One of the great pleasures in my life and in my work at Milton is that I get to teach seniors in a modern literature course. Every day, I look forward to the experience of walking into a room with teenagers, closing the door, and talking about reading and writing. This year’s Modern Comparative Literature course began as always with the discussion of summer reading. It was light stuff—breezy, easy reading—quotidian. Not really. Have you seen that New Yorker cartoon of a policeman standing in front of a man under an umbrella, sitting in a beach chair and holding a book? The caption goes something like this: “I’m sorry, sir, but Dostoevsky is not beach reading.” My students might agree.

You’d think that students would complain about reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Dickens’ Great Expectations in the August before their senior year begins, but that’s not what I heard in class. “So what’s with this Raskolnikov guy?” “Don’t you have to love Pip? but can we talk about just what’s so great about his expectations?” From the start, this group was on fire. They had read deeply and well, and they were hungry for discussion about both Dickens and Dostoevsky. More importantly to me, they had liked both books, though some liked one more than the other. That gave us plenty to talk about for the first few weeks of class, as we laid out the differences between discursive and symbolic narrative and took a first measure of modern literature. By the second week, when we talked about William Barrett’s Irrational Man, took a quick spin through Existentialism 101, and looked into Eric Hobsbawm’s argument about the modern era as a response to the end of the Age of Imperialism, we were joking that the course ought to be called “Twentieth Century Bleak.”

Kafka was a challenge—he always is. The surreality of “The Judgment” and the grotesquery of “In the Penal Colony” made for lively conversation, and some consternation and bemusement when I insisted that, grim as his vision is, Kafka is awfully funny. They weren’t buying it from me until we got to Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis” and that wonderful first line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” We had a great conversation about how humor intensifies the pathos rather than undercuts it, and we laughed uncomfortably at the parched irony of Kafka’s tone while we puzzled over the incongruity between what he says and how he says it. It was a fine introduction to the unease and dislocation of the alienated psyche of modern lit. And it was fascinating to me, as it is every time I teach Kafka, to see who leapt immediately into a detached critical distance in response to the horrors of the text and who resisted it. Best of all, the conversations trailed out into the hall after class, and students entered class the next day telling each other about the discussion over lunch about the stories.

This is the marvelous beating heart of the academic experience at Milton, for students and for teachers. Discussion around the work table—and by the way, we’re thrilled to be teaching and learning in such lovely new spaces in the renovated Warren and Wigg Halls, and the newly constructed Student Center. It’ll be exciting to see renovations and new facilities come on line as we go forward with our project of improving spaces to match the quality of teaching and learning that go on here.

The kind of pleasure that I take in teaching and that my students radiate in learning shows up everywhere as I make classroom visits to other teachers. In a new teacher’s calculus class two weeks ago, I witnessed playful seriousness, really rapt engagement (at 9:00 on a Monday morning) with the concept of limits and domains of functions. I visited a Methods of Scientific Research class last week, in which students were learning about the nitrogen cycle in water by considering the classroom fish tank; the atmosphere was informal and friendly, loose but productive, and the class ended with students testing the pH, ammonia, and nitrate levels in the tank and concluding that, without plants, the tank is not a complete ecosystem. I sat in on a ninth grade history class discussion about what we can infer an ancient society valued from the things prohibited by Hammurabi’s Code. The flow back and forth between concrete textual citation and high-level inference and abstraction was wonderful to see. These are just three recent examples of the kind of teaching and learning that goes on every day. In each of these classrooms, I saw students engaged with questions and ideas and each other, and teachers engaged with students.

In my most recent English class, we talked about the opening section of Portrait of the Artist, specifically about the fractured, disjointed consciousness in an early scene from Portrait in which Stephen Dedalus is nominally playing football with his classmates, but the narration is all in his head and not on the field. We followed the twists and turns of young Stephen’s mind as his attention wanders and his consciousness lights on words and their associations. We ended with the observation that the narrative operates on two levels—it both tells the story and shows the mind of the storyteller. I made a crack about the balance of the cosmic with the quotidian. One student’s sincere-but-wry response captures the give and take that I love in teaching: “Well, that’s a cool word, Mr. Silbaugh. Gonna have to use that one.”