Our Islands

When you’re on a golden sea
You don’t need no memory
Just a place to call your own
As we drift into the zone

On an island in the sun
We’ll be playing and having fun
And it makes me feel so fine
I can’t control my brain

We’ll run away together
We’ll spend some time forever
We’ll never feel bad anymore

Weezer

"OK, turn your desks to the front, folks," I request. "We have time to hear a few stories. Let's hear them."

The kids have been writing disaster stories today. We began reading Lord of the Flies about a week ago, but today is the first lesson after wrapping up the endless details of a research project. Research, as it happens, is my least favorite subject to teach, and one of the only strict directives given to me by my department: "Ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, and all graders shall participate in a yearly research project. They shall be given class time for research, class time for drafting, class time for revising, presenting, cutting out pictures for their visuals. Yea, verily, this shall be done." And so we do it.

I've never loved research; it reminds me of these nights in college, when I would finish a paper full of quotes and citations, woven together into a peice of writing that was technically correct and clever, but lacking in voice or artistry. Research papers were chores, asking little of me but the synthesis of other people's facts. As a teacher, I've struggled to bring any joy into this process; even when I can get excited about the body of knowledge and the pursuits of curiosity represented by these projects, I'm filled with dread at the reality of mentoring ninety individuals through the dark valleys of paraphrase, citation, and commentary. So the great fair, a culminating celebration of tri-fold poster boards and wandering teenagers, is over, to our great relief.

The weary students have just spend the first half of the class writing their own versions of Lord of the Flies. Last year, I'd written the first page of a macabre tale in which I was transporting a select group of ninth graders to Australia when our plane crashed on an island. (In an early draft, I'd written that I had died, along with the pilot, in the crash, leaving no adult survivors. But, unable to deal with my own mortality even in fiction, I had bumped myself off the flight in Hawaii for the final revision.) I asked the students to imagine how they--the kids in the classroom around them today--would deal with the challenge of surviving in the wild.

There was something magical about wandering around a mostly quiet classroom for twenty minutes, watching stories take shape on the page. Later in the week, the poet who teaches my second period on Thursdays would talk about the energy of a group of people devoted to a common and creative process. I would remember this moment. When pens began to slow, I tossed out ideas for them. "Make someone fall in a hole," I suggested once. "Just throw in a twist. That's what these stranded-on-a-island stories are about. Anything can happen."

"Anything?"

"Sure."

"Like a dinosaur?"

"Yeah. Dinosaur. Good one."

And they kept writing.

When the stories are finished, the kids spend several minutes sharing them with one another in small groups. As they share, my intern and I pace the classroom, eavesdropping on the most interesting creations we've heard in weeks. Gone are the stale details of research writing; here are students devoted to the cause of creating imaginative catastrophes. Now they turn their desks to the front. They know what's coming next.

"OK, are there any nominations? Any stories that the rest of the class must hear?"

A hand shoots up at the back of the class. It's a hand I see often, a hand I like to see, because it's often attached to thoughts that offer surprising depth and nuance.

"Yes? Who do you nominate?"

"Um, me. Myself."

"Good. And do you accept this nomination?"

The young boy, who's lived in Somalia and London and Seattle, raises his eyebrows at me.

"Course! OK," he weaves his way to the front of the room. "Here it is."

The tale, beginning when my students wake up and realize that they are stranded without adults on a beach, whisks us away on the ferris wheel of fortune. First the ninth graders return to the remains of the plane to discover "party snacks, drinks, and a turntable." (I recall hearing this student, when he was first sharing the story with his peers, saying, "Oh, don't worry about how there's power on the island. That's not important.") The party is in full swing when a tyrannosaurus invades, and this heroic boy fights it until he "tripped over a limbo stick." The rest of the one-page story is a darkly comic descent into disaster fantasy.

As he reads, as my intern, my students, and I break up into cascades of laughter at each new plot turn, I'm thinking about the joy of shared experience. Though I've often thought of teaching as an isolating experience, in that there are few other adults with whom I work on a daily basis, I'm realizing that this is more of a community than I once expected. In a school where differences sometimes threaten to divide us beyond reconciliation, how beautiful to find these places where we connect, places where age and ethnicity, education and even language no longer matter. Stranded on an island, away from cell phones and schools and responsibilities, we are united in the unknown, even if the island is only in a book we're reading together.