June 10, 2007
Sunday

Should she consult her marvellous shoes
they would tell her nothing . . .

Let her go down to the morning fire-haired
trailing her darkness behind her into the wet grass
Let her enter the schoolroom of broken children

She will teach them to touch their anger with the tips of their fingers
                                                 — Robert Dana, b. 1929
                                                     American poet
                                                     “The Woman on the Mall”

I’m back, after almost a month of silence here, with a new design, a new computer, and a new attitude. I was occupied regrouping from what turned out to be the hard but rewarding work of two retreats at the Jesuit Center at Wernersville. In the weeks since my flurry of posting, I’ve taken in two art exhibits, been admitted once more to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and spent two nights alone at a different retreat center considering the direction of my fiction writing and planning my summer.

Since 2002 I’ve named my summers, the way rock bands name their tours. Last year it was “Halcyon Days.” This year I’ve chosen some lines from a poem I’ve known since I lived, single and unshared, in a two-room apartment with a window seat, a purple-and-black bathroom, and upstairs neighbors whose energetic lovemaking, often undertaken after titanic screaming matches full of name-calling, shook the windows and rattled the walls.

I was in my second year of teaching in the fall of 1970. I’d spent my first year after college living with my parents again and teaching in the school district where my father was an administrator. I thought the arrangement was temporary, until the person I wanted to share my life with was ready for me to join him. That didn’t happen. Plan A had been vague and tentative. I didn’t really have a Plan B, but at least I got a job in a different school district and moved into my own apartment.

By November I was comfortable in the rhythms of my life. I rose early to shower and wash my long red hair, unaware that my purple bathtub leaked onto the bed of the couple in the apartment below. They were unmarried and occupying the space as a secret sublet, and thus were reluctant to call attention to themselves by complaining to the landlord, whose interest in the property seemed limited to one visit a month to the mail slot where we deposited our rent checks. At school I taught American literature and basic composition to eleventh graders, some of whom had done an hour or two of farm work before arriving in my classroom, mud on their shoes and smiles on their faces. I was usually home by 3:30. I’d read for a while, The New Yorker or Saturday Review or some author in the curriculum I needed to learn more about, and then take a nap. I’d wake around 5:15, when Marcia and Steve upstairs came clattering in from work, arguing about money and their dead-end jobs and when the goddamned dinner might be ready.

Last night I watched Freedom Writers, Hilary Swank’s movie about Erin Gruwell, an energetic (and, like me, something of an “accidental”) high school English teacher who uses personal writing and some unorthodox instructional strategies to transform the lives of her students. Like many movies and TV shows about school, some liberties are taken with the way such environments actually operate. For example, although there are several references to her having a load of 150 students — not unusual, really — she is portrayed as interacting with only the same dozen every day. And the students’ use of coarse language seems tame, probably in an effort to maintain a PG-13 rating.

But other things rang absolutely true for me, especially the veteran teachers less concerned about discovering fresh ways to ignite young minds than they are about protecting the sinecures they have made of their own positions. I saw myself, the eager, enthusiastic twenty-two-year-old Miss Yakimoff fresh from Woodstock and full of ideas about relevance, in the equally inventive Ms. Gruwell who bored her new husband with her passion for the work she had undertaken. My students came from family farms and a quintessential American small town. They were not so much less broken than the gang-influenced city youngsters who became the Freedom Writers. Rather, they were broken in different ways, as all of us are. And if I was teaching them to touch their anger with the tips of their fingers, I was also teaching myself to touch my own.

I said in February that something had set me on fire and was moving me into my most creative and productive years. I still believe that. I have nine weeks — the same time frame as a standard high school marking period — ahead of me before my usual August sojourn among the literati at Bread Loaf, and I feel not unlike the eager and dauntless young woman I was when I first took charge of a classroom. I have a reading list, a set of writing exercises, and at least one modest benchmark I want to achieve in each of The Six Goals of a Quality Life. My new design shows the tools I will use — sticky notes, writing implements, drawing materials, and a top-bound spiral notebook.*

I’m going down to each morning fire-haired.

You come too.

*(That design is no longer in place. A blog design is such a fluid thing! 12/6/2007)