Write What You Know

Tell Me Your Story

When we write a book
We tell a story.
But we tell a story too
with our hands.
A story is enfolded
in the bread we knead.
When you sit there
And I sit way over here
that's a story.

If we play a game, you moving
you begin to tell about "one time"
a story holds us both
As we we tell ourselves.
When we sit by the fire
a story sparkles.
On a bank, a cool clear evening
We share our story.
You sing your song
maybe on a Sunday
A story floated.

We bounce the ball
beating out your story.
There, in all the libraries
All the stories ever told
It is your story too.
Walking a long dark road
One still night
You unfolded your story
in rapid breaths we saw in the air.
Listening to the wren
It chirped and brought to mind
Another day's story.

Sweeping my floors
Slowly the story emerged
Yours was the story I found once
As I looked from my sweeping
Found on the floor
Folded and hidden.
It took awhile for it to unfold
And I am reading it still
Like the stories of a life
It is still telling itself
Within me as I feel it
in my heart beating.

Tell me your story
The one that shines from within
Maybe the one no one has spoken aloud
of the days you have lived
The ones you have loved
The hurt that you held
The teachers you knew
Yours is the story
That only you hold.
Tell me your story
It's never been told.


The Teacher That Changed Us

On the most practical of levels
I remember how she smelled
Leaning over me
Looking into my work for signs of understandings
Uttering a reassurance
Pointing out a thing to do
Catching a mistake for me to see myself
Lots of teachers did that.
What made her any different?

She sang and played piano
Brought in guava jelly homemade
Took off her glasses at fire drills
Noticed a thing I call her fairness, she kept order
But didn't impose it really
Established routines
Worked backwards within my time
So that now, when I am grown
And she is long gone from these places
In my work, life, she talks as I
sit with a student struggling
Lean in to offer my help
Struggle with unfairnesses and impossibilities
The poverty, the things
Outside our making
She still speaks into my life.

She taught her career in a segregated system
Was integrated in the last years
Into a school where
I stood at the wooden double doors
Welcomed, enjoyed, praised
Appreciated just for myself
It was enough, and it was
Important enough she remembered
Me long later, my family, my father
The professor, she said later to me
A few years after I had moved
I visited my teacher
Admonished, at my thanks, to go on
Give to the children
With your life
Thinking of me.


Asking

I always ask new people I meet
To tell me about school
Their teachers, experiences
What they hold
What mattered.

Many powerful things
Come rushing
Sometime a volcano erupts
Lava burns my questioning
It can pop like corn
Fast and furious
Or like a wave in the ocean wash over
My worn and sagging spirit

But I ask to know them better
So I might understand what they
Were shaped to think of me, too
How we think of school
Is our common understanding
It is something
Building our inner being
Defining so much
About who we are
And who, I,
as a Teacher
Can then be.



Beginning To Teach

Each year felt as if
I walked into a strange town
New community, unrecognized
a place with the need
To construct this as life.
I've had many new beginnings.

In teaching nothing was
Ever like an old song
It was always
The shock of the new
Waking up new ideas, new fibers
I've had many new beginnings.

One new beginning put
Me into nothing more than a closet, with a cart
A grade book, set of state curricular objectives, a classlist
and my lesson planner, 350 children to rotate
A rolling art cart
Serving to allow teachers a planning break
I've had many new beginnings.

One beginning I was locked and checked inside a metal cage
Afraid ever to step out onto the streets
Bullets flew, graffiti marred, rage roared
Heat, screams, restless tensions
With no books, few skills, no material goods, little hope
I've had many new beginnings.

One beginning I found
Myself within a community
where I didn't speak the language, then
Or really understand the culture
But I had Frosty The Snowman
And understood we could parrot.
I've had many new beginnings.

In one new beginning I was in an
Empty room in 1958, before I even was born transported
Thrust backward when a perky young head
Popped in to offer help
And to tell me about her life
She just popped up again a few months ago
I've had many new beginnings.

In one beginning I was
Up on a hill, piles of stuff
Exhausted, alone, in the mountains
With kids from the Rez
And holdng onto my collection of forbidden books
On black history
I've had many new beginnings.

In one beginning I
Decided to return to places
That didn't want a me there
And firmly called to tell me so
Violating every rule we have, of schools
No understanding there of worth.
So I went and unloaded my tricks
I've had many new beginnings.

In every beginning
I stood in the chaos of beginnings and my fears
Holding arms around myself
And sought the things
That we would do together.
To honor the days of our lives.
I've had many new beginnings.




The Child as Novel

Since childhood I'd peek
At the end of a book of fiction-novel
To see how it all came out
Then I'd work my way to the destination.
Not a cheat against myself, more
To appreciate the path there, the writer's choices.


With a child in my class
There is a sense of that hidden story
That I am gazing at the end
Of a journey already begun
That slowly I may read from
The pages of our own days together
As we go forward to write a sequel,
Or an alternate ending, or our forward.



Acts


Act I

I've held forth that what we do
Trumps what we say
Because early in my life
The lesson was well taught
That words spoken on many things
Can be be broken, withdrawn,
Forgotten, twisted, confused
Working to jettison hope.
But what you did, that was real
How you acted "was"

Act II

I built an artist within myself
Refining making into symbols
Meanings, visual, crafted, made
Learning processes and procedures
seeing this as the path to knowing self and others
Intuitive, creating, self-directed
Used to the messy chaos in a state of unknowing

Act III

I entered teaching
applying the lessons of art
Much like I entered
Relating, life, mothering
as a sticky, messy, making
Doing, playing, building,
Reading, coloring, construction
That can only exist in the
There and now, the here and us.

Act IV






Conversations In The Written Word

Two people ( or twenty)
Sit within a space
Exchanging right answers or thoughts
Their insights into a book or plot
Calling out gleefully
But in a conversation
There is the push and pull
The right answer
Bends to reveal
This always is evolving
Redefined, incorporating, observing
Theorizing, testing, turning over and around
Upside down.

In this conversation there is no "one."


How Do You See Me?

I did not ask
During this time we related
When so much occurred
So much was stated
So much was not
Who do you see
When you look my way?

The truth if you would
(my egos deflated)







Ideal / Real

I
You come loving to learn
Exploring, racing, touching, moving,
Talking, feeling, a wonder of parents

R
You get a seat, learn the rules
Slowly drop the petals,
Ask permissions, imitate, recite
Reproduce, take the test, listen carefully

I
You come a living question
Ready to challenge, turn, confront
Twist, dance, disassemble, knock down
Make, invite, figure out

R
You get your turn, a parking lot
Group norms, praise for conforming
A rational, logic system, a set theory
And a verbal warning

I
You come with your blocks
Your favorite toys, find friends,
Watch eyes, express feelings,
Spring forth from a womb

R

Now you are instructed
One of many not one,
Told what to do, modeled into systems,
Learning how it works "out there"
Contained, tamed
Socially framed


School has the role
Of talking the Ideals into the Realities.
If too imperfect a world then you
give rise to the terms "hidden curriculum"
And lose all meaning
To see the right one become the other.