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In the film Patch Adams, there is a line narrated by Robin Williams in the opening scene which goes something like this: “All of life is a coming home.” Why that line impacted me and has stayed with me the eight years since I first saw the film was a mystery until I began teaching. In the world of students, classes, bells, pep rallies, Friday night basketball games, homework, rivalries and inspiration, the truth of the line began to strike me. When I started teaching three years ago, I did so with the belief that every student wanted to be inspired, wanted to learn, wanted to be all that he or she could be. I, like most, had those visions of grandeur in which I saw myself at the head of the class, passionately saying something (anything would work, for the purposes of my imagination) while my students would be silently transfixed—their hearts beating loudly within and their skin tingling. When, during my first week of class, I heard students saying things like “Why do we have to do that—what’s the point?” and “I don’t get it—this is so boring!!” I realized quickly that my images were made more of a false deity than of a gritty understanding of connection. Now, in this third year of teaching freshmen and juniors at Farmington High School, I have tried to inspire my students by inspiring myself. In an attempt to bridge the gap between what students seem to hate (analytical writing and dissecting novels and poems), I made a promise to myself to include a number of assignments that I would love to write myself. Immediately upon deciding this, though, I realized that to assign personal and creative writing, I would have to do it myself. I would have to chase my own dreams of writing in a committed way. My wife and I hold each other to The Pact. It arose late one night after a day in which we felt as though we were living in one swoop of a long-lasting hurricane that constantly had us spinning through circles of work, family, trips, rush, rush, rush, car problems, car accidents, rush, rush, rush, exhaust systems, where to spend Christmas, application deadlines for grad school, rush, rush, rush. We felt spent, exhausted, worn out. That night as we lay in bed, we agreed on one thing: we have dreams. We told each other what we cared for most deeply on this planet: the causes we wanted to fight for, the things we believed in working towards, the kinds of people we wanted to be. We agreed that in the blink of an eye we could find ourselves retiring, sitting on our front porch discussing the days when we were young and in our first apartment with the broken toilet. But the thing was, we wanted to say more than that. We wanted to say things like, remember how I sent away that first novel and had it rejected so often before it finally was published? and remember how hard we trained for that first marathon, only to get caught with diarrhea on mile 17 and have it run down my leg? and even remember how we flew to England and backpacked through Europe for a whole semester, just talking with different people? We believed that these things involved taking action, opposed to allowing life to slip from comfortable second to minute to hour to day. In short, we made The Pact to promise to each other that every day we would do the things we truly cared about. Now, all this came after I began my third year of teaching, but I mention it because it is the outcome of which my desires at the inception of that school year were. I wanted my students to write with passion and insight and humor and genuine belief. I did not want them to only go through the motions of writing an essay and receiving a letter grade back. In order to accomplish this, the steadfast nature of a normal English classroom has to be temporarily put on hold—or, at least, bridged momentarily with another thing: pure and unadulterated fun (which is, I believe, what writing is). In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes that one of the keys towards becoming a writer is to produce “Shitty First Drafts.” She argues that as young adult and adult writers, our filters have grown too strong, and they block what could eventually become good writing. Instead of writing the silly, ridiculous thing—we wait it out and write the normal, accepted thing. This, she argues, acts as a stop for something truly inspirational further down the path of the free-thinking trek. I noticed this exact attitude in many of my students. They had become so conditioned to write critically that, like machines, they could produce a thesis, find evidence, argue it, end it, hand it in, get it back, and throw it away. They wrote very little, I learned, that they truly believed in. The Greek origins for the word believe actually mean “to live by.” Would any of my students live by what they wrote? If good writing happens when a writer truly believes in what he or she is producing, then I braced myself for the conclusion I knew had already found me: many students have not produced good writing since they were little kids, when they wrote because they loved making up stories. This is not to say that the thesis essay is a terrible Grendel when it comes to the world of English: far from it. Instead, what I learned was that the passion many students carry for their own lives and their own ideas actually becomes silenced rather than magnified in the school setting. I decided that my tack for the upcoming school year would be simple: I would assign all the normal work regarding thesis essays and analytical writing, but I would add two things: short essays based around themes that students live through and deal with every day, and the creation of their own 50 – 80 page novellas. When I first told them this news, I think they may have prayed for my immediate demise by lightning. However, the more they created this work, the more they came to love it. Every Friday, two new pages of their own novellas were due. I did not specify what the story had to be about or what it had to include. It was totally their decision: the only standard was that it eventually had to be 50 – 80 pages long. I was amazed that in the first two weeks of my experiment, students were handing me work early, and were handing me much more than the required amount. With their tangible writing came the surprised words, such as “I can’t wait to get home and keep writing this thing” or “I know what I’m going to have happen next” or “This is awesome.” My students came to love the creation of their own ideas and plots and characters and words. Now, for the first time in a long time, they were writing about what they truly wanted to write about, rather than what somebody else told them they had to write about. As the papers gathered (and made a nightmare for me in terms of proofreading and grading, by the way) and the positive comments rolled in, I found myself asking in that secret space of my own mind, “Who ever told Hemingway what he had to produce?” In short, then, this collection of essays is the result of one those experiments. For one particular Friday, I told the students a two page essay about love would be due. They had listened to a PowerPoint presentation that I created about love, in which I also shared some of my own embarrassing and funny meetings with the strange thing, and then I told them they had to write their own. They could choose to write a personal story of an experience they had with the thing, or their own ideas about the nature of the beast or the rose. You now hold in your hands their work. When I first collected their essays, I laughed, I sighed and I took pause to think about my own life. And more importantly, I truly—perhaps for the first time—saw theirs. I learned that teenagers have much to teach the rest of us in many avenues of our own lives, and they have much to say. I did not agree with all of it, but I read and relished every word, appreciating more and more the voices I had never really listened to speak in their own tones and with their own volume controls. Now, they were not spitting back what I had told them to say and how I had told them to say it. Instead (forgive the cliché), they were writing from the heart. And it was, for all of us, a breath of fresh air. It was a “coming home.” |