teaching

Without Your Words

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

without your words
your hippie style of teaching
your gathering in groups
your relentless rule-breaking
your freedom-comes-first
your choice-is-the-best-choice
i wouldn’t be a teacher

and yet

i am trapped under piles of
standardized tests
computerized reading programs
administrative book doctrines
absentee students, parents
and find your words difficult to read

i wish i could capture them from memory
snap up the beauty of the classroom
that my children will never know
in thirteen years of institutionalized “care,”
that i could take your vision of education,
walk it right down to Washington
and make the world the place you promised
me it was capable of being.

Copy

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

Dear Phil:

I saw that book you gave me.
Remember?
The best-first-year
beat-up, bedraggled
copy you’d
“given to all your proteges”?

You forgot something.
I wasn’t your protege.

I didn’t need to hear
how Kari won
best-first-year-teacher
the year before
or
how I “might not get
rehired”
if I couldn’t control
period six.

I needed for you
to not be my mother
to not be my father
to not be
the beat-up
bedraggled
copy of criticism
that had followed me
all of my life.

Do you remember?
It was my first year
and one of your last.
At least you can walk away
knowing you
were there for me.

Love,
The Best First Year

The Wall

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

how can i make you see
that with bricks stacked up
one by one in your way,
that with no bulldozer
or sledgehammer, you will
have to pull them down
one by one, tossing them
to the ground and climbing
over the remainder of the wall
that keeps you here?

i wish i could actually build it
and you could actually climb it
break it
take it with you

but i can’t. i can only offer
the parts you will need to
assemble your own hammer,
your own destructive machine.
and i can only hope that you will
take the time to put the parts
together and break through the wall.

Twenty Clicks

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

with twenty clicks
and a bowlful of anticipation
i await the shoes
that will take her
farther than my words
ever could,
even when i walked
alongside her jagged steps
and plucked her words
from the page into my memory.

i can already see them on her feet:
perfect and smooth, the bone,
perfect and smooth, the metal.
and her face? a picture
of deference wrapped up
in an ever-polite smile.

with twenty clicks
and a mouthful of anticipation
i await the shoes
that will take her
farther than my words alone
could carry her.

Wild Waves

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

in wild waves they come
splashing me with sticky, salty skin,
throwing me into the undercurrents
of what they think is right.

i stand on the shore facing their storm,
waiting for the moon to send the tide back,
their glistening white foam
tickling my toes with bubbles and warmth.

they push and pull and topple seashells onshore,
their distant fatherly clouds pounding down,
and they lap, lap, lap the sand at my feet,
not always waiting for my command.

in wild waves they come to my beach,
and though i try to clear the sticky salt,
it seeps in, breathes through my skin,
and together we intertwine our arms and swim.

Symphony

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

when it was just us,
your birdlike chatter sounded
like a jungle symphony of beauty,
your words dripping with inquiry,
your passions intense with dedication.

now, bright new birds have invaded
our once-peaceful jungle of language,
and cacophony blinds my ears,
stings with acrid haste my tongue,
sends us spinning to the canopy, lost.

i hope that we can find the place
somewhere between the lowest and highest limb
where the movements of your symphony
will smooth out our tumultuous cacophony,
so that together, birdlike, our song’s lyrics
will draw out the best voices in all of us.

Ode to Pod

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

for years I’ve dreamed of this day
so why am I not smiling? my own
classroom, my own walls, my desk
in the corner with no one to bother me,
no one to pester me with the constant
openings and closings of doors,
students incessantly filing in and out,
no little pod desk accessible only
by interrupting someone else’s teaching.

but if I hadn’t been here I wouldn’t
have heard Hanna wondering about
lessons that I then reached out to share
(making our co-teaching the best
teaching I’ve done so far);
been close enough to Karen to see
the endless hours she puts into teaching those kids;
heard Bill complain about the toilet
overflowing and everyone in homeroom
giving him crap about it (punny, I know!);
I wouldn’t have caught clips of those
conversations Bill and Scott had with
their students (the ones in trouble,
the bullies, the ones with family issues)
and witness, firsthand, how to mix humor
with discipline in a way that is nothing
shy of teaching’s greatest masterpiece;
I wouldn’t have visited Tammy’s lab
to see the limitless ways that students
could be brought to think for themselves.

if it weren’t for my little windowless pod,
my small desk that Bill cleared his crap for
(with nothing overflowing), I wouldn’t
have the friends who make me feel
less departmentalized (in my solo
department), I wouldn’t have even
had a brownie list, I wouldn’t have seen
the best teachers in the school, but would
be in the dark, just like I thought I would be
when (during the overcrowded days)
they put me in this dark space
that, in fact, has brought nothing less
than a world of light into my life.

Apology

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

oh, this is boring to you?
you would rather we not watch this video?
I would like to see your friends taken away
one by one
only for you to discover the gaseous
infusions that steal the air from their lungs
after weeks, months, years
without more than gruel to eat,
whips on backs,
clothingless filth
and no parents to cry to
(they are already gone)

boring, you say?
because you are so busy
sneaking to the restroom
to slip in a text, send a photo,
and check on your layers of makeup,
to be sure your revived 80’s
leggings look just right under the
mini skirt that barely covers your ass?

let me apologize.
I didn’t mean to plan six weeks
of lessons about tolerance,
history,
and revelations of truth
that should shock you to the core.

what I meant to do was
strip you of your identity,
call you names that only Satan would repeat,
demoralize you in front of your peers and the world,
and murder every person you’ve ever loved.

then maybe, just maybe,
you might come into my class,
sit quietly in your seat,
be grateful for every carefree moment
you’ve been handed by the
generations before you who were not carefree,
and let the tears that have been hiding inside you
slowly,
slowly,
slide down your cheeks.