Issue link: http://latinschool.uberflip.com/i/134761
FIRST PERSON First Person by James Joyce, Upper School English On Writing & Teaching ". . . the work that students produce outside of class, from what they've shared with my colleagues and me, has made me grateful to be a part of this community of readers and writers." 18 L AT I N M AGAZINE When I finally leave my house – for oranges, for dinner at a friend's place – I sometimes meet new people. And on occasion I'm forced to make small talk. The first big question is always, "What do you do for a living?" If it comes out that I'm an English teacher, I'm usually held accountable for the decline of handwriting and abandonment of Dickens. But once in a while, the inquiring party will say, "Oh yeah! So your job is talking about symbolism and stuff, right?" And then we take turns remembering symbols from our high school reading lists – symbols like keys, trees, suns, flowers, swords, dogs in the distance, eyeglasses and conches. I'm not wild about symbols. As far as I know, symbols are a sort of running gag among English teachers. They're a gateway device into cooler topics. But if you spend too much time on a symbol, you miss the story. During our sophomore poetry unit, we read selections from a Paris Review interview with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. We wanted to see what appeared when the poet spoke to his work. When reading Neruda (minus all those kiss-flooded love poems), you're going to find plenty of strangeness for analysis. Lemon cathedrals. Busted umbrellas. Dentures asleep in coffee pots. So we're reading this interview, milling past abstract talk of poetry's purpose, etc., when we hit pay dirt: The Review confronts Neruda on his poetry's abundance of "symbols" – doves, guitars, all that kind of thing. Anticipating a scintillating answer, we're left with this: Neruda says "the guitar signifies a musical instrument called the guitar," and that a dove is a dove. So. Does that mean all the poems we loved before are broken? Do they not stand for anything more than their components? Geometry class now pleases me greatly. In geometry, I learned of rays, those markings that start at one definite point and bear on endlessly from there until forever; and lines, which reach for infinity in both directions toward who knows what. Pretty wild stuff. Though when the students and I talk about writing, it seems that we can agree on at least one purpose to the phenomenon. For us, writing measures space and time. It helps us process and put frame around all that infinity out there. For me, the process is excitement with small amounts of terror. Terror of false starts and ray tangents. Terror of when I read this in front of 24 strangers in a Cincinnati basement with the band members cursing and feeding back on microphones all around me, will people like it? Will they want more symbols? My initial history with writing has been as a performer. Some nights the audience makes me feel enthusiastic about my life choices. Other nights it's despair, it's crickets. Now the deepest satisfaction comes from writing a piece deliberately throughout the week, month, year. I know our literary analysis essays, the standard fare of English classes, can't allow the luxury of slow crafting, but the work that students produce outside of class, from what they've shared with my colleagues and me, has made me grateful to be a part of this community of readers and writers. I'm thinking of our slam poets who trade poetry collections after school and perform to auditoriums of peers throughout Chicago, of our self-publishers who sell out of their zines at national book fairs. Among the student body are awardwinning essayists and storywriters, gifted editors, too. All to say, I don't know where their earned talent will lead them in adult years, but I'm happy my own love of writing brought me here with them. n