On the Eve of the First Day of the New School Year

So already, tomorrow the 2016-2017 school year will begin for Cambridge Rindge and Latin School students. And for the first time since I retired almost three years ago, I find myself really missing the prospect of beginning a new school year with a whole new group of students in front of me. 

It's taken almost three years for some of the reasons that I yearned to retire from CRLS to become less important to me than the reasons I went into teaching in the first place. Getting to know the kids, getting to watch them take hold, learn with and from one another, recognize their personal growth as learners, thinkers, community members, and people with serious individual interests and commitments*--that was always the most satisfying part of the job--and the real reason for doing it.

Light & Windows Reminiscent of Hope High Classroom in Fall**

The vivid dream I had the other night was what really clued me in to the fact that I was entering a new phase of "retirement." I was about to begin a new part-time teaching job in a warmly lit classroom that was practically identical to the one in which I'd student-taught. There were blackboards, not whiteboards, and old desks. My desk--symbolic, I think, of my very different place in my teaching career--was at the opposite end of the classroom from where it had been in September 1977. 

Taking stock of where I was and what it meant, I was excited and happy, but I also realized the kids would soon be arriving and I hadn't yet planned my lesson. Thinking I'd begin with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as I had done in so many of the English classes I'd taught to juniors and seniors, I went into the next classroom--and learned happily from the teacher next door--who just happened to be a beloved former colleague who now lives and teaches in St. Louis--that she had a set of copies of the play that I could borrow. Books in hand, I headed back to my classroom, confident that I'd come up with something that would get my students wanting to read Sophocles.

 
I woke up smiling. I don't know if it was because my new classroom had windows--the last time I'd taught in a classroom with windows was 2002!--or because I was about to teach Oedipus Rex, which always engaged the kids and became a text to which we referred again and again as we encountered characters, times, and situations in other works of literature. I also understood that during many previous Labor Day weekends at our cabin out in Berlin, I would have experienced a "school dream" as a sign of the inevitability of going back to work. Maybe I was glad to be dreaming about going back to school without actually needing to go back! Hmmm . . .

I began thinking of how I'd taught Oedipus Rex. I always framed our experience of the play by reminding my students that the Greeks who went to see Oedipus Rex--like us when we went to see historical movies such as Apollo 13, for example--already knew how the story was going to end. So a question for them and for us both might be, "Why do people go to see movies and plays of stories when they already know how they're going to end?"

There was another question with which I always required my students to wrestle: was Oedipus the victim of a destiny created for him--or did he create that destiny for himself? Often to the initial dismay of my students, I deliberately defined his destiny as his having blinded himself and exiled himself from Thebes, not as his having murdered his father and married his mother. 

My justification for defining Oedipus' destiny in this way was a typical English teacher's justification: I wanted to my students to base their interpretations on Oedipus' words and actions as the text presented them to us. As readers of the play, we do not get to observe firsthand how Oedipus becomes his mother's husband, his children's brother, and his father's murderer,*** though we do get to hear him describe the vigorous way in which he killed several strangers at a crossroads. We do, however, get to see and hear Oedipus when he responds to the call of his Theban subjects to liberate them from a plague that is afflicting the entire city, makes various promises to them, and responds to what ensues as a result of those promises.

As my students and I grappled with this question of Oedipus' destiny over a period of a week or so, my tack was to keep muddying the waters. First we looked at how Ancient Greek beliefs about fate, prophecies, oracles, sinfulness, and righteousness might explain responsibility for Oedipus' destiny. Next we considered Heraclites' idea that "Character is fate": was Oedipus the victim of his own personality? (This always led to a discussion about the degree to which personality is fixed or malleable.) Next, we tackled the relationship between role and fate: when a person is a leader of a country, is his/her destiny "determined" at least in part by the obligations associated with his/her role--in this case, as the king during a crisis? Though we explored these sequentially, the real takeaway was that all of these ideas could be mattering and interacting.

