I did something rather unexpected yesterday morning with my Heritage class- I let them go thirty minutes before class was officially over – and I wish you could have seen the look on their collective faces when I said “okay, time to get out into that springtime sunshine.” Disbelief. Wonderment. Gratitude.
What happened is that earlier in the morning I had my fourth and final session of opera class with Adventures in Lifelong Learning- and because the class was almost certainly going to make me late getting back to Carthage for heritage, I told the class Wednesday that Friday’s class would not begin until 11:10. That was going to give me plenty of time to get back from UW-Parkside with time to spare to get myself together. Unfortunately, one of the hardest things in the world for me to do is to stop talking when I’m on a roll and people seem to be enjoying what I’m doing. This class was devoted to Puccini’s La Boheme and Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment- the last two HD Simulcasts from the Met- and I found myself incapable of stopping at 10:50 as I had planned . . . and in fact was still talking about the Donizetti comedy at 10:59 as I was putting on my coat and putting my videos into my backpack. (It’s a wonder that I wasn’t still lecturing as I was walking down the hall- There is ALWAYS one more interesting thing to say, especially when there is a nice audience of people who seem genuinely interested.) So I had to roar over to Carthage and in fact walked into my classroom at exactly 11:10 with my head still filled with Puccini and Donizetti and realizing immediately that I just couldn’t teach the class I was intending to teach.
So. . . in the tradition of jazz musicians, I improvised. The students had to hand in an outline of the semester’s major paper, which is due in mid-May . . . and the next step is writing a thesis statement around which to base the paper. So that’s what I talked about – what is a thesis statement, and almost more importantly, what a thesis statement is not. I spoke with them for about fifteen minutes or so – actually never taking off my coat – and then I looked out the window at the sunshine, looked back at the thank-God-it’s- Friday expression on their faces, and said “That’s all.” And I let them go. It just felt right to do it because this was the first day we’ve had that even remotely looked and felt like spring . . . and sometimes you just have to do such things. One of my favorite courses at Luther was an intro to Psychology course- and one of the things I most appreciated about Jane Jakoubek, one of the three teachers of the course, is that when she was done with whatever it was she needed to lecture about, she let us go . The other teachers tended to yammer on for the full duration of the class period, even if there was nothing particular important to say. When Professor J was done, we were done. Now that’s the way to teach a college course.
And only now is the irony of all this occurring to me – that me talking about opera up to the last possible moment is the same as Professor Moorcraft talking right up to the last possible second about his first love – psychology. Get a normal person talking about that thing which most enflames their passion, and the steepest challenge of them all is knowing when to shut up!
Anyway, I am glad to have given those Heritage students and unexpected thirty-five minutes of freedom in their day- and to gain it for myself as well. Such surprises can mean the difference between mental health and mental breakdowns!
pictured: one of the trees in our backyard, with buds apparently on the verge of bursting.