Trust and Round Trips

Trust is the daughter of truth.


I've never been happier that it's sixth period.  Today--the second-to-last day of school before we disperse for Winter Break--has been difficult.  Difficult in a vague sense because we're all a little edgy these days, a little worn out and short-tempered, looking ahead to the rest or excitement or trouble coming in the next few weeks and reacting accordingly.  Difficult in a specific sense because I've just finished hosting five fifty-minute parties for teenagers.


The parties are typical school parties: menageries of flavored potato chips, whole cities of two-liter soda skyscrapers, the driest of Swiss Misses waiting for transformation.  They get snacks, cocoa, drinks, and sit down in the large circle Period One made of the chairs, and we play games I've borrowed from a my heritage of camp and church ministry.  The kids like the games, are shocked they like the games, express their liking for the games in cries of accusation or shouts of boasting when they lose or win.  It's fun, I think, for them.  As for me, I'm exhausted by the time I get to my last class of the day.


The journalism students are having a party as well, but theirs is the low-key kind.  No games for these sophomores, juniors and seniors, who just worked incredibly hard to get their newspaper done (on time for the first time since I've been in charge!) in time to hand out before the break. I'm proud of them and we're all tired as we gather around a table of chocolate mousse, eclairs, Chex Mix and spritz cookies.  I've been trying to avoid gluten lately, so I content myself with my still uneaten squash-and-rice-pasta lunch, sitting down in my corner to watch and be quiet for a while.


Trust talks to people who need to hear her; she listens to those who need to be heard; she sits quietly with those who are skeptical of words.


Ninth graders never come into this remote corner of the room where I have my desk and computer, as barriers of desks, wall and windows enclose it on three sides.  Journalism students have no such scruples, and soon three or four of them have migrated over, bringing chairs and pastries and conversation.  They come without demands; I can speak if I want to, but more often I like to listen, and they're fine with that, too.  It's my favorite place in any social setting--being in the presence but not center of conversations that interest me and people I enjoy--and I'm surprised and grateful to recognize it here.


After a while Frivolities Editor (generally she's the Back Page Editor, but for this holiday issue we created new titles) turns to me.


"I made you a card.  It's this one."  She hands me a square purple card with a paragraph glued to the front.  "The quote is from this book that personifies character qualities.  I thought that the one that someone gave to me was amusing, and this one... this one sounds like you."  I thank her for the card, and she turns back to a conversation on convex geometric shapes while I read.


Trust rarely buys round-trip tickets because she is never sure how long she will be gone and when she will return.


It has been a hard week, month, year so far.  Not hard like when I began all this, the hard of knowing just what to do and when, what to look for and how to see and hear and be all at the same time.  Hard because even if I become the best teacher in the world, I'll never be able to accomplish everything I want, nothing less than peaceful lives and a tolerant, critical, intellectual attitude toward the world for each of my students.  As pessimistic as it seems, I think I'll still be making calls home in twenty years, as I did yesterday afternoon, notifying parents that their sons/daughters are not coming/not performing/not listening as they should.  I'll still hear the heartbreaking news of warrants out and results just in, of interventions and the deaths of beloved family members.  It's hard because I keep hitting these limits and having to remember that I'm not God, that I can't make everything well just with concern.


Everyone has daydreams for discouraged moments, and mine involves moving away, teaching in a different and easier place.  It's selfish, I know; these kids who need so much won't go away if I stop teaching them, if I cross the ocean looking for adventure.  I'm humbled as I read the card, read this character of Trust to whom she's comparing me.  I wonder, did I buy a round trip ticket to Ingraham?  I know I began with an end date in mind, a June that meant the dissolving of some ties that kept me in Seattle, but that year has come and gone.  


I'm here.  


I have no idea if this is the last year or year four of forty, but I realize that on a day to day basis it doesn't matter that much.  There's today, with all it's parties.  There's tomorrow, when I'll miss my students as I board a plane to Germany for Christmas.  There's two and a half weeks from now, when we all start again, resolutions unwrinkled and ready to keep or start trying.  There are six months after that.  Who knows what each day holds, each hour, each minute?  The longer I teach, the more I'm learning that the most I or anyone can do is fill these minutes together with as much love and peace as I can, and that the best days are the ones when I can accept that it's not my love, my peace, my strength that makes this beautiful.


Trust is at home in the desert and the city, with dolphins and tigers, with outlaws, lovers and saints.


Frivolities Editor whirls out with the rest of them as the bell rings, crying "Have fun in Germany!" as she goes.  A few moments later she returns.


"There's a back to the card," she points out.


"Thanks."  Such a little word to express a magnitude of gratitude for the amount of confidence and, well, trust that her gift expresses.  It's the common thread, perhaps.  The trust I place in my students to make a poster in a group, or to become young men and women of wisdom and responsibility.  The trust that they place in me to tell the truth and not waste their time.  The trust that I learn again every day to place in the God who knows about this trip, whether it's round or one-way, who gives me just enough of love and wisdom to last each day.


...she is the mother of Love.

The Trial

The classroom--always a primary-colored melange of visual inside jokes--looks odder than usual. A third of the desks are pushed up in two rows against the windows, another third piled in the back, and the remaining third arranged towards the front of the room and bearing yellow placards that say things like "Othello," "Iago," and "Prosecution."  I'm leaning on a sarong-draped AV cart, clad in a black graduation robe.  


I'm always a little conscious of "what someone would think" if they walked into my classroom at any given moment.  Usually, the worst that could be said is that instead of restlessly pacing the floor I am sitting cross-legged on a table at the front.  (The most energetic and perfect teachers are always on the move; I prefer to hone Zen-like stillness, hoping it'll rub off.)  The scene today would be madness to an outsider, and I'm torn between hoping some supervisor shows up so I can explain, and praying that no one bothers us today so we can have our imaginative fun in peace.


"Students!  Listen up!"


"Use the--what's it called--gavel," suggests a student.


I pound the red plastic handles of a pair of scissors on the top of the cart.  "Order!  Order in the court!" It makes a hollow metallic sound, not the satisfying click of wood on wood that a real, non-scissor gavel might provide.


"You're not even supposed to be here yet," L the Bailiff reminds me.  She's sitting on a tall stool to the left of my cart.  She was absent for the day of trial preparation, so I've given her a scripted role.  "I'm supposed to call you in."


"Oh, right."  I walk out the door and return as she intones the orange-highlighted words on the paper.


"All rise for the Honorable Judge D, Duchess of Venice!"


