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.