Skiing

“No, you have to plant a pole when you turn!”

My father’s words are adamant and sound easy, but I know better than to fall for such simplicity. He has just watched me fly down a steep slope off of the highest chair lift at Mount Baker Ski Area, arms and poles flailing like wings as I weave drunkenly between moguls and steer away from the precious powder that will surely swallow me whole. I am not a great skier, and the infrequency of days like this one has made for little progress between seventh grade and now.

Plant a pole. I could respond that I am going too fast for a pole to stick into the snow for any useful amount of time, or that I have tried planting poles before and it has betrayed me as a turning technique, led to despairing crashes in forgotten corners of ski runs, tangled messes of skis, poles, and limbs. I have plenty of arguments, but I know it will not matter. The conversation will end, like so many others, with my asking “How?” and his responding “You just, you know, do it!” We speak different languages. His, the sparse words of the athletically gifted, who can see and do in one smooth motion. Mine, the careful expository steps of the uncoordinated, who must watch and listen and explain and practice and, yes, crash again and again.

I think about this athletic coaching—hours of trying to throw, shoot, or hit balls in the backyard, hours of frustration followed by long sabbaticals from sports—as I teach literature to high school students. “But how do you make yourself finish a book? How do you write something that you love?” they ask me every day, though never so directly, and I struggle for an answer. Who am I to teach them that? I read to experience another world and time, not bothered by the unfamiliar and bizarre encounters in literature. I have spent spare evenings reading Shakespeare and Donne aloud, around fireplaces or beside lakes, and I have burned away hours writing for the pleasure of arranging words into poems and stories. Reading and writing are, for me, as natural as skiing is for my father, an extension of self that is, to a point, unteachable.

As a teacher who pursued literature because I have always loved it, I can never fully relate to the challenges facing some of my students. I began this career hoping to make my students love literature as I do, but am beginning to realize that some of them may never pick up a novel after they graduate from high school. Passion for a subject is a nice treat to a teacher, but perhaps it is not a fair goal. How discouraging for all of the brilliant math teachers I have had over the years, if they were trying to lure me into an engineering career! No amount of explanation could make the numbers line up for me the way they did for those math-loving teachers.

I have instead begun to respect the moments that I catch students listening to the words we read, whether or not they enjoy the reading that gets them there. Students from North Seattle consider the dangers of the Salem witch trials, trying to apply the concepts of a small Puritan society the societies of family, school, city, and nation with which they are familiar. American students consider what life is like for Cuban immigrants in Florida, or twenty-first century students realize that the quarrel between the Montagues and the Capulets mirrors the Israeli-Palestinian feud. They learn empathy in these books; they are beginning to draw analogies between themselves and the fictional worlds we enter together. They may never read for pleasure, but if they can recognize the relationship between past and present, between art and the life it mirrors, then they have learned a more important skill. These students will become educated actors in a complex play that requires of them critical minds and wise decisions.

I pause as my father speeds down the slope ahead of me. The Cascades are shining to my right, smooth hills broken by black trees, branches weighed down with new snow. The grey sky promises more snow tonight, though the sun glows steadily behind the farthest hill. This is what I have learned from my mountain-obsessed dad, not a passion for skiing or hiking or climbing, but a love for the beautiful places they take me. I could stand here all day, watching this sky and these mountains. But my fingers are growing cold inside snowy fleece gloves, my toes freezing in plastic boots, and I know the view will be better from the swinging benches of Chair 8. With a shrug I push off down the slope, scratching the surface of the snow with my downhill pole in a vague attempt to turn left.

To Do: Hang Christmas Lights

Pulling the tangled lights out of the J. Crew shopping bag, I carefully plug the entire mess into the classroom wall. I give the knotted lights a cursory glance, admiring the multicolored sheen that they case on the sterile room, before laying them aside to attend to the business of hanging them. I have picked plastic light hooks from among the nails and screws in that chasm of a desk drawer that overflowed with useful and unused things, and now I begin, with overdone concentration, to stick them to the window frame.

It is my prep period, and I am hanging Christmas lights in my classroom. Experienced teachers must know how to maximize their prep periods, how to plan, grade, conference, and email sufficiently in this meager hour a day. I, on the other hand, often use this time to buffer the scratches of the morning, and to prepare for the wails of the afternoon. Today, I have retreated to the cool quietness of the empty library classroom.

