Here is another one I like by Liz Foster
Every summer I feel vague guilt about work undone, deep thoughts not thought, words not written. And even in summer I have dreams about school. This past summer was particularly haunted by my principal's invitation to share with the rest of the faculty of our high school a little "about what we value most about our vocation as teachers." These are my notes toward that sharing.
1. Thank you, Kevin, for focusing yet another summer for me. You've given me some weeks of hyper-alertness, self-awareness, and anxiety dreams:
[like have you had dreams of being on stage but not knowing your lines? Or what play you're in?
Or dreams of being in crowded rowdy classrooms
and not remembering anyone's name?
Not remembering what the class is supposed to be?
Finding that it's quantum physics; the text is the poetry of John Updike, which is a relief, since I love poetry.... But what if you don't love poetry? What if you find you must teach advanced calculus using only the poetry of Walt Whitman?]
2. So here I am
it's just a dream
just another anxiety dream about teaching
(which, yes, I still do have, after all these years
in a vocation I love
at a school I love
among wonderful students
and wonderful friends).
©2001-2008 FacultyShack
3. Several years ago I was gratified to find that, even for people who haven't become teachers and don't spend their whole lives in school, anxiety dreams about school are not uncommon. You, too, will probably recognize yourself in Linda Pastan's poem called "Pass / Fail," which begins with this epigram from TIME Magazine:
"Examination dreams are reported to persist even into old age..."
You will never graduate
from this dream
of blue books.
No matter how
you succeed awake,
asleep there is a test
waiting to be failed.
The dream beckons
with two dull pencils,
but you haven't even
taken the course;
when you reach for a book -
it closes a door
in your face; when
you conjugate a verb -
it is in the wrong
language.
Now the pillow becomes
A blank page. Turn it
to the cool side;
you will still smother
in all of the feathers
that have to be learned
by heart.
4. On July 21, safely asleep on my sister's farm outside Harmony, Minnesota, I dream:
I'm in a warren of cubicles without walls -
among many desks one desk is "mine" -
and today I take a timed SAT exam:
the lead in my # 2 pencil is broken inside, so each click spits small chunks. I find more lead in another pencil but when activated it expels length after length and I can't STOP it - and I can't just take a lead or two because the pencil has run wild. Besides, I couldn't fill in a scantron holding lead in my bare fingers....
There are other tests and test-takers randomly around me,
and I'm curious about SECURITY
vaguely aware that it could seem like I'm trying to CHEAT
(and even in my dream I'm aware of a deep inner questioning of my own motivation...and possible guilt....)
I quietly grow more and more frantic about NOT FINISHING THE SAT
-- so I seem to ask someone for permission for...more time?
a quieter place? a new start?
But the man says we all have the same disadvantages.
I have now misplaced the test itself - and wonder if the short first part has already been collected?....
And then person after person NEEDS me - as if they've been sent to me for help like in the Writing Center, but they're all looking for things that I'm not qualified or able to give. Young people I don't know with accents I can't quite understand are filling out forms for promotion or tenure or Fulbrights which they hand to me in waves like in the college guidance office but I don't know what to do with them and can't leave my SAT and HOW CAN THIS BE MY FAULT?? But it will be.
It's almost night - I've only done 4 or 5 questions and one was on the wrong side of the scantron blank.
The lamps will not stay at a good angle
and block each other's light
and of course burn out.
Then a whole batch of kids come in for help on an essay question about good Christian people with values versus savages who worship rocks.
The instructions include a quotation from THE GREAT GATSBY whose author is identified as Ernest Hemingway: "The biggest mistake a nanny can make when reading to her charges is to (a) not realize whose eyes the material is seen through, or (b) not realize the story is seen through the children's eyes." I want to tell them to BEWARE ASSUMPTIONS, but I worry I'll tell them too much.
Time's up, I flunked the SAT's, and now we must all file into the basement of Cooke Hall, some to a room on the right and some to a room on the left - we have to look to see where our names are and sign up and then go in, but no one is following instructions even when a teacher takes over from the cop - and only I seem to know that this is a matter of life or death because only one of the two groups will survive. But everyone blithely files in to one side or the other; no one signs up.
I wake, exhausted, and write these lines - baffled, frustrated, depressed, worried, whimpering.
5. Why do I write the dreams down? It's bad enough that I HAVE them - and even worse, a writing teacher of mine once announced in class that "there's nothing more boring than someone else's dream."
Ouch.
Freud and Jung and I, among others, don't agree.
As we all probably realize,
everything our teachers tell us
is not necessarily right.