This is fifth period, the third mock trial of the day.  I had hoped to have time to give both a final test and do this trial with my ninth grade English classes, but the short days between Thanksgiving and Christmas break ran out, and we had time for only one or the other.  In an effort at democracy I allowed students to vote on which final assessment they preferred.  One voted for the test, and one had their trial cancelled because half of them were absent, for various reasons, on the day of trial prep.  That left three trials, this the last one.


The Question: Clearly, Othello is guilty of the death of his wife, Desdemona, but is it entirely his fault?


There are many holes in this trial.  First, the defendant is dead at the end of Othello, so his  hypothetical trial requires a hypothetical failed suicide.  Second, since he is so clearly guilty I have doubts about whether or not the degree of fault even matters in a legal sense.  Our entire trial, in fact, is built around idioms and procedures that we've learned mostly from movies.


Still, it's turned out to be an excellent assessment of knowledge of the play.  The prosecutors and defenders have had to study Othello's character and history in order to craft their arguments, have had to line up their information in the most compelling order.  The witnesses had to reread the play to create their testimony, remembering what their character could have seen and known, trying to guess what information would be asked of them.  The jury, replete with opinions of their own, have had to write statements for both sides of the case in order to prevent bias.  As far as finals go, this one is as interesting and summative as they come.


"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," the speaker for the defense team begins after the prosecution's opening statement, "Othello has had a difficult past.  He was a soldier and a slave.  He fought in wars and was put in prison.  After all of this, the one thing he loved, the one thing he trusted--his wife--he thought she betrayed him.  This messed up his mental state, and with that kind of manipulation from Iago he isn't completely at fault."


The next day, I'll hear almost the exact words chillingly echoed in by the defenders of Naveed Haq, currently being tried for opening fire on the Seattle Jewish Federation three summers ago.  They'll repeat that the accused believed his actions were completely right and therefore could not have been fully sane.


This defense doesn't hold true in ninth grade.  The jury comes to a unanimous conclusion after only a few minutes of deliberation: no matter what voices led him to his crime, Othello must be held fully responsible for his own actions.


It can be tempting to question the relevancy of reading a text that is four centuries old, especially in a class where the anti-magic words are "it's just a book."  And yet as we finish this one I'm again struck by the importance of the issues we're discussing.  Responsibility, revenge, jealousy.  As much as Shakespeare may have hoped that these would "go out of style," they never have.  We're still trying our real Othellos in court, still trying to drown out the voices of real Iagos and decipher the truth in lives that are seldom as symmetrical or organized as a Shakespearean tragedy.

Giving Thanks

Dear Students,


I'm thankful for you.  Happy Thanksgiving!


Love,


Ms. D


PS Please take the first five minutes of class to study for your vocabulary quiz!  Thank you!

--Overhead Greeting for Wednesday

It bears repeating, this thankfulness for the people with whom I spend most of my time.  Perhaps because I think I've complained more than usual this year, if not committed to permanence here in the transience of conversations.  Or perhaps because this year is harder and more confusing than last.  I forget what I love about teaching at times like these, when the trees of details mask the forest of people who make this excellent.


But I'm still thankful for everyone here, for the young people who fill these days with energy, hope, confusion, laughter, and curiosity.  For the educators from whom I'm still learning, inspired by their love and passion and creativity.  It's a good place, a good time.


Thanks.

Legos

My students are playing with toys at the front of the classroom.  


Lego people, to be specific, mostly of the maritime variety.  There are several dressed in the red and white of the British navy, one with an identical uniform in blue (French?), a few pirate-esque gentlemen, two ponytailed ladies and a kid in a tux and baseball cap.  Right now, lunchtime, four or five boys are huddled around the table, posing this motley society a variety of martial (and dubiously sexual) positions.


"OK, you can play with the people," I accede from my desk, where I'm pretty busy with the warm and delicious leftovers from my first ever whole roasted chicken and the Myspace profile that a clever student created for a character from Othello.  "You can play with them, but don't change their hats and weapons around.  That's annoying."


No, I haven't been reassigned to an elementary school mid-year, as amusing as that would be. This is still ninth grade English, and the Lego people are fairly important--if rather quiet--members of our class these days.  They are, you see, the characters of Othello.  There is a Lego Iago (standing out in villainous blue, with forbidding jagged mustache), a Lego Cassio (with glasses and a backpack, as all lieutenants good at math are prone to have), and of course a Lego Othello.  


This title character posed something of a problem to me last year, as a search through Noah's bin of Legos produced only white (actually canary yellow) Lego people, whereas Othello is the most dynamic and powerful African character in all of Shakespeare's works.  After criticizing me roundly for my lack of cultural sensitivity, last year's journalism students took it upon themselves to color my Lego Othello's head and hands with a brown marker.  While that might have been a lateral move, sensitivity-wise, we now have a distinctly African Othello Lego.


My students thought the Lego people were funny the first day, as we began to read out the play aloud and various students bravely waded through the complex blank verse.  I set them up beneath the document camera--these days projecting so much more than documents!--with a black and white photograph of Venice as a backdrop.


"Why do you have these?" they demanded.  "Do you have kids at home?"


"We've been over this.  I don't have any kids."


"Then where did you get them?"


"They're my brother's."


"Your brother?  You took your brother's toys?  That's hella mean."


"My brother is twenty-three.  He'll be fine.  Plus, he has more Legos at home."


Now, a few weeks into the unit, we all accept the toys as a matter of course, a legitimate visual for a complicated book.  We don't start reading a scene until the characters and setting are up there to see.  We've moved on from Venice, and now we look at a castle that is, of course, the fort that Othello & Co. are busy defending in Cyprus.  As characters enter and exit, I set the people on the table or pull them off, tossing them into the blue plastic bowl that serves as backstage.  Students occasionally demand impossible acting from the characters, whose range of motion is admittedly limited, but mostly they glance up once in a while from the tricky syntax, resting their gazes with amusement or consternation on the primary-colored people projected on the screen.


"Why didn't you do this for all of the other books?" some students ask when Period Five begins and we start assigning parts for the day.


"Because the other books weren't full of Italian names that sound the same and written four hundred years ago.  This helps us remember who's there and what's going on.  Now, who's reading Roderigo today?  Short part, and today is his smartest day ever."


"Isn't he the really dumb one?" a student asks.


"He's the guy in the tux with the Dumbledore beard," another responds, pointing to the screen.  "A tux cause he's rich, and a beard cause he's in disguise, right?"


"That's the guy," I respond.


And I love my job.

