more audio: When a Teacher Goes to Jail

Okay, so here's my first attempt at a produced piece using the Audacity editing program. My friend, writer and teacher Paul Karrer, had a story to tell and so we recorded it and I put it here. You might want to give it a listen. And, hey, times are such that you might was to "share it" around. (It is also on my sidebar under Cool Stuff/Me Stuff.) Thanks.

And if anyone is an expert on Audacity, for godssake write me and give me all your tips.

more on that aquarium exhibit and beyond

I'll admit that I did not view the new exhibit very carefully this first time around. It was busy, and my guardedness around what Isaac might take in led me to steer more quickly through it than I otherwise might have. I'm also not in favor of the aquarium saying nothing on hard truths and thorny topics. But I am still troubled. It's kind of a “first do no harm” kind of issue.

Maybe it's a matter of what is presented in which form and in which order that needs review when we're thinking about serving a variety of ages and abilities to process this information. There may be, as the website quote I included in the last post suggests, lots more positive change stories enveloped in this new exhibit than were obvious to me. However, if they are mainly textual, that is not – even with a mama reading along – what my young child is going to take away from the experience.

There are all kinds of learners out there. But I'm going out on a limb here to say that a majority in our society might fall into the categories of visual and experiential. What you see and what you experience make the biggest, earliest impressions.

The same might be true for my college-age students. I critique the aquarium's exhibit, not from a place of knowledge, but from one of struggle. I battled how to present information for 15 weeks during my fall “environmental writing class.” For these kids, the dictate of the day is “save the planet.” And, believe me, they are over it. Yawn. Apathy is the top layer of all those other potentially negative outcomes like fear, hopelessness, etc. With the readings I required, it was a constant push/pull on looking for hard-hitting information and looking for uplifting outcomes. I can't be sure that any of it made any huge impression. But then there were the other assignments. The ones outside of the books.

I have a lot of doubts about teaching. A lot. Doubts that surface when I think about doing it, while I'm doing it, after I get my student evaluations, doing it in combination with real life lessons, in settings where grading becomes the salient carrot on the proverbial stick. I could go on. But I know a few things for certain that are good, solidly good stuff, the stuff they might even remember for years to come and that wouldn't have happened without the environment writing class we created together.

Things like two of my students touring Jeffers' Tor House guided by one of the most passionate, endearing local poets I know, who generously gave of his time to touch their lives. Like one of my students who wrote past her language issues and into a piece about a life-changing encounter with dolphins in a way that was so moving it brought both of us to tears. Like students using the “idle time” assignment to sit quietly and discover for the first time places and their own thoughts they'd rushed past for months. Like the students that found the thrill and vitality behind reading their own work aloud into a microphone for an eager crowd.

I know these things were good mostly because the students told me so. In weak moments, even these pierced angels of cynicism can admit when they've experienced something that has entered their hearts.

One day, I had made my class read excerpts from Edward Abbey and Bill Bryson on the same night. This was, one: curious because of their screamingly different approaches to writing, and two: dreadfully mean (according to my students) because they were each rather long passages.

One of my students, in discussing Abbey out there on his own among the rocks and coyotes, and Bryson with his page after page dedicated to his fear of bears along the Appalachian Trail, brought up the fact that nature for her is just downright “scary.”

“Pretty hard to save something you're afraid of, huh?” I tried. A stillness dipped into the room for a moment, a just-perceptible beat of quiet. The girl under direct address nodded slowly.

I would argue the same goes for climate change. If we are in a state of fear, we are much less likely to be able to do something about it. Far be it from me to argue for the All-American happy ending. Honesty is a bad habit of mine, truly. But it does seem like taking another look at “cheery” messages, might be worth our while.

a chance to see

You start to see what everyone else sees. What they see in themselves. You start to edge over toward the rest of the world: defining them through their failures; defining them as their crimes. You start to write them off.

This is not what they need from you. They already have all of it in abundance. But they are good actors, solid in their stage skills. It's been a long drive, a long week and you lose perspective and believe their hype.

Until it comes back to you without any doubt: they are kids. Scared. Desperate. Kids.