Happily, I also find something in my journal I copied down from William Stafford - another writer and teacher of writing:
"Research for what you're writing...is your whole life.
You're the authority. Language...life now...
break off a piece,
and call it a poem."
I tell my students that nothing is boring
and have them write every day
as a way of saving their lives
6. On July 25 my friend Kathy Stork drives to Harmony from Lake City to pick me up - the Hungry Five - the high school friends who represent for me the career options we had: 2 nurses, 2 teachers, 1 secretary - are meeting for coffee and Harmony House sweet rolls. Three summers ago we had met at Judy's farm - she had had chemo and surgery and radiation, was weak, wore a silly hat we got her. This year we meet at the cemetery, at Judy's grave, where we sit on a red plaid blanket and talk and cry and even laugh. We stay for almost three hours, until it's time to go get lunch. Because I'm an English teacher, my friends humor me and stay still while I read the Wendell Berry poem I copied for us all:
The Inlet
In a dream I go
out into the sunlit street
and I see a boy walking
clear-eyed in the light.
I recognize him, he is
Bill Lippert, wearing the gray
uniform of the school
we attended many years ago.
And then I see that my brother
is with me in the dream,
dressed too in the old uniform.
Our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.
Where I stood,
seeing and knowing, was time,
where we die of grief. And surely
the bright street of my dream,
in which we saw again
our old friend as a boy
clear-eyed in innocence of his death,
was some quickly-crossed
small inlet of eternity.
7. Stanley Kunitz, penultimate poet laureate and avid gardener, says, in an interview, "I think there are forms of communication beyond language, that have to do not only with the body, but with the spirit itself, and they're so internal, there's no way you can define them. It's a permeation of one's being."
"A curious gladness," he calls this convergence: "A curious gladness shook me."
"A curious gladness [strikes] me." Often. In class. In an English department meeting. In the lunch room sitting around a table with laughing friends on what has otherwise seemed like a bleak day. Working with a student on his college essay in the Writing Center, watching him remember and reconstruct an epiphany. Reading. Dreaming. Writing in my journal. Being with students while they navigate what Billy Collins calls "the treacherous hallways of high school." Sharing stories about the journey. Sharing the sunlit streets and #2 pencils of our dreams.
8. I feel very lucky.
Teaching English fills me with "a curious gladness."
Liz Foster teaches writing and shares her "curious gladness" with students and teachers at a high school in Honolulu, Hawai'i.
1. Thank you, Kevin, for focusing yet another summer for me. You've given me some weeks of hyper-alertness, self-awareness, and anxiety dreams:
[like have you had dreams of being on stage but not knowing your lines? Or what play you're in?
Or dreams of being in crowded rowdy classrooms
and not remembering anyone's name?
Not remembering what the class is supposed to be?
Finding that it's quantum physics; the text is the poetry of John Updike, which is a relief, since I love poetry.... But what if you don't love poetry? What if you find you must teach advanced calculus using only the poetry of Walt Whitman?]
2. So here I am
it's just a dream
just another anxiety dream about teaching
(which, yes, I still do have, after all these years
in a vocation I love
at a school I love
among wonderful students
and wonderful friends).
©2001-2008 FacultyShack
3. Several years ago I was gratified to find that, even for people who haven't become teachers and don't spend their whole lives in school, anxiety dreams about school are not uncommon. You, too, will probably recognize yourself in Linda Pastan's poem called "Pass / Fail," which begins with this epigram from TIME Magazine:
"Examination dreams are reported to persist even into old age..."
You will never graduate
from this dream
of blue books.
No matter how
you succeed awake,
asleep there is a test
waiting to be failed.
The dream beckons
with two dull pencils,
but you haven't even
taken the course;
when you reach for a book -
it closes a door
in your face; when
you conjugate a verb -
it is in the wrong
language.
Now the pillow becomes
A blank page. Turn it
to the cool side;
you will still smother
in all of the feathers
that have to be learned
by heart.
4. On July 21, safely asleep on my sister's farm outside Harmony, Minnesota, I dream:
I'm in a warren of cubicles without walls -
among many desks one desk is "mine" -
and today I take a timed SAT exam:
the lead in my # 2 pencil is broken inside, so each click spits small chunks. I find more lead in another pencil but when activated it expels length after length and I can't STOP it - and I can't just take a lead or two because the pencil has run wild. Besides, I couldn't fill in a scantron holding lead in my bare fingers....
There are other tests and test-takers randomly around me,
and I'm curious about SECURITY
vaguely aware that it could seem like I'm trying to CHEAT
(and even in my dream I'm aware of a deep inner questioning of my own motivation...and possible guilt....)
