20140108.0736

During my morning reading, I ran across a piece linked to a social media feed by an old colleague, Robert Bly's "Gratitude to Old Teachers" (which, since it is hosted on the Library of Congress website, I think I may use as part of public discourse).  The poem is presented as a paean or encomium to educators, expressing thanks to those whose work contributed to the collective narrator's ability to pass into the previously unknown.  The imagery of the poem seems to argue against that presentation, however, presenting personal advancement as a result of a negative view of education.

The identified milieu of the poem is "the frozen lake," a body of water rendered to stillness and solidity by long cold.  The narrator seeks to walk across it, working to go out onto a solidity new in the world--this lake is presumably not frozen in all weather--and is tentative in doing so because it is only newly frozen; it "once could take no human weight."  Now, however, it is frozen and seemingly supported by teachers under the surface of the ice.  The implication made is that the teachers extend as far as the ice does, "ahead of us for a mile," forming nuclei around which ice crystals can form and join together to provide a stable, if slippery and temporary, walking surface.

The imagery of the frozen lake that was "Water that once could take no human weight" during the collective narrator's school days, one being crossed amid stillness, seems to reflect a view that 1) learning is a one-time thing and that once it is achieved, 2) knowledge is static.  As the narrator moves out, the knowledge represented by the water does not move, nor does the rest of the environment, the context in which the knowledge exists.  An educational viewpoint that supports such an idea--that knowledge is a one-shot, static phenomenon--is clearly erroneous; knowledge, even basic knowledge, changes depending on the place and time.  What is taught is not necessarily what is "right"; it is at best the best understanding of what is right (and not all teaching is at its best, admittedly), and the best understanding changes with the passing years.

More disturbing is the underfloor of the frozen lake surface: old teachers.  Their being under the surface of the lake requires either that they can breathe water or that they are dead--and no evidence in the poem supports their having gills.  Also, for them to be visible under the ice as the collective narrator claims they are requires that they be quite close to the surface--likely frozen in the ice itself.  For the vision depicted in the poem to work, then, almost necessitates that teachers be frozen to death, a death particularly horrible to contemplate or to depict; certainly they must be dead and entombed in the ice.  The collective narrator needs the teachers to be living in the world no more; the advancement depends on death--and indeed mass death, if the teachers are coterminous with the ice that extends a mile ahead.  How many bodies must underlie the ice?  How many layers of bodies are needed to provide a stable walking surface, even in such cold as has typified early January 2014?

If what Bly expresses in the poem is the gratitude of the title, it cannot be wondered at that so many teachers burn out, that so many of them are at "both on autopilot and survival mode" as Strauss reports in her 31 December 2013 Washington Post piece "'I would love to teach, but....'"  If what Bly expresses is gratitude, censure must be all the more feared, for the gratitude is hardly to be sought.