I have had eight good days in a row in teaching this year; the first eight school days of the year in fact. So maybe I have found something to teach and the students and I have been able to get together and work on it and not find it too dull or disorganized. It helps to start out with Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”, a marvelous little story of a brave women fighting against nature; the nature of the world and her own; a story of a person “fighting the good fight”, and showing how love endures and is patient and kind, all without a sense of sentimentality or the odor of sanctimonious. Rather a sense of good humor, humility, and the goodness of life in spite of hardships are the keynotes.
We have four day work weeks this year, with class duration being one hour and forty-five minutes. So prep periods are treasured—keeping a class going for that long requires emotional and physical stamina even if the students are lively and well-behaved and fun. So last Thursday I was planning on a celebration of a sort: a quick trip across the street to Nico’s (a fast and good food Mexican restaurant) to buy a shrimp burrito, coming back to read a bit of news and do some planning for next week. Instead I had to substitute for the first time this year, rather a shock that I didn’t even comprehend at first—Substitute!? No!! But there it was.
So as I hung around the kids who were hanging around the computers doing who knows what (except I made sure it wasn’t pornography), I was in a funk, without my glasses (I had forgotten them in my own classroom), mostly just looking around and into space thinking: I am going to just sit here spacing out for 105 minutes. “What are we going to read? I don’t even have a textbook with me? How can we do everything we’re supposed to do? What is it that we are supposed to do?”
I don’t know how it happened. Somehow I found a plan and clarity about how the class should be run. It was as if I had dreamed a good dream and woke up. “This is it. I can make a plan, a syllabus even.” I shall see.
I also read an interview with Ray Bradbury in our sophomore literature textbook. I have always found him the most congenial of writing teachers, teaching us as he always does to trust ourselves first to write as we feel, as we will at a particular time and place; reminding us to remember what is and has been important to us and to thereby keep filling the well so there is a soul with substance; to keep reading for the same reason; and to work, to do those 1000 words a day.
