It's been some time since I last posted (a little too much time for my liking), this mostly due to reality regaining control of my life. So, please forgive me if my post is a bit sloppy. I'm excited about adapting to my new routine and writing on a daily basis once again.
I titled this post "Lessons" for a simple reason: lessons consume my life. I create lessons for my classes, teach my students lessons when they falter, and learn lessons from the mistakes I make along the way. So often as teachers we are so focused on making sure our students achieve the "Objectives of the Day" that we take our own path to achieve them and leave our students' needs by the wayside.
I can sit in my living room, live my comfortable life and create a lesson for the following day. Ideally, my students would show up to class on time, eager to learn and willing to participate. Yes, teacher friends, you can laugh at this part.
The fact is that kids deal with issues. Some of our students come from home lives we cannot, and will not (ever) understand, and we forget that our students suffer from raging hormones that can turn a twitter-fight into the world's biggest tragedy. The fact is, very few of our students enter our rooms at 7:20 in the morning thinking:
"Heck yes. Let's do this."
I still hold high standards for my students regardless of their outside issues. I try to create an environment in my room that separates my students from the outside world for 50 minutes, so that I can, if nothing else, provide a safe place for them to learn. I am not always successful in doing this, but I do my best to, when the time comes, sacrifice my priorities so I can tend to those of my students.
The point here is this: there are more lessons taught in an English room than those on the topics of grammar and reading comprehension. A big scary life awaits these kids who are sheltered by high school walls, and they need to be prepared by the time they leave. Everyone has bad days, but not everyone knows how to handle them. This is where teachers come in (especially when parents have failed to do so). I had an experience during my first year of teaching that opened my eyes to the valuable variety of lessons that can be taught in the classroom. The following poem is about that experience. Again, I apologize for the rambling and sloppy post. I promise those in the future will be better.
Thanks for reading! Enjoy!
Ortiz (the passive voice in the corner of the room)
His forehead is making an imprint on his desk
As I bark agreement to the rest,
He is
We are
She is
They are listening.
Some of them.
His eardrums are bruised
from other teachers disrupting his snooze,
questioning his effort,
claiming his talents are going unused.
I continue.
He sleeps.
Some call it slacking
She does
We do
They are packing up their bags as
the bell bellows through the speakers,
which is when I notice holes in his sneakers—
the soles as torn, as worn as his jeans—
he is waiting for the last student to leave.
They are gone.
He is staring,
glaring,
gulping, on the verge of crying
as he battles to release the pain from his mind.
I am listening,
understanding and catching on as I
cringe to the tune of his wretched song;
he sings “sorry, can I make up what I’ve missed?”
while he rubs the reddened, half-healed scars on his fists—
(residue from the raw chiseled jaws that they’ve kissed)
And with his tears flow endless confessions
of a life full of purposeless
merciless lessons
that leave him squeezing the veins from his wrists,
closing his eyes, clenching his fists
as he cries: “I don’t even know where I’m gonna sleep tonight!”
as he cries: “I don’t even know where I’m gonna sleep tonight!”
So my teacher hat comes off
and crawls into a drawer
so it won’t have to see him
pry his heart from the floor.
“I just want to be done,” he says.
“I just want to move on.”
And he waits in silence for his new start to dawn.
I am, past teaching,
He is, beyond weeping,
fighting the world for the rights to his breathing,
And we expect him to worry about verb agreement.
