Parental Paradigm Shift

I've noticed that the truly momentous events in the parent-child relationship don’t turn out to be the ones for which there are Hallmark cards and pages in the baby books. Sure, I celebrated my son’s birthdays and school promotions and confirmation, but if I had to choose moments when my son changed from one thing into another it would be moments like the first time he walked into the kitchen during dinner when I had left him in the family room. He WALKED in. Suddenly, my whole understanding of who he was and what our relationship was transformed.

I had another such moment tonight. As a mom, and, I’ll admit, as a high school teacher, I wasn’t expecting my son’s first day of high school to be more than another, albeit important, first day. I find, though, that after tonight, my vision of him has shifted. This summer he was a frequently and deliberately irritating middle-school boy. He was largely who he has been for the last decade. Although the change was likely more gradual than it feels, tonight I saw a different person.

When the marching band took the field, I honestly wasn’t expecting anything, but I was still surprised. It’s not that I thought he wasn’t going to be just fine, but I wouldn’t be entirely honest if I didn’t confess that I slightly anticipated that the fact that he’s never done anything remotely like marching band would maybe show a little. Maybe he’d be just a fraction of a step off or just going through the motions but not precise. Nope. He was, as far as I could tell, perfect. Perfectly in step. Sharp, perfectly crisp turns. He was as good as anyone else out there. When the band had to do dance moves, he looked cool. He looked like he’s been dancing all of his life. I mean, the kid—ahem teen—is fantastic! I had no idea. He learned all of that while I wasn’t watching.

Just as impressive is the story I heard from my husband, who watched him execute the day of high school, cross country practice, marching band performance, and team recognition. He wore one outfit to school and did a whole school day in a new building with a new schedule and new teachers. Piece of cake. Then he went to cross country practice and ran. He ate a sandwich, put on his white t-shirt and khaki pants to match the cross country team, and then put his band uniform on over that, including the pants. He performed flawlessly with the band--including the trombone suicides--left the field, stripped off one layer of clothes, threw on the cross country jacket one of his teammates carried out to the field for him, and then lined up with the team. He not only accomplished all of this in a day but planned ahead to make it happen without any direction, and he made it look effortless. Today was a big deal to me because it was not a big deal to him. Just another day in the life of a young man who has it together and gets it together on his own.

Maybe my jaw dropped just a little as I watched him on the field tonight. I can look backward in my mind and see the kid he used to be—only a month ago, I swear!—and I can turn my head just a bit and see the sharp, responsible, level-headed, capable man he is already becoming. I wasn’t prepared for that to happen. But he was.

Teaching Poetry and Learning Grace

My creative writing class. They are a sentence unto themselves and then some. And yet, just as a colleague promised, for the very reasons that they make me crazy, they will also be a class I remember for a long time and maybe even miss. In almost every sense of the typical use of the phrase, they are not my best students, but they are making me a better teacher.

Last week we worked on meter and rhyme. It was a struggle. A struggle that sort of defies description. Even so, yesterday we carried on with a really cool villanelle lesson that a colleague designed in which every student writes a single line in iambic pentameter with a few assigned end rhymes and then posts the line on a padlet that everyone can see. Then the homework was to cut and paste those lines into a villanelle template. Today’s plan was to look at how those same lines took on different meaning when used in different places in the villanelle: the point being that form affects meaning. Of course, today’s plan was entirely contingent on at least SOME students having turned in a sample villanelle. ONE person did. ONE.

I put a bunch of zeros in the gradebook. I showed up to class ready to lay into them. Why? Why couldn’t they do this super easy task? Why did they sign up for creative writing if they couldn’t write this one pre-made poem? I literally cannot make these people learn. I literally cannot make an assignment easy enough that they will even attempt to do it. Despair and frustration overtook my ability to make a new lesson plan. My colleague’s wise advice was to shame them by showing them that LITERALLY I was just asking them to cut and paste, that they could have done their homework in five minutes. Then make them do the assignment in five minutes and carry on with the lesson as planned. When the bell rang and they didn’t sit down and begin the Tuesday check-in, I stormed into the middle of the room and told them that I was already feeling low on grace due to having to change my lesson plans because noone did their homework and could they PLEASE just do the Tuesday check-in on classroom.

And then maybe because of the nature of grace, because it comes when we need it and not when we earn it, I was given grace.

