Teaching as an Art

Roy Boardman, Italy

Roy Boardman is a lecturer in English for International Relations at Naples University. He is interested in all aspects of language and literature teaching and teacher training. He has written coursebooks and experimental materials. His current interests are creative language teaching and learning. E-mail: royboardman@hotmail.com

For screaming years now
I’ve been wanting to write an art-
icle claiming teaching as an art,
objective as a battery hen,
cold and compact as an ic-
icle
in the very very best of academic styles.

Been wanting, but how
would it be seen? “Couldn’t give a fart”
they’d say “about teaching as an art”.
“Where’s the product of your pen?
Where’s the concept on the pin-
nacle
of the object, that pickled shark in its tank?”

You can come out of the studio
and have your installation sent off
post haste to the gallery.
Or it can just stay there,
I bet it’d be dug up centuries later.
A pin once used to hold up Pompei hair
gets displayed in cabinets.

Try coming out of the classroom
and sending off your learners as a show-
piece, they’d just laugh at you.
Or expect them to dig up what was learned
(perhaps) after the screaming trials of life,
a tense once shining to express a thought
laid lovingly in an old-age sentence.

I couldn’t get all this
into the cold-meat paragraphs of an art-
icle.
Teaching as an art has no neat
intro, body and conclusion.
It just boils on, the steam dis-
perses,
a teacher meddling in unruly verses.