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.