Snow Days of the Soul

My friends, ask gladness from God.  Be glad as children, as birds in the sky.  And let man's sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not fear that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, "Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless..." Flee from such despondency, my children!"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov

Friday afternoon.  This is the middle of my third day off from work this week, lurking indoors under self-imposed quarantine with a dilatory fever and various other halfhearted versions of the H1N1 symptoms that most of us in Seattle know by heart now.  A miserable Monday and Wednesday at work (yes, I went back to work on Wednesday, to teach a lesson on quotes in essays, be irritable and come home feeling far worse than before), and three quiet days at home, spent mostly on my computer.

Craving human contact, I've composed a few emails, engaged in some IM conversations, read narratives written by my two talented substitutes (trying to link names to the unfortunate quotations and habits relayed), and lingered on Facebook more than is healthy.

On the media front, I've watched half a season of The West Wing online, along with a few rental movies.  I've had several meals consisting only of soup, orange juice, and rice cakes, along with endless cups of tea and Nalgene bottles full of water.  It's all very busy, caring for myself.

It's the end of the quarter at school.  Grades are due in a week, and I dearly hope that most of my students turned in their final essays today.  The days for which I was present were full and fast-paced, taxing and demanding.  I wasn't kind or terribly patient, and neither were my students.  I didn't want to miss this week, but only because there was lots to do, I realize now.  Not because I particularly wanted to be there.

I always think of snow days as God's way of getting lots of people to stop and listen and do something different, all at once, at least here where snow is extraordinary and inconvenient.  These days have been like that, a mandatory slowing down and looking around.  Taking time to tend to things I haven't bothered with in a while, like reflection and reading and prayer for the people I love and serve.

As I finish what I hope will be the last sick day, considering another West Wing episode and what kind of tea to make next, I'm struck by the necessity of rest.  The sabbath was a commandment, a time for worship and community and restoration.  Without it we fall apart and have to stop anyway, eventually.  For a week or so, to wait while we're put back together.

I've been thankful for these three days, thankful for the people who've been teaching for me while I recover sufficiently to reenter society.  And with this perspective, a time apart, I'll be happy to return. 

Teachers and Introverts

Several people have asked me in the last few years what it's like to be a teacher and an introvert.  I've been thinking about this more than usual lately, as this year is especially people-intense.  In the midst of prayer and reflection on a retreat to the mountains last weekend, I stumbled on this analogy.  It seems like the best description of these days.

By day

I’m a bucket of water balloons,

expanded to bursting a while ago. 

Sloshing life and knowledge

bound in fragile walls.

I’m desperate to be thrown,

made to break merrily,

extravagant and poured out.

I’m spent,

splashed,

broken open. 

I’m vivid as electricity

each explosion an introduction

word sentence correction

complaint sigh

smile tear apology

farewell.

I’m made to be broken.

I’m an empty bucket each night,

fragments left behind,

scattered on the path,

soaking into the background.

I’m a million pieces now.

Start over, you tell me,

there will be more tomorrow.

More water (love patience peace hope),

more balloons to hold it.

Please promise to collect me,

and begin again.

Q & A

Thursday, in Unmatched Questions Asked and Answers Given

Q: Is there a tree map I could borrow?  Whose is finished?

A: Yes, I text.  Sometimes.  Not much.

Q: What's the difference between writing for school
 and the other writing that you do?

A: It's smoked salmon and cream cheese on rice cakes.

Q: OK, should we listen to Icelandic music
 or French music during work time?

A: You have to use the evidence from the play to support it. 

You've already found it; now you just have to use it!

Q: Has anyone seen M?  Her binder's here, but she is not.

A: Yes, I understand some Spanish.  Enough to

know that I don't like what you're saying.

Q: What are the rules of that other writing? 
What does a winking symbol really mean?  I mean, really? 
Or LOL?  Does it really mean that you're laughing out loud?

A: Thesis and essay and paragraph

are like the bones of your writing:

I should be able to tell that they are there,

but I don't want to see those words in your writing. 

Can you actually see any bones right now? 

If you see bones, there's a problem.

Q: "Out the cut"?  What does that mean?  Where is she, really?

A: You don't need "I" in the essay. 

It's not about you.  It's about characters. 

Q: Do you have any evidence for that statement?  Show me.

A: I do believe you.  I'm sure you can do a front-flip.

  I just don't want you to right now.  We're inside.

Q: Do you want tea?  I'm making some.

Two Debates

The Question:  You have bought a house in a neighborhood whose ethnic makeup is different from yours.  Just as you are about to move in, with your spouse and two young children, some of your new neighbors threaten to harm you, motivated by racial prejudice.  Do you still move in?

Modeled after one of the problems of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the question and its implications are clear to my students, who wrote for five minutes before dividing into sides based on their decisions.  They know racial prejudice, both in fiction and in life; to them the scenario is both feasible and manageable.

In theory, this debate should be just about the same in all five of my ninth grade English classes, which are composed of demographically similar students, balanced by gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status to reflect the ninth grade as a whole.  Today's debate, the first of the year, is an experiment, a benchmark maturity test.  If they are able to form two coherent positions and then argue them without yelling, the debates will happen.  If not, I'll draw them to a screeching halt and plan less difficult communication exercises until we reach the tipping point where civilization wins over savagery.

Numbers for Thursday:

Classes Who Started Yelling: 1, 3, 4

Arguments Involving Weapons: 3

Arguments Involving Civil Rights: 1

Debates: 2

Mediocre Debates: 1

Best Debate I've Ever Witnessed: 1

Period Five: Fear and Fantasy

This debate isn't going well.

It's not terrible either, Period Five with their after-lunch energy, not as bad as the cancelled debates of Periods One, Three and Four.  They divide to the two walls of the room with minimal squealing, nominate their speakers and move on from opening statements to general discussion.  This is when it starts to break down.

"I mean, it's better to feel safe in an OK place than really scared in a good house, right?" reasons one advocate of staying.

"No, man, we're moving in!" argues a classmate across the room.

"We know you're moving in," I remind them.  "That's the side you picked.  But why?  You need to respond.  They're talking about safety.  This isn't a safe place.  What do you say to that?"

Getting students to connect arguments, to arrange counter-arguments, has never been my strong suit.  Not a great persuader myself, I value debate more for the exercise of disagreeing with civility than the salesman rhetoric that wins converts to my position.

"OK--OK.  We're not scared cause--cause we're strapped."

Based on the knowing laughter and pantomimes of his teammates, I assume this means he's armed and ready to counter prejudiced neighbors.

"What about your kids?" someone asks.

"Um, my kids are strapped, too!"

And that's how it falls apart, talking about children with weapons and the value of living your whole life indoors so as to avoid the possibility of harm.  A team of mostly teenage boys, stuck in the invincibility that they learn from action movies, believe that they can defend themselves and their self-respect with weapons, while the girls across the room shrink away in horror.

