Yet Another Reason Why We're Here

I found this draft while digging through a pile of notebooks as I cleaned up my classroom. It came from a Central Utah Writing Project One-Week Institute that I helped to facilitate four or five months ago.

(from 23 June 2015)

I just read “Funny You Should Ask” by Rick Reilly as our scribble prompt this morning, and I asked the participants to write literally or figuratively why we are here. I’ve personally written to this prompt many times—some of the better ones made it to the blog—and I’m not too sure I want to go down the same road.

This time, as I read the passage aloud, I made a different connection. Even though it’s a funny piece, I became emotional three times from the underlying subtle truths about existence and what really matters in finding happiness.

After the third emotional pause, I thought of the last time I did a scribble for a CUWP group—one where I laughed so hard that I cried as I read. And it hit me that students need to see teachers as real people, with real lives and real emotions. If we want them to open up and find connections with this life, with the literature, with each other, we need to be there on all levels. My classroom needs to run the gamut of human experience. Tears of all varieties should be shed. Laughter should permeate the atmosphere. Life, literature, and even 6^th period English on a Wednesday afternoon are meant to be enjoyed. Sorrows should be shared, excitement accepted, frustration understood. We are human beings having human experiences. 

Once, when reading from Choosing Up Sidesby John H. Ritter, I had a class become so emotionally invested that even the too-tough-for life jocks wept openly. After I finished reading the selection for the day, they just shared a few more moments of silence (see also The Chosen by Chaim Potok). No one said a word about the experience, and no one needed to. Afterward, in the hallways, on the streets, in the supermarkets, they (and I) would just look at each other and bob their heads and half-smile in acknowledgement that they shared something special.

Nothing says that once you are an adult, you can’t show your emotions. Nothing says that schools need to be filled with automatons plowing through curricular drudgery.

Reading and writing are about shared experiences. They are about life (see also Dead Poets Society), and the teacher needs to lead by example. I need not be afraid to show and be who I am. Most of us as teachers have passion for our content area and passion for learning. That passion needs to be shared. It’s one of the reasons why we’re here.

And you don’t have to be a teacher to share it.