a poem about bored teachers in faculty meetings

I wrote this a few years ago, after looking around a faculty meeting at several zoned out colleagues.

In the Middle Ages,
were there second-rate martyrs,
friars who offered up
thrice used prayers from folders filled
with last years' parchments?
Did any go to the gallows
rolling their eyes and sighing
heavily?
Were there holy men at the Diet of Worms
doodling runes in the margins of manuscripts?
Did Father Do-Little
look out the window and dream
while others debated transubstantiation and
the Holy Mystery?
Were there monks who phoned it in?
Who celebrates these also-rans,
the guys and gals who may have meant well
in the beginning,
but somewhere along the way got tired?
Let us today praise below-average saints,
hosanna in the pretty-high.
In every group portrait tucked in a triptych,
someone must fill in the background,
come in 5th place in the tapestry weaving contest,
look up adoringly at the Bishop of Chartres.
Today, with the grace of God,
There go I.

what are we doing

Students got their grades today for the first quarter. One came to me to ask about her B- in my class. She thought it would be higher. We took a look at her grades for the quarter, talked for a few minutes, and then she burst into tears. She felt so much pressure, and she wasn't sure where it was coming from. Her parents weren't on her back, her teachers (me included) weren't riding her, but she felt so much pressure. It made me very sad. She's a good kid, an ok student, and she seems pretty sure of herself most of the time. But she has some indescribable sense that she is not doing enough, that she is falling behind. And she doesn't even know where she is trying to get; she just senses that she's not doing enough. What are we doing to these teenagers?

J.

if you just reach one student

Friday I had a twenty minute conversation with a student. She wanted to talk about sexism, about how she was tired of guys telling her she was "pretty funny, for a girl," about how even though she is thrilled about Obama's presidency, she thinks H. Clinton (and even S. Palin) got rough-handled because of their gender. She talked about how great it was to go to an all girl camp, where girls were the athletic ones, the funny ones, the smart ones, not the boys. It was a good talk, a rollicking, laughing, thoughtful conversation. And at the end, I asked her if she had any all women schools on her list of colleges she was considering. She said, "no?" and we laughed about that, too.

Today, I smiled at her as she turned in her test and asked her if she had any more thoughts about colleges. She smiled and said that she looked hard at Bryn Mawr over the weekend and asked her guidance counselor if she could add it to her list. If you just reach one student . . .

Honesty

Class Friday was Dreadfully Dull. I asked my students to read excerpts from papers they were turning in that day on Their Eyes Were Watching God. One student after another regurgitated points we had made all week about Janie's quest for independence and love, about how her hair represented her freedom, or about the porch's important role in the African American community. But no one had anything to say, positive or negative, about the other students' writings. We were going through the motions of a class, a group of isolated individuals sitting together but not really connecting.

Then C. volunteered to read from his paper. He launched into a description of his early childhood as an Asian student in a predominately white community in the mid west. He talked about the favoritism he received from some teachers because he was the only minority in the class; he described the rock thrown through his family's window because they were "other." And he compared himself to the least likable character in the novel we had read, a black woman who hates her race and wishes she were white. C. described how he sometimes wishes he weren't Asian, and how he sometimes hates a white majority that leads him into that moment of self-denial.

He put it all out there, his anger, his confusion, his desire to be different, and his darkest feelings about himself society and God. But it was all in the context of a novel we read in class, from a student who seldom contributes and who is not the strongest academic student in the room.

When he stopped speaking, there was nervous laughter followed by authentic applause. The previously disengaged students were riveted. They had been shocked out of their reveries by C's honesty. And while C. read, we were all tied together by his scathing, brutally honest connection to a troubling character in a novel. What a powerful moment, one of those electric days in a classroom.