Period Two: The Best Debate Ever

I don't expect my second class to like debating.  They are the quiet group--I've had one every year--and they tend to shrink from tasks that involve one student talking in front of all the other students.  In small groups or alone, they quietly and efficiently complete whatever tasks I set to them, but I expect them to balk at debating.

To my surprise, when asked to choose a position they neatly divide themselves into almost even side, discuss their positions without much prompting and select natural leaders from among their ranks.  After I ask the two opening speakers to stand to deliver their one-minute addresses, the rest of the students charmingly follow suit, standing by their desks to make arguments until I feel like I'm teaching in Victorian Britain, watching my proper students engage in scholarly discourse.

At first, the debate goes smoothly but not remarkably.  One side argues for the value of safety above all things, while the other defends the rights of all people to own land and live where they please.  Then, all at once, they come to life.

J stands on one foot behind her desk.  I don't know her well; she seems popular and comfortable here, but in Language Arts she is as reserved as the rest of her classmates.  "But it's your family," she insists. "Can you really bring your children into a place that isn't safe?"

Across the room, E rises from her desk.  She is the younger sister of a rather difficult student I taught last year, but thus far she has also been sleepy and reticent, only occasionally uttering spirited remarks to match her heritage.  Today, though, she is worked up, energy in every inch of her formidable frame.

"But what does that say?  That you're OK with things the way they are?  How can anything change unless someone's willing to take the risk?"  She sits down, arms folded, convinced she's said it all.  Her teammates nod in appreciation.

"It's not just someone!" J replies.  "It's your family.  Your kids.  Are you really going to bring your kids into this?  Just because you want to make a statement?"

Undaunted, E stands, shakes her arms like a boxer about to deliver the deciding blow.

"What if Rosa Parks thought that way?  And she actually just went to the back of the bus?"  From both sides come murmurs, of approval and comprehension, students torn between the immediacy of family and the ideal of civil rights.  E knows she's made an impact; beaming, she continues.

"Or what about Martin Luther King?  What if he tried to just protect himself and his family and stay safe?  We wouldn't even be here!  We'd all be in different schools.  We wouldn't even know each other."

I'm breathless, at the edge of the stool that I've placed in center of the room, and aware of the great weight of history and knowledge--past, present and future--that they've brought here today.  They bring their education, a series of schools with students from all over the world who taught and continue to teach them more than their teachers can.  They bring their hopes for the future in which things will be better, turning to justice and peace and equality in a way that even their parents couldn't imagine.  They are the students who are growing up with an African American president that they love, students who believe that the world will change only if they are willing to take risk to change it.

And they bring their own histories, the love of parents who protected them or didn't .  They bring their vows to do it the same or differently when it's their turn.  We all do.  So easy, I remind them when they finish and go back to their seats to carry on whispered mini-debates at the close of class, so easy to live for ideals as individuals, when our decisions affect only us.  How can we live our lives in community, in families, when the risks we take aren't just ours, but are carried on to another generation?

It reminds me of the struggles of urban schools all over the nation.  As affluent young people return to city centers, buying homes and starting families, they bring hopes of urban renewal.  But when it's time to find schools, no one seems eager to make a statement with their child's education.  It may improve, but it will take time, longer than the four years parents and students invest in a school.

As the class ends, I congratulate them on the Best Debate Ever, but it's not over.  And not in the ridiculous, "we'll carry this in our hearts" sense that we teachers usually use wistfully when we hope our lessons will be remembered.  They leave the classroom talking about it, taking the conversation into the halls.  "This isn't over!" they declare.


This is going to be excellent.

A Birthday, Fully Present

3. ___ Accomodate

E. To make space for; to allow


-from A Raisin in the Sun Vocabulary Quiz 1


2. Tomorrow=My Birthday! All I want from you is that you turn in your Dream House Vignette on time! It's due tomorrow!


-Monday Announcements


I had mixed feelings about using my own birthday as a reminder for ninth graders to turn in an essay. In theory, they should turn them in anyway, simply because they were assigned a week ago and are due tomorrow. They should have started last Monday, composing lyrical vignettes about their ideal houses, habitats they create only out of imagination, whether or not they are grounded specifically in the mundane world of reality. Along the way, I asked them to "toss in some poetic language" and "use good--no, brilliant--words" to make it interesting. With a week to get it done, they should be well on their way.


And yet, I thought yesterday as I put up the announcement, we all need reminders.


My birthday, so awkwardly late that every year in school the most common question was "Wait, you're how old? How did you do that?" As if I'd somehow fast-forwarded a year off of my life, or was lying to them. Yes, I'm really that young. This is also why I've never really mentioned my birthday to students. I turned twenty-one about a month into my student teaching, and for the next few years being twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four didn't seem like much to brag about. Only much later in the year did students do the math to discover that their teacher had less than a decade more knowledge than they. Up until this year, I've made it through whole school days with only sparse mentions of birthdays, which like contemporary music, dates on Fridays, and procrastination are deemed by students to be outside of Teacher World.


The students, seeing the connection of birthday and due date, exploded into a cacophany of complaint and inquiry.


"Wait, tomorrow's your birthday? Really?"


"How old will you be?"


"Wait, what do you want for your birthday?"


"I told you," I replied, pointing back at the announcement. "All I want is for you to finish your vignettes tonight and turn them in on time. Best birthday present ever."


"What if... what if," began a student in the front row.


"What if what?" I prodded.


"What if I got you a big plasma screen TV instead? Would you give me a good grade?"


"Plasma screen?" I scoffed. "I don't want that! That's ridiculous."


"What if I got you the best book in the world?"


"What if I called that--what's her name?--that Cisneros lady and asked her to write, you know, House on Mango Street 2? What would you do then?"


"Ha ha.  Tempting, but no.  I'd still rather have your essay."


Though it's a month into school, we're still mostly strangers, my students and I.  They are the whirling tornados of dismay and elation, spinning in from the halls and bringing their noise and their energy.  I am the one who likes books more than TV.  Other than that, our relationship has been largely transactional; time for knowledge, attention for achievement.  It's a state that bothers me slightly, at the beginning of every year, and even more so this year, as I've been using spare minutes to plan ahead, rather than look around and get to know the people in the room.


Now, twenty-four hours later, it's raining at lunch, the first rainy lunch of the year, and my classroom has filled with students.  This frequently happens when it starts raining, as all of the kids who've spent lunches outside begin to explore the halls, searching for new shelter.  Today they come in hordes,  not just the two young girls who usually gossip about youth group in the back, nor the sporadic ones who wander in and out with books and games and loneliness, looking for somewhere to anchor themselves.


