"When Your Homework's Done"

Room 120 is silent.  

It seems like it's never silent anymore, like I've somehow made peace with certain amounts of noise as they contribute to learning or the flow of ideas.  Either I'm talking or they are, and that's mostly perfect.  Silence now inhabits the realm of top-shelf punishments, saved for the class so unruly that they "lost the privilege of talking" for two days.  The first day, it was a clever novelty, and they dutifully read the short story and answered eleven questions.  By Day 2 they were sufficiently horrified.  "When can we TALK again?" they whispered.  We like talking, all of us.

Today, though, the silence is neither a grudging disciplinary measure nor the sullen blankness of early morning.  It's 10:55 AM, and my students are awake, not hungry, and writing.

To be fair, some of them are writing.  A few are drawing spirals on sheets of scratch paper or staring at lone sentences as if they splash words on the page with their minds.  My class isn't perfect; it's just quiet for a while.

Most of them, though, are writing, pencils and pens crawling across paper, slowly and quickly, tracing large and small letters back and forth like switchbacks descending down the desktops.     I should be planning or grading or doing something, but I'm watching them write, because I love watching students write.  Not just write--create.

We've been writing stories this week, the last of the semester, participating in what I've cleverly named The Great Story Contest.  It's a convoluted tournament of fiction, combining team creativity and individual literary skill, that I made up during Period One yesterday, when "Just write a story together this week" seemed like too sparse a lesson plan, even for me.  Yesterday, they arranged the skeleton details of the story, the real words with instructional merit like protagonist, antagonist, setting, and theme.  Today, everyone is writing their own versions of the stories.

I love assigning stories entirely because I loved writing them in school.  I remember the refreshing freedom of writing creatively to a prompt, having a structure within which to control a tiny world.  I especially loved them after I'd been laboring away at the clinical primness of research or history papers.  It's pure nostalgia that leads me to fill this last week of the semester--the week after students finish a month-long research project that's drained most of my energy for a long time--with stories about babies who fall in love, villainous Lasercats, or a race of blueberry people.  It's relaxing to me, after so long dwelling on finding answers to pressing questions, to leave the answers alone for a while and enjoy the freedom of arranging tiny worlds the way we want them.  You want your kangaroo protagonist to fight a fox named Roxy over the privilege of eating the "little leaping lemur" they found?  YES.  Let me know how it turns out.

With two minutes to go, I have to break the silence.

"OK, students.  You can pack up your things.  Nicely done today, by the way.  I'm excited to hear these stories."

"Do we finish them tonight?" someone asks.  

"You can if you want to.  We'll have about 15 minutes tomorrow to work on them."

"I'm finishing tonight," the boy replies.  "This is getting good." 

I hadn't intended this game to be homework, hoping to give them time to finish projects in other classes this week after working so hard last week.

"OK, but don't prioritize this, you know, over your other classes.  I'll give you time tomorrow.  So if you have a project or a final to study for, do that first."

It's one of those surreal moments, retro TV commercial territory, where the kid is begging for broccoli while his mom pushes calcium-infused chocolate pudding on him.

"Sure," he finally says.  "But if I finish everything else--all my work--then can I work on the story?"

I start to laugh.  "Of course," I say.  I don't tell him that I ask myself the same question nearly every day.

Overheard this Year

Waiting after school for an art show, going through old notebooks.  These are some excerpts from "Things My Students Say," a collaborative effort from students and the teacher who writes down what they're saying.

On Homework

K: I was reading in the book last night... and I realized that I don't like it.  It's not cool.

J: I  called you like five times this weekend!
J: Yeah.  My dad got a Playstation 3, so we were kinda busy.

On Vocabulary

O: "Spontaneous."  So, unplanned, right?
S: Oh.  Like a pregnancy?

A: "Clowns are irrelevant, when compared to presidents."
J: "A myriad of Legos can make almost anything."

S: I thought "scour" was a really bad look.
O: That's a scowl.
K: I thought it was a bad burn.
Me: A bad bird?  An owl?
K: No, a bad burn.
O: Scald!  No, scour is...

