Why I Teach: Reason 386

I’m in my classroom, going over the final prompt for my 122 students. This time, it involves a music video, Joan Osborne’s “One of Us.”

(The link’s above. Go listen. I’ll wait.)

OK? Now with that song in mind, imagine yourself in a dark computer lab on the last Friday afternoon before Dead Week. You are a bit burned out, and you’ve just put this video on (probably a bit too loud– the bass vibrates your desk) and had the student by the door—his name is Ivy, not that it matters—kill the lights.

You sit, and the desk vibrates, and on the screen images of Coney Island and its grubby, battered people stream, and the Joan’s soaring voice swirls around you on a wave of guitars and bass. On screen a roller coaster creeps to the top of a mountain and sweeps down, down, down, and halfway down the row of computer carrels a kid hesitantly raises one hand and starts swaying. I look and smile, thinking he might be joking. A roller coaster’s on screen, after all. He raises his other hand and keeps swaying, alone in the dark. After a few minutes he slows, stops, and starts to pull his hands down. And then something magical happens.  The kid across from him raises his hands, and sways. The first kid’s hands go back up and they sway together, in the dark and the music.

Somebody at the far end of the lab turns on the light app on her phone, raises it, and sways. And then the room is full of lights, swaying with the music, as Joan speculates about what it might be like if God really was one of us—or if we could learn to see the bit of Him, or Her, or It, that dwells in each of us, all the more precious for our imperfections that are really not imperfections at all, but the very things that make us uniquely perfect.

I think of my old drawing professor, who insisted that we look, really look, at our subjects, and draw not what we “knew was there,” but what we saw—scrapes, scratches, dents, wrinkles, cracks, bare spots, and patches—all the “imperfections” that somehow, in the alchemy of eyes, brains, pencils, and souls, became more than perfect. They became things to wake the soul.

Back in my classroom, the laughter has faded–we’re all caught up in the moment. Lights cut glowing arcs through the darkness and the music, meeting, intersecting, and passing only to meet again. And then, as suddenly as it began, it’s over. The hands drop. The phones go out. The video ends. Ivy turns on the light. We take a breath. And we go on talking about the final.

But what I’m going to remember is that wonderful moment, when one kid had the courage to put up his hands and found a kindred spirit, and together they filled a room with lights.