They begin to write the poetry they swore they wouldn't. It is part hip hop rhythm, part suicide note. They find an empty corner of the room and whisper out the beats, getting it down. They write long pieces that start “I miss my dad,” and tell of horrors you can't imagine that make you think of them more as heroes than thugs. That make you wonder how the system ever expected them to make it out of this hole when the roots they send them back to are poisoned. That make you wonder who hugs these children. Or they arrive beside you, hopeful - “It's a song. The teacher in the next room has a guitar. Do you want to hear it?” You listen. And for a few minutes both of you are transported out of this room that smells of separation and obligation, to a place where two parents wait eagerly, they are alive and sober; everything around is soft; everything is okay.

Tuesday is the yellow-green of a cat's eyes (with apologies to my lawyer friends)

Each time I go into a new classroom and ask the kids to warm up their poetry minds by writing down what they think is the color of Tuesday, the smell of anger, the texture of sunlight, there are always those that smirk and squirm. They stare back at me with confusion, pity, contempt, or all of the above, exchange incredulous glances. If they are fortunate enough, they have a spokesperson: “What?! That's nuts!”

“Write it down,” is always my reply. “'This assignment is nuts.' I want to see it on the paper.”

I cannot help the Future Lawyers of America. They will have to fend for themselves in that murky sea of logic they've chosen to swim. They are not why I'm here.

I am here for the girl in the fourth seat back, second row from the windows, that sits up straighter and catches my eye with her wide ones. She nods, ever so slightly. She has been waiting, waiting through grammar lessons, through book reports, through essay assignments, and oral presentations, and now she has it: permission. And so she begins, forgetting this once to dot her i's with little hearts, which really just began out of boredom, that silent killer. She writes and she writes and she writes. The hour speeds by and the prompts change, but she does not lift her pen. When class is dismissed, I watch her go. Her shadow is made of stardust.

poet in the schools

I feel like it is too close to report back even with partial truths on the workshops I'm teaching now. So, instead, and in the tradition I began a while back, I will include bits from my journals from the last time I taught for Poets-in-the-Schools.

At the time, I was teaching a class of group home guys just out of juvenile hall, and a class of teen moms. Essentially, I was teaching the gangsters and the gangsters' girlfriends. And by the way, I'd take the guys any day. They're all bark. The girls? Well, they'd kill you with a LOOK; no remorse.

from February 18, 2004:

As I walk around the room glancing at papers I find “Poetry Suck!” at the top of one.

“You forgot the 's',” I tell him.

“Oh yeah,” he says earnestly, and while he hunches with his pencil to fix it, I slip a copy of another poem on his desk and move on.

from February 25, 2004:

As the acacia blossom dies to a stale brown on my dashboard, I drive -- through high wind advisories and flood warnings under the swirling gulls who know better-- dancing through the drops they sail like wind is helium, the rain slight strings of ribbon they use to hover and bob. Work waits for me on the other side of the Bay, on the other side of this gray and, oddly, I want to go. So I follow the painted lines, since the horizon vanished long ago, and I pretend that when I arrive, I'll be greeted warmly praised without restraint, that my students will tear from my hands the poems of famous and infamous writers I've painstakingly chosen to present to them, absorb the words through bright eyes before sitting to etch their own world onto paper, wild and undefined like the sky today, the rain outside harmony to this melody, beat box to an interlude that can only bring clarity. And I pretend -- that these girls all named for saints will rise like the gulls, their black curls aloft in the wind, the rain on their faces holy water.

where it all begins: thinking about parenting and teaching, again

It's weird, really. How often on dates Mike and I end up in a toy store, milling around. I liken it to lesson planning. It's the perfect state of things – the time of imagining, before the people (the students or the boy) take those things (the lessons or the toys) and do what they will do with them.

It's before your best laid plans lie crumpled at your feet, shredded and bleeding. It's a beginning. I am obsessed with beginnings – mornings are my favorite time of day, before the fog lifts and the traffic is audible. My essays are all confused and muddled because I can't pick one way to start them, instead there are three or four introductions competing with each other.