I've been thinking of accommodation lately, what it means to truly "make space" for these people with whom I share my days.  When I am weary, as I've been so often this fall, it's tempting to be a teacher who just opens the door and lets things happen.  If I'm good enough at it, I tell myself, then it doesn't matter so much that I'm not paying terribly close attention to details.  We'll still learn, and maybe that's good enough.  It's sharing space--allowing information to rent property in our imaginations--but it's not accommodation.  If I ask my students to be fully present in classes, bringing minds, souls and bodies to school with them every day, then I must be, too.  Leaving the computer, whose information daily pulls me away from teenage world, I take my lunch to my desk and turn to face the room.


One girl sips peppermint tea while her friends decorate the white board with birthday messages.  Across the room, a boy types up poetry that he's written. I tell him a story I heard this weekend, about how in Nigeria each class elects a "love letter writer," the most eloquent of them to share his talent with lovestruck peers.  He declares he's discovered his calling.


In the space in front of the desks, half a dozen break-dancing Filipino students show off moves to music from a cell phone.  Many of them are quiet in class, docile students who haven't yet gotten in trouble, students I don't yet know very well.  I learn more about them in a minute of watching and listening than in the last month of classes. They laugh and dance and teach each other, cheering and calling to my attention the especially difficult windmills of flying arms and legs.


It's all so full, so terribly genuine in its disorganized and many-directioned energy.  And it's only through participating--asking questions and applauding and reading poems--that I can appreciate it all.  It's only when I am fully present, living entirely in the busy exhaustion of a twenty-fifth birthday lunch, that I can see the beauty of this place, this life and the people who fill it.

Laughing With

An editor, a food columnist and two reporters are laughing at me.

At the end of the day, the newspaper staff is finally and busily engaged in meeting the first deadline of the year. My role as adviser (spelled with an "e" because the Associated Press delights in ugly spelling), last year fairly peripheral to the happenings of the newsroom, this year has taken a more definite shape. Part of the change has come with experience. After a year I know what I should do--and what I shouldn't do--as the one adult between the newspaper's production and its dissemination to a thousand students, faculty, parents and community members. I should encourage students to become active, curious and outgoing members of our community, teaching them how to ask the right questions, and keep asking them, until they are the true voice of the student body. I shouldn't write their articles, express too much of my own opinions in school controversies, or tell them all the answers to the questions I make them write.

The rest of my adviser transformation resulted from the graduation of ten staff members last spring. With only four students who remember "the way it was last year," Because of this, I have remarkable freedom to mold class policy and procedure, as well as the responsibility of creating an interdependent team from a group of near-strangers. And unlike the passionate but essentially homogenous cadre of writers who left, I have begun this year with a near-perfect cross-section of our school. Some have come because they are new to Ingraham looking for a place to get involved. Some are making up Language Arts credit. Some love writing more than anything, and have added this elective to a collection of other writing electives. Whatever the motive, this newspaper staff comes from three grades, five countries and all levels of skill and experience.

So it is with a sense of relief that I am able, today, to sit down at my desk in the corner, melting into the background of advisership, while students who didn't know each other a few weeks ago live out a commercial for teambuilding games. They're brainstorming and writing, going over notes from interviews and snapping headshots. All is well.

I feel invisible for a while, in the corner of my classroom I've turned into an office, and pull out a stack of papers to grade. I never graded much in sixth period last year, since I usually did most of that during my planning period. This year, though, I am teaching all six classes, and thus have no more planning time during the day. It was a decision fraught with ambitious bravado ("I'm young and invincible!"), passive greed ("I guess it would be nice to make more money") and dubious altruism ("It really is better for he kids to be in five small classes than four huge ones"); but for better or worse, it's done and I am teaching all the time. No more planning periods for busy scheming, tea-aided unwinding, the rest of not saying any words for a while. No more mid-day writing myself back into love with students and teaching; all of it will have to wait, now, for mad lunches and listless after school hours.

Now, with sixth period going so well, I risk some multi-tasking. It's only after about ten minutes that I remember I'm still technically teaching a class, and I only remember because the table of girls nearest me starts to laugh at me. They're only laughing, I realize, because I was laughing first.

"What are you giggling at?" Food Columnist demands.

"The ninth graders. This assignment," I reply, holding up the papers.

"I didn't think teachers liked grading."

"Well, these are really funny. They were supposed to write a letter from an object in the room. And this one is from this kid's cell phone. 'This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, man. You know how you push my buttons.'"

The girls laugh, and Opinions Editor recalls when she did the assignment as a freshman, what she wrote about. I go back to reading. They are funny. This is the fourth time I have taught this class, this book, and by now I have saved only the assignments that I love, including this personification of an inanimate object in the room. I've read letters from the newly-installed carpet, demanding better treatment from careless, paper-shredding kids. Students have given voice to the clock, who is insecure because everyone is always looking at him; to the plastic crown that hangs above the white board and doesn't get along with the American flag next door; to the rubber duck that wishes I'd rotate him ninety degrees so that he could look back at the classroom instead of out the window. Yesterday we spent a solid twenty minutes sympathizing with things that cannot feel.

In strictly standards-based, literary language, I'm not sure that I could save this lesson from the coldness of an aligned curriculum. Yes, they have a better sense of personification, but more as the opposite of objectification than as the "description of non-humans in human terms." I could loosely connect it to letter-writing form. In terms of the soul-building that is tacitly inherent to most English classes, if we spend time searching for how something else might feel perhaps we will be able to do the same with one another. How would I feel, think, act if I were in that person's shoes? Yes, I justify after the fact, I'll connect back to this when we return to perspectives, again and again, throughout the year.

But as I'm reading letters from shoes and white boards, I feel like the chief value of this assignment is that it made us laugh for two days. It's been an exhausting beginning, this year, so much so that at times I've lost my footing of care and compassion for my students in the winds of weariness. Yesterday as I offered the beginnings of stories and characters, and now as I read them at the end of a long day, I'm filled with gratefulness for the creativity of kids who are still young enough to take an odd assignment and make it into something wonderful and unique. When I'm laughing, in sixth period, reading bits of the letters aloud at the request of Food Columnist and Student Life Editor, I'm not tired. Or it doesn't matter that I'm tired.

Go with this weirdness, I told them yesterday as they wrote. It will be fun.

It is.

Red Fern Meets Manual Math

More kids than I had ever seen were playing around a big red brick building. I thought some rich man lived there and was giving a party for his children. Walking up to the edge of the playground, I stopped to watch.

