Clean Marbles

It’s been three weeks since I started teaching in China. My typical day consists of about five classes, each made up of no more than two students. It’s refreshing and somewhat challenging to go from teaching 23 college students in one English composition class to teaching a small number of grade-schoolers from Korea. We work on grammar, speech, writing, diction, and language arts.

Two of my students just finished reading “A Wind in the Door” for our grade eight Language Arts class (the second book in the series that began with “A Wrinkle in Time”). We began the book on our first day together. Less than three weeks later we finished. It was amazing to see how much they enjoyed it. As we got closer to finishing the book, I noticed how much they picked up their reading pace. They wanted to hurry, to get to the end and find out what happened. What a change from walking into a classroom with drooping 18-year-olds who just rolled out of bed and don’t want to be there.

The freedom of lesson planning is exhilarating. I finally get to choose which authors, what books, what poems, and what writing assignments. One younger student, I found, had been assigned to memorize one poem a week in her regular school days. In learning this, I came up with an in-class assignment for her: to write about the most memorable poem. While she sat there writing about a lyrical verse that had moved her that year, my own poem memorization experiences came back to me; so, I decided to take up my own pen and join her in the assignment. Here’s what I wrote:

“The first poem I ever had to memorize was “O Captain, My Captain” by Walt Whitman. I was in second grade and didn’t understand why the assignment was given. I remember working on it for an entire week, trying to memorize it out of a very large, orange textbook. I noticed for the first time how the lines of a poem on the page don’t look at all like the lines we’d read before in books. They didn’t swim from one side of the page to the other, balancing across the white, but rather stopped at odd times to change places with emptiness. The first time I read it, I stumbled. I didn’t understand the turn of the rhyme or who was speaking. I didn’t understand why a strange sadness had come over me. Why did I care about this captain who had died? But I realized the more I read it, the more I understood what the words were trying to tell me and I recognized the rhythm I was creating by saying it out loud.”

I decided to introduce meter to another student – an eighth grader – who had never heard of scansion before. Classes I’d had as a student in high school, college, and grad school came flooding out onto the whiteboard. I tried not to cram it all into one lesson. I’d felt invigorated and excited. I wanted him to know everything I knew, then to go on and learn more. As his first introduction to iambic pentameter, I gave him a copy of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” – a typical run-of-the-mill poet/poem when I was in grade nine. I thought I’d bring him in ahead of the game.

For our writing portion, a ninth grader worked on writing a poem of his own. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t even that good. But I kept pushing and he kept trying, even with much reluctance. I could tell he saw no point in the assignment, nor had any desire to do his best. He simply wanted the end result: a decent grade. We revised for several days. He balked many of my ideas and rolled his eyes when I’d ask him questions about character or motivation. Who was speaking? What did he want to tell his reader? These were simple questions which I had learned to ask long ago and had become second nature to me since. I’d forgotten what it was like to be at the fundamental level of poetry, to not understand the simplistic economic value of a line that doesn’t repeat, and of trying to convey emotion that, at such a young age, hasn’t been developed to anything more complex than “happy,” “sad,” or “angry.”

When he completed the poem, he wasn’t as elated as the other students who had done the same assignment. The same pride wasn’t there. His completed project didn’t come from wanting to do his best or to create something original. I’m not sure whether he truly listened when I talked about what it meant to write poetry, but something might have sunk in along the way…

Sometimes you don’t get very far. But sometimes you get brilliant lines like these:
“Look at her eyes. They are clean marbles.”