A Reminder About Why We're Here: A Letter to My AP Students

To My AP Students:

Today I asked you to read a letter that my friend, Mrs. Paulsen, wrote to her students. I want to write to you now, and explain why we’ve gone away from the syllabus and the canon of classical literature here in AP class to read this letter.

Her letter is not to you, nor is to me. It is not about our classroom or about any poetry that we’ve read (until now). I believe it to be essential reading anyway. For in her words I see what is true, and I want to share that truth with you.

You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child you were expecting, but I do. You don’t know what it was like to be an adult and watch the Twin Towers fall, over and over again on TV, everywhere you went, hoping for a different ending every time; but I do. You don’t remember watching Bono at the Super Bowl, and you don’t still have some of the same chills every time you hear the song; I do. You don’t know what it’s like to be vulnerable in front of students, to walk that line between being a real person and being a bullet-proof god of academia, to share and to not share and to risk and to just pray that you won’t lose it, not today, even though a wound is bleeding more and more by the minute. Or what it’s like to be in Mrs. Paulsen’s classroom, to watch her with her students, to receive a glimpse of her heart in all that she does. You don’t know. But I do.

But there are other words in this piece that do resonate with you. I know there are, because it’s a great piece; it’s why I’m having you read it. For you know things that I don’t know. You’ve seen things that I haven’t seen. And you read her words, and you’re reminded of them all over again. They become real again. And that might crush you under the weight of emotion, make you jump for joy, warm your heart with the idea that you are not alone in this world, or simply make you turn up the corners of your mouth in a knowing smile. Or you will read it, widen your perspective, see me differently, and we’ll all be better.

The piece, when it was written, was not about you and me. But now it is. Now it’s in our hands. Now it enters through the eyes, worms its way around our brains, electrifying connections all over in times and places and emotions that we remember and even some that we don’t. If we let it, it keeps travelling all the way into our souls. It becomes ours. It speaks of something true that perhaps we knew but didn’t know we knew.

My class is better because of Mrs. Paulsen. And so I talk to my friends, my friends the English teachers, my friends the science teachers, my friends the accountants and the construction workers and the travelers and the parents and the jobless and the writers, because they are better than me. So much better than me. And if I can rub up against them, rub up against their life experiences and their lessons and take some of them back to you, then we all gain.

But that’s also why we do what we do in here. Yes, we are analyzing literature and finding meaning and breaking down authorial strategies in preparation for attempting to please the AP gods deciding your exam fate. But we are also helping you to live. For on some page, you will read about Elizabeth Bennett’s frustration or will or sass, and you will see your own. You will find your own goals and dreams and illusions of success in Gatsby and Death of a Salesman and hear about how they are a shiny, ghostly mess. You will read poems, new poems and old. They will speak to you about pain, about love, about how impossibly hopeless it feels to know that time and space cannot be manipulated, no matter how hard we try. You will find yourself somewhere in those poems. And while you don’t know it today, you will find the you that exists ten years from now, somewhere on that page. Some line, some phrase, some word will be yours. It will help you live. It will reinforce that you are alive right now.

And one day while we are writing in class, when I ask you to steal a sentence from another writer, make it your own, and see where your writing takes you, you will get it just right. Not the whole page. Not even the whole paragraph. But you will get one line or two just right, and you will share it with the person next to you. They won’t tell you this, but that line of writing will do for them on that day exactly what Mrs. Paulsen’s writing did for me.

We are in this class to live. Don’t ever forget that. In the middle of all the FRQ’s and the multiple choice practice and essays of analysis and the chapters of 18th Century literature that frustrate you, as you seek your “A” and the academic immortality of a high GPA, remember why we’re here. And I promise to work hard to remember that too.

- Dykstra           

Shannon Dykstra teaches American Lit and AP Lit and Comp at Mason City High School. A passionate UNI Panther and collector of various graduate degrees, Shannon also is an avid Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis, and all things Calvin and Hobbes disciple. You can read his meandering prose at his blog "Prone to Wander" or follow him on Twitter @Dykstra PTW.

On Love, Death, & Poetry Infections: A Letter to My 9th Grade Students

by Jenny Cameron Paulsen

Remember, about a month ago, when I burst into tears while reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “You Know Who You Are”?  So, about that.

That was not in the lesson plan.  

You’re smart, so you already know that.  I talked about this then, but it's taken some time and distance from the event to gain perspective.  I needed to explore the emotions that surfaced and write my way to understanding about the power of her words.