On Animals

O: I wouldn't give my ring away for something silly, like a monkey.
H: Neither would I.  She could get a horse.
Me: They don't need horses.  There aren't any roads [in Venice].
H: Oh yeah.  Aren't they on the water?
S: Do the monkeys swim?

O: Put the camel away.  Or keep it to yourself.

L: Oh, that would be badass to have four legs!

On the Moon

M: You know, the moon never looks happy.  It's always up there in the sky and... you know... sad.

On Diving

M: No, you don't understand.  G's don't dive!

On Burning Man

M: What I'm scared of is this massive dude on acid is going to beat me up.
J: What massive dude?
M: There's always a massive dude.

On Getting a Dark Hershey's Kiss instead of a Hershey's Hug Out of a Cardboard Box Called "The Box of Destiny"

T: Aw!  Destiny screwed me!

On Music
L: Who is this? (on the stereo)

Me: Joni Mitchell.

L: Oh, I know her! My grandma listens to her.

What joy.  Time for the show!

The Leaner

"So are you going to just admit this thing's dead, or what?"

New Reporter is towering over my desk, on the corner of which stands a withered orange tree in a plastic pot.  A transferring senior who needs a credit in journalism to finish out his incomplete semester from another district, he hasn't spoken much so far.  I assigned him to "review something... anything" for the paper since he came in after our production cycle began, but other than that we've had little interaction.  I have been running at full sprint, in journalism and my ninth grade classes, since school resumed almost two weeks ago, and to my shame haven't been terribly hospitable to the seven new students who've mysteriously arrived in various classes since Christmas.

Now New Reporter stands at my desk, commenting on my dead plant, the tragic tree whose welfare I actually looked into before leaving for Europe.  "Oh, it'll be fine," the expressive botany teacher crowed.  "Just give it some water before you go, and it will be great."  The other plants were fine, as spry and green as I left them, but the orange tree--a favorite of mine and the journalists--was not.  Now its leaves, as dry as tissue paper, cling hopelessly to the four brittle limbs.  New Reporter leans forward to look at it.

"Don't make fun of it," I reply with a sigh. 

"So, I have good news and bad news," he opens, changes the subject.  His jacket catches a leaf, which clatters down to the desk.

"The bad news is you're knocking my tree apart."

"No.  The good news is that I figured out a song to review."

"A song?  Oh, right.  You're doing a song review.  So you have one.  What's the bad news?"

"I can't get to it at school.  It's blocked, or something, and I can't listen to it at home."

"It's blocked?  Should you be listening to it at school?  What is it?"

"Tupac.  'Trapped.'"

"Hmm.  Tupac's good.  Let's see if we can get it."

New Reporter and I make short work of the Internet filter, which doesn't forbid YouTube for teachers.  I print out the lyrics, scanning them for overt scandal before handing them over to him while the video plays quietly in the background.  Meanwhile, some editors discover the dead tree, begin playing with the fallen leaves which give off an intensely citric aroma.

"What are you going to do with it?" they ask.

"I don't know.  It looks pretty dead, right?  Should I just, you know, throw it out?"

They look stricken, and no more than I feel.  I can't explain, even now, why the demise of my favorite tree spells such doom in January.  I feel like Jonah, mourning the loss of the waxy foliage of September optimism.

"No.  Not yet," Student Life Editor answers firmly.  "Put it by the window.  Give it a week."

I pick up the pardoned plant, but before I can put it down an unfamiliar student walks into the classroom.  She is holding a plant.

"Ms. D?" she asks.

"That's me.  What's up?"

The journalists are staring at the plant in her hands, a sultry maroon and teal affair, whose single stalk lurches almost sideways out of the pot.

"This is a flower for you.  From sixth period botany."

"For me?"  She nods.  "Is this because my tree died?"

The student shakes her head.  "What tree?"

"My... never mind."

"Yeah, this is for you.  It's not blooming, but it's a flower," she insists.  "And it's not dead.  It's a leaner."

"A leaner?" Back Page Editor asks, clarifying.

"It's a leaner," Botanist repeats, turning and disappearing as quietly as she'd arrived.

