Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Last spring, my graduate students and I propped my cellphone on the ledge of a whiteboard at the front of class and, with flutes of champagne in hand, we took a timed selfie. The occasion for the picture was a celebration of my twenty-five years of teaching in a university classroom. I never factored a career in education as part of my quarter-century life plan. I had my sights on the upper floors of a corporate office in a glass tower overlooking a major US city.

By my estimation, I’ve taught approximately 1500 students, read and discussed 6,000 original poems, spent 3000 hours lecturing, guided 50 graduate theses, and written at least 150 letters of recommendation. But impact isn’t measured by numbers alone. I’m proud of the students who have gone on to publish books and those who themselves now support a generation of aspiring writers to find value and worth, as Socrates phrased it, in an examined life.

Truth is, I gain as much, if not more, from my students as I believe they receive from me. Sometimes, a truly breathtaking poem lands on my desk, and I am utterly grateful for the miracle of language: a student writing about her developmentally disabled uncle and his heartbreaking kindness, a mother who emotionally wrestles with the challenges and joys of raising a transgender daughter. The pitch of awe, fear, and love expressed baldly by my less reticent students have encouraged me to explore greater depths of vulnerability and courage, to not hide behind the artifice of a poem, to mean what I say.

What I’ve learned over the past twenty-five years is that everyone yearns to understand themselves and the world around them, to live as best as they can by getting us close to how we feel, to not evade the difficult questions. When I risk sentimentality, I also find that I can encourage my students to claim a greater truth, to reveal excruciating intimacies that make a genuine bond with all in the room. In this way, we are more than a classroom. We are each other’s circle of light where connections blossom around artful speech.

Today’s poem understands the gift of students who enrich the profession of teaching through profound insights and perceptions that change us, change us utterly.

A Response to the Misguided Student
by Wesley Rothman

That semester we watched all those movies
& called it interracial: the leading roles
Were all played by early career blockbuster stars
But only one film busted the theaters, busted certain
Americans deeper into the dimness of their skulls —
Our birth, our nation. Your voice deep enough,
After so many years of smoke, its frequency still 
Trundles my inner ear. You didn’t know then,
& I couldn’t have either, that your lone question —
What happens when you ignore a part of someone? —
Would flood me, and in time, knock down
Every structure. At the center of every film
We studied, two people crossed into each other,
The world around us filled with water or fire or both.

“A Response to the Misguided Student” by Wesley Rothman. Used by permission of the poet.