Did I Loose My Sight or Is This Just a Hood?
Metaphors for the first year of teaching
Happy Friday. I am here. With an HP laptop from the dark ages, which isn’t even mine, because a quarter of my screen went black early this week and has not come back to consciousness.
If that don’t describe this second week of school, week after labor day, in the life of a first-year high school English teacher for you. Incorrect grammar intended.
Anticipating our work on metaphor in my creative writing class this coming week, I’ve written a little poem-story which reflects the various phases and feelings I’ve moved through the past couple weeks. If you are a teacher (I know a few of you are), I hope you can relate to these first-year struggles particularly. If you are not a teacher (most of you are not), I hope these reels-in-words might show you what you didn’t know about that first-year government teacher your junior year you couldn’t take seriously (I had one myself, if you can’t tell).
I.
It was known, from birth, you would lose your sight. You have prepared. When the time does come, you enter a new building with a full bladder. For the first time, you use your fingertips and those braille bumps on blue signs to find the bathroom. Locked inside the first stall, you wonder, Where’s the seat liners?, and, looking, with fingers, over every surface including the tile floor, find none. There’s nothing for it, now that your hands are dirtier than your private parts will be. Bare butt to the chipped plastic toilet seat.
II.
A hood over your head. Shapes and shadows punctuate the light pricks of the fabric. Sixteen assailants sneer. Their voices are your voice.
III.
For the first time, in braille, you read Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral,” in which a blind man teaches a seeing man to see. The results of your weeping wimples the wordless page.
IV.
Your hood is removed. Your assailants look at the hoods in their own hands, at each other, at you. You laugh, you jeer, at one another, at the answers you’ll never find to the questions your eyes, roving toward the walls and the doors, ask. Who took the hoods off your heads? Who put them there? Where have they gone?
V.
With a walking stick in one hand, a dog leash in the other, and World’s Greatest Short Stories: Braille Edition under your right elbow, you come to an intersection. Four lanes (at least) of traffic in a 45 (at least) mph zone. Your body is now a receptacle, via your fingertips, of all these stories, and you don’t know how to cross the road to get to the library on the other side.
You might not get it, these scenes of blindness. But I’m wondering, what has work or your new thing been like the past couple months? Like I have my students do, on Metaphor Mondays, I invite you to fill in the blanks and see where this prompt takes you: School/work/life/etc has been like_______
This week particularly, I have experienced the all feelings evoked in the five scenes above. Paranoia. Uncertainty. Joy. Incredulity. Openness. Most of all, I have been feeling my way forward with my fingers. I nearly cried in class yesterday. On the drive home, I had to stop myself from wondering down the deep dark whole of speculation over why my principal came to class at the beginning of Brit Lit and Creative Writing. My literature students wanted to (and maybe did) cry today. Excitedly retelling my tale of a student reciting her poem to the wonderstruck gasping of everyone else in the room, I knocked this cup of iced coffee off the table this afternoon.
Which is all to say: I’m loving it.
[French fries, anyone?]
Thanks for being here. For sticking with me. Moving forward, I’m not sure what this space holds for us. I want to keep writing. I want to keep listening. I hope you do too.
Take care.
—CJS
My past week is like me living under the hood because I still don’t like some of the ugly living inside me.
My past week has been like a juicy peach dripping sweet goodness off my lips and down my chin.