A Letter to My Students

I don’t say it enough, but I care about you. Each of you. That’s why I’m here. It’s too much work to do it for the money, so there must be something else, and that’s it: I care about you. I want everyone to do well, feel safe, feel valued, be happy, find success.

This room is our space. It’s a safe space. It’s generally calm. Whether the door is literally open or shut, you are welcome here, whether it’s during your scheduled class time or not. I want you to use this space to your advantage. Leave your worries and troubles at the door, and do your best to be fully present. More and more often, that means not being distracted by your phone. (You knew this part was coming.) If you are in the middle of a crisis, it’s unlikely that you will be able to solve it and be present in the class at the same time. If it’s not fatal or contagious, it can wait.

Here’s what happens when you continue to deal with a crisis after you enter our classroom: You appear distracted, anxious, upset. I wonder what’s up. I ask you to put aside your phone--and your emotions, for a time. Giving or getting further information in the midst of this is rarely good. It doesn’t end well. I’ve seen emotions pass across your faces like four seasons in a second. That may surprise you. I observe more than grammar. This is make-or-break time: you will compose yourself, or things will escalate. It won’t end well. Students shut down or leave the room without permission. To do what? Solve the problem? Ask yourself: how many times has that actually happened?

Think about your teachers. What are they dealing with, what are they carrying? Here’s a partial list: concern for aging parents, their own children, their spouses or partners, their own aging bodies and minds, bills, finances, whether or not they are getting sick, their colleagues, that stuff that absolutely needs to get done before the day ends. Somehow we manage. I won’t call it wisdom. It’s simply practice at regulating our own emotions. We taught after 9/11, after any number of national school shootings, after the presidential election, and any number of other polarizing, controversial or upsetting events. It’s guaranteed that some of us are going through a dark night of the soul during block 1 while you are doing a warm-up. Our experience has shown us what we can and cannot control. Adulthood is constant negotiation between those two things. The sooner anyone realizes that, the better equipped he or she is.

Okay, so what? Well, this is the hidden curriculum. The stuff you learn that’s not listed in any syllabus or course overview. It’s in the novels and plays we read, once you decode them and read between the lines. Protagonists face conflicts. It’s how they face them that reveals character. You are writing your story right now. Every moment contains a choice. How will you face them? What later events in your own life are you foreshadowing right now?

Ask yourself: This thing that has me so upset--will it be important in an hour? A day? A year? Ten years? Or will it pass quickly like a spring shower? Think about the verb to weather.

It gets better. Sometimes it gets worse, then it gets better again. Remember that we are together on a mission to make sure that you get what you need, intellectually and otherwise. I care, and I will continue to care as long as I remember you.

Overheard in Homeroom

Eyebrows are way down my list

of things about which to be concerned--

as a matter of fact, they

don't make the list at all,

but in room 305 at 7:40 a.m.

they constitute a crisis

as the girl looks at her reflection

in a compact and

brushes and tweezes,

while I, on the other side of 

the large desk, ponder

the difference between an

85 and an 88.

"Eyebrows are sisters, not twins," 

another girl offers, as I mumble

metaphor quietly.

So it goes, different orbits

but still the same

rumination and brooding, 

insistence on what is important,

things that concern us so 

at one point in life making way

for others unpredicted,

as I smile and thin lines

frame my eyes, my pen

loops two green eights,

and I raise one uncorrected

brow (one brother?), if not

in solidarity, then at least

in insight. 

Hard Time

No one tells me what to do,

you tell me no but I do it anyway,

'cuz I'm my own person,

the student says amid the

familiar desks, chairs, windows,

grubby floor tiles. He is a

shape, too: a box in a seating chart,

a check in a column, a lump at a desk,

all hard angles, sounding off

his song that he would swear is

unique in its singular note

of defiance, saying I AM--

the walls and the floors

have heard it all before,

small-room big talk

that rings out and dissipates

like chalk erased into

clouds of choking dust,

shouting it out over others' heads,

brazen morning orator issuing

forth from his rocky outcrop,

this risk-taker, cliff diver,

reckless driver, nothing without

his audience, sycophant circle

minions for each other,

thug-lite insubordination brothers,

soon to be free from this

sentence of kindergarten to twelfth,

hard time on the inside.

Remember Me

Remember me after

the robes are put away,

the candles are snuffed,

and the grave speakers

have had their say.

Remember me after

the repeated oath's

words echo and fade,

when the recessional

music has played.

Remember me when

this group is gone,

all on separate paths.

With your shoes worn down,

remember how I last.

Remember me when

you are bravely alone,

when good truly is sown,

to know and do what's right,

to keep me, your honor,

clear and bright.

School's Summer

An empty classroom, a floor like a sheet
of ice, reflects summer light from outside,
slight scent of wax lingering. A light wind in
the hall, and the school breathes easy.

The room reaches, wide and empty--
walls and board clean and bare.
Everything's been moved out:
furniture to the hallways, students

scattered like seeds, sprouting into
summer months, under high sun.
Here, real work has been done--
those who came before, turning

twenty-five, twenty-six or more,
somewhere, carrying something
from here—no one enters or exits
a room without taking something

and leaving something else.
Endings and beginnings, stories
crafted in four quarters, two semesters.
Now, no bells, but the slow pulse

of summer's time, measured in
light and darkness, heat and relief--
leading to a chance, in a while,
to pick up the pen, to start again.

More Creative Writing Homework

Thanks to the students of Creative Writing, semester one for these topics.

The root of the word “journal,” jour, means day. Write every day—or at least as often as you can—and you will be able to lower your anxiety and expectations about your writing. It will open your mind, free your thoughts. Remember, don’t edit as you go. Just write, and follow your writing, wherever it goes.

1. Write about the critic in your head. What does he or she say?
2. Explain the feeling of being inspired.
3. Incorporate the description of the sound of wind in your writing.
4. Describe a feeling by using a color.
5. What color is your soul?
6. When did you realize you’d grown up?
7. If you could have any superpower, what would it be, and why?
8. What is your favorite holiday, and why?
9. What is your worst fear?
10. Describe the sky, from night to morning.
11. A place you hate.
12. How do you feel about the mail?
13. Write about the changing of leaves.
14. Write about things in the clouds.
15. Write exactly what you are thinking.
16. Describe your best friend without giving his/her name.
17. Write about a hospital.
18. Write about one of your summer days.
19. What are you passionate about?
20. What gets you through the day?
21. Describe your day at school.
22. Write about your favorite season.
23. What is your dream day?
24. Describe a scene just by its sounds.
25. Write about your ideal family twenty years from now.
26. If you could pick one season to die, which one would it be?
27. Often, rain makes people depressed, and sunshine makes people happy. Why do you think this is, and what are some other things that create strong emotions for you?
28. Write about a place that has special meaning for you.
29. What is your favorite thing to do, and why?
30. Are we doomed to become our parents?
31. Write about a world without color.
32. Write from the perspective of an inanimate object.
33. How would you live your life if you knew the date of your death?
34. Write about the safest place you know.
35. What would you do if you won the lottery, but you couldn’t spend the money on yourself?
36. You’re an outcast, because you were born with feet where your hands should be, and hands where your feet should be. Write about your life.
37. You’re 37 years old. You almost made a pro soccer team, but you got injured and lost everything. You’ve turned to self-destructive actions. Write about everything.
38. Who is the one person you could spend your life with on an island? What would it be like?
39. What planet would you travel to, and why?
40. Write about your favorite song—how it makes you feel, lines you like, associations you have with it, etc.
41. Write about your favorite memory.
42. Write about a painful memory.
43. Write about a bittersweet memory.
44. Pick a place or region—real or fictional—and describe everything in and around it. Use imagery.
45. Are you afraid of death or not? Why or why not?
46. What makes you who you are?
47. What (NOT “who”) is your greatest teacher? It may be something abstract or concrete.
48. What word are you? Pick only one, and explain.
49. If you could live forever, would you? What would you do? How would life be different?
50. If you could read minds, would you? If so, which minds?
51. If you could go back in time, what would you do?
52. If you could be anyone else, who would you be?
53. If your life was a song, how would it go? What instruments would be involved?
54. Describe, in objects from nature, what is going through your mind.
55. If you could watch the world from the moon, what would you see?
56. If you could be a shadow of any person in the world, who would it be?
57. Describe your life by the seasons of the year. Does your lifestyle vary from season to season?
58. Write about the evolution of your taste in music. Has it changed since you were young?
59. Write about a snow day at your house.
60. Write about the last day of school. What emotions are present? Are there pranks or jokes?

Not the Bomb

Ten years ago, kids would have said, “It’s the bomb!” That’s fallen out of the vernacular, and it’s not quite accurate. Stay tuned, though.

A little background information first: Friday was field-trip day for the majority of the tenth grade, leaving me with two blocks and very few students—mostly those who forgot to hand in their permission slips. Not much teaching would happen, but it would be a chance to catch up with whatever work the stragglers were missing, and it would give me a chance to make a dent in my stack of papers.

That’s not exactly what happened.

I was out of the room, chatting with a colleague. My co-teacher, a special ed teacher with years of experience and copious grace, was in our room with our three students: a quiet kid seated at the front, and two class-clown types in the back.

I walked back in, and saw Mrs. G sitting in the back with the two cut-ups. Her body language—legs crossed, hands folded—put me at ease instantly, thus helping me not freak out when I said, “That’s a grenade.”

Told you it wasn’t the bomb, or even a bomb. Still, pretty close. And close counts with hand grenades.

Jester number one, a kid prone to wearing his hoodie backwards with the hood up, a kid whose parents receive regular email missives from me, had brought in a grenade, which now rested, upright, on the desk to Mrs. G’s right. A quick glance and I could tell it was just a shell, but still. A grenade. In the classroom. Just sayin.’

“Mr. W!” she began, in that animated voice teachers use when they are talking to other teachers but want students to hear. (It’s an old trick, but it still works fairly often.) “We’re just trying to figure out what to do with Stan’s grenade!” (NOTE: His name isn’t Stan. There’s nobody in my school named Stan.)

“Oh. Yes. That.” For some reason, I saw the absurdity in this situation right away. “Stan, why did you bring that in today?” I asked the urchin.

His face lit up into a big, goofy grin. “Show and tell?” he said sheepishly.

“Okay…” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“My grandfather was in the army. He gave it to me.”

“And you thought it would be a good idea to bring it in to school?”

“Uh…”

“Well, I think I should take it from you. I doubt you’ll need it before the end of the day.”

“Um.”

I picked it up. Despite its neutered state, it was still an impressively dangerous-feeling hunk of metal.

“Wow,” said Mrs. G. “That would send a lot of hunks of metal flying if it blew up!”

“That’s the idea,” I offered, at which point the other kid—an occasional hot-head whose bluster had melted into conviviality this morning—cracked up. “Hahaha, Mr. W! ‘That’s the idea’!”

“You know, Mr. A [our vice principal] is right next door,” I said, at which point Stan lost his smile.

Mrs. G exited with the grenade. She returned empty-handed. Mr. A soon appeared in the doorway, and motioned for Stan. The kid departed, and came back a few minutes later with a handful of pink referral papers. Turns out he had a few priors. To his credit, he still had his sheepishness about him. He’s not the type of kid I’d worry about. He probably just wanted some attention. We all had a good laugh, spurred on mostly by Mr. Convivial, who was probably relieved to not be the one in trouble this time.

The stars must have aligned that day. Would you believe there is more? Footnotes, really, after the grenade. But they have their own charm.

A teacher found an empty gin bottle in the boys’ bathroom. This, of course, led to all sorts of comments about said teacher’s imbibing. Someone suggested sending a message home asking parents to check their liquor cabinets, thus finding the guilty party. I told everyone that some kid had knocked on the faculty room door, looking for tonic and lime, but that I hadn’t put one and one together fast enough.

