this house

A kind of miracle. I may never pay it off; But as long as I can scrape to make the note, we’ll never drift: never be at someone else’s mercy. A single mom is expected to raise her kids without a yard, sharing bedrooms. Mine will not suffer for their parent’s mistakes. I promised myself that when he left. They have new clothes, a fridge that's almost always full; we go out to dinner sometimes. They take piano lessons. They'll never want for anything. I will keep this promise. The hours are long; but I can work at home. They don’t have to be alone, wear keys around their necks, wake themselves up. I can still be here when they really need me. I put band-aids on their cuts, hold them when they cry, take care of them.

A filthy cage. She works all day for the money to keep it, worries all night that it won't be enough. The filth builds. These walls will fall in on us one day. Her glassy eyes, her slack jaw. Hunched over the keyboard, she sends me outside, or to my room. I want to talk to her, So I sit on this patch of carpet Under her desk, listening to her type. Wearing cheap clothes and eating cereal with the black and white label: it's embarrassing. She wasted money on that old piano, when I just want nice clothes; I want brand name food. All she does is work. I think she suffers from being alone all the time. Mornings, she screams up the stairs, like she’s too weak to climb them. I sit under her desk. Her knees press my shoulder. I listen to the keys click overhead. Once, I cut myself on purpose so she would bend down to me.

scary poem (i'm no killer)

August 10, 2007--A 28-year old man and a 15-year old boy have been arrested in the execution-style killings of three students and the shooting of another in Newark, a crime so shocking that it has galvanized a city long plagued by violence.

Execution-style killings:
shocking, yet common enough
to be named.
A style:
distinct, familiar.

Homestyle
Country style
Family style
Execution style.
We know these killings.

The shock is layered:
Incomprehension covers
recognition.

No foreign war,
no act of God, corrupt government
or brilliant sociopath--
a simple act
of someone made in his image.

No lesson beneath the horror,
no benefit to hindsight--
only the act.
Only an urge, unchecked.
A choice.

Today
I choose differently.
There are many days ahead.

It's a heavy weight
I lift with a story:
galvanized community,
surviving angel,
wake up call,
turning point.

I can shoulder narrative.

The act, encased in tales
of angels, morals, scholarships:
We process.
We distill knowing's burden.

How else could I face you,
knowing we share the same dark impulse?

A naked urge to destroy
comes to us
bundled with empathy,
hunger,
loneliness;
inhaled with our first breath of world.

Were they born for this act?
Or did they bend to impulse,
momentarily weak?
It could happen to anyone.

I'm not afraid of dying this way.
It's killing I dread.

"I want justice. They took three angels away from their families but one angel survived so the story could get told."

teaching, killing words, and castrating tongues

Virigina Woolf delivered this gorgeous "Eulogy to Words" in 1937. Part of the reason that words are dead (or at least are lacking the power they once had), she claimed, was that "we refuse to allow words their liberty, we pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning...the meaning which makes us pass examinations."

Anna West describes the same problem in our age of state standards and standardized tests in a poem that speaks for itself, beginning with the title: "Battle for the Board of Ed (who thinks language arts is commas, clauses, correctness and the castration of the tongue before it ever emerges)." Oh, how I wish the Board of Ed would click on that link.

So this issue isn't new; perhaps it's one of the rare things about English that hasn't changed from Woolf's world to ours? The accents and diction and even punctuation have changed, but through it all, education remains at odds with powerful, artful language. That's pretty remarkable, really. Tests are often blamed, but we all know that the problem is more complex than that. It's a truism in anthropology that the act of observing a thing changes it. Perhaps it's become a truism in education that the teaching of language dries it up and hollows it out. It's frustrating to imagine that we've known about this problem for nearly a century but haven't made a dent in it.As a teacher, it's downright painful to think that I'm harming what I love most (students and language). Perhaps we're asking kids to write expressively and powerfully even as we're undermining their ability to do just that. No wonder so many of them are fed up, frustrated and totally resistant to school.

Not much that we've done since 1937 seems to have altered this, so what do we do next as we try to build a system that lives up to its promises? Can it be done by individual teachers in the current system (and if so, how do we enable more teachers to do it) or is it impossible without a radical overhaul? How do we educate in a way that enlivens and empowers? I don't want to kill words, and I'd like to have nothing to do with castrating tongues.