The boys and girls were about my age, and were thick as flies around a sorghum mill. They were milling, running, and jumping. Teeter-totters and swings were loaded down with them. Everyone was laughing and having a big time.

Wilson Rawls, from Where the Red Fern Grows

Walking around with my thumb in a paperback library copy of Rawls's classic, I'm proctoring a test in the library computer lab today. Students have rolled lazily up to the banks of computers and are now staring at screens, mostly quiet. It's the time of test-giving--after I've read all the material for my next lesson and sketched out the shape of the next few weeks of lessons--when I run out of things to do. Since I'm feeling neither tired enough to stare blankly at the Seattle Weekly online nor adventurous enough to peruse the T encyclopedia like my co-proctor, at the suggestion of a friend I'm reading about Billy and his two "hunting hounds" a few paragraphs at a time between my rounds of over-the-shoulder digital eavesdropping.

With outspoken scorn for "dog stories where the dog always dies," I've been resisting Where the Red Fern Grows for a while. It's a pity, actually, because I probably would have loved it if I'd read it when everyone else did, back in the fifth grade. Replete with vernal descriptions of the Ozark Mountains and thrifty, no-nonsense characters, the story would have fit well on the heels of my Little House on the Prairie obsession. As it is, I'm reading about the boy saving up for two hunting hounds and remembering not what it felt like to desperately want a dog (I've never wanted that), but instead the thoughts of the fifth-grader who read about prairies and schoolteachers and Indians and horses and sighed that her mountains, the mundane Cascades, could never be as interesting as the magical Dakota Territory.

It's the silence that first makes me look up from the novel, which has stalled for pages and pages at the love at first sight that Billy bears for his new dogs. For a room full of kids on computers, the lab is actually mostly quiet, and I watch the noiseless labor of the test takers. Everywhere I look, students are clearly in action, and after a second I remember the reason. They are taking a math test.

Watching students do math reminds me more of being in school than any other subject. Perhaps it's because most of the circumstances in which this happens are, like this one, tests on which I'm forbidden to help. There are other times when I'm vaguely aware that their homework assignments are beyond me and don't venture into the embarrassing territory of technique I've forgotten or--sometimes--never really knew. On occasion, though, when I decide to wade into a math problem, offering the much-caveated help that I can, my problem solving looks just like theirs right now.

My students' fingers are counting corners and angles on the screens, manipulating shapes by turning them in thin air and trying to imagine their path, and adding up averages manually. They scribble down whatever they know they must remember, making hesitant columns of long division and uneven geometry sketches. Their processes are on the surface, not mysterious or hidden, like with each new problem they evaluate and then roll up their sleeves, holding their breath and dodging obstacles as they arrive.

This is how I do math, too. Since there are no more tests, for now, I can enjoy the clean and ordered challenge of occasionally assisting on an algebra problem without fear. Writing has sunk below the surface for me, so saturating my thoughts and fingers that sometimes it seems to just happen, but with math the learning and the labor are still just as visible. I remember what it's like to pull on an equation like a gigantic knot, testing it for weaknesses that will lead to its untangling, or how sometimes the best way of thinking about a triangle's rotation is just to squeeze your eyes shut and twist your head around. It's not scientific, not the intuition that my calculus teacher always hoped to instill, but it worked for me as it seems to work for them.

As I go back to the book, just as Billy finally stows his puppies in a sack in order to transport them home, I pause in the intersection of my childhood passion--books about the country and hard living--and my childhood nemesis--math problems--and for a wildly nostalgic instant I'm intensely grateful for both, ghosts of school that remind me what it's like to be here.

Reading and Riding

Once an approaching dog is spotted, a good rider response is to slow, including a downshift, then accelerate past the point of interception. Don't kick at the dog because it will make controlling the motorcycle difficult.

from "Basic Rider Course" (Washington Motorcycle Safety)

“So complete this sentence—write it out on the card—‘The best book I’ve ever read is…’”

Some students laugh nervous, first-day-of-school laughs. Unwilling to point out their issue with my premise—the “best” of the sentence—they giggle and look anywhere but at me. Unwise to reveal on the first day, they must reason, our essential skepticism about the entire subject of Language Arts. But still how, they demand in their red-faced giggles, could any book be good enough to deserve to be called the best?

This is the fifth first day of school for me at IHS, including the one I spent during my student teaching, and they’ve all been very much the same, an energetic tangle of happy greetings and frantic rehabilitating of classroom management techniques from their summer atrophy.

It’s true, this one is a little more chaotic usual. Our entire school day has shifted fifteen minutes later, so that we watch our familiar class-ending times slide by, no longer momentous. Irate fellow teachers are still looking for furniture and boxes lost in the summer move, necessitated by new carpet that was an extremely unpopular district mandate. Scheduling and staffing upheaval has forced many of us to teach new subjects or, like me, to take on extra classes entirely. Though I’m bothered by neither the new schedule nor the carpet, I’m exhausted by the time I get to my fifth ninth grade Language Arts class. I’m missing the kids I know—now in tenth and eleventh grade—and weary of meeting new people, even the spectacularly interesting ones that have come through the doors today.

“Do like kid books count?” someone asks me.

“Definitely. One of the best books I’ve ever read is Yertle the Turtle.”

They return to their blue cards, the cards that introduce them to responding to a prompt, talking in small groups, and sharing in the large-group setting. I can see some of them still frowning, trying to remember a time that they liked a book.

I’ve written before about the disconnect between struggling students and the teachers who instruct on the subjects that they love best. Though I can try to imagine not liking a book just because it’s a book, I’ve never experienced the prejudice myself. Nor have I ever began an English class with a certainty that I won’t do well. Even in disciplines I care little about, I’ve always come to class with confidence that I can succeed. At the end of the summer, though, I stumbled upon humility—even empathy—in the unlikeliest of places.


On the last Sunday in August, pristine and splendid, I found myself terrified and fourth in line to take the final riding exam for my Washington Motorcycle Safety Course. If I passed, I could get a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license and legally drive the 125 scooter that I desire. If I failed, I couldn’t do that. I also, obscurely, would add this non-skill to a long list of other driving ineptitude. The near failure of driver’s education, the two attempts to learn manual transmission and numerous minor dents and scratches loomed large in the disappointing background as I considered this next hurdle. As I’d done poorly on those, so I must be headed for disgrace here.

