Your Kids Are Okay

(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