It is the creative part, the wide-open. It is possibility and sunrise. This sounds pretty dramatic when you think about wandering around a store front turning boxes of Legos over looking at prices. But there it is. The hope. I don't subscribe to the parenting method of buying and over-buying stuff for your kids. Yet, maybe I can muster some sympathy for those parents if I imagine them becoming caught up in a dream of possibility over and over. You don't see at this point, the Clue Jr. game abandoned in the closet, its box smashed on three corners. Each made-in-China plastic piece of junk perhaps not a substitute for love and understanding, but a seed of hope for the realization of this small being whose lighted with them for a brief era. Of course, it would be misdirected. We are all misdirected, sometimes down the most harrowing of paths. But I am speaking now of intention.

I drive past the hospital, the parole office, juvenile hall, out toward the hills, toward my next class. There is a sense for me of a not so subtle evolution, or devolution, that is brick and mortar real. I have been thinking about the students I am teaching in relation to the students who used to sit in their chairs when I taught six years back. Six years ago, these kids, the ones here today, still had time to go anywhere, else, away, from here. They had innocence, if not shiny and new, at least to some degree intact; they had the chance of anything possible.

Frequently enough, I can't wait to get the real Isaac to sleep, freeing me of the vigilance of motherhood for that brief space, only to stay up half the night talking to his dad about him.

Am I an idealist happiest when I'm divorced from reality? But we create our own reality. This is never truer than when speaking of writers. If I share with you the story of the magical invisible alligator that Isaac works with to deliver toys and picture frames (?) to houses, will you think all of my days enchanted? If I tell you about the years of lack of sleep, the demanding voice that barks about food and play and socks and now, will you know me as cursed? Writing takes everything – it is as egalitarian a vocation as you can get – you are well, you are sick, you are rich or poor, you have 10 dogs, you hate animals. The story can start anywhere. But you don't have to put it all down at once.

I think it is why so many students get stuck writing – they don't know they can select out the pieces they want to talk about, leave the rest. That they can even ruminate, perhaps forever, in the beginning, in the land of potential, in the moment before the gun goes off and their heel presses sharply against the starting block, in the moment before the gun goes off, period. In the time when they were kicking it with their buddies before the lights of the police car came like ugly streamers around the corner. That what happens afterwards, is just that – an afterwards. That whole worlds are made and broken in the dark of a nascent fog. That to sit outside your story, to tell it, creates another reality. That to write, all you need is a moment.

an audience for poetry

“Kathryn, man, why you always writin' poems? Why don't you play basketball or somethin'?”

That was William. From a 12-week workshop I taught for Poets-in-the-Schools some six years ago.

William would pin on me a hard sideways stare each Wednesday. “You comin' next week?” his second question so powered by suspicion you just knew this child had been raised on a pile of broken promises deep enough to slice you open from the inside.

I have just recently put myself in the position to answer those kinds of questions again. I'm back at it. NOT basketball, of course, but poetry workshops. And I get to meet class after class of Williams.

When I arrive at the first school the first day I recognize it immediately, though I've never been here before. I pull in and park next to the parole officer's car. The school is a dilapidated mess of concrete. The few kids I find wandering around have their pants sagging so low you'd wonder why they bothered to put them on. A sign titled “Rules” hangs in the room where I'll teach. “1 – Be nice. 2 – Be safe. 3 – Don't give up.”

I meet my classes. The kids bubble and joke, they love poetry, they hate it, they can't make up their minds. By third period word's gotten around – a visitor among them. A tall, lanky senior with space for a small barge between his front teeth slides into the classroom and confronts his teacher. “Tell me it's true!” he demands. “We writin' poems in here today??”

There is the one kid, whose sullen doesn't match the rest of his sulky brethren hiding in hoodies. You can't quite put your finger on it, so you speak to him softly while the others write or don't, offer suggestions he doesn't take, touch his arm as he leaves and tell him you'll see him next week. He looks at you almost as if he wishes it were true. You'll find out later he's the one whose cousin was murdered by gangs over the weekend. There is always that one.

Isaac asks me when I'm going to be a “real teacher” and get a “real job.” How can I explain to him – this is as real as it gets. How did I get so lucky?