The class itself, several hours of classroom and riding instruction over the two previous days, was an overwhelmingly good time. After electing to learn the simpler scooter and not the more complex motorcycle operation—requiring the mastery of the wicked clutch that’s haunted me for a decade—I enjoyed every minute of driving instruction. I wove through cones with ease, eeling elated at the weightless fluidity with which I could turn the little machine. The instructors, good-humored experienced riders on their elegant cruisers and ponderous touring bikes, showered us in encouragements, from thumbs raised in approval to the mysterious comment, “Kristi, I think you’ll be riding a big Harley in about five years.” Right, I thought. But still.

I’m wondering today, as I watch these students I don’t know try to remember a book they’ve read and liked, about the failures we carry around with us. Wondering what mistakes or dismissals my students bring with them to high school when they arrive in Language Arts class and believe—one the first day—that they can’t do it. It’s easy, I want to tell them. Just show up and keep doing what I’m telling you. Just read the book. Just write!

Just roll a little on the throttle to make the curve faster. Just slow down a little and your turns won’t be so wide. Just press down on your handlebar and lean in the direction you’re going. Just don’t look at the cones!

Just, just, just. So simple to just give advice about the thing that you know and love.

I passed my riding test with shaky grace, hitting none of the cones but taking some corners with a hesitant slowness that lost me three points. Out of one hundred. I left the motorcycle class feeling like I had just learned a new language and grown another few inches. I thought I couldn’t and I did. I left thinking about the value of encouragement, having learned as much about teaching as I did about riding a scooter, and thankful for the instructors who didn’t comment on my uncertainty, didn’t focus on the confidence I didn’t have.

The first day of school is new territory for all of us. For the ninth graders, poured into one class from different middle schools and cities, states and nations, it is a new school, one or several subjects that they’ve never succeeded in before. For me it’s 160 new voices and faces and stories and habits, strangers when I have trouble believing that I could possibly love any class as the ones I taught last June. (It’s always been like that, and I always have.) And yet, as I read over shoulders and see in unfamiliar letters the names of books enjoyed or merely tolerated, I can suddenly remember how it felt, ninth grade and meeting people and trying so so hard to figure out what’s going on all the time. I remember some of it from motorcycle class, and most of it because things change for me, too, every fall. For better or worse, we stand together on new carpet, fifteen minutes later than last year, united in uncertainty and, perhaps, in the hope of a new beginning.

Of Twists and Moments

The Jar

The past is a change jar,
waiting dusty on top of the bookshelf.
To be used
when only coins will do,
not for the water bill
or next years’ school supplies.

I’ve broken down the dollars of years
—common and bland and shabby—
to imperishable small change moments:
Quarter pancakes on a snow day
Dime compliments
Penny glances
Nickel smiles
Half-dollar kiss,
rare and precious and interesting.

The way we wash dishes
after everyone goes home:
Worth about $2.17 in various coins.

The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—
waits for days when I’m broke in the present.
When the tax of solitude is too high,
when criticism fines my already-low balance
and tollbooths loom ahead.

And on those poorest todays
I pull out a handful of moments,
turn them over and over until they are worn like pearls.
Coated with a lifetime of dust,
some are bright and new
and others gleam dully, worn with use.

That day when we
That summer when they
That night when I

And though I spend them
they are never gone.

A poem written for and to Period One
(as an example of extended metaphor)

I left my classroom as messy as it’s ever been. Skyscrapers of paper lean against the wall by the door. The desks huddle together in the center of the room, staying where I pushed them out of the way so I could climb on a cabinet and take down curtains covered in two years’ dust. The blue paint on the bulletin boards is starting to chip off, worn away when I removed the hundreds of staples and thumbtacks that held up flyers, grades, ad prices, photos and phone numbers. The furniture that I like is flagged with the blue labels of moving redemption; the rest have gone into exile, supposedly to a furniture graveyard underneath Memorial Stadium. Room 120, chaotic and awaiting new carpet and desks, won’t be resting this summer.

The school year ended like this, loose-ended, some details unresolved, some tasks incomplete. It ended with a sigh and a shrug, teenage-style, on a cloudy day and in the midst of cardboard and labels and packing tape.

It ended with a twist I would have scoffed at if it I’d read it in fiction. After spending a month planning for unemployment, daydreaming about traveling and mourning the loss of this school that I love, I was recalled to my job for the 2009-2010 school year. It is the last-minute reprieve of an author whose essential outlook on life changes mid-sentence, who doesn’t go back to rewrite the book but instead leaves it as is, strange and inconsistent. And yet, disorienting as it is, I am grateful. Questions of where I belong return to the background for a while; against all odds, I’m coming back for another year.

Like a cloudy last day of school, I’m excited and a little gloomy. I’m returning, but three of my favorite colleagues are not, a reality lost on me when all four of us were departing together. So it’s impossible to write a neat ending for the school year, as much as the writer in me desires to tie it up with a few words and an overall theme, or as a friend puts it, a “moral” for the year. I can only plead that lately I’ve been learning that reality defies this kind of metaphorization; in the end, I’m left with a scattered jar of moments to ponder in all their variety.

Period Four shrieks in rage when the bell dismissed class during The Merchant of Venice, leaving Antonio awaiting the legal doom of Shylock’s knife. They leave with the reluctant confession that they’re interested.

An assembly line of Friends of the Cascade fill our April newspaper with flyers that said “Josy, will you go to prom with me?” from one of the editors-in-chief to our artistic layout assistant.

I spend a 23-hour day with the Class of 2009, punctuated with an original song by one of our teachers, the first speech I’ve ever written, and a standing ovation from the students I’ve known and loved best so far.

The non-senior remainder of my journalism staff creates a farewell newspaper for me in three days, after which they declare, “We did all this! We can do the paper next year!”

Seniors on a post-graduation vacation call my classroom to see if I did indeed get hired back. They pass a cell phone around to confirm the news.

I moderate the poetry blog, kept up by a few students who call themselves the Ninth Wall Rebels, and discover genuine talent and thought-provoking dialogue, realizing once again that ninth graders are cleverer than anyone—even me—ever guesses at the beginning.

I’ve loved these days. Thanks, and have a spectacular summer.

The Ninth Wall

It's just barely eight o'clock when I finish giving the instructions. Even as I was talking about specific praise and constructive criticism (or, How to Comment on a Blog Post and Sound Absolutely Brilliant), I could tell that handing out the login instructions first was a mistake. I can see their monitors from the front of the computer lab, can see them hopping from screen to screen with feline technological agility.

"OK, I need to see all of your faces." Seven faces turn back to me, patient and silent, from where they were doubtless programming for the Defense Department or winning the 2015 Pulitzer. As soon as I start to speak they rotate back on swivel chairs, the magnetism of the more interesting Internet stealing them away.

