Hunger.

by Margeaux Temeltas

Chicago, October 2008
Dedicated to the 300

hunger spits on poetry

living as it does in the gut of the world,
in the gut of the world’s forgotten,
an ache that gnaws on displaced dreams,
howling, huge and empty,
eating everything _____ but itself.

hunger binds the blind and the forgotten
hunger thrives on blindness,
as in a blackly yawning alleyway
cracked streetlights glitter like a crooked grin,
lonesome for beauty.

only the blind see __an empty alley.

look._____________ inside empty,
hunger is a small boy crouched,
useless as a diamond,
his inconsolable bones digging into the moon.

for, yes— _________ even the hungry can see the moon.

that’s the oilslick glint in his inkblack eyes,
the light shivering now as the boy
gathers the dust of his hunger
into words, _________where,
discovered on a page,
hunger becomes beautiful.

because hunger?
hunger spits poetry.

_______________


from a prompt during after-school poetry club,
to be performed Friday, April 17th, 2009
at the Orr Academy High School Talent Show

Photo by Margeaux Temeltas
Midwinter Swimming Pool, Pulaski Park
Chicago 2008

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
____________
Photos by Fred Bialy

When A Child Is Like A Villanelle

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

________________
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.

________________
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.


________________
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.

Let Us Go To School!

Please support these Morton West High School students, who are threatened with expulsion for their peaceful sit-in against military recruitment inside their school. These are the brave, thoughtful, independent students I am trying to help build!

read about them here and here

sign the petition here

call the school administration here

You Might Be Here. (Field Notes #1)

I'm excited - and a little apprehensive - for the next four weeks. We'll be doing field visits at other schools, spending two weeks each in the classrooms of two previous residents. The schools are different from our own, and more like those - indeed may be the very ones - where we will teach next year. We are given official school "report cards," which I study with a few grains of salt - knowing they are only rough gestures toward a picture of students I can't yet know.



Children are more dynamic than numbers, but these numbers should startle you. They are as telling of their audience as they are of their subject. At CAHS, where we're doing our residency, the students are mostly low-income, but their ethnic make-up is unusually well-balanced for CPS - roughly 40% Hispanic, 25% African American, and 25% White (mostly Polish, Russian, and Eastern European). At the Excel school at Orr High, where I will be on Monday, the students are 97.3% low-income and 86.2% African American. At Little Village, where I will spend the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, the students are 99% low-income and 98.9% Hispanic. These curious statistical pies - composed almost entirely of one solid slice - are the norm for Chicago's schools, if not always its neighborhoods. A city whose public school students are 8.2% White and 85.9% low-income. A deeply flawed city, one I love very much.



Unlike some of my fellow residents, I don't really know what schools like these are like. (The suburban high school I spent my most formative years escaping had its own, very different, racial and institutional dynamics.) Though we've read and talked about them for months, I don't know who these students are I'll be teaching. What I do know is that I can't wait to meet them, and I've decided that's a pretty good start.

Among my instructions for meeting my new students, to be added to the "texts that need a close reading" list: "Don't worry about the metal detector - they don't stop adults."

For the purpose of finding my way, my mother's words yesterday were much more meaningful to me. She told me, "you are a survivor." Reading that, I found myself crying, and realized I was crying with how good it felt for someone to see that in me. That is the feeling I want for my map.


____________

The photos are by Stephen Shames, from his series on child poverty in Chicago, circa 1985. There are fewer photographs from the American ghettos of the 21st century. Perhaps our media is too saturated with images of the terror we are cultivating abroad to make room for the terror of our children at home. And yet the poverty, hopelessness, and violence persist, unrecorded.

on defiance.

Even the school bells, they tell us, have their history. Early public school children, their education aimed at creating successful factory workers out of farmboys accustomed to the rhythms of the sun, had to be conditioned to city time, to factory time. To it mattering that way, the way children and workers bellyache for the stroke of the bell, the way time feels when authority tells your body not you. Can you picture the blinking, barefoot, wild-eyed boy being herded, quieted, etched slowly away into the form of his caste?

But that is not my duty. I am building citizens - humans - not laborers. What I want is thoughtfulness, not obedience. Respect owed not because I am me but because we are we.

Now piece together incongruous fragments from our education: someone writes that "urban" (read: ghetto) children (who look to me much like other children on the inside), unaccustomed to the gentle and forgiving manner of the young white liberal teacher, are confused, their achievement threatened, by this approach and require the kind of toughness associated with love at home. (I won't unpack that sentence now but buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it.) Our optimistic (read: naive) ears abound in progressive euphemisms for "don't smile 'til Christmas," they fall from the mouths of authority and collect at our ankles.

