The Future is Now

A girl I know, who's the same age as me, got married a month ago. I thought she was a little nuts, and so did almost everyone else. I figured that it was just because she was brought up differently than I was and had different priorities for her life. But watching her young married life progress on facebook, I'm kind of jealous. She is building the life I want, with her repainted kitchen and crate-and-barrel boxes waiting to be unpacked. It's probably hard to be building this life while she's in school, but I'm starting to think that I'd rather have it than not.

Teaching is not a Pit Stop

Teaching is not a pit stop.

Teaching is a calling; it is an end in itself, and not a layover between graduate degrees. My boss teaches middle school after several years in the business world and a decade or so of mothering. I'm glad she's getting her masters, and I'm glad she's gone back to work somewhere important, but I found out a few days ago that she doesn't plan to stay. She's not a bad teacher-- she's more effective than many, unfortunately, but you can tell that she's not with the kids. She holds her biological children up as academic ideals and is quicker to catagorize kids as unintelligent than I would like. Finally able to work with a boy she's been considering as not smart enough for our college preperatory program, I uncovered an incredible curiousity masked by huge gaps in his education. He is blocked by his misguided ideas that the sun is an asteroid and that wind is caused by the earth's rotation, but his desire to learn is real and waiting to be harnessed by someone who's interested in teaching him, instead of doubting him.

My boss says that she doesn't feel challenged as she'd like to be in her current position. She wants to teach at the University level. College students are complicated, but we have nothing on middle-schoolers, especially these middle-schoolers. Every other kid has a home life I can't imagine, and the social pressures of adolescence are pushing into their lives, but there is so much potential in each one of them that needs to be teased out and pushed. The longer no one expects anything out of them, the smaller that pool of potential becomes.

Middle school is a bridge to professorship for my boss, because she is not being intellectually challenged.

My boss teaches Foods.

Why is Poetry Stupid?

I work with eighth-graders. Smart kids, but a school with over 80% of the kids getting free or reduced lunches, and too many parents who leave the teaching entirely up to the schools. "Why is poetry so stupid?" one of them asked. "Why does it suck?"

I didn't know what to say. I was wearing a tee shirt from my high school's literary magazine, and the night before the staff of my college's magazine had met to discuss recent submissions. This thirteen-year-old, bored in the face of innumerable rules and forms that meant nothing to her, understood poetry the same way I did when I was her age: it was small. Stories were big and poems were small and it never occurred to me that a poem could genuinely move me.

I publicly read a piece for the first time my sophomore year of high school. It wasn't extraordinary, but the experience was. As preparation, one of the magazine advisors brought in some local poets to coach us on reading, and I heard slam poetry for the first time, and I was taken aback by the way words tripped off their tongues and they let their words fall into convoluted patterns and subjects that somehow ended up all coming together. I think that's when poetry became alive for me. I began to see how words felt and moved together, carrying meanings bursting to be heard. Words were never again stationary — sometimes they needed a push or some rearranging, but they didn't want to sit still.

My senior year of high school, I was Editor-in-Chief of our humble little magazine (though we tended to call it a book, as it pushed two hundred and fifty pages). We didn't have poetry readings, we had Coffeehouse, and we didn't have to scavenge for guests; we seated them on the ground because we ran out of chairs. My friends, my acquaintances, and people I'd barely seen became my family as I watched them stand up before their peers and share a piece of themselves. An advisor's friend, a blogger, reviewed our little event and I was so proud. High schoolers were supposed to be apathetic and bogged down by poor funding and test scores, but we were excited, and about the strangest of things — poetry. The way I well up when I think about it is the way I feel when I watch someone in front of me spin words up and around and make me feel an issue or a situation or a moment, or even watch my favorite poems performed, over and over again, on youtube.

I'm not a poet. Sometimes I write, but mostly I listen and try to find a way to help the world see what I am privileged to see. So how do I show this girl that internal rhymes and meters and metaphors and ideas can come together beyond the examples she sees in class? How do I convince her that every word has a meaning and that she can harness that meaning for herself?

How do I prove that poetry isn't stupid?