What They Learned in School

A "poem" by Jerome Stern. This monologue aired March 17, 1990, on "All Things Considered," National Public Radio's daily news broadcast. Stern was a professor of English at Florida State University in Tallahasee.


In the schools now, they want them to know
all about marijuana, crack, heroin, and
amphetamines,

Because then they won't be interested in mari-
juana, crack, heroin, and amphetamines,

But they don't want to to tell them anything about
sex because if the schools tell them about sex,
then they will be interested in sex,

But if the schools don't tell them anything
about sex,

Then they will have high morals, and no one
will get pregnant, and everything will be all
right,

And they do want them to know a lot about
computers so they will outcompete the
Japanese,

But they don't want them to know anything
about real science because then they will lose
their faith and become secular humanists,

And they do want them to know about this
great land of ours so they will be patriotic,

But they don't want them to learn about the
tragedy and pain in its real history because
then they will be critical about this great land
of ours and we will be passively taken over by
a foreign power,

And they want them to learn how to think for
themselves so they can get good jobs and be
successful,

But they don't want them to have books that
confront them with real ideas because that
will confuse their values,

And they'd like them to be good parents,

But they can't teach them about families be-
cause that takes them back to how you get to
be a family,

And they want to warn them about how not to get AIDS

But that would mean telling them how not to get AIDS,

And they'd like them to know the Con-
stitution,

But they don't like some of those amendments
except when they are invoked by the people
they agree with,

And they'd like them to vote,

But they don't want them to discuss current
events because it might be controversial and
upset them and make them want to take
drugs, which they already have told them all about,

And they want to teach them the importance of
morality,

But they also want them to learn that Winning
is not everything--it is the Only Thing,

And they want them to be well-read,

But they don't want them to read Chaucer or
Shakespeare or Aristophanes or Mark Twain
or Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck, be-
cause that will corrupt them,

And they don't want them to know anything
about art because that will make them weird,

But they do want them to know about music so
they can march in the band,

And they mainly want to teach them not to
question, not to challenge, not to imagine,
but to be obedient and behave well so that
they can hold them forever as children to
their bosom as the second millennium lurches
toward its panicky close.

Purple

In first grade Mrs. Lohr
Said my purple teepee
Wasn't realistic enough for a tent,
That purple was a color
For people who died,
That my drawing wasn't
Good enough
To hang with the others.
I walked back to my seat
Counting the swish swish swishes
Of my baggy corduroy trousers.
With a black crayon
Nightfall came
To my purple tent
In the middle
Of an afternoon.

In second grade Mr. Barta
Said draw anything;
He didn't care what.
I left my paper blank
And when he came around
To my desk
My heart beat like a tom tom.
He touched my head
With his big hand
And in a soft voice said
The snowfall
How clean
And white
And beautiful.

--Alexis Rotella


"Purple" by Alexis Rotella is found in the book "Step Lightly" poems for the journey collected by Nancy Willard, 1998, published by Harcourt Brace & Company.

Spontaneous Teaching

My morning freshmen English class is much more obedient, but less engaged. Now that I'm getting used to the energy of my afternoon class, I'm finding I prefer the talk to the silence even if I have a headache by the end. Yesterday something magical happened in the morning class. As we moved through the final vignettes of "The House on Mango Street," which traverses ambiguous scenes of rape and domestic violence, I asked my students to complete the graphic organizer I'd created which included a box for them to write what the vignette reminded them of in their own experience (activating schema) and another box for them to draw a depiction of the vignette (accessing multiple intelligences while helping students visualize what they read). I was completing a model of this on the board as we went along. Problem is that I'm a terrible drawer. Even my stick figures are pathetically disproportionate. The normal thorn in my side, the student who two days ago told me he wanted me to go to another school where I could give other students nightmares, the one who makes farting sounds every time I try to lead the P.E. students in stretches, he was absent yesterday. There was no one to make fun of me, but me. So, I did. For perhaps the first time in this class, I was laughing at myself. I was relaxed and at home in my own teaching skin and it worked in my favor. Instead of belaboring over my pathetic drawing of a clown, I put my dry erase marker down and said, "Alright. Someone has got to come up here and save me." Immediately, one of the students who rarely participates positively came up to save the day. The clown he drew was pretty close to Crusty the Clown and a much better rendition of the one I drew. Of course, I used this opportunity to walk around to all of my students and see that there were working on their own drawings. Sure enough, everyone in the class was on task, and I got to see what fabulous artists I have in my classes. For those who weren't fabulous, I could encourage them by saying, "Look at my drawing! It can't be any worse than that!" We moved through the vignettes like this for a good half hour without my losing the focus and attention of my students. It just so happened that the principal had come in and seen all of this, too. I glanced at her every once in a while to see that she had a big smile on her face. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a female student who is a great writer and a smart cookie but who prefers to put on an edgy front and often pushes buttons, blurts out (as she usually does), "Ms. Barrett, you are so nice!"

