A Birthday, Fully Present

3. ___ Accomodate

E. To make space for; to allow


-from A Raisin in the Sun Vocabulary Quiz 1


2. Tomorrow=My Birthday! All I want from you is that you turn in your Dream House Vignette on time! It's due tomorrow!


-Monday Announcements


I had mixed feelings about using my own birthday as a reminder for ninth graders to turn in an essay. In theory, they should turn them in anyway, simply because they were assigned a week ago and are due tomorrow. They should have started last Monday, composing lyrical vignettes about their ideal houses, habitats they create only out of imagination, whether or not they are grounded specifically in the mundane world of reality. Along the way, I asked them to "toss in some poetic language" and "use good--no, brilliant--words" to make it interesting. With a week to get it done, they should be well on their way.


And yet, I thought yesterday as I put up the announcement, we all need reminders.


My birthday, so awkwardly late that every year in school the most common question was "Wait, you're how old? How did you do that?" As if I'd somehow fast-forwarded a year off of my life, or was lying to them. Yes, I'm really that young. This is also why I've never really mentioned my birthday to students. I turned twenty-one about a month into my student teaching, and for the next few years being twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four didn't seem like much to brag about. Only much later in the year did students do the math to discover that their teacher had less than a decade more knowledge than they. Up until this year, I've made it through whole school days with only sparse mentions of birthdays, which like contemporary music, dates on Fridays, and procrastination are deemed by students to be outside of Teacher World.


The students, seeing the connection of birthday and due date, exploded into a cacophany of complaint and inquiry.


"Wait, tomorrow's your birthday? Really?"


"How old will you be?"


"Wait, what do you want for your birthday?"


"I told you," I replied, pointing back at the announcement. "All I want is for you to finish your vignettes tonight and turn them in on time. Best birthday present ever."


"What if... what if," began a student in the front row.


"What if what?" I prodded.


"What if I got you a big plasma screen TV instead? Would you give me a good grade?"


"Plasma screen?" I scoffed. "I don't want that! That's ridiculous."


"What if I got you the best book in the world?"


"What if I called that--what's her name?--that Cisneros lady and asked her to write, you know, House on Mango Street 2? What would you do then?"


"Ha ha.  Tempting, but no.  I'd still rather have your essay."


Though it's a month into school, we're still mostly strangers, my students and I.  They are the whirling tornados of dismay and elation, spinning in from the halls and bringing their noise and their energy.  I am the one who likes books more than TV.  Other than that, our relationship has been largely transactional; time for knowledge, attention for achievement.  It's a state that bothers me slightly, at the beginning of every year, and even more so this year, as I've been using spare minutes to plan ahead, rather than look around and get to know the people in the room.


Now, twenty-four hours later, it's raining at lunch, the first rainy lunch of the year, and my classroom has filled with students.  This frequently happens when it starts raining, as all of the kids who've spent lunches outside begin to explore the halls, searching for new shelter.  Today they come in hordes,  not just the two young girls who usually gossip about youth group in the back, nor the sporadic ones who wander in and out with books and games and loneliness, looking for somewhere to anchor themselves.


I've been thinking of accommodation lately, what it means to truly "make space" for these people with whom I share my days.  When I am weary, as I've been so often this fall, it's tempting to be a teacher who just opens the door and lets things happen.  If I'm good enough at it, I tell myself, then it doesn't matter so much that I'm not paying terribly close attention to details.  We'll still learn, and maybe that's good enough.  It's sharing space--allowing information to rent property in our imaginations--but it's not accommodation.  If I ask my students to be fully present in classes, bringing minds, souls and bodies to school with them every day, then I must be, too.  Leaving the computer, whose information daily pulls me away from teenage world, I take my lunch to my desk and turn to face the room.


One girl sips peppermint tea while her friends decorate the white board with birthday messages.  Across the room, a boy types up poetry that he's written. I tell him a story I heard this weekend, about how in Nigeria each class elects a "love letter writer," the most eloquent of them to share his talent with lovestruck peers.  He declares he's discovered his calling.


In the space in front of the desks, half a dozen break-dancing Filipino students show off moves to music from a cell phone.  Many of them are quiet in class, docile students who haven't yet gotten in trouble, students I don't yet know very well.  I learn more about them in a minute of watching and listening than in the last month of classes. They laugh and dance and teach each other, cheering and calling to my attention the especially difficult windmills of flying arms and legs.


It's all so full, so terribly genuine in its disorganized and many-directioned energy.  And it's only through participating--asking questions and applauding and reading poems--that I can appreciate it all.  It's only when I am fully present, living entirely in the busy exhaustion of a twenty-fifth birthday lunch, that I can see the beauty of this place, this life and the people who fill it.