Once I was done thinking about how I used to teach the play, I began to imagine what it might be like to teach it during the current presidential campaign. There are so many moments when characters in the play who want to respect and trust Oedipus become alarmed by his apparent disrespect for the oracles, disdain for the divine order, and accusations against those whom he has trusted. The conversation between Choragos and Creon sounds like a discussion that could happen between two people worried about the effects of Donald Trump's impulsive accusations and comments on his ability to appear and be "presidential":

Choragos:
    He [Oedipus] may have spoken in anger, not from his mind.
Creon:
    But did you not hear him say I was one the one
    Who seduced the old prophet [Teiresias] into lying?
Choragos: 
    The thing was said; I do not know how seriously.
Creon:
    But you were watching him! Were his eyes steady?
    Did he look like a man in his right mind?
Choragos:
                               I do not know.
    I can not  judge the behavior of great men. (27)****

Meanwhile, the play's second choral ode could echo the sentiments of detractors of either Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump who tend to claim similarly that the candidate they detest is arrogant and corrupt, and that he/she routinely places him/herself above quintessential American laws and attitudes: 

Haughtiness and the high hand of disdain
Tempt and outrage God's holy law;
And any mortal who dares hold
No immortal Power in awe
Will be caught in a net of pain. . . .
Our masters call the oracle
Words on the wind, and the Delphic vision blind! (47)

I also began to wonder how these lines spoken by Oedipus would play to students in the current moment--not just the presidential moment, but the social media moment in which there's often so much disagreement about the degree to which people can understand the depth and complexity of other people's feelings:

Poor children! . . . 
I know that you are deathly sick; and yet,
Sick as you are, not one is as sick as I.
Each of you suffers in himself alone
His anguish, not another's; by my spirit
Groans for the city, for myself, for you. (5)

The first fifteen years that I taught this play, I interpreted these lines evidence of Oedipus' dedication to his subjects, of his largesse, compassion, and willingness to assume great responsibility for his subjects' well-being. 

CRLS after breaking rain, 2013

But the last fifteen years I taught this play, I began to hear them as belittling of the experience of his Theban subjects. How does he know who suffers "in himself alone"? Don't neighbors suffer for neighbors and others whose experiences they can imagine? And how patronizing of Oedipus to refer to his subjects as children: they are grown men and women, mothers and fathers watching the deaths of their own children, adults whose capacities for feeling for others he is assuming to be insignificant as compared to his own. Pity the poor Thebans, caught in net created by the cursed House of Labdakos and treated as if their suffering cannot compare to that of their king.

I offer the quotations and comments above only because my teacher brain has been stimulated by my dream. It's fun to wonder what kinds of connections students would make as they encountered this piece of literature in this current moment. Oedipus Rex continues to have  a great deal to teach us about being human within the context a powerful system that does not respond to the humans whose lives are strongly affected by it.

It's after 10:00. If I were still teaching, I'd be needing to wrap up this blog post right now and go to bed so I'd be ready for that first day tomorrow. And in fact, I do need to go to Cambridge for "work" tomorrow morning, but I won't be standing on the subway platform at 6:15, as was my old habit--and certainly one of the parts of my old life that I don't miss.  

Another great group of students!

Will I teach again? I don't know. What I do know is that I enjoyed that dream encounter with my old school-based self that gave me so much joy over the years: no matter what else was going on at work, I always trusted--well, almost always trusted--that when I really paid attention to my students--to their thinking, their learning, their feelings, their relationships with one another, their work--something good would come of it. 

So here's wishing a wonderful, promising start to the new school year to all the teachers and students who are getting ready for the first real day--and especially to those who are getting ready for their first real day at their new school. May each of you find yourself saying to yourself very soon, "I think this is going to be a really good year." I am feeling close to all of you tonight--and proud to have been the colleague and teacher of many of you! 

* School Friends Clipart Image #1. N.d. School Friends Clipart. School Friends Clipart. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Web. 5 Sept. 2016. <http://worldartsme.com/school-friends-clipart.html#gal_post_37787_school-friends-clipart-1.jpg>.  
** Screen shot of https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CVanQfF-7vM/TLdKK86S6VI/AAAAAAAADLg/JMVQd1q05V0/s1600/SchoollPaintLickOldWindowSunWdFloorsr.jpg: from Folkways Notebook blog: https://folkwaysnotebook.blogspot.com/2010/10/old-school-small-town-community.html 
*** Despite my insistence that we consider Oedipus' blind exile, we always discussed the degree to which he "chose" to kill his father and marry his mother.
*** Sophocles. (1977). The Oedipus cycle: An English version (D. Fitts & R. Fitzgerald, Trans.). San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company.