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Food for the Heart
By Michelle Martello
(October 13, 2000)
My ex-employer, upon discovering that I was going to teach four sections of English Composition at Berklee College of Music, rolled his eyes and wagged a finger. "You must be a glutton for punishment," he said.
After a half-year sabbatical, I returned last fall for a second semester teaching at Boston's premier contemporary music school. A stint at a law office, where I worked as a receptionist between teaching assingments, was enough to make me long for the classroom distractions of tippity tappity fingers playing scales on desks and sentences that begin, "Does anybody know that song–?"
When I arrived in Boston in the fall of 1998, I was interviewed on a Thursday afternoon by an enthusiastic chairman. On Friday morning, I was interviewed by a dean. On Friday afternoon, I met the provost. My hand was shaken firmly several times, and several times I was told with an elated sigh, "You will love the students."
By four o'clock that same whirlwind Friday, sans syllabus, I faced my young lions and, lo and behold, I fell in love.
There should be Byronic odes written for these guys with guitars strapped to their backs and these girls with dreadlocks. "You don't hide your enthusiasm, Martello," the chairman said to me last summer when I agreed to three and then four classes (that made for nearly 100 students under my tutelage, if you include those I taught twice a week at the Boston Conservatory). And I said to him what my former student Luke used to say to me: "I'm just happy to be here."
In September, my classes grew beyond capacity, but I had no complaints. It was Ron who made it difficult for me to turn people away. For two weeks, he approached me in the hallway after his frustrating, "borin'" English class and said to me achingly, "Martello, I gots to be in your class. Everybody says you straight, and I gots to be in you class!"
I chose to be flattered, and I told him he was more than welcome. Soon Ron was sitting front and center in my twelve o'clock section, eagerly questioning the details of menstruation as given in Jamaica Kincaid's short story "Gwen."
Idiosyncratic moments like this are the most glorious, of course. Let's take Alex and Jack, members of my one o'clock class. This particular classroom is dominated by an electronic keyboard where a desk should be. When Alex or Jack was feeling fiesty, he would follow my opening statements with suitable chords.
"Journals are due –" I'd begin.
DA-DA-DUM, he would play.
Of course, I had my panic moments, when there was too much silence. To illustrate the isolation conveyed in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," I lodged myself into the window frame, standing with one foot on the ledge and the other on the radiator. I pressed my palms and my forehead to the glass and discussion came alive. In another class, I pulled all 20 students over to the long window and together we inspected the world around us, eventually zeroing in on diners in a Japanese noodle house (we were noticed and waved to). To avoid the unbearable heat of another room, I took one group to the Reflecting Pool and was offered a thousand dollars to jump in naked.
For all of this, I am lucky. We learned so many different kinds of stories. Joo Wan from Korea, a recent graduate of a Zen monastery, mesmerized us with details of life before and after Buddhism. "Educate us!" Jacques would shout from the back of the room. Lara, from Ireland, told tales of childhood and relationships with grandparents and schoolteachers. Alex, from the Dominican Republic, let us taste the idea of spirits.
This profession, teaching, has been called the noble profession. What is so about it is the changing of expressions on faces, the ideas put around, the fact that my students call each other by name, the worlds colliding into spectacular light.
It is as my quiet and observant student So Young said of Kafka's "A Hunger Artist": "He does not want food for eating. He wants food for the heart." And when he said it, I realized that I am sated, that my heart is full.
This article originally ran in the Fall 1999 edition of CWRU Magazine, the alumni publication produced by Michelle Martello's alma mater, Case Western Reserve University. It appears here with the permission of the magazine and the author.
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