But the best part of the whole period was still to come. At the very end of class, I passed out a poem called "Empty House" by Rosario Castellanos. The poem is a perfect extention of the book we'd just finished. I began reading the poem to the class, not really sure what I would do with it besides read it and ask them to somehow connect it to the book, but I didn't have to figure it out because by the second stanza two boys started reading the poem aloud with me. We moved through it in perfect unison, as if riding a tandem bicycle for three. Their somewhat deeper and quieter voices matched with mine had a harmonizing effect. I am not exaggerating when I say that the atmosphere in the classroom was magical. All thirty-one of my students were on the edges of their seats and several students whispered to others, "Woah, do you hear that? That's cool. That's creepy." When the three of us finished our reading, the class burst into excitement and wanted to talk about the poem and the effect of the multiple voices. My mind immediately leapt to thinking about what a great lead-in this was to the dramatic reading of Romeo & Juliet we'll begin in a week. What's most amusing to me about this is I believe the boys who joined in on the reading really were trying to get at me at first; they thought it would make me mad or derail the reading. I don't think they expected me to keep reading and certainly not to love it. When the class finished exclaiming how much they liked the poem, I said, "That was great! Who wants to do it again?" Overwhelmingly the class wanted to do it again. This time I asked anyone who wanted to to read it aloud with us. The second reading, of course, wasn't as good in sound quality as the first, but it was exciting nonetheless that the class was willing to do a spontaneous choral reading of a poem. Magical, really.

This is clearly one of the best teaching days I've had yet. What made it so good, apart from one truly disruptive student being absent, was my comfort and confidence with the class. I was having a good time and I cared about what we were doing. The night before was Back to School Night. I spent 12 hours at school and by the time I got home, I was too burned out to put much energy into my lesson plan for the next day. I knew we needed to finish the book and I knew I had a poem that worked well at the end of the reading, but I spent less than twenty minutes on my lesson plan and said to myself, "I'll just figure it out." As a teacher, I'm all about careful planning and even scripting out some of the things that I need to say, but I also value the spontaneous moments in the classroom. At the beginning of the year, and with my students the beginning of their high school career, the emphasis is on structure, routine, and the expected. It's been hard for me because despite my very organized and somewhat methodical ways, I fell in love with teaching when I taught poetry for Upward Bound. I set a daily structure for the class, but I had the students supply the class with poems. I never knew what the class topic would be. If a student brought in a poem that exceptionally modeled the use of line breaks, then I did a mini-lecture on line breaks and then spontaneously created a writing assignment for them dealing with line breaks. I loved that class because I didn't know what to expect, because my students were providing the curriculum as much as I was, and because it felt as if it served my students where they were rather than from some place of my solitary ideals for them. Yesterday reminded me of my love of this organic teaching which comes from an organized classroom. There were moments for personality, real stories, and connection in class yesterday. I even found a moment to pull back from the scheduled curriculum and tell my students about the value of applying to private universities, to tell them that they should never let a price tag keep them from applying. I wrote out numbers on the board and spelled out for them my own experience of believing I couldn't afford a private education only to find out that in reality it was the public one I couldn't afford. And even then, they listened attentively. It might sound like a tangential thing to discuss, but it fit in perfectly with the quickwrite prompt to write about what they wanted to happen in their futures and how our protagonist overcame her own poverty and position in society. Education. Writing. Poetry. If this isn't an argument against the scripted textbooks being imposed in impoverished districts across the country as an off-shoot of the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind," then I don't know what is. I can hear my favorite mentor whispering,"We don't teach English. We teach people."

The "thank goodness I have a cool principal" post

The lesson is this: never give your students material you haven't already read for yourself. Today, I was sharing a chapter from "The Poet's Companion" by Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio. The chapter was about writing from an illogical point of view, not worrying about sense. It touched on dreamscapes and the subconscious. I played out a lesson I've known for a long time only because I did not have enough time in the day to prevent it. I decided to trust two of my favorite poets and their book. The beginning of the chapter was fine, a little esoteric and full of college words. But, I thought to myself, "This is good, I'm stretching their minds and giving them a taste of what college is like..." Then I got to the poem that was excerpted as an example of following a dream into a poem. It was called "You've Changed, Dr. Jekyll" by Jan Richman .