One of my students raised his hand and said that the Tuesday check-in wasn’t showing up on classroom. I apologized and said I’d go post it. As I was posting it, I overheard what my students were chattering about: poetry. My posse of students, more than half of whom are failing CREATIVE WRITING (!) as well as multiple other classes, most of whom have experienced some version of being kicked out of their houses or lost parents because of the actions of those parents, most of whom struggle just to show up on a regular basis, many of whom see their deans more than their classroom teachers, some of whom speak English as a second language, were talking about how they like poetry. (“Then why the hell didn’t you do the poetry homework?” I thought.) The rest of them were talking about the fact that I am their only teacher who does a check-in. They wanted to know why and if I use the information for planning. I told them that I don’t necessarily use it for planning, but I like to know about them, and some people will tell me things when asked that they wouldn’t initiate on their own. I want to be here if anyone needs me. “That’s nice,” said a very uber-cool young man. “I like that you do this.” And so, because of the nature of grace, instead of shaming or blaming or accusing, something moved me to say instead, “What’s going on? My lesson plan was to look at how lines take on different meanings in a bunch of different villanelles, but I didn’t get a bunch of villanelles, and so today might not be as good as I meant it to be. Why did this happen?”

Three people said they wrote their poems on paper and didn’t know they had to be turned in electronically. “OK,” I said. “Maybe we can still work with that. Let me think about that. Get them out.” Everyone else started to babble about how they just didn’t get it. “Didn’t get what?” I asked. “Tell me where the confusion starts.” About ten people raised their hands. After everyone had spoken once or twice, I said that I was hearing two possible places of confusion. One was that they didn’t understand what a villanelle does, and the other was that they didn’t see how to make sense of a bunch of random lines that didn’t necessarily go together. Most students said it was the second problem. The problem, dear teacher, was that my students want their poems to make sense. They didn’t want to write just anything and turn it in. Oh.

And then more grace happened. To show them that the point of the assignment was to help them see how form can help MAKE meaning, I pulled up the one poem that had been turned in. It was from a student who has not turned in anything else. She is from Colombia and struggles with English in addition to having the usual (in this class) list of personal issues. I had thought it odd that the handful of people who always turn in their work had not but that she had. With her permission, I projected her poem on the board and read it out loud. I read it with my most expressive awe-filled voice. I paused after a couple of the stanzas and pointed out something beautiful that had happened because of the form. When I finished reading, there was a moment of silence. “Wasn’t that beautiful?” I asked. “Didn’t she make something meaningful out of the lines that originally had nothing to do with each other?” The whole class nodded, unusually silent. I looked over at the poet, and she had her head down with her hood pulled up. I told her I didn’t mean to embarrass her but to show everyone what the villanelle form can do. She sat up, and tears were running down her face. Her friend, another native Spanish speaker, but one more adept at speaking in English, said, “No miss. She isn’t embarrassed. She’s...how do you say this? She wrote that for someone in particular. It’s emotional for her.” And then the class began to reread the poem and murmur about how beautiful it really was. They literally patted her on the back. They told her it was her best writing so far, and it was.

I held my breath. My lungs were filled with grace.

“Do you see how the form can help you write something beautiful?” I asked.

The class nodded.

“Do you want to try again?”

The class nodded.

“Do you want to just use your own rhymes and go it alone already?”

The class exhaled in relief and asked for me to post the template back on the board and a new assignment on classroom. One girl moved to her focus spot at a table by herself. Other people pulled up websites with rhymes. People started counting syllables on their fingers. Five hands went up: could I check this line? Did it have the right number of syllables? Did it make sense?

I ran around for about ten minutes posting things on classroom, answering questions, suggesting rhyme options. Then I stood still and looked at my room full of poets. They were learning. So was I.

After the bell

The bell rings, and the students who were lined up at the door (I know--shame on me for not keeping my seniors captivated up to the bell) join the noisy throng of teenagers in the hall. The room is silent except for the clicking of keys as I answer an email from a parent. The hallway is loud with words and bodies in motion. The contrast causes me to pause and contemplate my place in the order of the universe: I get to be a teacher. What a breathtaking responsibility and opportunity. I get to see these young people every day while they are still young. God willing (or helping,) they will be ever so slightly different when they leave me, and they WILL leave me. They will walk into the world as they walked into the hall, with anticipation to be elsewhere, with an idea that the something out there is better than whatever it is they already have in here. But, sitting in silence in my middle age, I know that I already have what I was hoping for. This. Them.