Education and Illumination
Processing systemic and personal issues through poetry
In 1992, I was a student teacher at Cloverdale Junior High, doing my practicum as a Social Studies teacher. My nominal sponsor teacher was a Social Studies teacher with years of experience, but he had handed me off to a younger teacher with I think three years experience, max. My young sponsor teacher was very nice, but had more or less a “sink or swim” approach to training me. He gave me his worst Grade 8 class, with six identified disciplinary problems, to start with. I was an excellent student, a stellar example of the system I was now serving, an idealist, and an egalitarian. I sank. Almost like a stone, but somehow I eventually managed to bob up and float a little, like a rotten, mostly waterlogged piece of wood.
As the son of two teachers, a lover of education, and an excellent student—a bit of a perfectionist, really—my almost-failure was more than a bit of a shock to me. I passed my practicum, really only because, while they wanted me to retake it, I insisted they either pass me or fail me. There was no way I was going through that three months of hell all over again. They passed me, and wrote me a letter of recommendation that pretty much guaranteed I would never get a job in the public school system. “Ed needs to develop withitness” (whatever that is) was the line in the letter that really damned with faint praise—or maybe just damned with faint condemnation.
My practicum wasn’t actually all bad. I just didn’t know what to do with the students who really did not want to learn. And I couldn’t wrap my brain around why they would consistently sabotage my every class, especially when I put rather a lot of effort into making learning in my class as fun as possible. I love simulations and board games, and I came up with a number of rather fun learning experiences—if I may say so myself—including an asymmetric fur-trading card game and a whole-class recreation of Bismark’s unification of Germany (in which the desks were arranged as a map of Germany and each student played a separate German state).
OK, so maybe if you weren’t into games and history my classes still weren’t that fun. As I’ve said (every paragraph so far!), I was a good student who genuinely loved learning, so I had zero understanding of what the experience of school, particularly in mandatory courses, was like for students who didn’t enjoy or didn’t do well in the system.
Despite being the son of two teachers and a good student (Did I mention that yet?), I had already had some questions about the efficacy of our educational system before my practicum experience. The education classes that I had to take for my B.Ed. were a case-in-point. They focussed, as far as I can remember, largely on administrivia, with a dose of child psychology and a bit of specialization-specific content thrown in. But the one thing we kept asking for, the one thing no one taught us, was instruction in classroom management. Even a brief course offering a few different approaches to classroom management would have been welcome, but the closest we got were a few tips wheedled out of one of the senior teachers during one of the more free-form instructional sessions. But for me the biggest question, which was heavily reinforced by my practicum experience, was why I was able to get into the teacher education program, just because I had good grades, while my friend Garth, whose open and engaging personality made him a naturally much better candidate for being an outstanding teacher, was “weeded out” because his grades weren’t as good.
Teaching is as much about personality and relationship, I think, as it is about knowledge. Knowledge is important, of course—almost as important as love for the subject matter one is teaching—but the most important factor (as I have come to believe after well over two decades of teaching) is the student-teacher relationship.
Anyhow, the system is broken, and just how broken it is became super-evident to me during my practicum. While things got better after my sponsor teacher finally pulled me out of that first Grade 8 class that he’d put me in, it was, up until that time of my life, the three months I had lived closest to hell: getting up at 5am to prep for the day, and getting back at 4pm so emotionally drained that I mostly just went to my room and went to sleep—sometimes even cried myself to sleep. I was very blessed to have two parents who, as teachers, understood the hell I was going through.
It was during one of the worst of these days that I wrote the following poem… it was one of those poems that just sort of poured out of me, as the cry of a wounded heart:
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Once I wore bright hues of red,1
But now my heart obeys my head.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
With 30 kids who hate my guts,
But know to ask no "ifs" or "buts".
I hate the system, but cannot
See how to change it, so get out.
This is obviously a pretty dark poem: it poured out of a pretty dark point in my life; and, as a Christian, I wasn’t satisfied with where it left me.
So, I kept thinking about my practicum experience and about education in general. And, when I took a creative writing class some time later, I decided to use the poem that poured out of me as a starting point for a longer meditation on the experience—one that I hoped would end more optimistically. There was only one problem. All my attempts at a positive resolution ended up sounding hollow and trite.
I think there were a few reasons for this. First, I was still pretty young and hadn’t really finished working through the problem yet. In fact, working on the poem became a key part of working through the problem. Second, my starting point was raw and real—a genuine cri de cœur—while my continuations of the poem were, due largely to the first reason, well… less so. Third, it’s much harder, I think, especially in our jaded culture, to convincingly express truth and goodness, than it is to express heartfelt brokenness. And, without the conviction that accompanies experientially grounded truth, my attempts at resolution came off somewhere between wishful thinking and an overly optimistic but ultimately ill-founded hope.
But resolving this long-unresolved issue was—as an unfulfilled lifelong aspiration, one that had become a key part of my identity—essential to me. And besides, I had a poem that I needed to finish! And so I kept at it, and, in the process, learned the value of process in processing, and eventually worked the process of processing right into the poem itself. The first part of the resolution, therefore, came from and became an expression of this iterative process, and a poetic embodiment of my failure, not only in the practicum experience, but also of my failure to resolve the experience in life and poetry.
