Turning up the sound on the symphony of learning

I was observing some excellent teaching in another department yesterday and finally figured out what the prof's distinctive hand gestures brought to mind: He was directing a symphony, holding the students' attention with his outstretched hands as he explained dense technical concepts.

I looked around to see how the students were responding. Many--most, even--were diligently taking notes, but one guy had his eyes shut and another was staring blankly into space without so much as a pencil in evidence and a third, in a remarkable feat of multitasking, was scrolling down his laptop screen with one hand and texting into his phone with the other while his ears were ensconced in big clunky headphones. Here was a symphony of learning happening right in front of their faces but some students simply muted the sound.

I saw something similar in my American Lit Survey class yesterday as I performed my annual song-and-dance in honor of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." We got to the end of Part I, where Ginsberg describes his poetic task: "confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought....with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years." I stand in front of the class with my right hand outstretched and say, "Here's a chunk of bloody flesh butchered out of my own body--take a bite! It'll do you good."

And they just stare at me as if I've lost my mind. A few take up a pen and write something down--"confessional poetry," perhaps, as if that explains everything. I want them to taste and feel the power of the poem but they want to note the words and phrases that might show up on a test. I feel I have failed them, but maybe it's an age thing. I'm sure I found "Howl" incomprehensible the first time I read it, but now it feels like the world I inhabit.

How often is wisdom wasted on the young? I've been thinking lately about Walt Whitman's poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," in which the spider casts out "filament, filament, filament" into the unknown in firm belief that it will latch on somewhere, and then the poet's soul tosses "gossamer threads" across "measureless oceans of space" in hope that the thread will connect across the gaping void.

And I wonder how anyone can fully comprehend this poem without having faced that void. If your life is full of inputs from laptops and smartphones and big clunky headphones, you might wander blindly past the void without feeling the chill of its presence. Whitman had seen enough of suffering and pain to know the void was always waiting just beyond the leaves of grass he traversed, but a person distracted by shiny sparkly images might never notice the gaping void just underfoot--until someone came along and pushed them in. 

Is it my task as a teacher to introduce students to the void, to feed them the bloody chunk of flesh, to turn up the sound on the symphony of learning? Or shall I feed them flavorless words and phrases they can regurgitate on an exam? Just for today, I think I'll grasp the bloody flesh from Ginsberg, cross the void with Whitman, and listen for the subtle notes of the symphony--and hope my students someday return to these poems for another taste.