Finding Your Story In A Story

 

{This is a little something I wrote for Ypsilanti Community School’s “Off the Shelf” newsletter.}

The night before I interviewed for the At-Risk Literacy Specialist position at YIES and Perry, I asked Jesse what he thinks I should do if I’m asked about the teaching job I left three months earlier.

“Should I even say anything?” I asked him.

“If you can tell a story, then yes,” Jesse said.

Jesse, who’s known me since I was 19, wasn’t telling me to lie. He was speaking my language, and my language is storytelling. I am fascinated with the truth – the hard, the confusing, the hilarious, the overwhelming, the glorious – and I make sense of the truth by putting it into a story.

But I had no story for the truth of why I left a 6^thgrade ELA position mid-year. The truth was I was quite successful at the school I taught in. The truth was the job was so much work, and so stressful that most days I was sick before or after school. The truth was my administrator was one of the best I’d worked for. She was knowledgeable, caring, captivating, and 100% supportive of her students. The truth was if I had to write one more “daily learning target,” one more, “I can” statement, give one more standardized test, sit in one more meeting, I believed I would disintegrate.

I don’t remember what I said in the interview with the principals that morning. I did my best to express my love for learning and curiosity and wonder, but I had no stories to tell of these things. The truth was I was afraid I didn’t belong in schools anymore – places I love and often felt more at home than my own home – and I was sure that my fear seeped from me and dripped all over my resume and onto the table where the three of us sat.

But here I am, about a year and a half later, and I think I’m learning that it’s OK to keep trying to do and learn what it is I love even when I can’t rely on a story I’ve created, and instead hold fragments of the truth in my hands and heart.

It is my love of story that is teaching me this lesson.

For example, one afternoon, I stepped out of the library at the same time a young student was running and screaming down the hallway.

“Can you help me?” her teacher asked.

I didn’t think I could, but I blurted out, “Sure,” and after that, all I could think of to say was, “Do you want to read some stories?”

The little girl stopped, mid-run and mid-scream, and asked, “You got any Berenstain Bears?”

Really? I thought. Berenstain Bears? How about Kevin Henkes? Jacqueline Woodson? Mo Willems?

“Sure,” I said in my most enthusiastic voice, “let’s find some Berenstain Bears.” I extended my hand, she grabbed it, and led me into the library where she pulled out all the Berenstain Bear books the library had. Then she read them, one by one. She read fluently, expressively, and with so much conviction I don’t think I’ll ever read these stories the same way again. Papa Bear isn’t a doofus – he’s a good guy who loves his kids. Mama Bear isn’t all that one dimensional – she is nuanced – patient, and kind. Sure, she gets angry and annoyed sometimes, but doesn’t every mother?

“I know why Brother Bear hit Sister Bear,” my first grade friend told me. “She was giving him tone. She had it coming!”

Spoken like a true sibling.

“They’ll be OK, though,” she assured me. “They’re brother and sister.”

These books, I assumed, had nothing to do with her life, or her current situation, and yet there she sat reading about these Bears as though they were old friends. And reading calmed her down. Maybe the bears gave her a different story to walk around in. Maybe the fiction helped her with the truth.

 

In April, the 5^thgraders at YIES read four short stories, and studied four types of poems to accompany those stories. They read, “All Summer in a Day,” and wrote haikus about the sun. They read, “Scout’s Honor,” a story about a group of boys who live in the Bronx, and decide to go camping, in nature, which they decide must be in Jersey. They wrote free verse poems called, “Where I’m From” poems based off of George Ella Lyons’ poem, “Where I’m From.” This was an exercise in exploring how our perspectives, personalities, and our thoughts about the world and how it works are shaped by the environment and community we grow up in. We read, “Thank You, M’am,” by Langston Hughes, and I had the students write spine poetry. This is a fun type of poetry where they pulled books from the shelves, and lined the spines up so they make a poem. The idea is to make sense out of something that at first seems senseless; to match words up that seem matchless. In “Thank You, M’am,” a young boy attempts to rob an old lady, and while one could make a strong argument that he should be punished, the story goes in a glorious and mysterious different direction. Readers are left wondering about all the great battles we are fighting and what would happen if we helped each other fight them. What would happen if we helped those who tried to hurt us?

Finally, we read Gary Soto’s “Seventh Grade.” This is a story about a boy’s first day of middle school. It is hilarious and I figured appropriate for the 5^thgraders to read in their last few weeks of elementary school. After we read the story, I had them write, “As In” poems. For this type of poetry, a writer chooses a word – hunger, fear, joy, for example, and in the first stanza, writes the definition in free verse. The next stanza begins with, “as in,” and from there, the writer explains how that word pertains to her life.

We had a Poetry Slam at the end of April, and the 5^thgraders shared the poems they had written about the sun, about where they’re from, about the poetry they found in stacks of books, about words that are meaningful to them. Each of them shared a story, no matter how small, about how they see the world, and where they fit into it.

A handful of parents came to the Poetry Slam, and after the students read, one father said that their poetry made him want to share a poem, too.

“You should!” I encouraged.

And so he did. “It’s not my poem,” he began, “but it means a lot to me.”

I don’t think it matters if he wrote the poem or not. Once we fall in love with a story, I believe it becomes a part of us, and so sharing the poem means he shared a part of himself that day.

 

One of the Caldecott nominations this year was Dan Santat’s, After the Fall. It’s the story of what happened to Humpty Dumpty after he fell from that great, big wall. He was afraid of heights (understandably), but wanted badly to be with the birds because he loved them so (that’s what he was doing up on the wall in the first place – admiring the birds). He figured out a way to be with them again without having to climb that wall, but something went wrong, and Humpty had to decide whether to face his fears and climb the wall again.

He decides to climb the wall, and as he climbs, Humpty, who is an egg, begins to crack. He is hatching; turning into a bird. He cannot be put back together again because he can no longer be what he once was. What’s more, he doesn’t have to be afraid because now, Humpty can fly.

Though it is not my story, like this father who shared a poem with his son and his classmates, After the Fall means a lot to me, and like the little girl who loves the Berenstain Bears, I think Santat’s story has helped me with the truth of my own story.

I think I’ve been telling myself my story ended when I fell from teaching, but maybe, like Humpty’s fall, that was a beginning. I’ve been hoping the cracks I have would soon heal so I could go back, but now I am beginning to wonder if they’re not meant to heal because maybe, like Humpty, I am becoming something else.

Whatever is happening, I feel like Humpty when he began to hatch, and any elementary science teacher will tell you that you can’t stop hatching. So I guess I’ll be like Humpty Dumpty and keep climbing, full of fear and joy, no matter what happens, and no matter what it is I become.

That’s my story.