Teaching, Living, and Learning: SWEET ENTRANCED

Sunday, December 19, 2010

SWEET ENTRANCED

"... sweet entranced
After her wandering labours long."
-- John Milton, in "Comus"

It's probably fool-headed to think of anyone being "entranced" by my English class, but I must confess to daydreaming about that possibility when I read these lines this morning. My students do a great amount of scholarly "wandering" as they work their way through my lessons and assignments, and I take pleasure in innocently assuming that they occasionally slip into the type of trances great books can produce. I guess teenagers sometimes fall into trances related to television shows or songs or sports, and my fantasy dream is that they might become similarly mesmerized by the wisdom of Whitman or the musical sentences of Dickens. After trekking through pages of perplexing reading, I hope they sometimes see a shining light of understanding that sends them into the most pleasant kind of daze. I'm sure it doesn't happen often. English class is probably more humdrum than breathtaking, but maybe the students occasionally find themselves "sweet entranced" by something like adverbs or the sonnets of Shakespeare.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

...........

The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett