Of Twists and Moments

The Jar

The past is a change jar,
waiting dusty on top of the bookshelf.
To be used
when only coins will do,
not for the water bill
or next years’ school supplies.

I’ve broken down the dollars of years
—common and bland and shabby—
to imperishable small change moments:
Quarter pancakes on a snow day
Dime compliments
Penny glances
Nickel smiles
Half-dollar kiss,
rare and precious and interesting.

The way we wash dishes
after everyone goes home:
Worth about $2.17 in various coins.

The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—
waits for days when I’m broke in the present.
When the tax of solitude is too high,
when criticism fines my already-low balance
and tollbooths loom ahead.

And on those poorest todays
I pull out a handful of moments,
turn them over and over until they are worn like pearls.
Coated with a lifetime of dust,
some are bright and new
and others gleam dully, worn with use.

That day when we
That summer when they
That night when I

And though I spend them
they are never gone.

A poem written for and to Period One
(as an example of extended metaphor)

I left my classroom as messy as it’s ever been. Skyscrapers of paper lean against the wall by the door. The desks huddle together in the center of the room, staying where I pushed them out of the way so I could climb on a cabinet and take down curtains covered in two years’ dust. The blue paint on the bulletin boards is starting to chip off, worn away when I removed the hundreds of staples and thumbtacks that held up flyers, grades, ad prices, photos and phone numbers. The furniture that I like is flagged with the blue labels of moving redemption; the rest have gone into exile, supposedly to a furniture graveyard underneath Memorial Stadium. Room 120, chaotic and awaiting new carpet and desks, won’t be resting this summer.

The school year ended like this, loose-ended, some details unresolved, some tasks incomplete. It ended with a sigh and a shrug, teenage-style, on a cloudy day and in the midst of cardboard and labels and packing tape.

It ended with a twist I would have scoffed at if it I’d read it in fiction. After spending a month planning for unemployment, daydreaming about traveling and mourning the loss of this school that I love, I was recalled to my job for the 2009-2010 school year. It is the last-minute reprieve of an author whose essential outlook on life changes mid-sentence, who doesn’t go back to rewrite the book but instead leaves it as is, strange and inconsistent. And yet, disorienting as it is, I am grateful. Questions of where I belong return to the background for a while; against all odds, I’m coming back for another year.

Like a cloudy last day of school, I’m excited and a little gloomy. I’m returning, but three of my favorite colleagues are not, a reality lost on me when all four of us were departing together. So it’s impossible to write a neat ending for the school year, as much as the writer in me desires to tie it up with a few words and an overall theme, or as a friend puts it, a “moral” for the year. I can only plead that lately I’ve been learning that reality defies this kind of metaphorization; in the end, I’m left with a scattered jar of moments to ponder in all their variety.

Period Four shrieks in rage when the bell dismissed class during The Merchant of Venice, leaving Antonio awaiting the legal doom of Shylock’s knife. They leave with the reluctant confession that they’re interested.

An assembly line of Friends of the Cascade fill our April newspaper with flyers that said “Josy, will you go to prom with me?” from one of the editors-in-chief to our artistic layout assistant.

I spend a 23-hour day with the Class of 2009, punctuated with an original song by one of our teachers, the first speech I’ve ever written, and a standing ovation from the students I’ve known and loved best so far.

The non-senior remainder of my journalism staff creates a farewell newspaper for me in three days, after which they declare, “We did all this! We can do the paper next year!”

Seniors on a post-graduation vacation call my classroom to see if I did indeed get hired back. They pass a cell phone around to confirm the news.

I moderate the poetry blog, kept up by a few students who call themselves the Ninth Wall Rebels, and discover genuine talent and thought-provoking dialogue, realizing once again that ninth graders are cleverer than anyone—even me—ever guesses at the beginning.

I’ve loved these days. Thanks, and have a spectacular summer.

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.

Please Sit on the Grass

Explain one of the following metaphors from pop music:

"Love is a battlefield."

"I am a rock."

"I'm a slave for you."

Journal Prompt, 5/27/09


I've never seen a class this lethargic. The usually riotous pre-lunch class is missing a few of its more rebellious members today, and the loud ones who remain seem to have lost courage. Or energy, if that's possible. They are melting into their seats like birthday candles inside a car, shrinking to liquid at the horrible thought of writing poetry.

This is one of those moments of painful teacher-student disconnect, when our tastes divide us so thoroughly that we're looking at the same lesson from different continents of experience and prejudice. I love this lesson, all of these lessons on poetry with which we're ending the year. I am still thinking about the metaphor from Period One--"the past is a jar of quarters"--still stretching it into form like a Silly Putty poetry, and that was three hours ago. These kids hate poetry, or something that they think of as poetry. When we began the unit last week, when I asked them to write down the "point" of poetry, they eagerly discarded poems as the worthless pursuit of beret-clad, cigarette-smoking, finger-snapping layabouts. Not for us, they wailed. You can't make us, they told me last week, and today they're demonstrating their passion for passive protest.

We make it, somehow, all the way to 11:30, through the analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Metaphors" and a poem called "War," written a few years ago by a student at Denny Middle School. They are impossibly even more listless now than at the beginning of class.

"So, pass everything up. All of it. The poems, your answers, everything. All you need out right now is your journal and a pencil. Yeah, clear the desks. Good." Some glacial movements bring us to a semi-ready state. "OK, new question. Raise your hand... and I need everyone to listen... raise your hand if you would be willing to sit on grass?"

Four students raise their hands, roll their eyes.

"Four? OK, never mind then."

The class seems to sense the missed opportunity, and it wakes them up a little.

"Wait, what did you say?"

"I asked if you would be willing to sit on grass."

"Like outside?"

"Outside. It's really nice out, and I kind of want to honor the twelve of you that actually chose to come to class today. Even though you're all asleep. But if only four of you will sit on the grass, we can't go."

"Vote again!" they cry. "I didn't hear."

"Of course not. One more time. Who'd sit out on the grass, if we went out?" Hands start to rise, waving like the tops of grass. "We need everyone for it to work. Total agreement. And... there it is! Let's go."

It takes a while to get everyone settled in a circle in the grass. The students who'd promised so eagerly to sit on the grass are now finding ants and the remnants of this morning's dew, making them hesitant to come down to our ground level. Once they are in the circle, they roll around and crane their necks to talk to the biology class that is collecting plant specimens, or the the stray truant students who are using their skipping-class time to wander the grounds. It's really funny, actually, all the fifteen-year-olds in the grass, balancing notebooks on their knees and looking everywhere but at me. At least they're caring about something.

Eventually I write the beginnings of simple metaphors on a legal pad, then hold them up for students to see before they spent a minute completing it in as many ways as possible.

"This one is 'Night is...' And don't write 'Night is dark.' Why not? Do you know? Because 'dark' is an...?"

"Adjective."

"Right. Night is a quilt from your grandma's house. Night is the underside of a rock on the beach. Night is..."

We write for a while, and get very little done. They argue about adjectives, argue about turning their metaphors to similes, argue about having to write at all when they're outside. We finish three minutes early, and they argue when I make them sit down until the bell rings faintly.

"Come on. Three minutes relaxing in the sun. Live it up. My gift to you."

In sunlit silence, contemplating our differences but enjoying the same spring morning, at last on the same invisible page, I take in the reality of the lesson, not perfect and far from metaphor.

Prom!

The events coordinator for Woodland Park Zoo finds me at 8:15 PM. I have a zebra-striped table runner tied around my waist, and a long stemmed bouquet of green and pink flowers in my hands.

"Are you still ready to let everyone in at 8:30?" she asks me.

