Schoolteaching Years

Welcome to Celebrate Whitman.  My name is George Bartley. This is episode 393 - Schoolteaching Years

When we left Walt in the previous episode, it seemed that his future career seemed set in the newspaper and printing trades - he saw the ability to print text that brought about images and emotions in the minds of other people to be almost magical. This was finally a vocation that he wanted to pursue.

Unfortunately, two of New York City’s worst fires destroyed the major printing and business centers of the city.  And New York, formerly a place of growth, suffered a dismal financial climate.

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Transcript

George Bartley - plain text

Walt Whitman - Italics text

Welcome to Celebrate Whitman.  My name is George Bartley. This is episode 393 - Schoolteaching Years

When we left Walt in the previous episode, it seemed that his future career seemed set in the newspaper and printing trades - he saw the ability to print text that brought about images and emotions in the minds of other people to be almost magical. This was finally a vocation that he wanted to pursue.

Unfortunately, two of New York City’s worst fires destroyed the major printing and business centers of the city.  And New York, formerly a place of growth, suffered a dismal financial climate.

Greetings, Mr Bartley.

Hello, Mr. Whitman.  I was just starting to talk about a period in your life when you seemed excited about the newspaper and printing trades, but a dismal financial climate made you want to change your direction in life. Is that a fair way of saying it?

yes, Mr. Bartley, I even retreated to rural Long Island.

Was this to rejoin your family?

Yes, Mr. Bartley.  I was only 17 years old, but it seemed that I was on the verge of some kind of a career change.

And what was that?

I decided to become a schoolteacher.

A schoolteacher.  Oh yes, I wanted to point out that the episodes about your time in New Orleans actually occurred after your time as a school teacher. But I wanted to give a little background, so that listeners could compare the vibrant time that you experience in New Orleans with the somewhat tedious times that you experience is a school teacher.

Yes Mr. Bartley, I can see why you would want to talk about the exciting experiences in New Orleans first and compare them to my rather lackluster Time as a school teacher in New York.

Now, Mr. Bartley, I admit that my own formal education was … what shall I say … quite minimal by your standards, as a newspaper apprentice, I had definitely developed the skills of reading and writing.  My knowledge would be more than enough for the kind of teaching that I would be doing for the next few years.  And I knew that I did not want to become a farmer, and rebelled at my father’s attempts to get me to work on the new family farm. Teaching was therefore an escape but was also clearly a job I was forced to take in bad economic times, and some of the unhappiest times of my life were these five years when I taught school in at least ten different Long Island towns, rooming in the homes of my students, teaching three-month terms to large and heterogeneous classes (some with over eighty students, ranging in age from five to fifteen, for up to nine hours a day), getting very little pay, and having to put up with some rather unenlightened people.

And after all the excitement of Brooklyn and New, the often isolated Long Island towns must have been depressing.

Yes, I must admit that I developed a certain disdain for backwards country attitudes in backwards Long Island towns.  I wrote to a friend named Abraham Leech that  "Never before have I entertained so low an idea of the beauty and perfection of man's nature, never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here," "Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dulness are the reigning gods of this sink of despair.”

That does sound like you were not that happy to be a teacher.

Oh, Mr. Bartley, I DID have original ideas, it appears, about especially regarding teaching mental arithmetic.

Had you already written the poetry that we know you for?

Oh, yes, I had definitely started writing verse. And dressed neatly in a black frock coat, was of beautiful complexion and rugged health, and attempted to spend every possible moment out of doors. I was even referred to as a man out of the average, who strangely attracted respect and affection.

Those are excellent qualities.  Do we have any accounts of your actual teaching?

Ah, Mr. Bartley, the little evidence regarding my teaching (mostly from short recollections by a few former students) suggests that I employed what were then progressive techniques—encouraging students to think aloud rather than simply recite, refusing to punish by paddling, involving my students in educational games, and joining my students in baseball and card games. I did not hesitate to use my own poems—which I was by this time writing with some frequency, though they were rhymed, conventional verses that indicated nothing of the innovative poetry that I would later write—as texts in my classroom.

Mr. Whitman, do you feel that you were suited to be a country teacher?

Mr. Bartley, while I would continue to write frequently about educational issues and would always retain a keen interest in how knowledge is acquired, I was clearly not suited to be a country teacher.

So, Mr. Whitman, how would you describer your educational philosophy?

Mr. Bartley, perhaps my educational philosophy can best be described in a poem from the first edition of Leaves of Grass - a poem that was eventually known as “There Was A Child Went Forth.”

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morningglories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phœbe-bird,
And the March-born lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf, and the noisy brood of the barn-yard or by the mire of the pond-side . . and the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there . . . and the beautiful curious liquid . . and the water-plants with their graceful flat heads . . all became part of him.

And the field-sprouts of April and May became part of him . . . . wintergrain sprouts, and those of the light-yellow corn, and of the esculent roots of the garden,
And the appletrees covered with blossoms, and the fruit afterward . . . . and woodberries . . and the commonest weeds by the road;
And the old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the tavern whence he had lately risen,
And the schoolmistress that passed on her way to the school . . and the friendly boys that passed . . and the quarrelsome boys . . and the tidy and fresh-cheeked girls . . and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
And all the changes of city and country wherever he went.

