Fifteen Gifts – Day One

{An Introduction} This Monday was a terrible, no good, very bad day with my 8th graders. There was yelling. I kicked a girl out of class. I cried on the way home from school, and that hasn’t happened in a while between this group and I. I was crying so hard I had to pull over and collect myself so that I wouldn’t upset Hadley and Harper when I picked them up from school. I did not want to go back. Even now as I write this I’m fantasizing about working at some kind of cute stationary/coffeeshop/wine store where I get to design paper products and write book reviews and read and write my own stuff. We’re going to hold book readings and poetry readings and writing workshops and the only rule is you can’t write on a computer. You have to bring in notebooks and pens or pencils. You don’t have one? That’s OK. They’re on sale in my cute staionary/coffeeshop/wine store. Yes, I made those sugar cookies. Yes, you can have two. What’s that? You’d like me to read an excerpt from my latest Newberry? Oh goodness, OK. But just this one time, and then you need to go write.

I did go back, and I was sitting at my desk in the classroom looking over my lesson plan for the day, trying to figure out what it is I’m doing wrong so I can make it right. Two women walk in, they were substitute teachers, but in my mind they were angels because they stood with me for about fifteen minutes and they talked with me about this class. They made me laugh. One of them said, “My kids are grown and they refer to   the middle school years as the ‘years that must not be named.'” The other one told me about a kind of nut that takes years and years to grow and rarely does anyone see the change. “They’re not like peanuts,” she told me. These nuts have more of a journey to take.

The women met with a group of kids in the back of the room for a few minutes, and when they were finished, one of them asked me if I’d read the latest Ann Voskamp blog. “It’s about feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. You know, never feeling like you can get a handle on any of it.” She put a pen she borrowed back on the desk. “It’s about grace, too.”

I don’t normally read Ann Voskamp, but I read it and she had me hooked when she wrote that grace doesn’t always feel good. I don’t like it when people tell me grace should feel good because I don’t always believe that. I wondered if maybe what I am experiencing with this group of 8th graders is grace.

Before these women came into the classroom, I was counting how many days I had left with these kids (I know, I’m awful). Fifteen days. Two weeks. I was thinking of giving myself fifteen little gifts for getting through each day: a pair of flip flops one day, a donut another. Maybe I buy myself flowers on another day. After they left though, and Ms Voskamp gave me a new definition of grace, I thought, “What if I found one gift with these 8th graders from now until they are no longer mine?”

So I think that’s what I’ll try to do. Here’s Day One:

We read, “Taking A Dare,” by Nicholasa Mohr today. A girl takes Communion without confessing, on a dare. She writes that she was sick of her friends’ humble brags regarding how awesome and pure they feel after confessing. She tells them confessing is no big deal – she’s going to take Communion without confessing. They can’t believe she’s going to do it. They say surely she will go to hell for this offense.

The girl follows through on her dare, but she’s afraid and worried she’s done something wrong. Years later, she confesses what she’d done to a priest. He gives her a small penance compared to what she thought she’d get. “Afterward,” Mohr writes, “I admitted to myself that it was a great relief to be able to confess and remove those dreaded sins from my conscience. But I never once admitted my relief to Casilda, Wanda, Mary, and little Ritchie, or even Joey. After all was said and done, I had won the dare. My newfound clean conscience remained my secret.”

I wondered what my students thought of this. Is faith strongest when you don’t show it? What is it that’s growing and hidden in this classroom that I will never see? Will it be strong enough to take with them?

We’re studying poetry as well as Creative Nonfiction because it’s National Poetry Month and also because I’ve learned the busier I keep this class the less problems we have.

Today, we’re reading “Paul Revere’s Ride.” I tell them a little about the background and the poet, Longfellow. I tell them the elementary school I went to was named after Longfellow. I show them pictures of me in grade school. One of me at my 6th birthday party. Another on Halloween dressed like Cyndi Lauper and Geoff is a Chiquita banana. Another of me in 5th grade with a perm. I don’t know why I show them these pictures. To share, I guess. To make them laugh. They’re such a tough group and I love making them laugh.

We go outside to read the poem because it’s beautiful out. Spring is here and I think it’s here to stay. My classroom with all these kids in it is so stuffy and today’s the day when the sun melts the tension I carry between my shoulder blades so that it hurts to breath away. Today’s the day when the breeze is just right – a whisper of cool so as not to disrupt the glory of the sun.

I didn’t plan to take them outside, but one student saw me take the 7th grade class outside and asked if they could do the same. In the history of teaching, I never change my plans at the spur of the moment, except with this class. I don’t know why. I want to make them happy. They make me take risks. Be bold. They make me try so hard and forget about everything else so that when I come home I have nothing left. For anyone.

So we go outside and they work. I can’t believe they work, but they do. What would’ve taken 45 minutes of me “sshing” and trying to lead a discussion takes twenty minutes.

One girl and her friend finish early and they stand. She begins to spin around and around and I think about fifth grade when one of my classmates did the same thing. She spun and she spun and I guess the spinning made her think she could fly because she jumped and I don’t know how she did it but she was parallel to the ground, and about three feet above it. We all gasped in awe and also delight because we knew she would fall smack! to the ground and the room was dead silent but in seconds it would be filled with moronic laughter, the best kind. I could feel it gurgling in my stomach.

Taking flight must be universal because this girl did the same thing and watching her I was eleven all over again, writing complete sentences and then I wasn’t because I was laughing. How does someone think they can fly when they start to spin? I spin and I spot something so I know where I am; where I’m going. How do you get to be so bold to spin and lose track of where you are, feel nauseous, and if that weren’t enough, lift off to see if you can fly? Of course you can’t fly, but do you do it anyway because what if? What if you flew? What if you took Communion without confessing and got away with it and ended up with a stronger, haunted faith you’ll never be able to articulate no matter how hard you try?  What if you did things you were afraid of?

You fall to the ground. You fail. For a moment though, it wasn’t that way. For a moment you had lift off. Maybe that’s enough to try again. I dare you.