I examine the room. It's a food court by day, but with black linens and square vases and tropical flowers and the whirling lights from the DJ's table by the window, you'd never know it now. We're waiting in a safari, elegant and cool in the evening of this hot May day, for the guests to arrive. After almost six months of planning, it's prom night at IHS, and we're ready.

"Yes. Definitely let them in," I reply, nodding.

Prom is the first of four events that I have helped to plan as the co-advisor of the Class of 2009, and by far the most complicated. This business is far out of my comfort zone. Never a party planner, most of my birthdays slide by without much ado, as I shrink away from the detail-ridden process of inviting, arranging, reserving, splitting checks, and other complications. Prom 2009 has been full of complication: We've spent hours on the phone with caterers and DJs and photographers or in meetings with the Prom Committee, voting on backgrounds and themes and decorating schemes. Though the students have been deeply invested in this project, helping at every step of the way, we're the ones in charge right now, as the students are still posing stereotypically and ordering hip urban food in stately gowns and tuxes. With the room ready, we retreat for a moment to change into pretty dresses and cardigans, then head outside to wait.

The gravel walk from the zoo gate to the pavilion is lined with votive candles, flickering in miniature fishbowls. Half a dozen teachers wait along the shadowy path, sipping coffee and chatting about the end of the year, of past proms and future plans. The first students arrive and we applaud, cheering for the ironed and proper look of rumpled boys in tuxes and the girl who wears a backwards baseball cap every day, tonight donning a cocktail dress and pristine black curls. As the sun sets and the candles glow, we squint through the dusk at each new face, disguised but so familiar. A camera dangles from my wrist, but I've never been excited about interrupting moments to take pictures. And this, the true promenade on the way to prom, is truly a moment.

It's a moment for them, certainly, but also for us, the teachers who welcome our guests, our students. This is the first class that I have seen all the way through, from the first day of freshman year until now, just two weeks before I stand on the stage and call them up to receive diplomas. In a way, we've been waiting for this forever--but it only feels like a few minutes. I've had time to learn names and faces, a few stories and some quirky personalities, and now they are on their way out. Just a moment, these four years.

It is a night of effusive celebrations. Perhaps the lights are a little too bright, and the process of naming the king and queen is awkward and slightly silly, but no one minds. Mostly they are happy to be together; I get the impression that the details are just a colorful background for friendships at their summit. With a swaying last slow song--which I swear was the same slow song that ended my own prom, seven years ago--it's over and they pour out, laughing and talking and shouting "2009" into the cool night.

"All that planning!" sighs my co-advisor.

"All that money!" I laugh in reply.

"No drama!" congratulates the principal. "No drunk kids."

Only a few more steps and we'll be parting ways for good. Whether or not my co-advisor and I, both facing the loss of our jobs, make it back to IHS, these seniors won't be back. When I started all of this, I thought that four years was the marathon of education, long compared sprinting of camp ministry and even the middle distance terms of student leadership in college. Four years is ages to teach someone, I thought back then. It's true: four years is long enough to know someone well, to recognize handwriting and read expressions as clearly as words. But it's just a moment, really, from the Day One to this day, one of the last.

And we're carrying bouquets back to the car, reflecting on the night. Did they like it? Will they remember it? I know I will.

RIF v. riff

riff (rĭf)
n.
Music A short rhythmic phrase, especially one that is repeated in improvisation.

riffed, riff·ing, riffs
v.
To play or make riffs.


RIF  [rif]
n.
A reduction in the number of persons employed by a business, government department, etc., esp. for budgetary reasons.

Origin:
R(eduction) I(n) F(orce)



riff (n.)

The lions are dancing down the aisle. One is silver, the other gold, and they twist and furl themselves from the doors at the top of the auditorium, past a thousand frozen faces as a boy onstage beats a frantic rhythm and another—the lion tamer—follows with a mask and a fan. When the golden lion is even with my seat on the aisle, the head bobs up and I see the puppeteer brothers underneath.