I'm reading aloud to the class a poem I've never read or even heard of, and with each word I am becoming more tentative, wishing I'd taken that extra five minutes last night to skim the chapter. I get to the phrase "your uncircumstance" and I'm afraid. But I continue until I'm reading "While your left hand/ conducts an under-the-table ejaculation, your right flips the rusty tongue of a Dream Date lunchbox." Oh no, what have I done! I refuse to look up at my small class of seniors. I'm grateful about five didn't show up today because I just said ejaculation and my face must be bright red. They say nothing. Not even a snicker, but the silence tells all. And at that moment, the door opens and in walks my principal for a surprise observation. There's nothing to do but keep reading even though I want nothing more than to slam the book shut. These are seniors. They can handle it. I want to prepare them for college level discussions, right? But why now with the special education support teacher and the principal here to witness it? Then I say the rest of the poem: "Herr, Doctor, Mr. Dad, you've handed/ down a scratchy decree, this cushion on which I sit to jerk/ off in the meager poem of your hiding place. Five hot minutes/ on the phone with legacy equals a cup of serum..."

Ohmigosh, what have I said? What have I done? The students are still silent. Maybe they missed it thanks to the line break that separates "jerk" from "off." But I can sense that they get it, loud and clear. I move through it like nothing happened, like we are absolutely all adults and there's nothing to be embarrassed about. But inside I'm wondering if this is the second time I've blown it with poetry. Two summers ago, I asked a poetry class to write down a list of favorite words or expressions. Many were culled from hip hop songs I knew and some I didn't know. One expression was "slob my knob" and while I got the gist of the meaning, I didn't pursue the definition. I encouraged the students to put all of the words in their poem. A week later at the staff meeting the issue of not encouraging students to write about sex was brought up. Guilty party? Me.

Poetry is meant to be read with the body. It is not of the brain. This is exactly what Laux and Addonizio were arguing in the embarrassing chapter about self-satisfaction. Poetry likes to slide into the sensual, the sexual, and sometimes the baudy. And I want my students to have full access to the artistic expression and to their own desire and understanding of their body. And yet...

Later today I checked in with the principal to see if she had been bothered. She said, "Oh no. You don't have to worry about that with me. In fact, it was amusing to see what the students did. They looked up at you, up at me, up at each other, and then puzzled went back to the reading."

Had this been my ninth grade class, I might never have recovered.

The Season of Poetry

Today, I finally got my poetry class to sit in a circle, to look at each other, to share more openly. The assignment was for them to bring in a favorite poem of theirs. It could be from childhood, from a rap song, from a lullaby -- anything. In the past this has been the easiest assignment ever. Students can hide behind someone else's words. There's no analysis, just aesthetic pleasure. I asked them to write a mere 1/2 page about why they chose the poem and where they found it, but half of them brought only the poem. Two were bold enough to bring a favorite poem they had written. One young man who told me flat out the other day that he is only going to pass my class so he can sign himself out of high school as soon as he turns 18 in December, told me he hates poetry, told me he's just "not into it." But today, he brought in a poem from Tupac Shakur's book and said, "I found a poem I actually like." It was simple, more like a prayer about finding strength in God. This student who acts so tough admitted that he liked the poem because it was similar to what he was going through right now. I'm not sure the details of what he's talking about, but I see some sort of turn around with him. Until today, he had turned in absolutely nothing for my class and had an F. Over half of my poetry students did. I told them point blank on Monday when I passed out progress reports that this should be an "easy A" class, a way to boost their GPA. I purposefully did not assign homework this week and told the class I would accept all late work until today because I didn't want to see all of these F's. Some students still failed to turn in their work, but others, like this young man, stepped up to my offer. He stayed after school today until 5pm to finish all of his work and turn it into me to grade over the weekend. He may never love poetry, but I hope he'll come away with something valuable from my class.

Tonight I attended a poetry reading and reacquainted myself with a few of my favorite poets. Both of them were supportive of my teaching endeavors, but it was Dorianne Laux who made my day. I told her I'd used one of her poems in my class this very week, and she thanked me. Then she said, "What about your own poetry?" I didn't have to say too many words; it was clearly written on my face that I'm too tired to write my own. She assured me; "Don't worry, as you go along your body will adjust to this and come summertime, it will know that it is poetry season -- time to write." I know she must be right. She must be right. There is no other way.