prose of a Robert Frost, I will continue at forty-three to learn of facts and of mysteries through reading books. And I will honor my obligation to try and pass on to others what I have learned. My job is much harder than yours. I have to put pictures of naked women on the outside of my books and magazines in order to trick others into reading them.

More money is put into prison construction than into schools. That, in itself, is a nation bent on suicide....We'll certainly need more prisons if our students won't read books. And if our legislators don't send our students books to read, they themselves should be imprisoned.

Hopefully your editorial will receive more illuminating response, and experiences of specific literature with which to inspire your students. Perhaps you can use mine to exemplify the consequence of failure and point out how easy it is to slide into sub-moronic idiocy.

Language is the crux of communication. We learn from the experience of others---that becomes written history, in books....

Endeavor to persevere. I salute you.

Yours truly,

Eddie Burnett

My class was coming alive, and I was being transformed by this experience, by these voices. Instead of teaching by the district's itemized list of things to do---all of which I recognized as important---I was moving toward what Arthur Applebee calls "curriculum as conversation." I began to sit with them more, asking more and telling less, and all the while feeling myself filling up with the same joy and excitement I had witnessed in Flossie Lewis when I watched her teach. I think we were learning how to learn and giving each other permission to do so in that class.

Keeping It Fresh Means Continuing to Learn

One lasting outcome of that class, of that year, has been my need to have some new thing I am determined to learn or do better that year. I've grown to think of teaching as a juggling act: each year I master the routine I have (mostly), learning to finally incorporate more poetry as I promised myself; then I come back in the fall and choose something new to add. I feel sometimes like the juggler who has everything going and then asks the kid to throw him the live fish which the juggler must then work into the routine and, with practice and patience, eventually does so. This keeps teaching alive for me and keeps me honest in the presence of my students who are consistently aware that I am always trying to learn.

One of my favorite stories to discuss is Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus," in which Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity. I talk about how we all have our boulders to push up the hill of our life. We all draw our boulders, filling them in with the different names we must all push up the mountain: work, family, relationships, life. And we start talking about how you can get up and push that rock up the mountain day in, day out. Our discussion recalls the examples given at the beginning. Mr. Cragen let the stone roll over him, seeing in the task no room for creativity. Flossie Lewis, on the other hand, brought style to her work. She dressed up as a historical character one day and recited poetry by Keats the next while she pushed her boulder; she established a relationship with that rock, which is to say, with her students, and through this relationship was transformed into a remarkable teacher. Being a teacher offers so many blessings to those who can invite the world into their classroom through a simple question that might yield such a response as this one, with which I will close this reflection:

Is reading important to you? Yes because if you don't read and if you can't read you can't learn and if you can't learn you can't servive and no one wants to die and that's why reading is important to me.

Stephen Schueler, second grade student