I tell my students again and again that I’m a better teacher when they’re better students, and that part of being a better student is not just being a cleverer student but being a more open and committed student. Bear down hard, be prepared for class, be creative and bold, and above all let me see your mind at work, online and face-to-face. If you do, I tell them, I’ll get inspired, and if I get inspired, I’ll be a better teacher–which means there’s more of a chance that they’ll get inspired. A virtuous cycle, and lots more fun than business as usual.

It will feel strange at first. The more familiar paradigm keeps us both in a more comfortable place. You do the work when and as it’s assigned, no more, and sometimes less. I take the work in, mark it, and return it to you. In Karen Stephenson’s analysis, it’s a transactional process. It doesn’t require much trust, and it leaves us both plenty of personal space for other pursuits.

Now, if we were preparing a play, or a recital, or a choral performance, or if we were training for the Olympics, a transactional process would obviously be the wrong choice for both of us. Why isn’t that obviously the case for learning, for school?

My high-school choir director, Mr. Snyder, used to tell us that we made him a poorer conductor when we weren’t well-practiced and fully engaged with our singing. He’d tell us that we literally made his arms hurt. By contrast, on those days in which we arrived knowing the notes, well-rested, focused and responsive and ready to make music, he’d take us to even higher levels, pulling nuances out of our releases, shaping phrases with revelatory care and detail, showing us performance horizons we hadn’t even guessed at but suddenly found ourselves traveling toward, together. On those days, we singers would get goosebumps. We’d look around at each other: can it be that we are making these sublime sounds? Didn’t we see those purposeful micro-gestures from Mr. Snyder before? Had we never realized the way one phrase could answer another, or how the altos subtly reinforced the tenors on a particular line? How could we have not understood why our director sped up the tempo just before the last chorus? It all makes so much more sense, now.

“Readiness is all,” Hamlet says. What kind of readiness am I describing here? The readiness to make music, to make meaning–to find meaning, rather? And of what does that readiness consist?

As a teacher, as a leader, I look constantly for readiness. My preparations are also meta-preparations, as I ready myself to find my engaged students and, on the good days, when I’m at my best, to bring those students into a fuller, more challenging awareness of possibilities for learning, for making, for doing.

And when my students inspire me, I hope I will always be ready to clap my hands and say, “again!”

A case in point for those interested in further reading: yesterday I lectured on lyric poetry and its flowering in the English Renaissance. (Yes, I lectured. Clowned, and preached, and hammed it up, and led the class in singing “Greensleeves.” It has its place.) A student blogged about part of the lecture. She inspired me to think harder and better about something I’d said. I commented on her blog and felt inspired to write more, hence the blog post you’re reading now. Her blog post will appear on the class aggregation page. My comment will appear on that page’s sidebar. I have realized my own blog post here, and glimpsed a more distant horizon myself, thanks to an inspiring student.

A virtuous cycle.

Again!