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.