I wrote this the night before I started teaching. I was thinking about Leslie Reyes.
And now the curtain is falling on two years and so here is a thingI wrote while I was waiting for Chiovani's detention to be over so I could go to dinner:
In retrospect, I realize that my worldview for the first chunk of my life was shaped, in large part, by John Donne by way of Paul Simon, who wrote:
An my poetry to protect me;…
I have always been a reader; I have always loved inhabiting books and language and other worlds and other lives. And I have always been my own center—guided more by my own responses and needs than anyone else’s. Often, I’ve existed in happy silence—although of course sometimes it’s tense silence or frightened silence.
Audre Lorde tells us that our silence will not protect us. “We can sit in our safe corners, mute as bottles,” she says, “and we will be no less afraid.”
And like Audre, “I have come to believe, over and over again, that what is important to me must be spoken.”
I believe in the power of voices—speaking in chorus, singing in harmony, trembling but emerging anyway out of silence.
These past two years have shown me the transformative power of voice in kids’ lives, and what it can mean for them when we coax forth and celebrate and treasure their voices. Too often, our kids have been constrained by others’ voices and others’ visions and others’ narratives where they are excluded, or maybe figure peripherally as ciphers or props, rather than as protagonists. They’ve grown up in a country that too often views their brown skin with suspicion, and that writes their motivations for them; too often, they are told that they must behave one way or another because of their gender or their race or whatever narrative we’ve already written for them in our heads. They are told and told and told.
I believe that they need to do the telling.
I believe in Icnacio, who can knock me off my feet with an offhanded line: “Love me, / and I’ll love back.”
I believe in Cruz, who can turn a phrase like nobody’s business.
I believe in Alexis, who raised his voice and moved his feet and hustled his bustle to raise money for cancer research in Stephanie’s honor.
I believe in Monica, who has the biggest heart and the biggest dimples of anyone I’ve ever met, who uses her voice to advocate for herself and her classmates.
I believe in Julian, who sucked all of the air out of the room with one question: “Which are more powerful: weapons or words?”
I believe in Lesliee and Diana and Brayan and Jose and Larissa and Ariana and Antonio and Josue and the 150 other names and stories that build and echo and reverberate and that have planted themselves in my heart and soul.
As an ELA teacher, I have the burden and the privilege of sharing stories with my kids, and of asking them to share their voices—their stories, their values, their jokes and their celebrations and their fears—with me and with each other. As I start packing up my classroom at Stockard and getting ready to move into my new one, as I prepare to leave my kids, I can’t help but feel some pangs of guilt: how can I leave them when we have so much left to do, so much literature unanalyzed, so many poems unwritten?
And the only answer I can think of is that I believe in their voices. I believe in their ability to motivate and to heal and to transform. I believe that by unleashing and valuing their voices, we can help kids become the authors of their own futures.
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
2087
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areudirty
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theartofmadeline