If my library classroom were a normal classroom, the kind entered by only one door and visible only from the outside windows, I might have been less concerned by my light hanging mission. But this long, narrow space was once two luxurious conference rooms, with two doors and windows not only out to the courtyard, but also back into the library. As I stand on the chair and wrestle with knotted twinkle lights, I look out at hundreds of high school students, busily working away at research or peering back at me, that bizarre young woman who teaches in an annexed classroom and spends her planning period hanging lights. I feel childish and capricious, and I am convicted that I should in the future limit my prep period fare to dry state standards and tasteless lesson plans.

This morose vocational crisis has distracted me from the dreary fact that only half of the lights work. Wretched lights. I know that there is one rebellious blub in the far half, one bulb that is ruining everything, but as so often happens I have run out of time. The first bell has rung. I have decorated only one of my two library windows, and half of the decorated lights are sneering back at me with their beady, unlit bulbs, daring me to pull out each one and discover the problem. In exasperation I instead stretch the good half over the top and sides of the window, rolling the rest of the lights into a tight ball in the bottom corner. As I scrunch them tightly into the corner, the wicked lights wink on. I unravel them out to finish the window and they flash off again. Roll them together, they return to brightness. In exasperation, I push the lights back against the edge of the window as the bell rings, and my students meander in with Sunday brunch nonchalance.

The fourth period students do not acknowledge the lights except to mention, near the end of class, that "Christmas lights still won't make this fun." I reply that the lights were not meant to be fun. I put them up because I like them. The end. They shrug their boxy shoulders and slink back into their vocabulary tests.

Soon even I have forgotten the lights, lurking in their stubborn, tangled state on the wall. The small rooms become full of visitors, who observe, comment, and ask questions. Fifth period needs more time for the test. A new student demands attention. The day is nearly over when one of my students, a recent immigrant from East Africa, points to the messy decorations.

"Hey, why those lights like that? Fix them." I glare at the tumorous ball that the fickle half of the strand has become.

"No, I can't fix them." I walk over and unroll the ball, and the lights flicker out. The students giggle, each looking up from their work as I frown in frustration and squeeze the lights together until they come back on. "See, they have to stay like that."

"You buy us these lights? You have much money?"

"No," I shake my head again. "The lights are from my mom. Thank her if you see her."

As they finish their tests, I begin to drape the second strand around the remaining window. As I stretch to the top edge of the window, the curious Somali student looks up from his work.

"Hey, le' me help you. I can reach top."

"Help me by finishing your vocabulary test," I answer absently.

I look back at the lights, my chief adversaries of the day. They were the extra item on my to-do list, that task that took longer than I had expected or hoped. They were the trinkets that made me feel childish and inadequate. They were the fickle and perverse representatives of a depraved race of electronics. I despise the lights for their uselessness.

I notice that all six of my students are looking at the glowing lights. What are they thinking, high school juniors and too old to be excited about most things? Some of them celebrate Christmas, while others do not, and all are new to the overwhelming phenomenon of Christmas in America. What do the lights mean to them? Really, what do strings of Christmas lights mean at all?

Suddenly I am seeing my mother, draping delicate branches of twenty-one Christmas trees with white lights. Did she do it because she had to, because decorating the tree was the first in a long line of arduous holiday tasks? No. I have recently heard her proclaim that this was her favorite time of all, these hours spent with the lights, the tree, and her family. She lit the tree out of love; she lit it because we liked it.

Again I notice my students, guiltily stealing glances at the colored lights and I remember that, before the lights became a task or a holy war in the library classroom, I had cared, too. I had wanted to decorate this room we shared, because I thought my students might enjoy it. Buried in my busyness was a sliver of love, which I pulled out to examine and appreciate as my last set of students glowed in the colored lights.

"Are we getting a Christmas tree?" comes one voice, no longer able to contain her reminiscences. I sit down with them at the large, square table, ready to listen to their distraction and get lost in my own. It will be fine; there are only five minutes left of class.

"In Mexico, at Christmas," they begin, remember, "We had great bonfires..."