Life as an essay

Over the past few days I've had a really fun e-mail exchange with a friend and former colleague. During our time working together I always looked forward to the conversations we'd share and the e-mail exchange felt like an electronic renaissance of nostalgic proportions. The power of connecting with other humans never ceases to amaze me, and I am constantly left in awe of how much I enjoy gaining insight into the innerworkings of other people's brains.

One of the topics of our exchange included mention of recent books we'd read. I shared my enjoyment of Percival Everett's innovative, complicated, Italo Calvino-esque novel, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.

In the novel, Everett writes,

"To a considerable degree, by the time we have reached a certain age, it varies for each of us, we have said all we meant to say. Everything else is either a reissue or an elucidation, a gloss. Some utterances might be reconstructions of some erased pages, palimpsests of sorts, but it’s mere repetition."

I asked my friend whether he agreed. His response included the following:

"In basic education, don’t we value repetition: keep writing / revising an essay until you get your point across? What if your life or my life is one long essay that keeps getting rewritten … elucidated … polished."

This idea, in turn, got me thinking about another quote I'd read this week as I prepared to discuss Animal Farm with my 8th grade English class. George Orwell, the novella's author, wrote an essay entitled "Why I write," which includes the following passage:

"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally."

So where does all of this land me in my own understanding of myself, my students, and this journey of life that we share. Well, I do like the idea that our lives do share similarities with the drafting of an essay, but essays tend to get better and better, right? One would hope that each successive draft is more polished than the last. But any writer will tell you that there is a certain uncertainty to writing, too. An author-friend of mine who has been widely published to great critical acclaim, once confessed that he awakens each morning and has to literally look himself in the mirror and remind himself, "I am a good writer" over and over again.

I wonder, then, whether we might be penning essays that--during our weaker moments of struggle and self-doubt and reinvention possess those invariable moments of rambling fluff, misplaced citations, and blatant instances of plagiarism, along with the decorative adjectives and humbug generally of our lives. They're those "purple passages" where we lost the thread of thesis that was stringing everything together so nicely at the outset. Hopefully we all find the course again and the next chapter regains the magic that drew us (and our readers) in during that jaw-dropping introduction.

Life humbles us and can certainly be a "horrible, exhausting struggle," but there is also that opportunity for editing, revising, and refreshing the narrative. The characters have staying power, but the delivery and the elucidation of the soul of our writing--our lives--can, and does, evolve.

The circles we touch

Today I had the opportunity to speak to a group of parents whose children had been offered acceptance to my school. It got me thinking about the fact that their children could end up being in my classroom someday, and would therefore be a part of the future history of my life.

And it got me thinking...

Years before I was born, one summer in the 1970s, my father bought a notebook for 29 cents.

He was driving across America, a relative Kerouac or Steinbeck in his own right. My father espoused on the people he met, the places he stayed, the things he saw and felt. One evening, he flipped open the journal (he'd bought it at the outset of his trip) and touched upon a point that is acutely familiar to those of us who work in schools: People come and go. Students, colleagues, friends. Relationships with parents vary from year to year and the depth and amplitude of connections ebb and flow. But, like the tide, sometimes they come back.

Here's what my dad put on the page:

...upon this circle will touch and sometimes enter strangers, known at first by some of us, or none, and so the circle will grow and change as we travel and move. Eventually each of us in the circle will leave it, some forever, some for a day or a year. As time passes the circle will change, the periphery will fade and new friends will draw near the center. 


Schools are just such human spaces. Spheres of connection and interaction...circles that envelop strangers and draw them close, inviting them to stay or go. I remember returning from the NAIS People of Color Conference in Houston five years ago and thinking, "there is nothing more important than ensuring everyone in this school feels connected to everyone else...that everyone feels known.

I was reminded of this recently when a current student of mine told me she had been accepted to a different school for next year and would not be returning.

Students come and go.

I was reminded, too, of the paper-thin existence of today, of our normalcy, of our able-bodiedness. Things change fast and there is no guarantee of tomorrow. Robin Williams reminds the boys in Dead Poets' Society "Carpe Diem" as they stare at old photographs of  former students from their school. We must seize each day in schools because we don't know what tomorrow holds. This is the oldest any of us have ever been, and we are all trying to be the best versions of ourselves. Teachers want students to be successful. Parents want children to be successful. And young men and women want to be successful, too. We all drive for the same thing and are consumers of the relationships we build.

I've always felt that my students stay the same age as my own wisdom develops from year to year. My students certainly change, but they stay the same, too. Every topic studied is new to them, and just as inspiring. And it is that journey that draws me into the craft of teaching, too.

Sometimes I'll open a file and read something a former student once wrote. A poem, or an essay, or just a note to say thank you. Sometimes I miss my students. I think about my someday future retirement, and how many students I will have known and with whom I will have connected.

Teaching is a profession worthy of attention for anyone who likes celebrating our humanity, our vision, and our propensity for growth. But without the ability to reflect on the craft of being human, it could easily be mistaken for a bunch of correcting papers and writing tests and telling students to sit down and spit out their gum.