Viva Flamenco! Or: teaching with duende in the American classroom
by SHaragos
It was one of those gray winter mornings when it was easy to forget the wonder of it all: that I live in New York City (for the third consecutive year, God, how time flies!), that I have a place of my own in the Upper West Side of Manhattan (or “a room of my own,” rather, like Virginia Woolf would put it since my place is a “mini-studio” and that, too, by New York City standards.…), that I walk to Hunter College every morning through Central Park and it takes me a maximum of twenty minutes to get there. (Does it get any better? My colleagues, who commute from Brooklyn or Queens or Long Island, I’m sure, think I am a spoilt brat.) I felt tired of the long winter, of going through the motions of teaching yet again when my own coursework was lagging behind, of counting the days till my next paycheck arrives, etc. Oh, the joys of graduate life in the metropolis, I thought as I entered “our” office, shared by twenty-something “adjunct faculty” at Hunter. I was going to promptly try and clean up at least part of the communal mass, remembering that my Mom would disown me from across the ocean if I sat down to work amidst discarded paper towels and food leftovers scattered on the computer-desks. Before doing that, however, I reached into my mailbox to pull out a bulkier bunch that filled up most of the place within. “Aha, student evaluations,” I realized, and sat down demurely to look over them. I did not expect too many heart-warming comments; I have to some degree got used to the fact that I will never really ace it with my students. I will get really nice feedback, luckily from my most intelligent ones, who seem to appreciate my “style.” There are many, however, who think I am too harsh a grader, too stuck with “no fun” literary texts I choose to teach instead of the “kool” stuff, etc. The other day I checked out my scores on “ratemyprofessor.com” only to find out, to my heartache, that I have lost the red pepper icon that was meant to show that I was “hot.” Oh, well, I sighed and told my Mom, who is a teacher herself, over the phone, that my American students are losing their appreciation of my Eastern European charm and that my schooldays in socialist Romania were indeed “no fun” by American student standards, but I have acquired a solid education I rely on even today, and could I please get the same respect that I paid all through my undergraduate days to my own professors?
Gradually, however, while leafing through my evaluations, I started feeling more and more awake; my students’ handwritten comments made my day increasingly better. (Students, I have come to the realization, can do that to you; they can make your day or ruin it.) I was holding in my hands probably the best evaluations I have ever received, but what really made me enjoy the moment was not the fact that they were so positive. Rather, it was my understanding of the intricate relationship I had had with these “kids” for a semester. I was surprised by their insight and appreciation of things about me and my teaching that I would not have thought they would care to see, let alone look for. They wrote that they liked the fact that I paid them “respect,” that I approached them as adults and treated them accordingly. They enjoyed the intellectual challenge of my class, the questions that prompted them to look closer and closer to a literary text. As one of the comments put it, due to my class, a student learned to be more “introspective.” (I kept repeating to them that the whole world is a text, and we are all readers of it, suggesting that to look at ourselves as complex texts, walking ones, might be quite an interesting mental exercise.) Probably the comment I enjoyed the most, nevertheless, the one that really made me laugh out loud was the following one:
“Great Professor! I have never read so much in a term of school and I enjoyed doing it. She is cool and knows how to relate to students of any age. She also never did her flamenco dance or gypsy dance, I don’t remember which one it was.”
I never thought it would register. I never thought they would even remember what I told them about my dancing Flamenco. I thought they would be so immersed in their own issues that anything unrelated to their wellbeing in the course, their grade, they will discard as unimportant. The fact is, however, that my students had been watching me all throughout the semester, many of them reading me as a text, precisely the thing I was trying to teach them do better. They noticed things not just about their “professor,” but about me, the individual, though I often pulled up my guards and retreated behind my shield of authority so that I do not let them get too close. I also remembered another set of evaluations from the previous semester and the one remark that stood out from all and touched me the most. My student wrote that I was teaching the course with “refined passion,” and I was moved by his/her discernment of “refinement” as such, of using the term in a context that involved me. The passion for teaching is there, I nodded, not always, but most of the time. But in what exactly did he or she notice that quality I was so proud to claim as my own, now that he/she had granted me the opportunity to do so: the craftsmanship that comes from endless practice, shaping, forming that creates a refined product of any kind?
In Flamenco, they call it “duende,” a word that could mean passion, spirit, love for the dance, or all of these together. When one dances with “duende,” one lives the dance to the fullest and goes through the fire and depth that I associate with “real” Flamenco. I do not know if I have ever danced like this, all I know is that I have been trying, the way I am trying to teach with my fullest potential. There are times when I end up with less than that, but I know at least that I am faking it only, missing out on the beat, on my students, on the magic in the classroom.
At times I feel I could do without them: without teaching and without dancing. It would be nice to be on a comfortable fellowship at Columbia or NYU, focusing on my research and making faster headway in my program. I would not be running around, preparing lesson plans in the last possible minute, and I could probably divert from a peanut-butter sandwich diet that makes it possible for me to pay for my dance classes in the city. But then again, I remember the words of my chairperson “down South,” where I got my first American MA. He was teaching courses in English Romanticism while playing in a jazz band on the side. In his welcoming speech addressed to us, incoming MA students at Auburn University, he said something like, “Focus on your studies, plan ahead so that you get done in the most efficient way possible, but do not forget in the meantime to do something else, something non-academic. You will be a better student and a better scholar as a result.” I try to keep his words in mind as I am pushing my way through snowstorm or rain to the run-down dance studio on 8th Avenue and 46th Street in Manhattan. I want to focus on them as I sweat my heart out during those summer days when we practice without air conditioning, while the smog and the smell of melting asphalt drifting through the open windows come together to create the reality-effect of a tiny Flamenco studio in Madrid or Seville. Most of all, I cling to them when it seems that there is nothing else left really: amidst the chaotic rush of city life, far away from home, family, emotional or financial security, I have to hold myself up tall. Just as my dance instructor says, with her special mixture of Spanish and English: “Stand up, right, with nipples to the sky!” This is it, ultimately, the dance and the life I chose because of a weird mixture of karma and individual will, and I do both of them, live and dance, with similar trepidation and similar exhilaration because I know that they are the only authentic ways for me to be myself, after all.
There are days when I step into the classroom with my Flamenco posture, and I tell my students as well to straighten their shoulders, tighten their belly and hold their chest wide and open. We laugh and we can all hold it up for a couple of minutes. Gradually, however, they let go and relax back into their former stooping postures and former selves. I watch them sit there, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, trying to figure out life on their own terms, getting over blunders, making the next attempt at growing up. I cheer for them silently as I hope to teach them, through literature, about a few more steps in the dance of life.
