What I Didn't Teach

 When I opened the Power Point for the Grade 4 class on Gulliver's Travels, I knew instinctively that I wasn't going to follow it during this class. I could see that I had put together too many quotes from the book and long , wordy historical references to the conflicts between England and Ireland in Swift's time...and for Grade 4 students! And there were simply not enough pictures in my power point to make something compelling for me to teach. It seems as though when I had designed this power point, I had either overestimated the kids' interest in historical forays, or was simply in a scholarly mood. I gather that teachers may sometimes have difficulties of drawing the line between their own pet interests and those of their students. And sometimes even one's confidence can falter in those tiny micro-moments between looking at the power point and starting to engage the class.
   It turns out, as usual, that my students become my best teachers when it comes to communicating to me how I can best communicate with them. Surprisingly to me, the students do have their own unique curiosities about Swift, much of which center around the kinds of things that many of the "censored" children's editions of Gulliver's Travels leave out, namely the scatalogical and urological references. Let's face it: perhaps the most memorable part of this book is  the one we don't see in the children's movie version, namely the part where Gulliver urinates on a building to put out a fire in Lilliput. Even I find it amusing, and I am supposedly a grown man. It's not just the physical act itself which is amusing (although that's part of it), but more so the ethical meanings that the kids can tease out of it, including whether Gulliver was right to soil the Princesses' quarters with his bodily fluid, in the interests of putting out a fire. One of the students insisted that we read this part together--which he certainly volunteered to do with a lot of gusto. And he made me realize that there is no need to fluff up this book with too many royal frills from a historical past; Gulliver's dilemmas still have relevance and interest for young readers, with or without the historical references to battles and skirmishes that took place in Ireland and England in the 1700s.
   At the same time, I can honestly reflect that I could have done a better job in being more confident about what I did prepare. Sometimes, a teacher needs to pause and ask her or himself: if this "thing" that I prepared is so onerous, so daunting, so painful to look at, why did it seem like "a good idea at the time"? What was it about that time, that place, that mental space, etc. that lead me to create those slides, and not some others? Reflecting on these decisions can allow me to fine tune my approach, incorporating historical background into a more pedestrian, everyday summary of what is actually going on in the text. So, there is a balance of decisions to be made here, which relate to both past and present: namely, how to "render" the meaning of what a person prepared in the past with the contingencies of the current moment. That's a skill that I hope to learn more in teaching.