Why Am I Suddenly Telling Stories To My Students?

1 Oct 2018
           So, I'm tasked with teaching poetry this year. Not my passion, not my content, not my anything. I kinda suck at it, to be honest. I have my three poets I love and ...scene. However, since I am not allowed to teach my love theatre, and I wish to pay my bills, I am figuring it out. Sure, sure I could teach plays written in a meter if I wished to torture non theatre kids (many of whom who were assigned poetry by their counselors because it's "easy") with Tartuffe.  And I already did sonnets and that was pretty rough...so, I decided, after doing Shakespeare sonnets, to do children's  poetry via Shel Silvestein and Dr. Seuss. Sounded easier than sonnets.
          It sounded easier...
          Spoiler Alert: These Are Not Children's Poets.
          This is a fact I knew on some level, but did not fully understand until I had to teach them.
          Sons of bitches.
          So, since  I write alongside my students, so they can see poor examples and feel better about their own journey, I was doing the pre-writing verbal vomit process: use a social or political issue that has impacted you and then explain it to children using poetry.
           My verbal vomit and social issue was a memory from the Boulder Mall Crawl in 1980 Something. Dressed in  what I had cobbled together in my closet, based around the weird punk I had been and the "Funky Annie Hall" a professor had recently dubbed me, I was something of a low rent Mary Poppins. Or Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice. Same Thing. Anywhoo, my boyfriend and a few other friends were crawling along, as is the ritual, and some guy behind me grabbed a handful of something that did not belong to him. In case you're not a careful reader- he grabbed something that belonged to me. Something attached. As I was in college and the new, proud owner of a green belt in tae kown do, I promptly connected by elbow to his nose. The few fellow crawlers in the vicinity who saw the exchange--it's a "crawl" for a reason, the mall was packed--gave me dirty looks. I heard someone say "You don't even know if it was him".
            Well...here's the deal, Spanky. Based on your comment, I know that  you saw him, or whoever it was, do it. So if I was wrong, then shouldn't you have pointed out the perpetrator to me? You did not, leading me to believe I had the right guy, and he didn't complain or respond, he just shoved his body into the crowd. Based on this circumstantial evidence, I believe Sherlock himself would have supported my verdict.

             
           I am sharing this for several reasons. I think you are smart, and can sense my subtext.  But I also realized something completely unrelated: these kids know more about me than any of my theatre students did.  I  have a  few theatre kids in the class, and I looked at them and said "I never told stories about myself in theatre, did I?" There was an emphatic "Nope", and a student asked me why? He said he figured the theatre kids would know me well. I paused, because they did know me well, they just didn't know my personal stories. I wondered why. Then it hit me: it was the content. I love theatre, I worship theatre, theatre is not what I do but who I am. There is simply no time, when you are worshipping and inspiring others to do so, for your stupid personal stories.

           In conclusion, all in all, to sum up, that is why I will never be a great language arts teacher.