Perfect. I’ve been asking to see this dance—which they always described energetic but abstract terms—for almost four years now. Always we get to May and I ask the older of the brothers why they don’t do it for our school’s Multicultural Assembly, and for three years he protested was too busy. Now he’s busier than ever, but time is running out: the head of the golden lion, all of the silver one and their masked tamer are graduating seniors. They’ll be gone in a month, leaving only the memory of the lions behind.

The Multicultural Assembly, always a high point of the spring, came too quickly this year. It crept up among the chaotic responsibilities of planning the senior prom, getting the newspaper out on time, meeting with parents teachers principals committees, researching journalism camp and resuming some of my responsibilities as a classroom teacher after several months of serving primarily as a consultant to a teaching intern. I came to school on Tuesday and realized that the assembly was Wednesday. I started to look forward to it.

Then, a few hours later, several of my colleagues and I lost our jobs. And I forgot about the assembly again.

RIF (n.)

The details of a RIF—or Reduction in Force—are not clear to me. Yesterday I did enough research to learn that I was not being terminated for any reason other than a lack of seniority in the district. The hope is that jettisoning dozens of young teachers may lighten the load enough save the leaking ship of a district from sinking under this year’s stormy, debt-ridden economy.

I’ve spent the morning listening to stories, some nearly legendary in their bizarreness, about what’s happened to me. A veteran history teacher recalls the media frenzy of a massive RIF that took place one year after I was born. An administrator tells me she was laid off and then hired back to her school three times in her first three years of teaching. Another staff member remembers being riffed and then getting a job at another district, even though she thought she might have been able to return if she’d wanted to.

“I moved on,” she said and paused, perhaps lingering on the abandoned path for a moment before she remembered me. “But we don’t want you to do that. We want to you stay.”

I’ve been wandering around the school all morning, running errands as I mechanically return to the duties of teacher, advisor and editor that haven’t gone away or become any less pressing as I try to regain my balance in light of this news. And everywhere I go the command has been the same: Don’t give up. We want you here. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

riff (n.)

The lions frolic onstage until they are replaced by an upright piano and a Rachmaninoff concerto. We hear “My Girl” sung by a barbershop quintet from the Special Education department, then a former student sings “My Heart Will Go On” with earnestness only available to someone who was an infant in Africa while I was in middle school and glued to the radio. Ethiopia and Eritrea have two separate songs, but the dancers are the same students wearing different dresses, a mixed group united to share both cultures with their school.

This is who we are, this Multicultural Assembly, an experiential collage, full of people eager to tell their stories. A few weeks ago, the journalists were considering the ways in which our school, never an athletic standout but with nationally ranked chess and rocket teams, was different from more “typical” high schools.

“You know, we don’t have one of those… you know, hierarchies here. The cheerleaders and the sports people, they’re not the most popular,” someone remarked.

And I love this about my school. The class presidents are in the school plays and the captain of the wrestling team is singing a Vietnamese pop duet on stage at the multicultural assembly. We cheer loudest for the Special Olympics basketball team and listen to podcasts of our Rocketeers on an alternative talk radio show. Wherever I look, students honor the gifts they see in each other, celebrating successes and uniting in the face of loss.

The final number of the show, called only “Hip-Hop Dance” features many of the same dancers from the opening lion dance. This is where they are in their element, in the whirling and falling and shaking of break-dancing. These are boys that I taught their freshman year, when I was a student teacher and they were fourteen-year-olds excited about the Seahawks in the Superbowl and the way their Mariner hats matched their shoelaces. In a month I’ll read their names aloud at graduation, shake their hands when they walk across the stage, and say goodbye as we part ways. They to colleges across the country, me to somewhere, to interviews or traveling or, as my colleagues ask, waiting here.

It’s the lion who really closes the day. Most of the way through “Hip-Hop Dance,” after the break-dancing bully has break-dance beaten down a dozen of his friends, the golden lion romps back on stage. It’s the past and the present, their heritage and their passions, colliding in a ridiculous battle at the end of my favorite Multicultural Assembly. The lion conquers the bully, writhes for a mighty moment, and pulls a vanquished enemy offstage by his foot, the true victor of the hour.

