The boy with the ice-eyes is in class today. From across the room I catch him in the corral of bright colored balls.
He is so kind. We play a game. Putting the same colored balls in a basket. Red. Green. Blue. He calls Yellow, "Low." His favorite color is blue. He is two. He fits my need for order.
Been falling in love with my students lately. Spending all my days thinking of what to do with them and then throwing it all out the window and just listening to their stories. It has yet to come to anyone's attention how terribly under qualified I am to teach writing. I don't believe my employers know what I do.
This is my third year working at the Nature of Words and only now am I settling into it. It is because of the students.
Tristan, pixie-cut wandere who invented her own compass that points only to the heart when she is lost. She could probably point out the North star but follows the direction of Orion - spinning round and round, finding the stories most kids her age never find. This evening on the sidewalk she pulled a cigarette out of her mouth and hid it, slight of hand, while saying goodbye. Walking away with Erica who looks like Scarlet Johanson and starts her drawings with the eyes. Puppy haired Canon who confessed tonight they call him "Guac-Boy" at the Mexican restaurant he does dishes at and is sixteen years old. In the blanket fort, Canon played a spoken-word bit on the tinny iphone speaker, "We all have different abilities, thought processes, experiences and genes. So why is a class full of individuals tested by the same means?" Then we dismantled the blanket fort.
Jeremiah was helping me with blankets and bags when we all parted ways.
"Tristan hid her cigarette from me," I mused to him, "she doesn't want me to know she smokes."
"I smoke cigarettes. And I smoke pot. I'm a closet nothing."
Jeremiah is going back to Marshall High School, the alternative school. We applauded him earlier when he made that announcement.
Maybe I am qualified to work with these students. No degree, but a chest full of old notebooks since Middle school. I don't know if the students know what a scared kid I am. How I feel just like them. Judged and
Once at a weekend intensive in Sisters at Caldera I cowered back with my student assistant, Marlee, the germaphob graphic novelist. Admitted if I was a student I would hide in the back with my notebook rather than teach the class. Just a scared kid teaching other kids that are much louder and braver.
The first time I met Tristan I was terrified of her. It was years ago and I watched her put a then, fifteen-year-old Canon in a stunned silence. I told her to write something on my hand and she wrote "For those who favor fire," from the Robert Frost poem. She told me she might not stay. Might run out of the room crying and I told her to do what she needed to do. But she stayed through the entire class.
Last week we both accidentally brought each other presents. Mine, an old Pollyannas band t-shirt and hers, a tiny terrarium in a jar with a christmas light.
"We won't let exam results decided our fate."
Take time loving me
