Fly Envious Time
Teaching as a Leisurely Stroll Through the Ages (A Knickerbocker Education No. 04)
This is a talk I gave at the Repairing the Ruins conference in Frisco, TX on June 18, 2021. It has not been edited to flow more like an essay and includes the portion where I engaged in a reading aloud exercise with the attendees. I still think about the elements I cover here, so it seemed like something worth revisiting.
Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace;
And glut thy self with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more then what is false and vain,
And meerly mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb’d,
And last of all, thy greedy self consum’d,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood,
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine
About the supreme Throne
Of him, t’whose happy-making sight alone,
When once our heav’nly-guided soul shall clime,
Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,
Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.1
That is one of John Milton’s earlier poems, “On Time.” From there, I drew the title of this presentation, “Fly envious Time.” I doubt the young Milton had any such notion that this poem would find use in this kind of setting, but such is the way of things we leave to posterity. Before pressing on, it is perhaps worth noting a few things up front. First, I must apologize for the poor summary of this workshop in the ACCS guidebook. Originally, I had pitched this idea as a practicum, where I would do little speaking, if any, and others would offer their views. ACCS, instead, asked me to turn it into a breakout session, but the wording of the original proposal remained. Mea culpa. Second, the practical aspect of this talk might come across as unusual. In the time we have allotted, my ability to give practicable advice on how you run your classroom, without knowing much about your context, is incredibly limited. And dare I say, such an approach isn’t really Classical in its form. So, I would like to move quickly through this rather obligatory introduction portion, and move to a sample lesson. Upon entering, you should have received a copy of the short story entitled “The Pedestrian.” Hold on to it; we will get to it soon.
There have been lots of talks this week about the meaning of “classical,” as well as some presentations on how to grade or build assessments that make the teacher’s job a little easier. These are helpful things to consider, and if you missed one of those talks, you should definitely listen to them as soon as ACCS puts them up in the Member Resource Center. I don’t intend this talk to contradict any of those fine presentations, but I do want to come at the discussion of classical assessments from a slightly different angle. I think you’ll find lots of overlap with what others have said this week, so I hope this will offer a kind of consolation if I am not practical enough.
You’ll notice the use of the word leisure in my title, which is something of a buzzword these days in our small CCE circles. And it isn’t hard to meet someone who has read Josef Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture and believes it to hold the key to something important for teachers, though it is not always clear what that important something might be. It is also common to meet those who have only heard of Pieper’s work, and long for leisure in their own classroom. What I want to suggest to you today is one way in which I believe leisure might be accomplished in a humanities classroom. I hasten to add that I think this is applicable to all classrooms and all grades. But, my suggestions today are based on my engagement with the books I teach as well as attempts I’ve made in the classroom. I’d be happy to discuss with the Geometry teacher or the Grammar PE instructor on ways to adapt this sort of thing, if they’re so inclined. I only ask that you remember that my anecdotes are worth very little compared to the 6,000 years of recorded history that we attempt to give to our students every school year in a humanities classroom, but that realization is part of what led me here.
Let’s get our terminology straight before getting too deep. And it is probably best to start with leisure. The word comes from the Greek, σχολε, which became the Latin scola, and in English becomes school.2 And contrary to what that English word conjures up for us, the Greek concept is more akin to the English word leisure. I won’t press the etymology much further, because that would rob you of the joy in reading Pieper, whether for the first time or for a re-read. So, if you want to know more, grab a copy of Leisure from the Eighth Day Books table before you leave. The easiest way to show you what the Greek word suggests is to look at Aristotle, who always makes for wonderful examples. He says in the Nicomachean Ethics: “And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.”3 The Greek here is instructive: δοκεῖ τε ἡ εὐδαιμονία ἐν τῇ σχολῇ εἶναι· ἀσχολούμεθα γὰρ ἵνα σχολάζωμεν.4 We are “un-leisurely” in order that we might have leisure. This Greek concept does make an appearance in the Old Testament as well. In Psalm 46:11 we read: “Cease striving and know that I am God.”5 That phrase, cease striving, is the Greek σχολάσατε. And the noun form of this word became ὁ σχολαστής for Plutarch, meaning one who lives at ease or a man of leisure.6 Plutarch uses it to describe Marcus Brutus, saying he was “given to books and study.”7 So put images of a 1970s leisure suit aside, forget any notion of leisure as a solid day of binge-watching your favorite show. Leisure stems from work, and it is itself a work oriented to books and study. This is what I suggest should shape your classroom. I’m sure you have students who cherish grades more than the eloquence of a fine Shakespearean sonnet. Or perhaps you have parents who don’t care what the story of Calculus might mean for their children, they just want them to succeed on the SAT.
