Yet, sometimes to the amazement of everyone, especially myself, I'll find my mouth saying, "Yes. Yes! Let's have class outside!"

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER On nice days, sometimes I'll enter the classroom and bark out "no!" before my students even know I've arrived. I'm answering the inevitable question. "Can we hold class outside?" Yet my students, especially in the spring, display an incredible persistence and optimism. Even if I say "no" at the start of every lesson for nine weeks, hope still scents the air in week 10 when someone asks, "Can we go outside?" My refusal is brief and professional. I pretend that discussing thesis statements under fluorescent lighting has a greater appeal to me than sitting in the sun by the duck pond. Yet, sometimes to the amazement of everyone, especially myself, I'll find my mouth saying, "Yes. Yes! Let's have class outside!" A festival atmosphere overtakes us. We laugh as we gather our books. Everyone talks animatedly--even those who a moment ago had seemed like case studies for a narcolepsy textbook. We skip outside. Then, inevitably, the same thing happens. After we've arranged ourselves on the grass in a pastoral semicircle, when I tell them to open to the day's assignment, each face registers an indignant shock that says: "Wait! We're still going to work? What is this?" They feel cheated. Class usually goes poorly. It's difficult to hear. I'm annoyed that I don't have a chalkboard. Attention wanders. People worry more about getting grass stains on their clothes than answering questions about the reading. If we're close to the MU or a coffee cart, students look longingly at their friends going by. One class ended in disaster. We were clustered at the bottom of a small grassy knoll, and discussion was going well despite a constant far-off buzzing. It grew louder, then still louder, and suddenly a maintenance man on a turbo-charged riding mower appeared above us and plunged down the slope into the group. I can still see various students rolling out of the way in their best Stallone and Schwarzenegger manner and the mower blade chopping through abandoned notebooks so ferociously that for a moment it seemed like it was snowing. We never fully regrouped. So why, even when I thoroughly understand the dangers and the inevitable disillusionment, why do I still sometimes answer, "Yes, let's go outside"? I think it's because I continue to be seduced by the illusion of the Socratic ideal. I visualize my students and myself bathed in golden light and engaged in very, very serious conversation; we're so intent on our discourse that we don't even notice the photographer snapping pictures for the university's recruitment brochure or squealing children chasing the ducks. Although Socrates probably never had to deal with Jeff throwing acorns at Nancy or Jill trying to make a whistle out of a blade of grass, maybe he did. Maybe his student Plato stopped in the middle of a dialogue to wave at a friend across the Parthenon and yell, "See you at the party tonight!" I like to think so. I've come to realize, when someone asks, "Let's have class outside," and I agree, it's not my students' hope that I'm trying to fulfill, but my own. -- Joseph Mills, Ph.D. '98