First Person

We Just Do

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By Sean Chapman

Nine years ago, I began the lifelong job of learning how to teach. After the initial elation of being accepted as a graduate student in the creative-writing program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and learning that I would be studying with one of my favorite poets, I moved on to the next phase: fear. I knew that I would have to teach as part of my assistantship, and the thought of walking into a room full of people -- their heads swiveling to follow my shaky journey to the lectern at the front of the class -- scared me as nothing had since my one-scene stint as an actor.

I've led a classroom more than a thousand times since then, and I still get that little nip of fear as I walk into the room. But I think that's a good sign. The moment that I don't feel that thrill of the unexpected -- the realization that I am in an unscripted improv -- is when I should stop teaching.

I learned a lot of what I needed to know as a teacher that first semester leading my first composition class, and sometimes the names of those students, their faces, pop into my head as I'm walking to school or preparing for the next class. I wish I could thank them personally today, but I can't. I can, however, approach each semester as a learning experience, and I can try to teach with the same excitement and energy that I had so many classrooms ago.

Back then, I had no idea how much energy teaching takes. None of the new graduate students did. As part of our training as teaching assistants, we met in a daily workshop designed to prepare us for that first day in the classroom. Every day that passed was one day closer to the day that we had to teach. We had all done enough undergraduate work to be able to handle what was required of us in the classes we had to take. We all knew how to play that game, but actually teaching, that was a new one. We only had three days, two days, then one night, one hour, one minute, the bell.

Over beers that first night, we exchanged stories: "I saw myself from above." "I was listening to myself talk." "I felt like I was making an entrance onto a tiny stage." And my story was the same.

As I approached the classroom, I had one last thought: Go away, just turn, there's the exit. But my feet moved forward as they do when you're waiting at an amusement park for a ride that 30 feet back you decided wasn't such a good idea. People all around you moving forward until you are there at the turnstile. You are on the ride. I gathered up enough speed so that I couldn't convince my feet to turn around. I felt the doorknob, can still feel it. I walked into the room and was on auto-pilot.

"Good afternoon. My name is Sean. You can call me Mr. Chapman if you insist." I made it through the day and began to learn my students' names.

As the weeks went by, my students got to know me, and I got to know them. Most lived in Chicago and came to Carbondale to get as far from their parents as they could. One of my students, Jaime, was heartsick over the distance between his girlfriend and our university. I called his journal "The Amanda Chronicles," and it was full of clear description, minute details of their life and love.

Another student was in a motorized wheelchair. Rodney didn't know what happened to him one night in Chicago. He and his friends were out doing drugs, he said, and wandering the train tracks. He woke up later in the hospital with brain damage. He couldn't use his hands, and his speech was slowed. After he got out of the hospital, he decided to go to school to become a lawyer and do a better job than his had done, so he was in my freshman English class trying to get through his first year.

His comments in class would stop us all. We would be having a fast, spirited discussion about race-relations or advertising, (two of the topics that my students knew could distract me from the required paper that was always due soon) and Rodney would slowly lift his hand and start talking. It took a long time to get to the center of his thoughts, and the students waited with quiet respect for his comments, which were sometimes perfectly fitting and sometimes off the subject entirely.

The class loved to argue about anything. One day everyone was talking at once. I commanded, "Silence!" This tiny attempt at control by a teacher whom I'm fairly sure the students viewed as a pushover was greeted with a chorus of laughter. Then I remembered a technique I had learned in one of the many teaching workshops. In that workshop, we took turns talking. It was our turn when the professor threw us a rubber ball. All of the graduate students were a little embarrassed by this childish technique, but we played along, dutifully waiting our turn to catch the ball and talk. I didn't think that I'd ever be using that method, but I decided to try it that unruly day in own classroom.

Feeling embarrassed, I held up a pen and announced, "This is the talking pen. No one can speak without the talking pen." The students were silent. They loved this idea, and I started throwing the pen around from one student to the next.

Then Rodney raised his hand.

And I didn't know what to do. I had gone out of my way all semester to overlook Rodney's disability, to treat him as if there was nothing different about him. But there was. His hands were frozen in strange positions. He could barely hold his own pen much less write up to speed during our in-class writing assignments.

I had to do something. Should I have walked over to his seat and given him the pen? Should I have ended the game and simply called on him?

The class quieted. I bent my arm. I threw the pen. The air was thick; the silence -- pure and complete. Outside the construction of the parking garage, the singing of the birds, even the planes, seemed to wait for the pen to fly. And it did. It spun and turned, and Rodney turned his face away, and we all watched, not breathing, as the pen stuck perfectly between his third and fourth fingers and held.

At the end of a symphony, if it is really good, the audience is quiet for a moment, and so were we. We were silenced, and Rodney lifted his head and looked at the pen in his hand. We went crazy. I ran around the classroom, my arms in the air. The class cheered, and Rodney sat there smiling in his chair.

We all try so hard to get along, to know each other, to be loved or admired. We put miles between us and our parents. We miss our sweethearts. We get calls from poets who become our friends. We talk too loud. We are afraid. But sometimes we don't think. We just do. And that is right.