from The Wire: "Mr. P," on his first day in his 7th grade classroom. 

After the abrupt end of my career in dance, after a couple of years listless shuffling what was left of my deck, I went back to school to get a teaching certificate. Eventually I honed in on special education, with a focus on children with learning disabilities and emotional handicaps. Those were the kids that drew me in, their huge need matched my huge need to feel useful. My fifteen and some years of teaching started in Florida and ended abruptly in Maryland. Dunno. Rugs get pulled, eh?

My first teaching job was in a special education center in Florida. I taught emotionally disturbed Kindergartners. The children had already run into big trouble in their pre-schools or regular Kindergarten classes and they were placed with us. The students, roughly evenly black and white, with a few Asians, a few Hispanic, qualified for free breakfast and lunch 98% of the time. Basically, they were all dirt poor.

“My” children were five and six and once they trusted me, they would let me teach them. In most cases, during the years I worked in this center, the children reached the first goal the school established for them: the student will be able to experience their environment with pleasure. When these children came to our center, they weren’t able to do that, and I felt like that was a damn shame. Here’s a poem:

Children, I will teach you.

We will make Green Eggs and Ham,

sing the alphabet in funny voices, celebrate

your good behavior with stickers and playtime,

watch The Red Balloon, dance on Friday afternoons.

Eric Carle, Maurice Sendak, A.A. Milne, Dr. Zeuss,

Ezra Jack Keats, Chinua Achebe, Beatrice Potter,

and their friends will join us and you will sit quietly,

soaking in poetry, pictures, and tales of wise animals, 

foolishness, kindness, impossibilities, and satisfying resolutions. 

My last teaching job was in a large middle school in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in a town half-way between D.C. and Baltimore. The school population was about 60% white and 40% black; the faculty was a fair mix of black and white, men and women; the children came from well-off families, getting by families, homeless families, and no family at all to speak of. When they were poor, more often than not, they came from a poverty of long standing in their family histories.

During my first year at that school I was a “co-teacher,” supposedly working in tandem with regular teachers, supposedly helping the kids with learning disabilities. The special ed students were in large classes meant to be “regular” education, but most of the other students were placed there because they had behavior issues that were deemed “incorrigible,” or were emotionally damaged or learning disabled, but undiagnosed. Chaos reigned. I tried to teach and now and then I felt like I had taught someone something useful, but most nights I left the school feeling utterly frustrated, lost, and depressed.

During my second year at the school, I taught (by myself, which was better) an “intensive” class of 7th and 8th graders language arts and social studies. Once I won the battle with the administration to get my class size in line with special education guidelines, we, the children and I, had a pretty good time and I think they learned. No, I know they did. But I messed it up by needing open-heart surgery in April of that year. I couldn’t return to that job, in fact I never returned to full-time teaching. 

I recently watched TheWire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire,

which originally aired from 2002 to 2008. I didn’t watch it then because, because… Wow. The story is about life in Baltimore, Maryland, but it could be about any city in our country that has poor neighborhoods, political corruption, problems in police departments, a shrinking middle class, children and schools in crisis. So, any U.S. city.  I spread the 60 episodes out sensibly over a couple of months, didn’t binge, because I could only take one or two episodes a night and not every night. Some nights I felt weak. Every American should watch The Wire from start to finish, I think. That won’t happen, of course. Some Americans would rather be shot; for others watching The Wire would never occur to them, simply wouldn’t be in their radar; and for many Americans there would be no opportunity and anyway it would be redundant because they are living it, know the scenes all too well. The fourth season brings a group of middler schoolers into the story and I followed them living out their plot lines with recognition, rage, heartbreak, and in one lone case, joy. Okay, I am, “to the depths of my being” one of the tribe who think this series brilliantly written— accurate, perceptive, and brutally honest, but the thing about the series that both broke my heart and cheered me up the most was that in the final season they zoomed in on the children. We all need to zoom in on the children. Until we do that, we will get nowhere. We can have “conversations” (Jeez louise, I’m sick of hearing about conversations) until we exhaust ourselves, but we can also do things differently so that poverty doesn’t beget poverty, and a zip code doesn’t get to say it all about a child’s chance in America. Let’s finally do as much as we can to help every child thrive and see if that doesn’t help all of us. We need to nurture the roots of us. And yes, I’m a Democrat.

Nonnie's Poetry Trip: Part 2

Who would think, if they met me today, in bed with dog, cat and computer, that I am a woman of such passions? There has never been a time in my life when I haven't been deeply in love with something or someone. As a child my fervors were directed toward ballet and Catholic saints. I would read biographies of famous ballerinas, when I could find them, and the lives of cannonized women  with equal intensity. Could I somehow become the first ballerina-saint, I wondered?

With "boys" went my plans for sainthood, but my love of dance surged. And, indeed, I became a dancer of the daily class or classes; sweaty hours in studios; bloody ugly feet; living to perform and choreograph; GROW; variety. But I turned thirty and became a mess. Serious physical injury, a year or so of full-time drinking, and then, thanks to family love bucking me up and the help of a 12 step program (you know which one) sober living.
I believed, briefly, I could now become a less driven woman. I even pretended to be a secretary but was caught out.

After floundering about I became a teacher of children who were challenged by differences in mental, emotional, or physical states of being. The first priority for these lost souls was to help them "experience their environment with pleasure." Ah, yes.  Passion, for these kids, was back in my life. Then my heart got sick and I had to stop.

This blog was to be about my poetry trip, and indeed it will be. Poetry was and is a passion right there beside me, behind me and in front of me, leading me. From the first memories of my Nonnie teaching me nursery rhymes, I've been a fan. "My poets" have known, challenged, comforted, mirrored, and lord knows, amused me. One of the firsts dances I choreographed was inspired by a line from T.S.Eliot. My last group of special education students were able to recite, with sensitivity, and in front of the class (!) Robert Frost's, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Atlantic Ave, early morning

Atlantic Ave, Delray Beach, Florida

Poet David Kirby

Me, blurred by passion

A few weeks ago I went to my second Palm Beach Poetry Festival, which is not the least concerned, by the way, with taking place in Delray Beach, Florida. (I don't know. Is that whole beachy yet utterly urban sprawl Palm Beach?) I had a full schedule of workshops (with scholar, poet, rock and roll historian, prince of a man, David Kirby), craft talks and readings by top-shelf writers who gave and gave and gave, an invaluable manuscript conference with Ginger Murchison (oh, yeah, I want to publish a book) and many, many walks between my hotel, The Colony Hotel and Cabana Club (I love that name) and Old School Square, the festival venue. Walks along Atlantic Avenue were exciting imput-events for me. Cafés, fancy restaurants, boutiques, antiques, great dogs, and old, young, rich, homeless, Jewish, Cuban, European, black, bohemian, Americans. I had an excellent time in Delray. Weather was great and all and…poetry astounds me. During the readings I discovered new voices speaking to me and of course, those who have always been around will not go away. This passion will carry on,  I think, forever.

There have been men along the way. Sex and great love and all that. I'll write about them in another blog or two, I think. No, scratch that idea. Poems, definitely poems, for all that.