The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [26]
We talk about the ways this kind of writing differs from learning spelling or math, where there are right and wrong answers. I tell the kids that in what we’ll be doing, there is no one right answer, not even a right way or wrong way to do it. And if, in a particular writing assignment, I do suggest some rules to follow, I always say, if you can think of a way to break these rules and still come out with a really good poem—go right ahead. I see this as a way to get beyond paying lip service to children’s creativity and encouraging them to practice it. By now the good students may be feeling lost. They’re often kids who have beaten the system, who have become experts at following the rules in order to get a good grade. And now, maybe for the first time, they’re experiencing helplessness at school, because the boundaries have shifted; without rules to follow, they’re not sure how to proceed. They may sulk, or even cry, although they usually come around and have a good time.
But it’s the other students, the bad students, the little criminals, who often have a form of intelligence that is not much rewarded in school, who are listening most attentively. It’s these kids, for whom helplessness and frustration are the norm at school, and often in life—maybe their mom’s boyfriend got drunk and abusive the night before—who take to poetry like ducklings to water. And sometimes, as with that fifth-grade boy, they find that adopting a poetic voice can be a revelation. It’s as if they’re free to speak with their true voice for the very first time. It is always a gift—to the teacher, the class, and to me—to have a child lead us into the heart of poetry. That boy spoke to our own loneliness and exile and reminded us that our everyday world is more mysterious than we know: who would have guessed that an ordinary boy, in an ordinary classroom in North Dakota, was walking around with a love, and a loss, as big as Texas in his heart?
Often, when I’m working in an elementary classroom, my mind pitches back to my own school days. I enjoyed school wholeheartedly until third grade. My mother was an elementary-school teacher, and that may have helped me develop early on a sense of what was expected of me, and the confidence that I could learn new things. Then, as we moved from adding and subtracting to multiplying and dividing, I had my first taste of failure. I’d grown used to counting on my fingers and panicked when the numbers became so big so fast, literally untouchable. I became enormously frustrated trying to grasp concepts that remained tantalizingly out of reach. I still excelled at English and found spelling easy. But I began to fall behind in math.
One day, in fourth grade, I had an epiphany about the nature of numbers, and a peculiar taste of otherness—the unmistakable sense that I’d seen something that my teacher, and the other students, could not see. My teacher that year prided herself on being tough. She had warned us on the very first day of school that she expected us to work, and to work hard. That was fine with me; I wanted to learn. As I was one of the better students in English, however, my teacher seemed unable to forgive me for being so backward in mathematics. I believe she thought that if she pressured me enough, even ridiculed me from time to time, I would simply apply myself and learn. Thus, one day, in exasperation at some muddle I’d made with a math problem on the blackboard, an experience