Break Out the Tap Shoes

Okay, so I'll admit that the classroom is all wrong. I'm teaching on the bottom floor this semester, in a squared-off white-block room primarily reserved for criminal justice classes. The residual vibes are hinky. When I enter the room, my mind seizes, all those shadow words about police procedure jamming my normal thought processes. My creative feelers are sticky from the nasty web in the doorway.

I'll also admit that the class is at 2:30. The grayed-out sky doesn't help. The students (and I) have too much to do.

But, come on...an eye roll? Really?

My class in the white-block room is called Teaching Writing, a course designed to help future teachers reverse the negativity many students feel about writing. My syllabus argues that words and ideas can change the world. I do believe in the transformative power of writing, just as Professor Keating does in Dead Poets Society. Mentally, I rip, rip, rip the formalist pages out of J. Evans Pritchard's Introduction to Literature. I throw my ideas about teaching writing into the air, hoping that they break open in front of my students' eyes, that at least one idea will be carried home to sprout.

Tonight I'm feeling like the room won.

Next week I'll go back, carrying my passion for writing like a disfiguring hump on my back. "Look at me!" I'll cry, just before I strap on my shiny black tap shoes.

On Writing

Today I searched through books on writing, on the teaching of writing, for a new course I'm offering in the fall. It's an honor for me to teach composition theory to eager fledgling teachers, but it's a daunting task. So much hangs in the balance: how can I reveal to them the secrets of being an inspiring writing teacher, the art of balance on the tightrope? Do I even know the secrets? Can I keep my balance?

I was shamed into writing this post after reading a new blog by a former student who is headed off to earn her MFA at LSU, where she will perform her magic trick for a new audience-- blowing jewel-toned words onto the page, lovely words that cast color and reflect light. She began her blog by saying that she hadn't written since graduation, that one who calls herself a writer must actually write. And so, here I am, writing out of guilt.

Like Sarah, I can't write at home. At school, in my small office full of books and carefully collected treasures, I can write tight academic prose. I can grade papers, create curriculum, solve problems with my words, but I can't string together a line of words that move me...or anyone else. At home, it is only early in the morning or very late at night when the words come to me, albeit limpingly. Here, there is too much distraction...laundry to be folded, dogs to be let outside, dinner to be thawed and cooked. Voices rise and fall with needs and desires. I am not a writer within the walls of my home; I am a mother, a wife, a woman of sand and straw. It is only when I am away from home that the words come tumbling. At the beach, fully formed sentences and paragraphs roll into my brain. On the road, I fill my journal with detailed notations: room descriptions, conversations overheard, life's truths unraveled. If I lived at the beach in a small gray weathered cottage, would my words force the air from the room? If I'd taken that other lonelier path, would I be someone called Joyce Carol Oates or Kate Chopin?

Maybe location has nothing to do with my productivity. It may be that I don't have enough strong magic to blow clear emerald and ruby bubbles into the air. Perhaps the sawdust within me coats my powers, leaving me only enough creativity to wonder what might have been.

I'm putting myself to the test of fire this summer. Am I more than sand and straw? Look for me at Panera or Starbucks or Barnes and Nobles, where I'll be waiting for the words to come.

Be a Teacher; Change a Life, or Something Like That

I'm getting old, I think. My teacher's optimism is graying at the roots. Proof? I spend a little of each teaching day in my building's kitchenette, hands gripping one of my many mugs that celebrate creativity, grousing about my students' lack of interest.

I can't fathom disinterest. I was never able to wrap my hungry mind around this dead concept, but when I was younger, disinterest seemed to have a cure. I would reach them, I knew, if I just tried hard enough. I used to play a game--a capture the flag kind of game, (capture the mind, I suppose) although my opponents never even knew they were playing. The game went this way: when I noticed a disinterested student, a student staring out of the window or a distractedly doodling student, I would flip on my power switch--teaching directly to that lost student, ever more determined to bring him back to the heat of my focus. Most often, it worked, and then our classroom would hum along in some approximation of intellectual unity.

The game doesn't seem to work these days because the ranks of disinterested students have grown, seemingly multiplying indifference infinitely. Even today, there might have been a bland explosion in one of the first floor classrooms. Sometimes, though, I still pull off that willing suspension of disbelief, and the students follow me leapfrog style to the interior of the human heart. When they don't follow, stubbornly digging their heels into mediocrity, I can't believe it's all me. I continue to work the crowd, pulling out the props as I do from my bag of tricks--a joke here, a startling fact there, a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo thrown in for good measure.

In the kitchen later, sipping on lukewarm, bitter Maxwell House, I tell my story. Recently, it's always the same, though the class and seasons change. Here is what I have said and probably will continue to say: The hardest punch isn't that my young people impatiently shrug off the lovely bell-shaped words that I offer them each class, words carefully collected from the likes of Morrison and Silko, magical words that peal inside the heart. Worse than their rejection of this luminescent word pool is the dull sound made by the hasty and indifferent slamming of so many minds' doors.

To Truman Capote

Truman,
are you there?
Sometimes I hear
your next drink
sloshing in the shaker,
small ice crystals
frenzied in their swirl,
both numbing
and greasing at once.
An olive, Mr. Capote?
After all, where does a
mind like yours go
when a heart like yours
ceases to beat?
If I breathe deeply
enough, expanding
my nostrils for
maximum intake,
will one of the molecules
expelled by you find its way
into me?
Will I then be breathing in
a little of the Clutters,
a little more of Perry and Dick,
and some of the darkness you
carried with you to the end?
Though I don't have
94% recall, will some of you
bleed through my pen,
creating havoc on my yellow
legal pad?
If you could, Truman,
would you prime the pump
for me?
Unleash the words clogging
my brain, help them drip,
drip, drip into a pool of
wonder on the page.
I'll see your reflection
when I gaze upon it,
I promise.
In the meantime, Truman,
I'll continue to lead them
to the altar of you.