Last week and this, English IV Honors: Turning Toward Home met for Thursday’s class in my living room. We move here when I feel that the seminar table in Room C is too vast an ocean of oak, when I sense the students are not connecting across it as powerfully as I want for them–and of them. People talk about “chemistry” in a class. There’s another factor–what I think of as relational geography–and sometimes it’s just better realized in a living room. (I know I’m lucky this way: not all faculty homes are close enough to the center of campus to allow this kind of flexibility. And I’m in a subject area ripe for this kind of interchange: chemistry probably wouldn’t fly very well in the same space.)

There are rules: sit up, even if you’re cross-legged on the floor; stay actively in your book; annotate; contribute at least twice; be attentive to each other, whatever the squirrels or jays might be doing in the acacia tree outside the window. I typically set them up with a context or question. And then I leave.

Not out of the room, but to a spot definitively outside their circle. I listen carefully, take notes on a Google Doc that I can share with them later.

What they bring out of the essay or fiction and lay out for each other comes sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly. They are pretty patient and are learning to be ok with silence–a challenge for me, too. My fingers don’t slow on the keyboard very often, though–and as I’m typing, I’m also highlighting points I want to return to the next day. Or noting a stunning contribution by someone who might typically be more the silent observer than the voluble yakker in our usual seminar space–an offering that sums up the whole of the 35 minutes with clarity and preciseness and an authority derived from the group’s meaning-making, not mine.

The lesson for me is clear: Let loose the reins; let them have their heads. They’ll always find their way home.