dolor hic tibi proderit olim*

*someday this pain will be useful to you

Graduation Speech
By Margeaux Temeltas


To the AUSL Class of 2008

As residents, we have been teachers and students at once. Individually, we have been models of the kinds of independent, critical, inquisitive thinkers we want our students to become. Collectively, we have built our achievements upon the strength of our community; and it is a community which I hope will not only serve as a model for those we build with our future students, but which will endure in its own right as a continued dialogue among teachers, colleagues, and friends.

We sometimes call each other comrades, but most often, family. Surviving this year has required the loyalty and unconditional love of both soldiers and siblings, and a more generous, compassionate, and fiercely independent family I could not hope to belong to.

From at least five states and two countries we came, idealistic pilgrims of social justice, each bearing our own unique stories, but with a shared faith in the transformative power of education.

Some of us came here after witnessing the senseless abandonment of our cities in the face of natural catastrophe; others, the slow devastation of our neighborhoods in the face of social neglect.

All of us are husbands, children, mothers, lovers, and citizens.

Some of us turned from illustrious careers in law, business, or marketing to join the side of the underpaid good guys; others sprang fresh from college with the certainty of purpose.

Each of us came with hope, passion, and a commitment to justice for all children. We came because we understand that freedom—true freedom, intellectual, political, and economic—means nothing if it is not possessed by all; that a change in the distribution of power is not only possible but necessary; and that the key to this change is the transformation of public education.

But life does not stand still, even for revolution. In the past year, the residents we celebrate today have welcomed two new babies and many more of life’s joyful distractions; we have survived divorce, death, and other shades of loss; and all while planning lessons, grading homework, writing papers, preparing presentations, and a thousand other things of which none, I assure you, is sleeping. Without one another’s support, managing this delicate balance might not have been possible. What brought us here was hope, but what kept us here was a belief in each other.

It’s never easy to see yourself becoming. And in the hustle and intensity of the residency year, it can be hard to find the time to notice all that you have learned and how much you have changed. This is one among the many ways I am grateful to you, my fellow residents. Through you, I have marked my own growth as a teacher…And standing before you now, looking proudly into this mirror of passionate, dedicated, and confident new teachers, I see how much we have all grown, and the incredible change that we have become capable of.

Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Chicago Academy High School
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Photos by Fred Bialy

When A Child Is Like A Villanelle

It's been a while. I hope you will forgive my dust.

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Three times this week I did not cry for you.

I will not see you again, child.

And so when I say three times this week I did not cry for you I mean three times I began this story to someone else, felt the choked weight welling at my chest—the silence fractures, I swallow, and three times this week I do not finish telling your story. I keep moving, and I do not fall apart.

I don’t know much about this boy, except that he is just a boy, and smart too. Suspended on the first day of high school for a fight and again throughout the year, he would appear in our freshman lit studies class for a few days every now and then, ace tests he’d missed half the lessons for, and then disappear again. Small, gentle, with black hair cut sharp, a quiet kid with diamond earrings and bad posture but graceful hands and intelligent eyes. Quiet can be dangerous when there are 29 kids in the class all wrangling to be loved or noticed.

And they all deserve it.

This kid loved patterns, had a knack for them, was intrigued when we studied sonnet forms, iambic pentameter and all that, stuff I personally always found sort of hopelessly dull. (Maybe not dull. Maybe just, a language I hadn’t mastered.) And this kid, my student, had mastered this language or would master it, I tell you he was smart.

On Tuesday morning, he—

Here is a sound I hate. Tuesday afternoon, as on so many afternoons before, another teacher, shook up about this too, but this way: shouting at the kids, Maybe this isn’t the place for you. In my head there is sometimes screaming NO DON’T TELL THIS DON’T TELL THIS TO ANYONE. This is the place for you. Please, stay. Wanting to grab these grammar exercises from their hands and tear them up and sit cross-legged on the floor and say: You. You you you tell me about you and what you need and how can I help you please make better choices?

No he did not die. Should I have told you that in the beginning? Nobody died on Tuesday. A boy was hit in the head with a lock, he had stitches and is back at school. And perhaps in the absence of what is called tragedy it will be all right if I tell you that it’s the other boy I’m grieving for, the one who somehow—the way we know and don’t know how—grabbed a metal lock off a locker and hit some other kid in the head with it. In Kite Runner, which we are reading for AP, the child narrator says: "I wondered how and when I'd become capable of causing this kind of pain."

So what I’m grieving for is that kid I was talking to Tuesday morning, so maybe it’s Tuesday morning I’m grieving for, those lost seconds with this kid I was getting caught up on an essay assignment about Romeo and Juliet, who got taken out of school in handcuffs at lunch. I never got to know him but I spoke to him this morning about Romeo and Juliet I looked him in the eyes and I tell you the boy’s a genius (THEY’RE ALL GENIUSES) and he’s being expelled, transferred ASAP, and what I’m grieving for is those eyes, not like a child but smart, and wondering if anyone—at this next and all the places after that catch kids when they fall—will have the time to make him notice it better than we I did.

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Post Script

This week we also read an Elizabeth Bishop poem entitled "One Art."

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

And in my clumsy way I try to guide my students to see in this poem the rare way form comes to life for me, the controlled grief, the way the logic of the line does something. The way disaster is written into the horizon with the first tercet of this villanelle. A difficult poem, one must pay attention to the time: "I shan't have lied." I ask if anyone has ever had someone in their lives they hadn't lost yet but were afraid they might. Nearly the whole class raises their hands. We keep (Write it!) We keep moving.


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The blue sketch I drew in late November, following my field visit to Orr High School, to remember a few of the students I’d met there.

Beneath, the opposite page from my sketchbook: the metal detectors and x-ray machines they pass through each day before class.