On Teaching: Fire in the Classroom

Today I experienced perhaps one of the most exciting classes I've ever been involved in. It was a 9th grade group, in which we were discussing a chapter in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, and these students lit fires in each other as they spoke. They burned with a passion for this old, underappreciated, seldom-read classic. Their hands were constantly waving, and it was all I could do to call on half of those who wanted to be heard. The word "excitement" derives from the Latin word for "set into action", and that's what happened in this class: many young minds were put into motion as the students talked animatedly about what they had read last night. The Latin root is an interesting way to look at the act of thinking -- as a series of "actions" that have a snowball or domino effect, building in power as the thoughts are created. That's what I saw today in this class. It was as if a snowball of teenage thoughts was rolling down hill, and all I could was stand out of the way and watch it gain momentum. An even better analogy, perhaps, comes when I think of these students today as being ardent. As the etymology of the word suggests, the kids "burned" with enthusiasm for Dickens' novel. They were like so many flames in my classroom, and the wonderful thing is that the flames spread as the minutes passed. Like many fires, the students' excitement was uncontainable and unmanageable. In some ways, it wasn't an orderly class, just as fires are not orderly. Fires burn the way they want to, and my 9th grade students today thought, felt, and spoke the way they wanted to. At one point, I remember thinking, "I'm losing control of this class. The kids are taking over." But then I thought, "Good. Let the fire burn." And it did.