Among the teachers I remember gratefully is my history professor, Dr. Poland. No doubt I owe to him much of what I know about the French Revolution, but what remains with me as his most valuable teaching is his way of speaking. He gave every sentence full weight. He spoke with deliberation, a little more slowly than other professors who tried a bit too hard to crowd copious lecture material into the hour at hand. He rarely used intensifiers or unnecessary modifiers. He would often pause slightly at the end of a sentence—just an extra beat, but long enough for the sentence to register before moving on. Listening to him made me aware of the value and the craft of a good sentence—that each sentence is something completed, a gift to be received, an invitation to reflect for a moment before going on. His clarity seemed a measure of integrity; his concern seemed not so much to persuade as to show and tell in a way that provided the listener with as much usable information and perspective as possible. I found his style especially refreshing when contrasted with a few peers who I remember as chronically “excited,” eager to impose their enthusiasms, which were less substantive than emotive.
Lest I make Dr. Poland sound plodding, let me add that he had a delightful sense of humor and was an attentive listener. Indeed, his speaking style seemed closely related to careful listening. He considered words, caring for and about them. He selected them in a way that seemed effortlessly deft—the mark of someone for whom language was a pleasure and a matter of moral responsibility. When I wrote Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Dr. Poland came regularly to mind.
As did my grandmother—an English teacher to whose many good-humored readings of Winnie-the-Pooh I attribute an enduring appreciation for British humor and kindly conversation. She taught me the twenty-third Psalm and gently corrected my pronunciation. What she modeled when she spoke was a gift to me; I continue to pray my speaking might be a similar gift to students and colleagues. She spoke so I could hear. She taught me to hear. And hearing—taking in, absorbing, integrating—is not simple. It keeps happening: dimensions of meaning dawn on us as certain words linger and resonate, stretching the imagination and remapping the mind.
Teachers are stewards of students’ minds, hearts, energies, hopes, and potential. We’re stewards of the words we hope will equip them for the conversations they will engage in over the course of their adult lives. When we speak, we share with them the fruits of our own lives of reading, writing, and speaking. However well or poorly we attend to them, our words matter. Most of us have heard them quoted back to us. Most of us, I imagine, have been surprised by former students who remembered something we said that we had long forgotten. We don’t always know what they hear when we speak, but what follows is a short inventory of what they are likely to be hearing.
They hear our verbs. Students hear how we understand process. A good verb invites students to fine-tune their understanding of how things happen: how photosynthesis converts sunlight into food; how rituals help communities survive loss; how a line of poetry or a parable can ambush us; how airplanes fly, cells divide, an atom is split, soil dies or is replenished.
Good verbs educate; they reveal what remains hidden in a world of commodities whose stories are often deliberately left untold. Most of us see persons, places, or things as nouns—objects on our landscape—but verbs remind us that everything we look at has been planted, born, mined, manufactured, nurtured, tended, crafted, transported, transformed, exchanged, damaged, sold, or saved. Seeing nouns as results of processes trains depth perception and awareness of cost and care.
In our culture, actions and consequences are obscured by abstractions. Verbs like redevelop, economize, cultivate, or protect, for instance, cover a multitude of processes needing examination. Developing anything involves disruption: what is disrupted—habitats, homes, or habits—deserves to be assessed before we get too comfortable with that apparently innocuous term. We economize at others’ expense, cultivate crops in ways that deplete the soil, or protect our borders by training our sights on what we want to see, eliding what lies outside the frame.
Our verbs train students’ vision. Putting on the mind of Christ includes the awareness that all creation is in process, unfolding in God’s good time. Each person’s journey is complicated in ways we don’t know until we seek deeper answers to the common question, “What’s happening?”
They hear our nouns. They notice what we name. When we name things with precision, moving from general to specific—from flower to marigold, bug to aphid—they come into closer relationship with what they may have seen but not yet witnessed.
I once wrote a piece entitled “The Sin of Abstractions” in a state of dismay about how politicians and educators use terms like excellence, achievement, leadership, or commitment without discussing what those terms mean. We’re surrounded with institutional PR and incessant messages from the wider culture that crumble into vacuity or veil what we’ve avoided naming. When we call torture enhanced interrogation, war a job, or a child’s death collateral damage, we do harm. If, like doctors, we commit ourselves to “first do no harm,” we must commit ourselves to avoiding evasive abstractions in favor of vigorous, eye-opening nouns.
