Teaching With Fire

Yesterday between subbing and teaching the after school reading program, I picked up the book: Teaching With Fire" in the teacher's lounge.

A compilation of teacher's favorite poem's and their insights that help them find the courage to continue. So I took off my heels and cozied up on the couch for the spare hour I had and filled my cup.

Here are the notes I scrawled in a notebook to preserve:

"I don't remember precisely what my teacher's taught me in grade school, but I remember the realationshiops I had with them and thier individual charcters." (p.26)

"Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure." Lucille Clifton (p. 58 shared by Maren MacCurdy)n

First Reader meant a lot to the teacher, Linda Lantieri, who worked with young children whose 'lives have been largely untouched by books and whose backgrounds are amazingly diverse'. The last line of the poem she loves says: ".. we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read." by Billy Collins. See the whole poem online.





"Your very flesh shall be a great poem." Walt Whitman

Dream Deferred


What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisen in the sun

Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
OR crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

OR does it explode? Langston Hughes

I am seeing the inception of these little explosions and witnessing some of these kids already there...

"As teachers we feel the children in our classrooms become part of our lives. We witness them growing , learning, and becoming. Sometimes we witness and expereince their tragedies as well."




Fueled

Fueled by a million
man-mad
wings of fire
the rocket tore a tunnel
through the sky
and everbody cheered.
Fueled
only by a thougth from God
the seedling
urged its way
through thckness of black-
as it pierced
the heavy ceiling of the soil-
and launched itself
up into outer space
no
one
even
clapped. Marcie Hans

Al Zolyneas referring to a line that he had experienced toward his students: "And it hits me out of nowhere - a sudden, sweet, almost painful love for my students." (Love in the Classroom for my students.)

I have had that feeling hit me and it is painful. It makes me want to be the kind of teacher that feels like a shoe that fits, a warn coat that zips easily to put on for recess,

A teacher that exudes the shine of being scrubbed in a tub of warm water and lathered in yummy smelling lotion. Hair free of lice so that it is not a distraction to learn, and I could go on and on. But that is what comes to me this morning.