I've read this poem many times.  But reading these words for an audience, reading them aloud on a sunny day in my classroom, your faces bright with expectation, I was surprised to find new emotions surfacing.  Like the poet, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and longing for my world to be simpler.  Maybe bringing this state of consciousness  to the poem made me feel more vulnerable than usual.  When I reached the line, “Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words / and not one of them can save me,” my skin tingled in recognition at this beautifully simple metaphor. Did you feel a visceral reaction to those words as well?  Did you feel like the poet had somehow seen inside your heart and mind?  In my mind, my own “hurricane of words,” safely contained in my navy notebook of poetry scribbles, threatened on the horizon.  Perhaps because I thought I had lost this precious item, and I rediscovered it recently. Perhaps because I was nearing the anniversary of a crippling sorrow.  Perhaps because I know what it's like to wake up sobbing at three in the morning, and the only way to relieve the agony of the images whirling and haunting every moment, asleep and awake, is to write them down, to try harnessing the storm in the desperate hope that pinning the words to the page will save me from their unspeakable power.  

As I read through the previous paragraph upon revising, I almost removed that last sentence, afraid it might be too raw and confessional.  Then I remembered a quote from Neil Gaiman, shared at our English teaching conference this week by my treasured friend Kirstey Ewald, a teacher in Charles City: “That moment [while writing] when you think, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists inside, showing too much of yourself . . . that is the moment you might be starting to get it right.”  And so I let the sentence stand.  Because as a writer, I want to get it right.  And if I expect you to take risks in your writing, I should show you how.

Return to the poem: as I read the line “not one of them can save me,” the familiar sting of beginning tears surfaced.  I know you heard my voice hitch. Most of you suddenly sat up straighter.  But I sailed on to the next line thinking, “Keep it together, Jenny.  You cannot lay this burden at their feet.”  

Then I read, “Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together, / they float. / I want to tell you about the afternoon / I floated on your poems.”  A different afternoon of bright blue sky surfaced from the darkness of memory: stepping out of the hospital in Iowa City and sinking into the front seat, my husband and I both mute, numb with the grief of leaving without our first born, our twin daughters Lucie and Lillie, who emerged too soon from the womb, perfect and still.  The sunlight blinded—it could not pierce my personal darkness. On Saturday afternoon, September 15, 2001, I was in dire need of a raft of poems. Four days in and out of labor.  Four days of watching planes explode into the Twin Towers.  Four days so surreal and singular in all my personal history, they are singed into my memory with vivid, scarring clarity.  When I saw that particular patch of blue sky in my mind’s eye, I crumbled.  I knew I’d need a great deal of courage to finish reading the poem to you as I struggled for composure through hot tears.  My hands trembled, and my voice wobbled dangerously, but I swam on through the words, hoping a raft would float by in the torrent.

The raft appeared, in both the past and the present, when I reached the lines, “Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me, / like a raft, I felt words as something portable again.”  My voice strengthened in the present while remembering the past:  I was sitting on my couch, ten days after 9/11, seven days after the death of my daughters, watching Bono on television.  Vulnerable without his usual sunglasses, sang  "Walk On" as if written only for me:  “And if your glass heart should crack / And for a second you turn back / Oh no, be strong / Walk on, walk on.”  Yes, my glass heart had cracked.  That was exactly the image that contained all the grief I could not say.  For the first time in ten days, my heart lifted with hope, as if a raft had floated under the current and popped up in exactly the right place.  There was a moment of stillness in the storm.  It happened again in February when U2 performed “Beautiful Day” at the Super Bowl: “The heart is a bloom, shoots up through stony ground.”  Two heart images capturing both fragility and resilience.  Two messages of hope.  This is my raft.  These are my “portable” words I carry with me when I’m overwhelmed in the hurricane.

I’m not the only one for whom U2’s music is a raft.  In David Levithan’s lovely novel Love is the Higher Law, written about the events of 9/11, a number of New York City characters connect with U2's music, in addition to the work of many other artists, to make sense of their world after devastating change.  The character Peter says, “The song I latched onto most, the song that I would play ten times in a row because I needed to hear it all ten times, was ‘Walk On.’ It was that unexpected, almost religious thing: the right song at the right time” (119).  If you are looking for song lyrics to use as rafts, like all Levithan’s works, this book is full of them.  It’s one of the reasons he’s a favorite writer of mine.

Back in the classroom, we arrived at the end of the poem, Nye’s words echoing Bono’s: “You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other, / saying ‘This is what I need to remember’ / and then hoping you can.”  We all experience survival mode, where existence narrows to one foot in front of the other, and we chant our personal mantra over and over inside our heads to get through.  We make our world simpler in order to survive it.  This is the understanding of the poem I discovered in writing this letter to you.  Hold on to this truth when the world threatens.  Focus entirely on the next step only. And then the next. Do not dwell on the whole journey ahead.  This is how to combat the paralysis of fear.  In the famous words of Thoreau, “Simplify.”