"Thank you!" we call after her.

But she's already gone, leaving us alone with the strange flower.

The next day, five students will gaze in perplexity at my desk, wondering how their partner in daydreaming, a lithe orange tree, transformed overnight into this piscine flower that looks mostly asleep.

"What happened to the orange tree?" they'll ask.

"The orange tree went back to the greenhouse."

"Then what's this?  Is it dead?"

"No, it's not dead," I'll shrug.  "It's just a leaner."

Students will try to "fix" it all day, only to have it flop  back to its recumbent position.  And I'll find myself trusting in yet another thing, trusting blindly for now.  This flower will bloom.  This semester will end.  It will stop raining. 

Someday.

Riding West, Looking East

Prague is hazy again as we board the train.

We picked Prague as a three-day diversion on our Christmas vacation—after much discussion—because it was historic and unfamiliar and should probably be covered in snow during the last week of December.  I’d argued strenuously that the parts of Italy we could reach by train from Austria wouldn’t be a sun-saturated, sipping-wine-on-a-piazza sort of Italy.  It would be a rainy mess that reminded us all too much of the Seattle we’d left behind.  Prague had in its favor a far-north latitude and seductive foreignness.

It’s not snowing, and in fact the city is living up to the other reputation we read sometime later.  “In the winter, Prague can be quite grey with poor air quality.”  On our first morning here, the spires of the medieval city peered mysteriously at us from behind a champagne-colored veil of lingering fog, smoke, and tourists’ breath.  One clear day, glorious to see from the top of the Old Town Hall clock tower, and now we are leaving, and again this city is sneaking glances at us through the gloom.

After the haste of a hundred people assembling themselves on the late train, the haste of saying goodbye to a dear friend who’s traveled with us for the last week or so, there is the ground-to-a-halt stillness of staring out of the train window.  The dreamy, quiet city slides past as my sister and I share a set of headphones, and soon we’re beyond the streets of pastel Baroque buildings, threading our way through the Czech countryside.

As I’d hoped, it is incredibly cold here, though the Czech Republic in general did not provide the snow of which I'd dreamed.  I watch as frost-enveloped pastures, chicken-restless yards and monochrome cars breathe behind curtains of fog, their outlines sometimes half imagination.  Whole ponds are frozen, their surfaces snapped to an unnatural halt.  I’ve never been anywhere so consistently frigid, and it’s never stopped fascinating me.

This southwest train journey eventually takes us out of the whites and greys of Eastern Europe, back to the green neatness of Bavaria, where friends are waiting with supper.  I’m thankful for a safe destination, thankful to see them after several years.  Still, I can’t deny that there is something irresistible about the empty tracks that run beside us, the ones that would take us further east, into places I’ve only read about.  Perhaps it’s childish or provincial, or maybe just the alloy of vivid imagination, compulsive reading and safe Western traveling habits.  I want to see more.

I’m remembering on the train, remembering these other ambitions that involved exploring.  There was writing, or teaching, or learning, all of them far away.  It’s usually easy to go home, whether home is Seattle—as it mostly is—or just a golden-windowed house in Augsburg, home for a few days.  And yet there are times when home as I know it isn’t the easy path, when coming back asks me solemnly to recall the faces and names, the calling and love that make life glorious wherever in the world I find myself, even if those places seem to be the familiar, the rainy, the predictable.  Glorious and, I know, not entirely mine to begin with.

My parents are talking across from us, but my sister and I can only hear tones over the exuberant notes of the Wicked soundtrack.  Holly snaps their picture and laughs.  Mom leans over to see a frozen river glowing dully behind the spiny fingers of a leafless tree.  Dad highlights the book of Czech history he bought in the Communism Museum yesterday.  It’s beautiful out there, strange and wild as it demands that I ask again what it would mean to live life on another continent for a while.  But in here, on the train with most of my family—a family of love and loyalty, faith and humor—it’s not so easy to imagine.  

Nicht so einfach, as my friends back on a well-loved Austrian farm would remind me.

So I can only pray, as the frost turns to grass, the snow to rain, can only peer through the fog and ask for the next step.