1st Glance
(Will o' the Wisp)
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
With 30 kids who hate my guts,
But know to ask no "ifs" or "buts".
I hate the system, but cannot
See how to change it, so get out.
2nd Look
(Fade to Black)
Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
With 30 kids who hate my guts,
But know to ask no "ifs" or "buts",
Learning names and dates and grammar,
How to speak and not to stammer,
How to add up "a" plus "b",
How to fake it till you're free:
Free from all this useless learning,
Free to "get out" and start earning
Money, though a few survive,
Escape the system half-alive,
Return to turn it on its head,
And fade to black from wearing red.
3rd Strike
(Coalblack)
Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
Of words and rhymes now in control
And framing mem'ry like a roll
Of film without the star's control,
But rolling, rolled, into a roll
Of fear, self-pity, uncontrolled
Reactions, anger, till the whole
Explodes, collapses, self-implodes
Into a lightless blackened hole.
And, in this process of processing, I think I came up with the most perfect expression of my frustration with the system in “2nd Look”.
But the more meaningful part of this resolution came in the form of the final sonnet. I had been playing with sonnets for a while, inspired by my poetry professor, Dr. Lee M. Johnson (about whom I have written two sonnets), who presented the sonnet not only as fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a complex rhyme scheme (and, importantly, a rhyme-scheme that varied, depending upon whether the sonnet was Shakesperean or Petrarchan), but, most importantly, as a meditative form, in which the initial octave (the first eight lines, which numerologically represent the four elements: 2 x 4) considers the subject matter from an earthly perspective, while the final sestet (the last six lines, which represent the Trinity: 2 x 3) considers the same question from a heavenly perspective.
As I had been exploring the sonnet as a meditative form, I had started playing with the sonnet’s rhyme-scheme as another potential layer of meaning (perhaps embodied most perfectly in my sonnet “Reflection”), so I decided to wrap up and reflectively bring the conclusions of all three previous poetic attempts to wrestle with my practicum experience into a concluding sonnet through rhyme. The result was a resolution and conclusion that not only helped me come to terms with my practice-teaching and poetic failures, but has become one of the most perfect expressions of what I aspire to and how I engage with this life:
4th Attempt
(Sunrise)
Enough already! I am in, not out,
And in or out, I'll teach. The problem's not
That I can't turn the system on its head,
But how to overcome my fear and doubt
And how I can escape the blackened hole
That's swallowed me and all the dreams I bought.
My struggles show that I am not yet dead,
But what will give me life, to truly teach?
Not what, but who will heal my broken soul.
Who but the Teacher whom the system killed?
Who lives and teaches truth that we may reach
Outside ourselves to live and teach and build
An open system, and a living rule
Where God and life and love are all our school.
The educational system, as a man-made system, is not ultimately fixable: it is as broken as we are. But, in and out of that brokenness, God works, in love, to bring into being new life, which teaches us, as we follow Him, to truly learn and live, from now, through death, on into eternity.
Illumination
1st Glance
(Will o' the Wisp)
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
With 30 kids who hate my guts,
But know to ask no "ifs" or "buts".
I hate the system, but cannot
See how to change it, so get out.
2nd Look
(Fade to Black)
Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
With 30 kids who hate my guts,
But know to ask no "ifs" or "buts",
Learning names and dates and grammar,
How to speak and not to stammer,
How to add up "a" plus "b",
How to fake it till you're free:
Free from all this useless learning,
Free to "get out" and start earning
Money, though a few survive,
Escape the system half-alive,
Return to turn it on its head,
And fade to black from wearing red.
3rd Strike
(Coalblack)
Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
Of words and rhymes now in control
And framing mem'ry like a roll
Of film without the star's control,
But rolling, rolled, into a roll
Of fear, self-pity, uncontrolled
Reactions, anger, till the whole
Explodes, collapses, self-implodes
Into a lightless blackened hole.
4th Attempt
(Sunrise)
Enough already! I am in, not out,
And in or out, I'll teach. The problem's not
That I can't turn the system on its head,
But how to overcome my fear and doubt
And how I can escape the blackened hole
That's swallowed me and all the dreams I bought.
My struggles show that I am not yet dead,
But what will give me life, to truly teach?
Not what, but who will heal my broken soul.
Who but the Teacher whom the system killed?
Who lives and teaches truth that we may reach
Outside ourselves to live and teach and build
An open system, and a living rule
Where God and life and love are all our school.
The line about “once I wore bright shades of red” actually comes from one of my sponsor teacher’s criticisms of me. He said I shouldn’t wear such bright colours because it didn’t look professional.
I had a lot of emotions reading this, Father. I too had a really rough student teaching experience (in 1995), and thought about quitting, finding a new profession. It played on my confidence, on my weaknesses, on my very heart. That persisted into my first year as a high school English teacher, which was equally rough. But by my third year, the sun rose. I started to come into my own, and found I loved the students. That grew, and for the next 14 years I loved my job, I loved being with the students, I loved teaching Shakespeare and Twain and even grammar. I left it to become a principal--which was a whole new bucket of frustration--but I'll always remember fondly my teaching days.