The Classroom Paradox
When I’m teaching, I love the classroom.
I love the attention and the validation that I get at the front of the room. I love making relationships with students, seeing them grow and know that I had a hand in their success.
I love challenging, exploring, singing and dancing and discovering with students. I love story telling. I love laughing. I am so happy and fulfilled when I stand and the front of this room.
But-
Put me at the back of this very same room, crushed into a plastic chair and
I hate the classroom. My soul dies.
I hate sitting in silence, expected to absorb information with the attention and discipline of a ‘mature adult mind’. I hate that maturity is equated with stillness. I hate that ‘grown-up’ really just means ‘quiet’.
I hate the shudder that rattles my mind as the movement inherent to my body is restricted to the insides of my bones.
From this chair I want to rage and scream and rend the sky with passion and ideas.
But I cannot.
I must sit and absorb with all the vibrance and diligence of a sponge.
When I teach, I mourn my lack of creativity. I pour all of my artistry into my work, my lessons, my plans, and I am left with only the drab phonetic remains of a picked-over lexicon.
Where have my words gone? Where has my poetry gone? What happened to the ache in my hands for the art of creation?
Fie! Fie! The muses are dead!
Thalia is slain! Erato has fallen! Calliope floats, belly up, in the fifty-gallon fish tank of existential inspiration. My art is exhausted.
I am exhausted.
But-
Crush me into this damn plastic chair at the back of this classroom- make me the learner, make me a sponge- and life rushes back to my mind with such force it leaves even Pallas Athene breathless.
The sun rises on my muses and lo-- They are not dead! Merely asleep!
Fat bastards.
My ass hits the cold, black plastic and Calliope rights herself.
The creativity flares.
The words return in an articulate torrent, jostling to be spilled onto paper as professors throw knowledge at the walls of my mind, hoping something sticks
whilst I struggle to juggle note-taking and prose-making.
01/11/22
