String the Bow

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the frustrations of dealing with 'won't-do' students -- those who have the intelligence and tools to do good work but, mysteriously, just won't. If all, or the majority, of my students were like that, I couldn't do this job.

Luckily, they aren't. So this week, I want to talk about the other end of the spectrum -- those students who make a teacher's job a joy, and also, perhaps, an even greater challenge.

There's a girl in my creative writing class who might be a great poet. I can't tell. I know she's a better than poet than I am, and a better poet than any other student I've ever had in creative writing. I'm not a profound student of poetry, but I read it in The New Yorker , and this girl -- let's call her Lily -- writes at least as well as some of the poets I see published there. She's
scary-good. Here's a poem she wrote called 'The Way It Happened':
      

       The sound her foot made
       Going through the wall,
       And the sound of her body landing
       After her horizontal fall.
       The way noise bleeds
       Through the drywall and the beams,
       The primer, the painted layers of sea green.

       The way the hole was not too wide
       To fix, and they layered more paint to hide
       The seams, the edges. The way
       The bruises faded, and were gone one day.
       The way the shallow ankle cuts
       Knit back together, the skin remade.

What am I supposed to teach Lily about writing? The best I can do is ask her questions about places I don't understand, or suggest that certain lines might be tighter, swifter, more exact. I'm not her teacher, but her editor. That's all she needs.

Then there's my whole freshman honors English class. It's not just that they're bright -- I expect that from honors students. It's that they're so kind to each other, which is not always the case in such a group. Sometimes, it's the opposite.
      

Recently, we were reading the part of Homer's Odyssey where the Phaeacians honor Odysseus with a day of games. Lisa Cochran, my co-teacher, and I challenged our 39 freshmen to a series of our own games, all related to The Odyssey : storytelling, poetry, choral reading and dancing, and others. The last challenge was to string a bow, as Odysseus must do at the climax of the story.

We've done this particular challenge every year, and usually there's one or more students who know the trick, and can do it in seconds. This year, we had nobody like that. So it turned into a problem-solving exercise.

They did it in teams, and everyone paid close attention. They tried different approaches, most of which failed, but nobody mocked anyone else's efforts. After 20 minutes, the last team managed to string the bow three times in three minutes, which made them the champs.

But the best part came after the competition ended. For the last five minutes of class, the people who had succeeded in stringing the bow taught those who hadn't how to do it. Everybody who wanted to try got another turn. And when the bell rang, one student said I should bring the bow back to class the next week, so that those who were absent that day could have a chance to learn it, too.

The joy of teaching such students is transcendent. The challenge is to be worthy of them.