(I started teaching at LUMS in 2014 and needless to say dealing with people and public speaking has never been my comfort zone, it still isn't but practice has made it bearable. I threw up twice on my first day of classes, once before each Writing and Communication class. However, towards the end of my first semester, I penned this poem for my students. I recently came upon it when sorting through my old folders and thought I would share ... )
So, one of your kids
… And, yes, you call them ‘your kids’ now
Because there are just so many of them
and you don’t have any other word for it yet
and it makes you feel oddly invested
Perversely paternal, even.
Anyway, so one of your kids asks you to sit in on them SLAMming poetry,
And you agree because you haven’t yet learned how to disagree
But you dread it
You’ve read their work and it usually involves a host of acronyms you don’t understand
OMG'S, LOLs, Y.O.L.Os & Whatevs
It makes you feel irrelevant, decrepit and not quite ‘with it’
you’ve never really been ‘with it’ but this just leaves you without…
You go anyway.
There they are, working with words
Real words…
in complete, incomplete, inchoate,
off-key, hackneyed, ugly, pretty, petty and everything-in-between sentences
And it reminds of you of Cohen yelling at a studio hand “Yeah but there are no dirty words…ever”
And you are pleasantly surprised, and it is surprisingly pleasant
You find yourself justified in all those silly, lofty ideals you keep constructing around them
The unknown pressure of giving you purpose
Of justifying your time spent pouring over papers
Of dreaming up interesting misnomers and thought exercises
Of wanting them to stay silly rather than self-effacing
Of hoping they stay awake during your class
And suddenly it doesn’t matter that these kids aren’t yours
They’re the same, gaffing and riffing their way through
Extemporizing, elasticizing, euhemerizing
They remind you of the one who never stops talking
That other one who pontificates
The one who can’t help but dramatize everything
That other one who never speaks but pens the most beautiful opening sentences
The ones who always sit in corners and hang on your every word without ever adding their own
…no matter how hard you beg them to
The one who reminds you of yourself at 19
and you think ‘oh you poor, poor thing’,
The one who judges you and you always fall short
That one who loves to improvise
The other one who tries to get you to listen to Pantera
The obsessive one who forced you to watch countless videos on Particle physics so you could hope to understand his paper,
The girl who needs to discuss every paper three times before she pens a paragraph
That one always waiting outside your office before you even get there
The one who never spoke in class but suddenly launches into a soliloquy that validates your entire existence
The one you will never reach
The one who says ‘But Ma’am your uninterpretating me’
And you say Trust me kid, I couldn’t even if I tried.
The one who shuts your office door behind them and cries
The one you shut the office door behind and cry for
And you know you’re being especially sentimental because term is ending
And they are the first people you’ve ever been paid to talk to
And yet it doesn’t feel like it
… At least not always
And you don’t know how to thank them for giving you hope
and purpose and all those gooey, toe-tingly things
that a person like you needed without knowing it
And you don’t know how to punish them for occasionally pushing you around
And you don’t know what appropriate teacher protocol is
Or appropriate student protocol
Or appropriate
Or protocol
So you just say, ‘let’s talk’
And you soon realize how much there is to say
And how badly someone needs to listen to them
And, sometimes, how badly they need to listen to each other
So you bluff your way in and out of it all
thinking you are capable of teaching them anything
And they are kind enough to let you
And you hope you can teach them to make the most of this
This odd moratorium on both life and reality
this place where learning is contagious
and there is no warranty on the watershed of ideas
That this is the only time in life that they will get to do this
Have big ideas and not have the world shoot them down
Think big thoughts and believe them to be big enough
Make friends and mayhaps keep them
And you hope they will remember you
As that nutty lady who
for a tiny moment
was the one who told them
exactly what they needed to hear on a bad day
that it will all be okay
That they will all be okay