God’s granting Adam and Eve the privilege of naming earth’s creatures empowered human beings and brought them into relationship with each creature. Our careful, attentive naming of persons, places, and things passes on this gift to students.
They hear our pronouns. Although English has neuter pronouns, pronouns are hardly neutral. They’re the subject of lively debate, especially among those who work with words—English teachers, writers and editors, preachers and public speakers. Although the effort to be gender neutral can seem an aggravating inconvenience, many of us have seen a flicker of new self-awareness emerge in a girl’s eyes when she refers to the antecedent doctor, mayor, or coach.
Pronouns are vital in debates over abortion as well. Whether the unborn child is it or he or she makes considerable difference; gendered pronouns remind us the question is not about disposal of tissue but about when it is justifiable to cut short a human life. Soldiers often adopt dehumanizing euphemisms for “the enemy” to enable themselves to kill without, presumably, serious moral damage. There too, though, a target may be it, the rubble may include a him or a her whose story has come to a horrifying end.
We distribute pronouns curiously—we hear boats or trucks called she; we refer to abstract terms like poverty with an it that allows us to forget that the they who are poor endure disheartening days. In one part of Isaiah, the writer refers to Israel as he and in another as she—a fact I find puzzling but gratifyingly ambiguous, as I am teased into bemused rumination.
Pronouns point; they set their own humble terms. They invite us to think of the nouns they serve in particular ways. Like pawns on the chessboard, they can make a critical difference when they are the ones protecting the King.
They hear our modifiers. Our students live in a culture of hyperbole. The space between awesome and pathetic lies neglected. Think of the nuance in Jane Austen’s words like agreeable, amiable, perplexing, offensive, or satisfactory and how, like an English garden, they provide peaceful, colorful, varied places from which to consider the merits or challenges of a situation or, say, a person who is tolerable if disagreeable. It’s unrealistic to imagine we would get much traction in a classroom if we suddenly spoke like Elizabeth Bennett, though we might make some waves if we adopted a few of Shakespeare’s more vivid modifiers. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if students had to look up fatuous or bootless. Still, a more practicable objective as we choose our own modifiers, hoping to help students make more discerning distinctions, is to reach deeper into our personal trove of neglected terms and reseed the fallow middle ground where rich nuances may be retrieved. I like witty or amusing, for instance, and Bill Bryson’s observation of arresting differences among cultures and Margaret Edson’s focus on medical and nonmedical uses of insidious. Surely we can help students find something to say about even the most troubling players on the political stage that might help them recognize one can be decisive but not altogether wise, or discreet rather than secretive.
In worship, even after singing about God as awesome and great, we might wander among modifiers to revive our wonder at One holy, mysterious, sovereign, tender, jealous, gracious, and robed in light.
They hear our prepositions. These little words instruct us about relationships, sometimes in life-changing ways, as when we add “in” before love. It matters whether I speak to you or with you, whether I dive into a problem or make my way through it or circle around it looking for points of entry.
In the life of faith, we might consider what it means to abide in Christ, to walk with him, to pray to God above, or to listen for the Spirit within the heart’s core. Prepositions in St. Patrick’s ancient prayer parse the ways of divine presence: Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me.
They hear our conjunctions and interjections. For reasons of brevity (though that ship has sailed) I will confine my remarks on conjunctions and interjections to this: God’s light may shine in small words, sometimes with laser-like specificity. Whether we follow an opinion with and or but can make a decisive difference in how that opinion is heard. No one wants to hear “I love you. But . . .”
And interjections serve their own surprising purposes. Wait! For instance, can drop a superficial conversation into more authentic reflection. Listen! can introduce a welcome surprise if we follow it with a moment of unlikely silence. The murmured “Mmm hmm” of worshipers who unselfconsciously support a preacher with wordless affirmation opens my heart and helps me feel safe in a space of shared love.
I would hope that our classrooms would be similarly safe. What we share with our students is love—of life, of those we are given to live with and learn from, of the God who gave them, and of the words that God also gave us to care for and ply with wit and delight and reverent precision.
Marilyn McEntyre is a Fellow at the Gaede Institute, Westmont College and teaches medical humanities at UC Berkeley. Her recent books include What’s in a Phrase? – Pausing where Scripture Gives You Pause and Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice. (marilynmcentyre.com)