This is by far the coolest thing I've done as a teacher. Usually I am comfortable with the marginal coolness bestowed on my because of my youth and the occasional instances in which I can mimic students with startling accuracy. That's fine, they shrug. You're not that bad. But you still like to write for fun and you don't go to the clubs on the weekend. And you think Shakespeare is great, so clearly you have taste issues.

This might be another Shakespeare--something that I think is spectacular and genius and my students just find annoying--but I suspect that our collaborative poetry blog, The Ninth Wall, might be cool on an absolute scale. I feel clever and edgy, excited for once about my relative youth instead of seeing it as a pitiful liability in these uncertain times. And that, for once, we might agree.

When I finally set them free to do so, they log in to the site with surprising ease. Since it took me almost three hours to work out the many kinks in this blog host and then create twenty-three profiles, I'm both relieved and a little bewildered at the fluency of their interaction with this completely unfamiliar medium. They find the obscure login at the corner of the page, quickly change their own passwords and move on to the poems they are supposed to be critiquing. I smile to compare this to the first day of poetry, a few weeks ago, which brought dozens of I can'ts and This is too hards from every corner of the room.

"Where's my comment?" someone asks, and I realize that I'm done instructing. They've taken over, essentially, but not in a hostile way. They have simply mastered what I thought was a strange concept, mastered it more quickly than I thought possible. They are commenting on the two poems that Ms. P and I posted for them to practice on. I return to my desk to moderate.

There are already six comments.

I scroll through the ones relating to the poem I posted, one that I had written on the overhead last week, when they challenged me to extend the ridiculous metaphor "The past is a jar of quarters."

This is great ms. dahlstrom the way you used the metaphores and it’s about money, and money keeps people happy all the time.

“The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—”

I like how you used this metaphor to explain the greater meaning of the jar. I believe that you can improve your already excellent poem by adding a couple more similes.

great job on your imagery I felt as if i was there enjoying the snow with you

It’s improved since your last random quarter escapade on the projector.

It is a moment of breathtaking beauty, as I read the articulate and earnest critiques and approval from my students, commenting on my work for the first time. It is love, true and sincere.

Soon, they have each made their required "practice comment" on one of our poems, and they move on to typing up their own poems and posting them to the blog. After closing the loophole that let them use the comments as public instant messenger, I spend the last minutes of the classroom reading and publishing their submitted poems, lingering on their comments to one another.

Nice rhyme scheme.
Mr.Duck is ownage(;

I really love this poem especially how you use the seasons for phases of life. But you mightttt want to check the spelling on autumn.
(:

I like the smilie “Love is like the picture sitting in my mind over and over”, first post?:3

On the assignment sheet I handed out to them--written at the end of a long and incredibly stressful day--I had asked them to think of The Ninth Wall as "a big, magical refrigerator door, where we can put up all the things we're most proud of."

As I sit in the computer lab, approving comments and pre-reading poems, I realize it's not the refrigerator door we've created with our "collaborative poetry blog," home of originality and dialogue.

The Ninth Wall is our kitchen.

Please Sit on the Grass

Explain one of the following metaphors from pop music:

"Love is a battlefield."

"I am a rock."

"I'm a slave for you."

Journal Prompt, 5/27/09


I've never seen a class this lethargic. The usually riotous pre-lunch class is missing a few of its more rebellious members today, and the loud ones who remain seem to have lost courage. Or energy, if that's possible. They are melting into their seats like birthday candles inside a car, shrinking to liquid at the horrible thought of writing poetry.

This is one of those moments of painful teacher-student disconnect, when our tastes divide us so thoroughly that we're looking at the same lesson from different continents of experience and prejudice. I love this lesson, all of these lessons on poetry with which we're ending the year. I am still thinking about the metaphor from Period One--"the past is a jar of quarters"--still stretching it into form like a Silly Putty poetry, and that was three hours ago. These kids hate poetry, or something that they think of as poetry. When we began the unit last week, when I asked them to write down the "point" of poetry, they eagerly discarded poems as the worthless pursuit of beret-clad, cigarette-smoking, finger-snapping layabouts. Not for us, they wailed. You can't make us, they told me last week, and today they're demonstrating their passion for passive protest.

We make it, somehow, all the way to 11:30, through the analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Metaphors" and a poem called "War," written a few years ago by a student at Denny Middle School. They are impossibly even more listless now than at the beginning of class.

"So, pass everything up. All of it. The poems, your answers, everything. All you need out right now is your journal and a pencil. Yeah, clear the desks. Good." Some glacial movements bring us to a semi-ready state. "OK, new question. Raise your hand... and I need everyone to listen... raise your hand if you would be willing to sit on grass?"

Four students raise their hands, roll their eyes.

"Four? OK, never mind then."

The class seems to sense the missed opportunity, and it wakes them up a little.

"Wait, what did you say?"

"I asked if you would be willing to sit on grass."

"Like outside?"

"Outside. It's really nice out, and I kind of want to honor the twelve of you that actually chose to come to class today. Even though you're all asleep. But if only four of you will sit on the grass, we can't go."

"Vote again!" they cry. "I didn't hear."

"Of course not. One more time. Who'd sit out on the grass, if we went out?" Hands start to rise, waving like the tops of grass. "We need everyone for it to work. Total agreement. And... there it is! Let's go."

It takes a while to get everyone settled in a circle in the grass. The students who'd promised so eagerly to sit on the grass are now finding ants and the remnants of this morning's dew, making them hesitant to come down to our ground level. Once they are in the circle, they roll around and crane their necks to talk to the biology class that is collecting plant specimens, or the the stray truant students who are using their skipping-class time to wander the grounds. It's really funny, actually, all the fifteen-year-olds in the grass, balancing notebooks on their knees and looking everywhere but at me. At least they're caring about something.

Eventually I write the beginnings of simple metaphors on a legal pad, then hold them up for students to see before they spent a minute completing it in as many ways as possible.

"This one is 'Night is...' And don't write 'Night is dark.' Why not? Do you know? Because 'dark' is an...?"

"Adjective."

"Right. Night is a quilt from your grandma's house. Night is the underside of a rock on the beach. Night is..."

We write for a while, and get very little done. They argue about adjectives, argue about turning their metaphors to similes, argue about having to write at all when they're outside. We finish three minutes early, and they argue when I make them sit down until the bell rings faintly.

"Come on. Three minutes relaxing in the sun. Live it up. My gift to you."

In sunlit silence, contemplating our differences but enjoying the same spring morning, at last on the same invisible page, I take in the reality of the lesson, not perfect and far from metaphor.