The Line

We’re outlining our final writing assignment for A Day No Pigs Would Die. I’m asking the kids to take either the role of a parent who wants to ban the book from our library, or a student who is defending its presence. We’re using the persuasion map from the NCTE Read, Write, Think website (a GOLD MINE– not kidding) as our guide; the American Library Association’s banned categories for our vocabulary; and somehow everything is, miraculously, coming together. Their arguments are solid, nuanced, metacognitive. You experimental souls will understand my bemused joy when I say I’m not really sure how this happened.

I had a student four years ago who was this kind of thinking crystallized– it flew out of her mouth like birds. A brilliant, passionate, headstrong Afghani refugee, she had risen above her every circumstance, mastered English in three years, and earned a full scholarship to a local college. The last time I saw her, just before she graduated last year, she had taken her head scarf off, and flew at me from the doorway of her house to give me a huge hug.

I learned yesterday that a few weeks ago she came home and was stabbed several times by her older brother, in what appears to be a shame retribution. She survived, barely.

I kneel next to a student who is still working on her Pigs outline. “Tell me more about what you mean when you say, ‘This book teaches you about the real world’.”

She thinks. “You know. Like, there’s death, like Pinky dies.”

“Yes,” I encourage her. “That’s an incredibly important theme. Life is beautiful, but there’s death and suffering, too. That’s just a part of it all.”

And I suddenly have to close my eyes, bite my lip, and walk away.

S., who earned himself an earlier post, is paging through his binder for a paper he has lost about nine times. The binder reminds me of a molting adolescent songbird, stuffed to bursting and shedding. (The discovery of clear plastic sheaths to protect individual papers has saved this boy’s hide, and I would recommend that any teacher who has recurring problems with wrinkles, rips, food stains and footprints have an available stack of these in the classroom.)

As he riffles through the binder, without looking up, he asks, “Ms. S, what is that thing where you’re super organized? It’s like a, I don’t know, a disorder?”

I try to put myself into his synapses, and then grab it. “You mean, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?”

“Yeah,” he says matter-of-factly, papers flying everywhere. “I ain’t got none of that.”

It’s JP, of course, who’s coming up to me during writing time at the end of class, and I’ve learned by now that it can be for only one of three reasons: a) to show me his incomplete work and beg for help; b) to tell me about his missing work and beg for time to complete it; c) to attempt to make one of those jokes that demonstrates, once again, that there is an unusually decimated circuit between his head and his mouth.

But every once in awhile something astonishingly beautiful opens up in him, like a flower in flash photography.

“In this chapter,” reads the writing prompt I have created, “Haven Peck says his ‘mission’ is the work of slaughtering pigs– something that must be done, no matter how hard it is. What do you think your mission in life is?”

He hands it to me, points to his one sentence, and sits down fast, not making eye contact. I glance at the lack of development and sigh inwardly. Then I actually see what he has put down.

“My mission is to find my mission,” he has written.

As I get further into A Day No Pigs Would Die I’m discovering, quite by accident (or maybe not), a wealth of nature-related wisdom packed into it. It does take place on a Shaker Vermont farm, after all. So despite my initial woes, not only is Pigs starting to work well as an example of a banned book, but it makes this unit a shoe-in for the one just before The Leopold Education Project next year. We could collect Pigs axioms (I’m already getting kid-generated questions like, “Is it really true that pigs and cows can’t be penned next to each other?”) and research them, while relating them to excerpts from Sand County Almanac. Perfect springtime stuff, perfect high quality literature, perfect dovetail between fiction and non-fiction. I can’t wait.

I’m reflecting on this while my kids and I are wildcrafting in the backyard this evening– this is the absolutely lovely word, I’ve learned, for harvesting uncultivated edible plants. Today we’re hurrying to get four packed cups of violet blossoms before we cut the lawn. We’ll boil them down with sugar into a deep-hued, fragrant syrup, great over pancakes and near heaven with vanilla ice cream. My daughter is tweezing the flowers with her little fingers out of the long grass, singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the top of her lungs.

We’re doing double-duty by also weeding the garlic mustard that’s spread into the yard. One of the worst spreading non-indigenous plants of New York State, it was originally brought over by European settlers as a fast-growing herb for flavor in stews. My daughter offers to help me pull up the shallow root stocks, which complain by letting loose their characteristic pungent smell.

“But why are we pulling these up? They have pretty white flowers on the top,” she comments.

“Well, we don’t really want them in the yard,” I say gently.

“Why?”

I’m suddenly faced with explaining the concept of invasive species to a five year old. This sort of thing happens a lot.

I hunker down to her level in the grass, try to put it in language she’ll understand. “See how it grows so fast, and goes all over the place? When it does that, it takes the light and the soil away from other plants. It doesn’t want to share.”

She processes this, then nods.

“Oh,” she says solemnly. “It’s like people.”

