One Friday, while doing service at a neighboring High School after-school program, I was working with a student who was writing a poem about Baltimore. His assignment was to pick a place in Baltimore that he had visited and complete a worksheet that asked him to write about specific sensory details of the place including smell, sight, sound, season, time of day, weather, temperature and what he did while he was there. He had picked the Inner Harbor, a place he had visited a few years prior with his family and was having trouble picking out exact details of the place. Once the worksheet was complete, he was supposed to write at least ten lines of a poem, inspired by the details he had written down, so the fact that he couldn’t remember details was impeding the process that had been set out for him.
Oddly enough, I had recently been given an assignment to write a poem about rain. In a dance class, we were to lay back and listen to the sounds of the rain, list all the sounds we could think of, let our minds exist fully in memory of rain, feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing. We were then to fill our lists with these sensory details and rearrange the things we wrote into a poem. I don’t remember the last time I wrote a poem, but for some reason, this was simple for me; in fact, it was enjoyable. I used some of the tactics we used in dance to help the student, and I completed the assignment alongside him so that we would both construct poems from our own memories.
First, I gave him one minute to create a word dump of everything he thought of when he thought of his trip to the Inner Harbor. We wrote furiously for sixty seconds and then I told him to use these words to create phrases, sentences, and more full ideas that could be crafted into lines and there we sat next to each other molding our lists into poetry. I know this may come as a shock (not), but mine was overly sentimental and emotional. It was about one of my very best friends and the fact that, because I met her upon my arrival to college, I associate her with Baltimore. I wrote about our excursions to the Inner Harbor and how grateful I am that we could escape campus for a little while together. (The looming thought of graduation had transformed me into quite the basket case.)
When I was finished writing my poem I went to the bathroom and when I came back the student had gone off to chat with some friends since his once seemingly impossible assignment was complete and I stole the opportunity to take a peek at the finished product. It was hilarious. I wish I could have written it down so that you could experience for yourself how funny it was, but I will try to give you a taste: he wrote about the whirlwind of sensory details; he wrote that on his visit to the Inner Harbor, he was overwhelmed by the plethora of smells emitted from food and from cars, the lights of the stores and their reflections in the windows and in the water, the yelling, honking, tires screeching, talking and walking of the crowds of people hurrying through the city. But he also wrote about his family and the meal they shared. Towards the end, he described the nauseous feeling he had after eating, describing the city as if it was a smorgasbord (he literally got out a dictionary in order to use this fantastic word). Reading it, I felt like I was on a dizzying ride at a carnival, constantly being hit in the face with something else to hear, feel, do, see, smell or taste. He ended with a warning to his audience to avoid vomiting because of the dizziness of his experience. It was incredibly well written and entertaining due to his excellent use of humor, but more importantly, it was exciting because the two of us had sat next to each other crafting our poetry and had created shockingly different products.
I chose to do service at a high school specifically in order that I might better make a decision about my own career path. Considering teaching, but not really knowing which age group I would prefer to work with, I wanted to try my hand at both building relationships and facilitating academic conversations with high school students. I was expecting something serious; basically, I was expecting to fill some sort of adult-like (and absolutely zero fun) role as if I would suddenly stop being enthusiastic or energetic, as if I would grow up into someone other than me. I also thought if I pursued a teaching career, I should have all the answers. I felt so unprepared, so young, so not ready because I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do, how to do it, what to say or how to say it. Guess what! I still don’t have the answers, but here is what changed: I don’t want to or need to.
Reading (and giggling at) this particular student’s poem made me realize that the answers matter so much less than the questions. By asking him what he remembered, what words came to mind, how his memories could fit together, he created his own answer, his own response, his own artistic creation to express something that I could never have imagined. I loved it so much because it was his, not mine, because it was honest to his experience, not mine. I want to teach because I want to ask questions and I want to be there to witness the creation of each student’s own answer. I want to teach English because literature has the power to ask questions within the context of someone else’s perspective. We immerse ourselves into text but we’re still us. We bring into everything we do our ideas, our lives, our passions, our joy and our pain and we come out changed as we integrate another’s story into our own. No one that enters into a particular book will come out the same as another person who reads it, but we all come out with new dreams, our own individual responses, and a changed perspective on the world around us. I don’t need any answers; I just need to keep challenging myself and those around me to ask all the questions we can possibly ask.