Now to be clear, I’m not denigrating those things. Parents see test scores as keys to their child’s happiness in the future; students see practicality in the classroom as the only measurable benefit. And good Christian people adhere to such views. But they are, I think, aiming in the wrong direction. They are typically either desirous of leisure so as to be leisurely, wanting the end reward without the effort up front, or they understand leisure to mean vacating or emptying. As I tell my students often, remember your Aristotle: we are un-leisurely in order to have leisure, we strive to know God that we might cease striving by knowing Him. This notion of leisure is aimed at the pursuit of truth, of knowledge, of virtue. James Schall puts this into a nice context in his On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, another book I cannot recommend enough. He explains, “To waste our time with our friends means that we do not have some sort of tight agenda, that we are not always looking at our watches or worrying about our lives . . . We need time-out-of-time, the time that passes without our noticing.”8 Schall compares this kind of “wasting time” to prayer, a comparison that I think we all ought to linger upon and one that resonates strongly with Psalm 46. For your classroom ought to be of the same kind, if leisure is your desire. Remove the clocks from the sight of your students. Ask them to put their watches in pencil pouches or lockers. It will no doubt be difficult, but your students need to see what you do in the classroom as akin to visiting with old friends, of wasting time in the most glorious and holy sense of the idea. Milton challenges Time in his poem, to run out its race, to glut itself on what is false and vain. Our classrooms must be places where time works differently, where the rat race of human existence is put aside, and teachers and students and visitors get lost in conversations with the long-dead and the eternal. If you want to know how to acquire leisure in your classroom, it will have to begin with a repudiation of the clock.
Now to be clear, I’m not denigrating those things. Parents see test scores as keys to their child’s happiness in the future; students see practicality in the classroom as the only measurable benefit. And good Christian people adhere to such views. But they are, I think, aiming in the wrong direction.
“But,” you are likely saying to yourself, “I have a curriculum map I must finish. My academic dean will kill me if I only get to Homer in the Ancient era or Austen in the Modern.” Fair enough. How can you make it through a course, hitting all the right notes, getting in at least the minimum number of assessments, and still have leisure? It’s a good question. I’ll start answering it by telling you a secret: I don’t take work home. This past year, I had 3 Composition courses to prep and 1 humanities seminar. That totaled about 40 students, writing essays, speeches, thesis papers, and course assessments, on a fairly regular schedule. And outside of some occasional senior thesis editing, I did not bring work home all year. This was not always true of my life as a teacher, but by my fourth year in the classroom, this had become standard for me. As Hemingway once said, “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”9 I spent enough late nights grading student essays, looking for those oasis points in a dry desert of mediocrity, and it cost me plenty. But I realized that if I did not know how to live leisurely outside of my classroom, it was not something I could give my students in my classroom. If I wanted those under my tutelage to leave school in possession of what Milton describes as sincerely good, perfectly divine, with Truth and Peace and Love, then I had to break time’s hold on me outside of class, which might, just might, enable me to help students do the same.
This has given me a threefold approach to the classroom, which I have employed in a variety of humanities settings, but which I think are applicable to every course, math, science, art, and music included. I will briefly lay these out, and then attempt to demonstrate what I mean in our remaining time. First, I dispensed with the idea that the goal of a classroom was to expose students to as much as possible. It is not faithful nor reasonable to think that a seventeen-year-old will retain and comprehend half of the historical, literary, or theological aspects of the Medieval period, simply because I try to cram it in. The tyranny of time is often accompanied by the fear of missing out. FOMO did not begin with social media but has been the plague of teachers and students for millennia. I give students, in my humanities class, the best of what I am able. We read all of Homer, but we jump around in Josephus. We read most of Blaise Pascal, but only the most pertinent sections of Francis Bacon. This frees me to linger, to work hard at understanding specific things, that I might move leisurely through the chronology of human history. It does mean that I must know where I want to take my students; it means I must be un-leisurely to have leisure. But it has been liberating. And so the first principle of my classroom is to cover fewer books with an aim to deeper understanding.