His own parents . . he that had propelled the fatherstuff at night, and fathered him . . and she that conceived him in her womb and birthed him . . . . they gave this child more of themselves than that,
They gave him afterward every day . . . . they and of them became part of him.
The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the suppertable,
The mother with mild words . . . . clean her cap and gown . . . . a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by:
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust,
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture . . . . the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsayed . . . . The sense of what is real . . . . the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of daytime and the doubts of nighttime . . . . the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so . . . . Or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets . . if they are not flashes and specks what are they?
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses. . . . the goods in the windows,
Vehicles . . teams . . the tiered wharves, and the huge crossing at the ferries;
The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset . . . . the river between,
Shadows . . mist . . light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown, three miles off,
The hurrying tumbling waves and quickbroken crests and slapping;
The strata of colored clouds . . . . the long bar of maroontint away solitary by itself . . . . the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
TThese became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes and will always go forth every day,
And these become of him or her that peruses them now.

Mr. Whitman - what does that poem say to you?

Ah, Mr. Bartley - I believe that There Was a Child Went Forth can be read as a statement of how important it is to celebrate unrestricted learning with an openness not only to experience, but an openness to ideas that would allow for endless absorption of variety and difference.
Mr. Whitman, that sounds like the kind of education you gave yourself and the kind of education you valued.

Very well stated, Mr. Bartley.  To be honest, I am always somewhat suspicious of classrooms - I believe that true learning is the result of honest curiosity - an example being my poem with the child who asks the question “What is the Grass”

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

My intention in this poem is to discover the complex in the seemingly simple, the cosmos in myself—an attitude that is possible only when we put "creeds and schools in abeyance."

Well, Mr. Whitman - what are some other ways that you kept yourself mentally active?

Ah, Mr. Bartley, I kept himself alive intellectually by taking an active part in debating societies and in political campaigns: inspired by the Scottish reformist Frances Wright, who came to the United States to support Martin Van Buren in the presidential election of 1836, I became an industrious worker for the Democratic party , campaigning most vigorously for Martin Van Buren's successful candidacy.

Great!   That kind of thing can give purpose to your life.

Yes, Mr. Bartley, but despite my strong tendency to be optimistic about my situation, there were situations in which teaching could be most depressing. In a letter I wrote to Abraham Paul Leech on August 11, 1840, I wrote O, how I wish I was among you for a few hours: how tired and sick I am of this wretched, wretched hole!—I wander about like an evil spirit, over hills and dales, and through woods, fields, and swamps. In the manufactory of Nature, the building of these coarse gump-heads that people Woodbury, must have been given to some raw hand; for surely no decent workman ever had the making of them.—And these are the contemptible ninnies, with whom I have to do, and among whom I have to live.—O, damnation, damnation! thy other name is school-teaching and thy residence Woodbury.—Time, put spurs to thy leaden wings, and bring on the period when my allotted time of torment here shall be fulfilled.—Speed, ye airy hours, lift me from this earthly purgatory; nor do I care how soon ye lay these pudding-brained bog-trotters, amid their kindred earth.— Never before have I entertained so low an idea of the beauty and perfection of man's nature, never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here.—Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dulness are the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair.

Yes, I can see where it would be difficult to remain optimistic under those circumstances.

By 1841, I decided to try my luck at starting my own newspaper, The Long Islander, devoted to  covering the towns around Huntington.

Did you have a press?

No, but I bought a press and type and hired my younger brother George as an assistant.  Unfortunately, despite energetic efforts to edit, publish, write for, and deliver the new paper, it folded within a year, and I reluctantly returned to the classroom. Newspaper work made me happy, but teaching did not, and two years later, I abruptly quit my job as an itinerant schoolteacher.

Mr. Whitman, why?

That is not as easy a question to answer as it might appear.  I know that there seems to be a constant rumor that I was engaged in sodomy with one of my students while teaching in Southhold - that I was run out of town in disgrace - never to teach again. However, it is not possible to prove that I ever even taught there.  Now it is true that I DID travel again to Southold to write some journalistic pieces about the place.

When was this?

Ah, Mr. Bartley, this was during the late 1840s and early 1860s.

What do believe was the reason you left teaching?

Ah, Mr. Bartley - it seems far more likely that I gave up schoolteaching because I found myself temperamentally unsuited for it. And, besides, I had a new career in front of me - My inclinations were to become a fiction writer. Best of all, to nurture that career, I would need to return to New York City and re-establish myself in the world of journalism.

Well, Mr. Whitman that seems as good a place as any to stop.

Join Celebrate Whitman for our next episode 394 - Simplicity where Mr. Whitman talks about the importance of simplicity in his life, and it's not as easy as you might think.
 
Sources include: The Complete Works of Walt Whitman, especially Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman by Ivan R. Dee, Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving, and Walt Whitman by James E. Miller.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Whitman.