Sweet are the pleasures of teaching when a student posts on your Facebook wall: “Came on to your page to say, someone who taught Bob [Dylan] for literature class knew what she was doing.”
Teaching is about creating the umbilical cord that connects you to your class. It must contain your blood, adrenaline, passion – something that makes your lungs fill with air, makes you see “darkness at the break of noon” and still be able to say, “It’s alright Ma, I can make it.”
If what you offer to your class does not matter to you, it cannot matter to anyone else.
Fortunately, the schools I taught at did not interfere with my classes and Bob Dylan’s lyrics were regular intakes of breath. Dylan’s stories of bad press, walking out on lovers, his religious chapter (“changing horses in midstream”) even his disarming impudence – all this was for after hours. In the classroom, Dylan’s music gave us new mornings.
Lessons in song
Way before the Swedish Academy recognised his literary contributions and awarded him with the Nobel Prize on Thursday, Dylan's inspired song writing provided me with much matter to stimulate and engage my class. For an extraordinary class play, 13-year-olds designed surrealist posters on Mr Tambourine Man, interpreting “the jingle-jangle morning,” the “foggy ruins of time” and the desire to “forget about today until tomorrow.”
In composition-building classes with 14-year-olds, Masters of War and With God on our Side made for compelling discussions on political game changers. The need for ecological sustainability and climate change was both heard and seen in Mark Edwards's riveting photographs, combined into a video and set to Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.
In debates on the immunity of the affluent, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll revealed the hypocrisy of the judge who declared “the ladder of law has no top and no bottom” only to hand out “strongly, for penalty and repentance William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.” It was time for the class to examine how and why a double-speaking judge can come only from a society that should weep for itself.
Everything is Broken could have been as relevant to the wars in Korea and Vietnam as it was to Iraq. When one's universe crumbles, how much of a psychological world is left?
Dylan worked like a catalyst in my classroom and many a withdrawn student broke their reserve. “Isn’t he a bit extreme?” I was asked. “He’s passionate,” came an answer before I found my own. “When you are passionate, you are extreme.”
“Doesn’t he have any love songs?”
“Like no other,” I remember saying. A class of 16-year-olds were wild in point and counterpoint when I told them I considered It Ain’t Me Babe and Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright to be love songs.
Two literary greats
Possibly a reflection of the world’s most popular love story, Romeo and Juliet, is found in the words of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin', which has a special verse for parents:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticise what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
In classes with adults, I use Bob Dylan’s Shelter From the Storm to illustrate Othello's story of himself and Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello.
I came in from the wilderness
A creature void of form
"Come in,” she said
"I’ll give you
Shelter from the storm.”
Later on in the play, when Othello tortures himself with hallucinations of her infidelity, the memory of Desdemona’s gentleness adds to his dilemma. Dylan finds the words for this in Love Minus Zero/No Limit: “My love, she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence.”
Never letting go
I first heard Bob Dylan when I was 15. Everything about his music was different and he was to me, from the very first instant, irreplaceable – for his voice, his musical arrangements, his ideas and his demanding and often enigmatic lyrics.
I quoted him extensively through high school and college, like many around the world do, and at one time I wondered whether I would make it as a “Dylanologist”. In those pre-internet days, Dylan’s snarling "crimson flames" remained "tied through my ears" until I saw them in what I called “that yellow book of lyrics,” which remained a vital appendage until it finally gave way to a firmer, updated replacement.
That yellow book of lyrics is preserved as an heirloom of my classes by one of my students. I hope she will never get over pages of Dylan’s lyrics blowing in the wind.