We are at the girls’ piano recital, on a late Sunday afternoon that both hints at rain but changes its mind and sun shimmers itself through the maples and onto our knees, before changing its mind again. It is difficult to tell which shift to settle into.
Each student plays a couple of pieces, and when it’s Hadley’s turn, the teacher explains she’ll perform a sonatina, a piece we’ve been listening to and enjoying most afternoons when she opens the door of her bedroom, brings that days’ dishes downstairs, then sits at the piano. Mozart tells me school is out for the day.
Her next piece is, “Night Changes,” by One Direction. A song, the teacher tells us, that Hadley has learned to play completely by ear.
I do not understand what this band was able to do that NKOTB, Backstreet Boys, and NSync could not. Is it talent? Is it that they don’t dance? Are their lyrics better? (Can you really compete with, “Woah, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh! Hangin’ Tough!”?) No matter, they have rocked steady since the days when I was rushing the girls home from the park in time for naps while singing – with deep conviction at the top of my lungs – “You don’t know you’re beautiful!”
What Hadley did was bold, I think. I do my best to keep who I love and what I love to myself for fear I will be judged as trivial, sensitive, dramatic. Hadley doesn’t seem to possess that characteristic. What’s more admirable, is the fact that she learned the melody she loved by pulling out what she knew of it and trying to listen to what she heard, instead of being told, “This is how you do it.” She loves the song enough to sit and plunk the wrong keys until she finds the melody that stirs within her.
I had a student (I probably had several) who loved One Direction. She knew enough about the band to write a book. I know because this was how I was able to get her to turn in her assignments. Research project? One Direction. Character development analysis? One Direction. Persuasive essay? One Direction. Her most powerful piece was a Creative Nonfiction essay connecting a fading friendship with the break-up of the band. I admit, I cried reading it.
Her writing came alive when she wrote about the band. While she knew an endless amount about these guys, they were her way into what was going on in her life. Something about their music allowed her to sit with herself – what she loved but didn’t understand – and find a melody.
She reminded me of me, this long ago fourteen year old. She was quiet but passionate, and like the weather that shifts with the wind on a spring day, it is hard to know what’s happening. It is hard at times to keep up with yourself.
Once, she and I found we were wearing the same pair of shoes, and in the moment of discovery where I quickly assessed whether she was horrified, and realized with relief that she wasn’t, I thought, does the fourteen year old ever leave us? Is that even possible?
She was in my first book. I call her Radley, and I write about our matching shoes, and One Direction. Since it’s a book about Romeo and Juliet, I write about Juliet, too. Specifically, the afternoon I watched Radley play Juliet:
I watched as Radley spun around and leapt on stage, chasing after the Nurse, trying to get information from her. Radley’s hair flew and twirled. A confidence I’d never seen from her came through that day. My seemingly timid student had completely transformed.
I think this is because Radley understood how Juliet felt. She knew that strange desperation of loving a person (albeit one she barely knew), and wanting so badly for that person to love her back. I believe she was drawing from her own life, and she could do that because Juliet provided words for how she feels. Watching Radley, I thought of her One Direction essay, and realized she was not only trying to express the love she had for a band whose music captured her heart, but she was also exploring the heartbreak of that band breaking up, and the loss of a friendship.
Maybe I shoul’ve taught Romeo and Juliet before my class wrote creative nonfiction. I could’ve told Radley, “Do what you did with Act 2, Scene 5 when you revise. Pull Juliet out.” I hope though, now that Radley has grappled with Shakespeare’s language, now that she’s met Juliet, she can pull Juliet out of herself.
The Teacher Diaries, “Polka-Dotted Sneakers”
I’ve heard before that Romeo and Juliet is a sexist play, and there is, I’m sure, substantial back-up for this claim. However, I often think that calling the play sexist has to do with its outcome. Had the two teenagers – so tangled up in their love for one another – lived, would we draw attention to this component? Or is it because the play is a tragedy that we are urgent to explain what went wrong, lest we identify with a lovesick teenager? Perhaps it’s more comfortable to call out the prejudice, sexism, and other evils than to identify with the teenagers who’ve been struck by a melody they do not understand but has already seeped its way into their hearts.
I do not know if Hadley has felt the way Juliet felt. It probably isn’t for me to know. I know – I hope – she will experience that kind of love someday. I also know it is fierce and overwhelming. It is wonderful and mysterious. It is a melody she will never fully learn; never fully understand. But it will be hers to follow, if she chooses. If she’s brave enough.
I am grateful for her teacher, who didn’t laugh at Hadley’s request to learn, “Night Changes” by ear, but instead said, “Go ahead and try.” I am grateful for the music she’s helping my daughter learn as the season of nuance is upon us and Juliet grows and grows.
Through the end of May, all patrons of TS Poetry Press can get The Teacher Diaries for .99 cents. For a free sample download, click here. For another free chapter, click here.
This is a book about being a teacher, and about being a mother, and, in its way, about being a writer. But it is most fully a depiction of living with a work of literature, about the conversations literature can spark and the memories literature can hold and reconfigure. The acknowledgments suggest that writing this book helped Callie Feyen remember why she loved teaching. Reading it made me remember why I love to read. —Lauren Winner, bestselling author and Associate Professor, Duke Divinity School
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