I’m sitting at lunch with one of the worst slackers in my entire team of students—he’s in to make up a quiz from three months ago. Bright, gangly; often out of school during the first day of any given hunting season. The words “You’re so gay” are about as prevalent in his vocabulary as, well, nouns.

He has a kind and ironic sense of humor, though, and it is this that has me laughing like an idiot about a story he’s relating about a sub, who apparently cemented his power structure in the class by introducing himself as “King Johnson.”

“And then we started talking about rainbow t-shirts, you know, tie-dye,” says my student, “and then I said I didn’t like them, and he called me homophobic.”

He pauses.

“Like, what does that MEAN, Ms. S?”

I have struggled with nearly every aspect of teaching in this first mainstream year, but one of the things I can manage to do with kids is navigate fairly sensitive topics. We start a very matter of fact conversation about what people mean these days when they say colloquially that someone is homophobic. I wait for the putdown, the expected profession of revulsion, the unthinking spitback of adult conservatism. Silently I start marshalling my defense of treating everyone with dignity, regardless of whether one agrees with their choices.

My kid pauses again, now for a long time.

“But one of my family members is gay,” he says. “And some of my neighbors. And they’re fine.”

And now it’s my turn to pause.

“Then you’re not homophobic, Jack,” I finally tell him.

He squares his shoulders. Shakes his hair out of his eyes. Looks at me.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

Dear Lupe,

Did you ever wish that you could save the world?

Awhile back a student of mine, in seventh grade English, turned in an assigned poem. I loved its simplicity, its rhythm, the way the lines broke on the page. What made my heart even more glad was that it was from a kid I’ve been trying to reach for several years now.

Anyway. I was so proud of him that I posted the poem on my teacher blog earlier this week. And that’s where I found out he hadn’t written it at all. He had plagiarized “Kick, Push,” and confirmed that he had done it deliberately when I asked him about it. And not knowing your rap until this week, I had no idea.

It’s been an interesting journey, these past few days. I’ve cried once or twice. I’ve rethought how I give and support assignments for second language kids. I’ve been surfing your sites, pulling up your stuff on Youtube. I’ve fallen in love with your work. And I’ve rejected completely the punitive coercion that could serve as the consequence for plagiarism in my school. That stuff won’t work. This kid is too smart.

The only thing that will work, I’ve come to realize, is if, somehow, he talks to you.

This might strike you as overkill. What is plagiarism, after all, next to cheese heroin addiction, or teenage pregnancy, or gang bangs? But I would argue that it’s just this kind of tiny, critical choice, and how it’s handled by the adults involved, that can tip the balance in a pre-adolescent kid. Towards a life that is ruled by a living sense of the dignity of human beings, or suffocated with the stale mediocrity of selfishness. Towards a life fortified against amorality, or one that invites it in—in small ways now, and perhaps much worse ones later.

So now is the time.

I don’t really know what I am asking you for. Five minutes on speakerphone would do it. Perhaps a letter. Something that makes you real to my kid. Something that it is not yet, or may never be, within my power to do– try as I might.

Because you see, it’s not enough that you’re like a god to him; it’s not enough that he listens to you constantly and can recite your raps with passion and accuracy from memory in the middle of class. None of it matters—not the poetry, the positive role model, or the message—unless he internalizes it enough to know that in the destructive habit of taking the short, easy way out, he cheats everyone. You. All of us. And most importantly, himself.

I can’t guarantee that this will save the world. Maybe not even this kid. But it might. Will you bank on hope, with me?

Please give me a call.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ll be sending this via snail and email to Lupe’s production company, 1st and 15th Entertainment. Anyone else got any bright ideas? Contacts I can use? How much does a full page ad in the Chicago Times cost?

So I’m out crazy sick yesterday– fever, aches, nausea, the whole nine yards. This, of course, occurs right at the key point of introduction in a unit I’m creating from scratch based on the First Amendment. Students bring in favorite “statement” T-shirts and analyze them in writing– first for their presuppositions, and then as protected (or not) free speech. It’s challenging for everyone involved, and weird, and genre-busting, and full of little steps and student-centered discussions and teacher as guide and I was very nervous about my ability to carry it off to begin with– never mind that the products are going to be displayed for parents next week.

I’m in at 6 AM before I retreat to my bed, plugging through the haze of my aching bones, writing out what I am sure are completely unintelligible sub plans for a person I’ve never met– probably certified in math 25 years ago. I’m positive I’m going to come in the next day and find shreds of t-shirts, note cards, half-finished background packets, and a charred overhead projector, with a one word message from the sub in red pen: WHY?

Instead I find this note.

“Hi! The kids were great. Most of them got a solid start on their drafts. We had some wonderful conversations. My undergraduate degree was in Constitutional Law, so I think I fielded most of their questions well.”

It was almost worth being absent.