In the course of my teaching day on Friday,
two things were bothersome.
The first occurred when I read a poem with
my Honors freshmen. It’s a prose poem by
Jack Gilbert entitled “Waiting and Finding" which appeared in the July, 2013 issue of The Sun. In it, the poet mentions
a memory from his early school days, and in order to set up the poem for my
students, I asked if they’d had the experience in elementary school of a
teacher pulling out a box of instruments and distributing them to kids in the
class to play as an accompaniment to group singing. A roomful of faces stared
back at me in wonderment. I shared with
them my own experience of having a song book in my classroom desk each year of
elementary school. Once a week—because it
was part of the curriculum—the teacher would tell us to “get out your song
books,” and for a half an hour or so, we would sing American folk and patriotic
songs like “America the Beautiful” and “This Land is Your Land” and “The ErieCanal” and “Tingalayo.” (Click on the song titles to listen to them on YouTube.) As we sang, kids
used a wide variety of percussion instruments like maracas and tom toms and tambourines and cymbals and castanets to keep time and punctuate the cacophonous music we made,
and for a shy kid like me, it was a chance to sing along without fear of being
heard.
“Why didn’t we get to do that in elementary
school?” my modern day students asked, and I nearly choked up in answering
them.
“Because your teachers were busy preparing
you for those all-important state tests,” I told them. And I also told them, as I often do, that
they are the next in line to rule the world, and as future school board members
or school superintendents or state senators or governors, they can change
things. They should change things.
And also on Friday, I asked each class
period of freshmen if they knew why they weren’t coming to school on Monday.
“It’s some holiday,” I heard in reply.
“Labor Day?” someone asked.
They didn’t know.
Telling them “Veteran’s Day” didn’t
help. They didn’t understand what it was
for. So I explained. And then I had them write a brief paragraph
on what it means to be a soldier. For
once, no one complained. No one tried to
waste time with questions or stall tactics.
They all simply began writing.
Because they all know someone who is serving or has served in some
branch of the military. And they wrote
these amazing paragraphs about what it means to sign up for a job that might
kill you or maim you or at the very least, require you to leave your family and
friends and reside on foreign soil for long periods of time in uncomfortable
conditions.
So I guess, yeah, they do really know what
the day is for. They just needed a
moment to muse on it.
