What did I know? I had started as an ed tech working with small groups of first graders on reading skills. Go, Dog, Go! And just like that I got my first classroom teaching eighth-graders. They were larger, snarly, and rolled their eyes a lot at me. They were also brilliantly funny and wide open to the world. I fell in love with all of them and have been teaching middle school ever since. This is a poem I wrote this spring for my creative writing course. I was thinking (again) of classroom fans and the memory came back to me. True story.
First Year teaching Eighth Grade
“Gotta go, Mrs. C.”
He popped the screen in the middle of class
character analysis static or dynamic? for Lord of the Flies
Oh, Lord
It was not much of a drop out the window
cartoon running
arms pumping legs in a circular blur
across the road across the field
swallowed by the horizon
I could not hear through the June heat
and the fan
or no one said a word and there was nothing to hear until
someone said it
“Here comes the po-po!”
it was way too rural to say it
but it was said
so I laughed I laughed
There was the cruiser parked outside the office
there were the po-pos
plural
two po-pos all blue clunky hand cuffs
“Please dismiss Anthony to the office.”
Anthony knew. He had known.
I reported that he was not present.
He had fled by foot westward.
He was fifteen in eighth grade wide smile
His brown eyes would not read I tried
He liked lasagna
He was dynamic
I never saw him again.
-Kim Cowperthwaite
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