As I gazed into your faces and saw your discomfort and empathy and tears, those of you who could still look at me instead of away, I knew I would have to tell you my story.  And that would require more courage and heart than I felt I had in reserve.  But I owed you an explanation about the power of words, especially spoken aloud, to trap us in a hurricane or lift us like a raft.  About the stealthy way grief sneaks up on you, unaware, and wrecks your heart, and sometimes your lesson plan.  

Words can haunt, and words can heal.  This is why we read and write: this interaction between the reader and writer, and all the connections, memories, and emotions he or she brings to the text.  What you bring to the text is as important as what I bring to it, and what the author brought to it.  John Green even says his books "belong to their readers now, which is a great thing—because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.” I hope you felt this power as you read along with me, your own images flashing in your mind.  I know you all have your own rafts.  When you are feeling brave, I hope to hear about them someday.  Because the only thing more powerful than what we each bring to a text, the only thing more powerful than a text by itself, is the meaning we create together from our shared experience of reading and discussing it.

Please know that I was uncomfortable, too.  There is nothing more terrifying than laying your fragile heart bare in front of a crowd.  A week later, I was worrying I hadn’t handled it well, (to be honest, I’m still worrying), and I felt ashamed I hadn’t contained my emotions and protected you from them.  I regretted laying my heaviest burden on your unsuspecting young shoulders.  And my dear friend and writing coach, Shaelynn Farnsworth said, “Don’t you think it would’ve been worse to cry and not tell them why?”  Yes.  No doubt.  But, it would’ve been better not to cry at all, I thought, trying to channel the strength of Matt “it-doesn’t-count-unless-the-tears-leave-the-eye” de la Peña.   But my tear ducts are apparently not macho enough nor deep enough to contain the well of my sorrow and shame.  

Speaking of Matt de la Peña, it’s only in writing this letter that I finally discovered my answer to his two word assignment imitating this sentence from "Steady Hands at Seattle General" by Denis Johnson: “When I look back at my life all I see are wrecked cars.”  My replacement for "wrecked cars"?  Blue skies. These two words could take me to a lot of places as a writer: the layers of possible meanings, the irony in associating blue skies with sadness as well as happiness, the various significant blue sky images I remember throughout my life. What do you think? Have you discovered your two words?

Later in the day, I received a serendipitous tweet from Shaelynn, (retweeted from Bud Hunt, @budtheteacher) with a link to a Naomi Shihab Nye video, “The Art of Teaching Poetry.”  In the video, Nye talks about bursting into tears at a dinner party while listening to a guest recite a Longfellow poem from memory because she was so moved by its “exquisite beauty.” So, I’m not alone.  Bursting into tears while reading or listening to poetry might be a thing.  I feel a little better.

What Nye said in her video rings so true to me.  “What gives us a relationship with poetry, it’s our love for the poems that we’ve known, what they’ve done for us.” Absolutely! I want you all to strengthen your relationship with poetry, to find poems to love, and to share them with our learning community. While the most pervasive form of poetry in our culture is song lyrics, I hope to add other kinds of poetry to your reading life.  You are living at a time with unprecedented access to poetry.  Read as much of it as you can.   (Start at Poetry 180 online.)  When you do, Nye suggests,  “Find places of real love within yourself for lines, for voices, for topics, for ways of writing, for styles that will help you create an atmosphere where poetry becomes contagious.”  YES!  That’s exactly what I want!  A poetry infection.  Don’t you?  Maybe not, but I will continue to share the poems I love with you, no matter what emotions steal up and mug me while reading.

Finally, Nye suggests rather than worrying about “getting” poetry, we should approach it from a curiosity standpoint, asking:  “Do you like it? Where does it take you? What does it make you think of?”  Using this approach as a teacher involves some risk.  It’s messy and unpredictable, but your answers are interesting and thoughtful and worthy of exploration.  It’s what makes your one-pagers on poetry so much fun to read and think about.  One of them is never the same as another.  Many of you are worried though, about “getting it.” Or more likely you're afraid of not "getting it" right. Some of the most beautiful poems I carry with me mystify me.  I can’t say I “get” them, but I love certain lines.  (For examples, check out any e.e. cummings poem or Shakespearean sonnet.)  What matters most is your willingness to travel with a poem.  Thinking in a “getting it” mentality is destination-focused.  To change your thinking about poetry, consider that it’s more journey-focused.  The obstacles, the sidetracks, the traveling companions, and the scenery along your journey of reading the poem are all of far more interest.  Besides, every poem has multiple destinations of arrival.  Choose your path.  Pay attention en route.  Report back about where you end up.

