I taught a Franklin College class for a friend this week—a slightly risky task for an old, out-of-practice teacher. Even after 25 years of teaching, I go into every first day with trepidation.
This was a class in a January short course called “Art & Zen” (not “Art & Sin,” as my son Mike at first thought I’d said). The friend, Kathy Carlson, had asked me to talk about haiku and its relation to Zen.
Given an hour, I decided to do two things—invite the 20-some students to write haiku themselves, and give them a brief introduction to the Japanese haiku master, Basho.
I won’t recapitulate the talk in any detail here. We had some discussion of haiku as a poetic form, I read some excerpts from Basho’s masterpiece, Narrow Road to the Interior, and ended with a couple poems of my own that play off Basho. The student haikus ranged from quite good to slapstick—all acceptable and there were no grades. When they were turned in after five minutes, I mixed them up and had other students read them aloud.
The room itself, an art classroom, was unlike any other in which I’ve ever taught. The students were behind large art tables arranged around the four sides of the room. I ended by getting out into the room—arena-style teaching—and trying to remember not to keep my back to the same students all the time.
I had come early in hopes of meeting some of the students in advance. I always try to do this as a guest lecturer. It’s as much to allay my own jitters as anything, but presumably it also makes the teacher seem a bit more approachable. The class start-up was slow enough that I managed to identify nearly all the students and even construct a rough seating chart. Thank you, Jennifer, David, Morgan, Emmanuel, Jake, Rachel, Josh, Lauren, Lacey, Kahlie, Courtney, Lauren, Reb, Julie (from St. Louis), Jacie, Andrew, Kassie, Amber, Jack, and Bart.
One student was absent—“too stressed to come,” a friend reported. I thought about her a lot, and wrote a haiku the next day while Karen was with her occupational therapist:
This absent student,
who is she, and what sorrow
unsettles her mind?
I sent it to Kathy, who replied that I had “intuited” the situation, and could she show the verse to the student when the time was right? Of course, but also tell her I wasn’t playing poet with her situation—I had some tough times in college, and the word from here is that things get better.
I had fun quoting a couple of Basho’s earthier poems to the class:
Eaten alive by lice and fleas
now the horse
beside my pillow pees.
Bush warbler:
shits on the rice cakes
on the porch rail.
Kathy then teased me about wanting to say “shit” in class, and of course I did. And I had to tell about once being the only older student in a class on History of the English Language. Our team—two young women and me—was assigned the task of researching obscenities, from Old English times to the present. The girls did their research but were uncomfortable about the oral report. So I stood up and recited about 50 of the choicest words in English. In the hushed silence that followed, the prof finally said, “Does anyone else want to say something dirty?”
