When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
— Walt Whitman

In Teaching with Heart, Ron Gordon, University of Hawaii, reflects on Walt Whitman’s poem. On this day of the eclipse, it seems a fitting reminder for us to “rise in awe” to the majesty of nature and “open our hearts to the true uniqueness” of those in our lives.

“Walt Whitman hears the learned astronomer with his abundance of charts, columns, and calculations, and soon feels drained and sickened. I, too, can feel weary and dispirited in my work as a college professor. This lethargy takes hold when I survey college texts, heavy of page and with an overkill of learning objectives, or when I trudge through box loads of dossiers dutifully and painstakingly assembled for tenure or promotion. The volume of detail, its sheer glut, overwhelms, until I, too, yearn to wander off and breathe “the mystical moist night-air.”

Who among us has not wilted under a barrage of PowerPointed academic monologues, or felt coldly hollow when facing bureaucratic rubrics and assessment standards? Who has not winced at long-winded scholarship and research that offer so little help? At such moments, we silently scream at the gap between the abstractions of our discourse and life itself, including the world within which our students live and move. Each of us in our own way and time, if sensitivity be ours, shares Whitman’s nausea at the gulfs between symbols and the real deal.

And like Whitman, from time to time, we glide past the rigorous propriety of sanctioned learnedness and gaze “in perfect silence at the stars.” Standing beside Whitman, we rise in awe at the beautiful elusiveness of the subject matter that beguiled us years ago, and once again open our hearts to the true uniqueness and ultimate immeasurability of each of our students. Heart, head, and hand united, we reach.

And then, we teach.”