Trust
Almost exactly half a year has passed since my last post: sobsey.com just aged by more than a third without a new word added. I'd like to believe that somehow the site has matured, and perhaps acquired some attractive wrinkles and wisdom, the way a good book does when you return to it. But immediacy, not endurance, is the forte of the internet, and the writing I've posted here seems to wither on impact. So by not updating I've dropped the ball, lost the handle, neglected my children. All thirty-five of them.
To retrace, then.
I removed the teaching journals from the site last fall when a couple of my students tracked it down started to read my private thoughts about them. I can't really claim these musings were private, though, since I was publishing them here. Although I had changed all the names, any kid could see through the aliases, especially in such a small school. I was only trying to understand the students and how to teach them, but I admit that broadcasting their trials -- even to the few, mostly disinterested readers I have -- was essentially traitorous. Changing names conferred a loyalty no deeper than changing uniforms. I was quite delighted when they triumphed, and I said so and wrote so; but I may have been less amazed by the contents of their successes than by their succeeding at all -- something like the thrill, I imagine, of watching your baby take occasional wobbly steps in between pratfalls. I lacked the faith that they would inevitably learn to walk if they kept trying. This had little to do with them: early on, I hadn't much confidence in myself. I was a new teacher, working with an age group I'd scarcely been exposed to before, with a subject I knew nothing about, and with no curriculum to prop me up. Like they often did themselves, I threw us rashly into a herculean endeavor. Like them in their hormonal seas, I was in over my head, but I found a way slowly to shore. In order to surface I needed trust, which turned out to be much more than an act of simple transference or reliance. And not really an act at all.
Speaking of trust, I owe gratitude to the natural credulity of thirteen-year-olds that my students embraced the ludicrous idea of creating a three-act play about the Civil War. I wrote in October that I could imagine the drama unfold right there in the Middle School's center area: some kid with a fake beard playing Ulysses S. Grant, belting shots of whiskey before accepting Robert E. Lee's dignified surrender; John Wilkes Booth shooting Lincoln ("Sic semper tyrannis!") in a great spatter of stage blood; a chaotic onslaught at Bull Run, shrieking with thirty-five Rebel Yells -- the entire terrified audience of middle schoolers and their poor parents stampeding out of doors to end Act One. I framed the project for my students, paired them in writing teams, gave them research to do and scenes to write, and then loosed them upon the making of their own Civil War theater epic.
