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Welcome to MORNING OPEN THREAD, a daily post with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic for the day's posting. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.
So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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October 5 is World Teachers’ Day,started by an international coalition of teachers’ organizations in 1994. Teachers, at least in the U.S., are probably the most undervalued, yet critically important, people in the country.
I’ve rarely met a person who hasn’t had at least one favorite teacher, someone who encouraged them, inspired them, or helped them to “NOW I Get It!” after years of struggling.
Gifted teachers should be treated –and paid– like the National Treasures each and every one of them are.
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The odds stacked against good teachers are far too high – crowded classrooms; lack of basic materials and tools because of underfunding; so many exhausting hours spent in meetings, or grading papers; and worse, being forced to spend more time drilling students for testing than opening their young minds. We’re burning out a lot of our best and brightest.
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The Process of Explication
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by Dorothea Lasky
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I
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Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.
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Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags
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Likewise, hello and goodbye.
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II
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Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.
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Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.
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III
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Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.
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I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.
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And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.
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"The Process of Explication" from Awe, © 2007 by Dorothea Lasky – Wave Books
Dorothea Lasky (1978 - ) American poet and teacher, born in St. Louis Missouri. Her collections of poetry include Animal, Milk, I Used to Be a Witch , and Rome. She has also published several chapbooks, and is the co-author with Dominic Luxford and Jesse Nathan of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry. Lasky has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is currently an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts.
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Teaching English from an Old Composition Book
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by Gary Soto
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My chalk is no longer than a chip of fingernail,
Chip by which I must explain this Monday
Night the verbs “to get;”“to wear,”“to cut.”
I’m not given much, these tired students,
Knuckle-wrapped from work as roofers,
Sour from scrubbing toilets and pedestal sinks.
I’m given this room with five windows,
A coffee machine, a piano with busted strings,
The music of how we feel as the sun falls,
Exhausted from keeping up.
I stand at
The blackboard. The chalk is worn to a hangnail,
Nearly gone, the dust of some educational bone.
By and by I’m Cantiflas, the comic
Busybody in front. I say, “I get the coffee.”
I pick up a coffee cup and sip.
I click my heels and say, “I wear my shoes.”
I bring an invisible fork to my mouth
And say, “I eat the chicken.”
Suddenly the class is alive—
Each one putting on hats and shoes,
Drinking sodas and beers, cutting flowers
And steaks—a pantomime of sumptuous living.
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At break I pass out cookies.
Augustine, the Guatemalan, asks in Spanish,
“Teacher, what is ‘tally-ho’?”
I look at the word in the composition book.
I raise my face to the bare bulb for a blind answer.
I stutter, then say, “Es como adelante.”
Augustine smiles, then nudges a friend
In the next desk, now smarter by one word.
After the cookies are eaten,
We move ahead to prepositions—
“Under,”“over,” and “between,”
Useful words when la migra opens the doors
Of their idling vans.
At ten to nine, I’m tired of acting,
And they’re tired of their roles.
When class ends, I clap my hands of chalk dust,
And two students applaud, thinking it’s a new verb.
I tell them adelante,
And they pick up their old books.
They smile and, in return, cry, “Tally-ho.”
As they head for the door.
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“Teaching English from an Old Composition Book” from Gary Soto: New and Selected Poems,© 1995 by Gary Soto – Chronicle Books
Gary Soto (1952 - ) American poet, novelist, memoirist, and teacher, was born to Mexican-American parents, and the family worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. His father died when he was five, and he spent little time on schoolwork. But in high school, he discovered poetry. He studied with Philip Levine at California State University Fresno, and earned a BA in English in 1974, then became the first Mexican-American to earn an MFA at UC Irvine in 1976. Soto taught at University of California, Berkeley, and at University of California, Riverside, where he was a Distinguished Professor. He also served as a 'Young People's Ambassador' for the United Farm Workers of America, introducing young people to the organization's work and goals. Soto has published many children’s books, and 16 poetry collections including Sudden Loss of Dignity, Canto Familiar/Familiar Song, and Where Sparrows Work Hard. His New and Selected Poems, published in 1995, was a National Book Award Finalist. He has retired from teaching.
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Theme for English B
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by Langston Hughes
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The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.
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I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
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It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
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Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.
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This is my page for English B.
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"Theme for English B" from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes,© 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes – Vintage Classics
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin Missouri. After working his way to Europe as a ship’s crewman, he spent time in Paris, and London, then returned to the states, spending time in Washington DC, where he met Vachel Lindsay, who helped him gain recognition. He became one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. In 1954, Hughes was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
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Of course, some teachers aren’t gifted – in fact, they’re boring. The people who think they don’t like poetry were probably victims of some tedious teacher.
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Transcendentalism
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by Lucia Perillo
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The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks
before coughing up the question
that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:
Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered
while his lecture drifted against us like snow.
If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.
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I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,
a quiet little interlude from everyone outside
rooting up the corpse of literature
for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer
to my own question (how come no one loved me,
stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):
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I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,
though I liked If the red slayer think he slays—
the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.
Then he read a chapter from his own book:
naptime.
He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks.
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When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard
where dogwood bloomed despite a few last
dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal
being chased across the tundra by those wolves,
the postmodernists. At any moment
you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.
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And I am I who never understood his question,
though he let me climb to take a seat
aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade
of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it
from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery.
The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.
