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.