And I am grateful, not eager for it to end.

Liking It

I feel like a student today.

As the PA announcement voice clicks off over the loudspeakers, I quietly open a classroom door. It's not my classroom; my students are busily translating Shakespeare with their hardworking student teacher. I am using her independence and competence to visit other classes. I've seen most of my English colleagues teach at one time or another, so today I am following my students rather than my subject area. That's how I've found myself in Integrated Science.

The students, several of whom I see at other times throughout the day, look up as I enter, and their responses range from welcoming to abrasive.

"What are you doing here?"

"HEY!"

"Are you teaching today?"

"Why aren't you in class, Ms. D?"

"I'm just watching. Shh," I reply, shrinking into a desk at the back as the science teacher hands me a physics book, opened to the page of today's project.

"Today, we're simulating automatic trigger mechanisms!" she declares excitedly. I read the two-page lab instructions twice. They are brightly colored, written in several fonts to keep kids interested, but I don't understand. How can they make the lightbulb go on when the model car crashes, but not when it comes to a normal stop? How?

As the students get up to gather their supplies--wild supplies that include mousetraps and D batteries--my eyes wander over every inch of the deliciously unfamiliar room. Posters inspire me from one corner; they remind me to thank science if I use drugs to treat allergies or have never had polio, exhort me to keep learning and discovering. Drying racks are decorated with beakers and test tubes. The ceiling fixtures dangle with garlands of paper DNA and styrofoam and pushpin molecules. For a moment it's more than a visit; this classroom makes me feel like I'm in high school.

The kids are involved in their experiments with varying levels of commitment. I wander around and ask questions. I pause for a while with a disjointed collection of geniuses who describe themselves as "smart but not creative." They have decided to revive a broken mechanism left by the last class, but are overwhelmed with the meaningless motor attached to the top. Another group spends the majority of class trying unsuccessfully to get their lightbulb to turn on under any circumstances.

Further investigation leads me to an efficient team in the back, who creates a working car after only a few minutes.

"Wow!" I cry. "How does it work?"

An articulate young woman shows me the connection of bulb and battery, linked together with red and black wires.

"So," she concludes, "when the car crashes it pushes the battery in up here and that completes a circuit."

"So that's what a circuit is?" I ask, to the group's amusement. "I've never really known." I shrug as they giggle. "I don't teach science."

"Good thing."

I am mystified by circuits and the ninth grade textbook because of a decision to take a second year of chemistry during my last year of high school. In order to do this, I dropped the customary physics class most seniors took. I even remember asking the chemistry teacher for permission:

"Hey, can I take your AP Chem class?" It was a few days into the school year, only a handful of nonsensical lessons into physics class, but I had judged it and hated it already. Chemistry I liked. I wanted more of it.

He looked up from the lab he was preparing afer school, raised his eyebrows.

"Sure."

"OK, so I'll drop physics and..."

"No, no. You can't drop physics," he corrected.

"Why not?"

"You'll need physics if you're doing anything with science in college."

"Oh, that's fine then. I'm going to be an English teacher."

He scowled incredulously through lab goggles. "Really? English? The why are you taking more chemistry?"

I shrugged. "I just like it."

That's what I'm remembering today, in the ninth grade science class: liking classes because they were different and interesting and not what I would ever do in my life otherwise. I know it doesn't work for everyone and that I'll still spend days and days arguing for the relevance of finding rhyme schemes and reading fantasy stories. But for a moment, as I learn about circuits and watch ninth graders make light-up cars, I am excited by the possibilities of simply liking something new.

A Warning

Remarks to ninth graders will be taken seriously, no matter how flippantly they are delivered.

Example:

"If you win that fish, I'll put it in the classroom."

She will win the fish. Every time. And then you'll have a class fish. That's how it happens.