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“Transcendentalism” from Inseminating the Elephant,© 2009 by Lucia Perillo. Copper Canyon Press
Lucia Perillo (1958 - ) American poet, short fiction writer, and teacher, born in Manhattan, and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. She majored in wildlife management, and worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, then worked summers at Mount Rainier National Park while earning her MA in English at Syracuse University. In 1987, she moved to Olympia, Washington, and taught at Saint Martin’s College. In the 1990s, Perillo taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Many of her writings are about living with multiple sclerosis, notably On a Spectrum of Possible Deaths. She has received many awards, including several Pushcart Prizes, and her collection, Inseminating the Elephant, was a finalist in 2010 for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
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But far worse than a boring teacher are the teachers who don’t like or respect their students – they shouldn’t be allowed in classrooms at all.
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Reservation School for Girls
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by Diane Glancy
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I.
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We hang clothes on the line.
His wide trousers and shirt, wind-beat,
roar small thunder from one prairie cloud.
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The same rapple of flag on its pole.
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Half in fear, half in jest, we laugh.
He calls us crow women.
Our black hair shines in the sun
and in the light from school windows.
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He drives his car to town, upsets the dust
on buckboard hills.
We sit on the fence when he is gone.
Does he know we speak of thunder in his shirts?
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We cannot do well in his school.
He reads from west to east,
The sun we follow moves the other way.
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Crowbar.
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Our eyes come loose from words on the page
in narrow rooms of the reservation school.
He perceives and deciphers at once.
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For us
written letters will not stay on the page,
but fall like crows from the sky and hit
against the glass windows of the school.
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Our day is night when we sit in rows of the classroom.
Leaves in a whirlwind from sumac groves.
Flock of crows are black stars on a white night.
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II.
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On the porch of the reservation school
the blackbirds walk around our feet,
fly into our head.
They call our secret name.
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Dark corridors linger in our mind
We whisper the plains to one another.
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We do not talk of what we cannot understand.
Black and white fleckered dresses.
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Our face like our fathers.
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The sun is no enemy to the eye looking west.
The brush thin as hair of old ones.
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It blinds the eye, makes fire on fields,
flashes against windows like silver ribbons
on burial robes.
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Hot late into the fall, windy, ready for
cold to sweep in.
The heat seems solid, but totters on the brink
of winter.
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We laugh to ourselves when he returns to the
reservation school for girls.
Take his clothes from the line.
Set the table with salt and pepper, spoon, knives.
Cattails and milk-pods in a jar.
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We get lard from the basement,
rub a place in the dusty window like a moon in the ancient sky.
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III.
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One hill larger than the others:
an old buffalo with heavy head and whiskers
nods at the ground,
grazes in my dreams, one blade at a time.
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We stay in our stiff white-sheeted beds in the
dormitory room.
Buffalo wander in our dreams.
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White night-dresses.
Black pods suspended in sumac groves like crows.
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In the sweat lodge of sleep
we make our vision quest,
black as pitch in crevice between crow feathers.
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We hang his thunder clothes in sleep,
arms reach above our beds like willows blowing slowly
by the creek.
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Quietly we choke,
hold our wounded arms like papooses.
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Clothes beat on lines.
Sumac groves and whirl of leaves:
a shadow of our fathers at council fires.
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Red leaves, waxy as hay on fields.
We dream of schoolrooms.
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Written letters on the wind.
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He reads crow-marks on the page but does not know
crow.
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“Reservation School for Girls” from Offering: aliscolidoi, © 1986 by Diane Glancy –
Holy Cow! Press
Diane Glancy (1941 - ) American, author, poet, playwright, historical novelist, and teacher, born as Helen Diane Hall in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father was of part Cherokee-descent. She has served as artist-in-residence for the Oklahoma State Arts Council (traveling around the state to teach poetry to Native American students) and has taught Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her poetry collection, Primer of the Obsolete, won the 2003 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Other collections include Stories of the Driven World, The Shadow’s Horse, The Stones for a Pillow, and Two Worlds Walking. Glancy retired as a professor of English in 2011.
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And sometimes a wonderful teacher didn’t get to go to college, but still finds a way to use their gift.
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Lecciones de lengua
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by Brenda Cárdenas
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She is proud of her papá
because he comes
to their little grey school,
converted from army barracks,
to teach español
to Mrs. Brenda’s fifth grade.
And that means they don’t
have to listen to that awful
Señora Beister on TV
with her screech owl version
of “Las mañanitas” and her annoying
forefinger to the ear,
Escuchen
and then to the lips,
y repitan.
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He teaches them to order
Coca-Cola en el restaurán–
Señor, quisiera una Coca, por favor–
and the names of all the utensils–
cuchara, cuchillo, tenedor.
The children look at him funny
when he picks up the knife.
Next week he will demonstrate
the bullfights he watched
in Mexico when he was muy chiquitito.
He will choose a boy to snort, stomp,
charge the red cloth
that Papá will snap
at his side as he dodges
the sharp-horned strike,
stabs invisible swords
into the boy’s hide
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and makes the children laugh.
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“Lecciones de lengua”from Boomerang,© 2009 by Brenda Cárdenas –
Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe
Brenda Cárdenas is an American poet and teacher, who was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, and was Milwaukee’s poet laureate (2010-2012). She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her poetry collections are From the Tongues of Brick and Stone, and Boomerang. Cárdenas is coeditor of Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest, andher poetry was also featured in the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry.
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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