I just read a preview of a presentation (via Facebook status) from our art teacher Mr. McCormick where he observes how our culture is immersed in media violence and death while creating a “societal disconnection with real death.” I like the way he always pushes me to think deeply and differently.  It only occurs to me now, after reading about this idea, that while I’m anxious to protect you from a quiet and personal death, we are reading and discussing a book narrated by Death, about one of the most violent times in world history: WWII.  My personal tragedy seems small, almost inconsequential in this context. There’s an irony in this tension between the personal and political.  Most of the great works of literature you’ll read in school are tragic.  But to speak of the deaths that may personally haunt us is taboo.  I am wondering why we teach so many tragic narratives in school, yet the life skills associated with management of fear and grieving, perhaps our hardest human work, are not taught.  As suggested by Mr. McCormick, art, in all its forms, can be a way of owning and harnessing our grief and fear.  Perhaps we can explore these ideas together.  If we all, like the character Death in The Book Thief, are “haunted by humans,” why do we suffer in silence?   Chew on that and get back to me.

So, this letter was also not in my lesson plan.  But I have hope that something within it will reach you.  Because I don’t want you to feel compelled to respond, or like we have a Great Wall of Awkward between us, I wanted to discuss how you might  respond to this type of letter.  Well, it’s not an assignment, so you may leave it behind and never think of it again.  But I hope you don’t.  If you are moved to do so, you could write one back at some point in the future.  You might share a line that got you thinking and where it leads.  You could lift a line and write your own story.  Maybe write a letter to someone else and see where it takes you.  If it makes sense to do so, you might refer to something within in it during a discussion or one-pager.  But for now, please tuck it into your notebook and think about the power of words.  That is all I ask.

Thank you for traveling with me on this journey even though you weren’t sure where I was going.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure either.  But I’m happy at our place of arrival.  Keep this raft from U2 stowed away in your reserves:  “Walk on / stay safe tonight.”

And here’s one more raft especially for you from me:  Make wise choices.

Mrs. Paulsen

Jenny Cameron Paulsen teaches English (and knitting) to 8th and 9th graders at Holmes Junior High in Cedar Falls, Iowa. A graduate of Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, she writes bad poetry in her steno notebook and sometimes blogs about life as a teacher at 2020teachervision.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter @JennyPaulsen555.

Dear Jordan

Dear Jordan,

I know you think of me as your “second Mom,” and I’m not sure how I ever landed in that role. I never intended to be anyone’s mother; I don’t envision motherhood in my future. But I guess you’ve seen many things in me over the past few years that I’ve never been able to see in myself. You make me a better person and teacher because I have to live up to what you already think I am.

I didn't like you at first, but you knew that already. You didn’t listen and you blurted out all the time and I sent you in the hall during the first week of school in your seventh grade year. You were a top student and a hard worker, but we butted heads and you rubbed me the wrong way. It’s okay; I’m hard to please.

When you came back as an 8th grader, things changed. I share more of myself with students in their second year, and you realized we were more alike than you’d previously thought. Maybe I always knew we were alike, and I was scared to see those parts of me reflected back. We’re both searching for mothers to love and accept us, and we both can’t quite stop from wanting that connection. We both don’t like what we see when we look in the mirror. We both would rather read and write and daydream than live in the real world.

Our personalities are also incredibly different. You spend volunteer hours trying to organize my classroom, and I can see the vein pulse in your forehead when you drop by to visit and see the hurricane wreckage of my desk. You love to get involved and spend time around others, and I’m just learning how to do that as an adult. You are organized and dependable and you take charge. Sometimes I wonder why you look up to me so much. You can juggle more than I can, even though you are half my age.

I know I’m probably not supposed to say this, because you are a student and I am your former teacher, but you are special to me. You are someone that I hope can be my friend someday, instead of just teacher and student. I am your second mom, but you were the first student who has been anything near my “daughter.”  I can’t wait to see you grow into the amazing person I know you will be someday. I am filled with pride that I have had a tiny part in forming who that person ends up to be.

Thank you for not giving up on me just because you moved on to the high school and left me behind. Thank you for being the president of my unofficial fan club and the person who has so often made me realize that what I do matters. Thank you for being you.

With Much Love,

Hauptsteen

Missy Springsteen-Haupt cannot seem to decide which of her three last name combinations she likes best on any given day. She is an expert in the art of awkward writing and has never met a run-on sentence she doesn't like. She blogs at themrshauptsteen.weebly.com.