Second, I adopted a method of instruction which puts the emphasis of reading in the classroom. We read the bulk of our materials together, as a group. This accomplishes a lot but let me explain a couple of primary points worth noting. It models how to read for the students, while encouraging them to be bold in front of others, to be unafraid of making mistakes. It gives us a shared vocabulary, so that our common language can make real discussion possible. And it shows the students what I value, far more than charts or timelines or quizzes can ever make plain to them. Students leave my class understanding the value that I place on reading, because we do it together, often. Again, this means thinking through the text on the front end in order to move leisurely in class, but that is how leisure is attained. So the second principle of my classroom is to read our primary texts aloud in class.
Third, I lecture rarely, opting instead for discussions, which is what makes this a bit hard for me. It is not unusual to read a passage with students, only for me to turn around and ask them to explain it to me. “Help me understand what Augustine is saying,” I tell them. And I have done this with third graders studying Rome, fourth graders studying Roland, eighth graders studying Beowulf and twelfth graders studying Booker T. Washington. I teach by asking questions, by engaging the dialectical process of refining the pursuit of truth by seeking to understand. I am not deceiving my students when I ask for their help, for I truly gain a better picture of Augustine and Aquinas and Abelard when I ask questions of my students and when they ask questions of me. I could summarize Aquinas’s Four Ways or Livy’s Roman history, but what would that yield? Content crammed in craniums. For texts to have any chance of forming our students, you must let the texts do their work, just like old friends providing counsel around a roaring fire. And yep, you guessed it, that requires more of me up front. So the third principle which guides my classroom is to devote most of the time not reading a text to discussions, centered on the Socratic method of questioning.
So let’s try this, shall we? I’m going to read this story to you. And then, I’m going to ask you some questions.
I have other suggestions, of course. I do assessments in a particular way. I engage parents using specific language. I send home only certain kinds of homework. But since I don’t know your context, I won’t pepper you with what very well be useless tips. Instead, I want to leave you with this thought: regardless of what subject you teach, I am convinced that you will find leisure and rest by reading good things in your classroom with your students. But don’t take my word for it. Russell Kirk, someone whom you should all become familiar with if you are not already, talked about a lack of reading as an enemy of the Permanent Things which give life meaning. He says,
Literature can corrupt; and it is possible, too, to be corrupted by an ignorance of humane letters, much of our normative knowledge necessarily being derived from our reading. The person who reads bad books instead of good may be subtly corrupted; the person who reads nothing at all may be adrift in life, unless he lives in a community still powerfully influenced by what Gustave Thibon calls ‘moral habits’ and by oral tradition. And absolute abstinence from printed matter has become rare. If a small boy does not read Treasure Island (1883), odds are that he will read Mad Ghoul Comics.10
Kirk’s point is that Literature (with a capital L) unites us in our pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. It is the source, particularly for Christians, of the normative, virtuous, moral direction our lives take as we grow further up and further in to the righteous life. If you take nothing else away from today, take this: read good books with your people. It is, I’m convinced, the surest way to a life of leisure. Thank you. I’m happy to take any questions.
John Milton, “On Time,” in English Minor Poems; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica, ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz, Second Edition., vol. 29, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 12.
Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 19-20.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz, trans. W. D. Ross, Second Edition., vol. 8, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 432.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Greek), ed. J. Bywater (Medford, MA: Perseus Digital Library, 1894), 1177b.4-5.
New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995), Ps 46:11.
Henry George Liddell et al., A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1747.
Plutarch, “Marcus Brutus,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans: The Dryden Translation, ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz, Second Edition., vol. 13, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 803.
James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2012), 99.
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1996), 192.
Russell Kirk, “Teaching Humane Literature in High Schools,” in The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, ed. George A. Panichas (ISI Books: Wilmington, DE, 2007), 307.