lately some senior teachers have been having their students ask questions. i'm in favor of asking questions. question asking is an honorable pastime. i'd rather be asking questions than doing just about anything else i can think of (no, that's not true. i'm not telling you the truth, but...) sometimes people think that the teacher is smart (the fools), that the teacher has the answers. but the cool thing about asking questions is that you don't have to have the answers. in fact, i just about never have the answers to the questions that i ask (inside or outside of the classroom).

this, you would say, only makes sense. for why would a person ask a question if he already had the answer? but you are not that simple, not that naive. i know you aren't. you know that the true joy of asking questions is that you get to be in charge - you get to be the boss of the moment, however fleeting it may be.

so lately some senior teachers have been having their students ask questions.

on monday, i think, two students asked, "brother tom, what do you mean by harmonics"?

i wanted to be a smartass and reply, "i don't mean anything by harmonics; you brought it up." but i controlled myself and said, "well, i used to mess around with a harmonica. i'd blow into the darn thing and some noise would come out, made by whatever number of particular holes i blew into. it didn't sound too bad because of the way a harmonica is set up, but if somebody were to know which holes to blow into, he could make some very pretty noises. so i'm guessing that harmonics means something like one whole pleasing effect created by a lot of particular individual parts - e pluribus unum, don't you know."

and then a group of three... and then a loner... and then a pair came to me over the next four days with the same question, and i dutifully repeated my philosophy of harmonics. and then this morning, just when i thought it had run its course, a kid in homeroom bushwhacked me: "brother tom, what do you mean by harmonics?

i don't mind. it was kind of funny. i felt honored to be asked... though it was the honor of being the nearest, handiest adult at the last possible moment. at least i had some kind of answer...

...because yesterday morning, 7:54 i think, a bit before homeroom, a student approaches. "brother tom, can i ask you a question - my religion teacher wants us to ask some questions."

ok, kiddo, fire away.

"ok. first question. what is your philosophy of life?"

on a good day, on my smartest day - on a day when i'm ready to tackle the complexities of faulkner, dickinson and the blinkety-blanken understanding-by-design assessment process - i get this question, this impossible question. i knew it was impossible because not even a smartass answer came to mind. i just sat and stared, muttered "you've got to be kidding."

after a slow, horrible waddle through the void, i pulled out, "do the best you can." a sigh of relief. that doesn't sound so bad. still, i apologized for being so uninspired. do the best you can? that's it? that's yr freaking philosophy of life? give me a break.

"ok. now, the next questions are..."

... no better, even worse. huge questions whose answers could only appear, if ever, in dull flashes over long insomniac nights... all hopped up on chocolate milk and cheez-its... never under the wide flouresence of this over-sized, overheated classroom fifteen minutes before homeroom with two hundred frags of spam to dump... ever so carefully...

this afternoon a student named ben from some other school writes something like: "my teacher wants to know how you got all those titles for the collected works of wendell berry. and what does br. stand for?" i tell him.

also this afternoon, i found this message, sent from my form on last quarter's ap assignments page: "do you have any handouts on musical devices in poetry?" that's it. no name, no return email address.

as it happens, i do not have any such handouts. so i type a reply and click it out into the ether: sorry i don't have any... sorry sorry sorry... but... do you play the harmonica?

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Frank Moore Colby

 

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