I quietly grow more and more frantic about NOT FINISHING THE SAT
-- so I seem to ask someone for permission for...more time?
a quieter place? a new start?
But the man says we all have the same disadvantages.
I have now misplaced the test itself - and wonder if the short first part has already been collected?....
And then person after person NEEDS me - as if they've been sent to me for help like in the Writing Center, but they're all looking for things that I'm not qualified or able to give. Young people I don't know with accents I can't quite understand are filling out forms for promotion or tenure or Fulbrights which they hand to me in waves like in the college guidance office but I don't know what to do with them and can't leave my SAT and HOW CAN THIS BE MY FAULT?? But it will be.
It's almost night - I've only done 4 or 5 questions and one was on the wrong side of the scantron blank.
The lamps will not stay at a good angle
and block each other's light
and of course burn out.
Then a whole batch of kids come in for help on an essay question about good Christian people with values versus savages who worship rocks.
The instructions include a quotation from THE GREAT GATSBY whose author is identified as Ernest Hemingway: "The biggest mistake a nanny can make when reading to her charges is to (a) not realize whose eyes the material is seen through, or (b) not realize the story is seen through the children's eyes." I want to tell them to BEWARE ASSUMPTIONS, but I worry I'll tell them too much.
Time's up, I flunked the SAT's, and now we must all file into the basement of Cooke Hall, some to a room on the right and some to a room on the left - we have to look to see where our names are and sign up and then go in, but no one is following instructions even when a teacher takes over from the cop - and only I seem to know that this is a matter of life or death because only one of the two groups will survive. But everyone blithely files in to one side or the other; no one signs up.
I wake, exhausted, and write these lines - baffled, frustrated, depressed, worried, whimpering.
5. Why do I write the dreams down? It's bad enough that I HAVE them - and even worse, a writing teacher of mine once announced in class that "there's nothing more boring than someone else's dream."
Ouch.
Freud and Jung and I, among others, don't agree.
As we all probably realize,
everything our teachers tell us
is not necessarily right.
Happily, I also find something in my journal I copied down from William Stafford - another writer and teacher of writing:
"Research for what you're writing...is your whole life.
You're the authority. Language...life now...
break off a piece,
and call it a poem."
I tell my students that nothing is boring
and have them write every day
as a way of saving their lives
6. On July 25 my friend Kathy Stork drives to Harmony from Lake City to pick me up - the Hungry Five - the high school friends who represent for me the career options we had: 2 nurses, 2 teachers, 1 secretary - are meeting for coffee and Harmony House sweet rolls. Three summers ago we had met at Judy's farm - she had had chemo and surgery and radiation, was weak, wore a silly hat we got her. This year we meet at the cemetery, at Judy's grave, where we sit on a red plaid blanket and talk and cry and even laugh. We stay for almost three hours, until it's time to go get lunch. Because I'm an English teacher, my friends humor me and stay still while I read the Wendell Berry poem I copied for us all:
The Inlet
In a dream I go
out into the sunlit street
and I see a boy walking
clear-eyed in the light.
I recognize him, he is
Bill Lippert, wearing the gray
uniform of the school
we attended many years ago.
And then I see that my brother
is with me in the dream,
dressed too in the old uniform.
Our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.
Where I stood,
seeing and knowing, was time,
where we die of grief. And surely
the bright street of my dream,
in which we saw again
our old friend as a boy
clear-eyed in innocence of his death,
was some quickly-crossed
small inlet of eternity.
7. Stanley Kunitz, penultimate poet laureate and avid gardener, says, in an interview, "I think there are forms of communication beyond language, that have to do not only with the body, but with the spirit itself, and they're so internal, there's no way you can define them. It's a permeation of one's being."
"A curious gladness," he calls this convergence: "A curious gladness shook me."
"A curious gladness [strikes] me." Often. In class. In an English department meeting. In the lunch room sitting around a table with laughing friends on what has otherwise seemed like a bleak day. Working with a student on his college essay in the Writing Center, watching him remember and reconstruct an epiphany. Reading. Dreaming. Writing in my journal. Being with students while they navigate what Billy Collins calls "the treacherous hallways of high school." Sharing stories about the journey. Sharing the sunlit streets and #2 pencils of our dreams.
8. I feel very lucky.
Teaching English fills me with "a curious gladness."
Liz Foster teaches writing and shares her "curious gladness" with students and teachers at a high school in Honolulu, Hawai'i.
Comment
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Comment by Dan Mindich on November 10, 2008 at 7:45am - I love this piece.
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