Last one. The tide of humanity outside my classroom door slowed, then did that weird forward-backward thing. My teacher senses tingled. Fight. Yup. Two girls, lots of yelling, everyone else spectating. Adults arrived before fisticuffs even started. Off each one marched, in separate directions, clutching their cell-phone talismans, trailing profanity and hangers-on.

I can say many things about my job. Most days, I can honestly say that it’s never dull. The preceding words are a work of fiction, somewhat. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. Oh, and this all happened long ago and far away. Maybe.

Tragicomedy, Act 4 out of 5

Forget basketball. Ask anyone in this building--child or adult--and they'll tell you the true March Madness is going on within these walls.

March. What other month commands in such strident fashion? I mean, please. "May" is much more gentle. May I? But it's not here yet.

We've been teaching full weeks since the end of February break. That conference day we were supposed to have last Friday? Well, thanks to that ice storm a while back, it was a regular school day. Kids and teachers crankier than usual. Mostly--I'll get to that in a minute.

The dark clouds hovering over the faculty room have taken on a particularly bruised, angry hue recently. The rants are familiar: students with poor attendance/word choice/fashion sense/grooming habits/sentence structure, etc. Parents who don't care or--worse--actively enable behavior that works against us. Administrators who clearly don't understand What It Is That We Do. Deadlines. Piles of papers.

And, of course, this is a good time for everyone to get their schedules for next year. I'm teaching a level I've never taught before, and I'm doing another course I seem to get every few years or so, thus preventing me from establishing any kind of rhythm. (Those who are not teachers will vouch that such changes keep me fresh.)

Cranky. Cranky. Cranky.

Yes, I said to my colleague. But predictable. So predictable. How would the review go? The cast obviously knows their parts inside and out, and all deliver their lines with passion and verve, but the plot is a bit hackneyed, reducing the characters to flat stereotypes: the teacher martyr, the spoiled sophomore princess, the boy who throws worms and stuff, the text-addled junior with her hands constantly in her purse or her lap, the barking administrator.

Yawn. There's something better nearby... There's life outside these walls, even in that courtyard just outside my classroom window, where things actually grow. The grass will soon be lush and green, and gentle breezes will surely, um, stir the darling buds of... May. (Forgive me. I've read that sonnet too many times.)

See the humor in it, I enthused to my patient colleague. The deus ex machina, even. Invisible strings are tugging at us. We ARE reading scripts, and this is a restless falling action, hopefully leading to some sort of cathartic denouement: papers graded, boards washed clean, exams bundled neatly, students reduced to GPAs and class rank. Me, caught up for the first time all year. Yes, but we are stronger than those strings.

We can improvise. We must.

Another trusted colleague and I fall back on our favorite rhetorical question that gets us out of this rank-and-file March: "What's really important?" Well, it sure isn't the duct tape on the faculty room carpet. It's most definitely not the Regents exam. And no way is it the faculty meeting agenda.

March is gone. March on? Nah. Amble, sidle, sashay, and remember what's really important.

The tyranny of the test

I proctored part one of the English Regents exam today. Three hours of ennui, perched on a desk, while the entire eleventh grade (and a few seniors, for good measure) slaved away. Too bad they won't get to take part two tomorrow, due to the major whuppin' Mother Nature is about to dish out. (My school is notorious for snow days. I'm surprised the call hasn't come tonight.)

Anyway, to stem my boredom during such proctoring assignments, I occasionally jot down poems to pass the time. Like this one, about a fictitious student:

Her head on the desk,
energy drink by her side--
irony's portrait.

Or this one, which indicates that my mind has wandered a couple of calendar pages and a few miles further into the country:

A country road: bikes
on parade as blossoms fall--
nature's confetti.

The longer I teach, the less I believe in tests... Let's call this "Part 1 of 2":

Snow tomorrow--this
exam won't count. Dig those holes,
then fill them back up.


There. I feel better. Hey, don't argue with nature. Happy hibernating.