We have hammered into us this idea that you gotta be tough right from the start, to not slip, not accept anything once, not early on, or else there's no hope and you can never reel 'em back in. Sometimes it seems very sensible. I do believe kids need a consistent, solid structure. (I know I do.) But how can we teach them to think critically, if we don't allow them to criticize us? I have seen an entire class cower in silence as they are yelled at for not meeting miscommunicated, and sometimes actually incorrect or spontaneously altered, expectations. It is at these moments that I realize again that the majority of my struggles these days have to do with being made to feel as these kids are feeling. Where's the sense in teaching "open-ended questions," in believing in education as dialogue, but not accepting students' questioning of your self?

If I am making a mistake or being unjust, I want my kids to feel free to point it out to me. Otherwise, what are we teaching them to do when they encounter injustice in the world?

The night I found "A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero,"* by Bill Ayers, I had grown sick of cowering in silence with my students and exhausted at having to teach outside my skin. There was magic in there, words that showed my bruised instincts I wasn't crazy. In it, he tracks the Hollywood image of the teacher-hero, reading films such as "Stand and Deliver" and "Blackboard Jungle" for what they tell us a city teacher should be like, and for that idealized teacher the first principle is always assumed to be "classroom management" (read: discipline). The problem with that picture, as Ayers so eloquently points out, is that "real learning requires assertion, not obedience; action, not passivity." As he talks of "teaching defiance" I curl over the page, circling words and underlining passages, and feel myself begin to breathe again. I think again of how reading is so often about feeling yourself not to be alone.

"Teaching is intellectual work - puzzling and difficult - and at its heart it is ethical work. It is idiosyncratic, improvisational, and most of all, relational. All attempts to reduce teaching to a formula, to something easily predicted, degrade it immeasurably...

...it involves learning how to...embrace students as dynamic beings and fellow creatures. It requires building bridges from the known to the not-yet-known. And it demands liberating schooling from its single-minded obsession with control, obedience, hierarchy and everyone's place in it...

Real teachers need to question the common sense, break the rules, become political and activist in concert with kids. This is true heroism, an authentic act of courage. We need to take seriously the experiences of youngsters, their sense-making, their knowledge, and their dreams - and particularly we must interrogate the structures that kids are rejecting. In other words, we must assume an intelligence in youngsters, assume that they are acting sensibly and making meaning in situations that are difficult and often dreadful, and certainly not of their own making. In finding common cause with youngsters, we may also find there our own salvation as teachers."

Serendipitously, Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were speaking the next day, in another context, a screening of the documentary of the Weather Underground, of which they once were a part. I hold my mother's hand as we watch, then wait shyly after the talk, wanting to tell him, thank you for helping me to breathe. Instead I manage to introduce myself. Nonetheless the day is beautiful and invigorating and I sit in the park, sunny autumn afternoon, blissfully reading the page where he's written "To Margeaux, With admiration for your journey so far and hope for a future fit for children - a place of peace and justice."

There are still only more questions. What does a classroom look like where rigor and freedom both thrive? How do I get us there? And always more words, falling. In a marginal vignette one of our textbooks warns us about the first-year elementary school teacher fired for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance along with her students, who were required to do so. What do I do about the tiny freshman girl in my homeroom who's already planning on joining the marines after high school, like her big brothers? What kind of space will I build with my students, once I am free to choose this for myself? What I found the night I read Ayers's essay wasn't an answer but something more dynamic, an affirmation of my own senses.

Even as I type these words, return to the moments of this reading, I feel myself healing again. Exhausted by the dissonance at my ankles, I had again lost track of my purpose for a moment. Telling you this story brings me back home to my journey.


____________

"A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero" is from the wonderful collection City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, edited by William Ayers and Patricia Ford.

disembodied

Here in Chicago it's what I guess they call an indian summer. There's a July thickness to the air, a sleepy, saturating heat that makes your bones lazy and wants your feet bare. The summer weather is misleading, suggesting as it does that time has not been passing, October already, candy corn in my kitchen. The disconnect's in the fall crunch of dead leaves beneath flip-flopped toes, beach-headed.

This weekend, though, I don't care how false it is, summer ex machina, it tastes like freedom and I dive in, the water's cold and delicious and wakes me back up into myself. All weekend I zoom and pounce around the nighttime city, a hoodlum on my rusty blue bike, tasting it.

During the week I don't own my body. It's not just time, those cruel limits, it's words too, politics, constrictions. Nerve-wracking to be under observation, critiqued/criticized, throughout the day. It stings a little even when it's right, and when it isn't it stings worse. Often what is criticized is so deeply tied to my own instincts that I find myself floundering, a metaphorical amputee with the best intentions. I'm tired of being told I'm kind as if it were a disease that might be catching.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I've got the sort of skin easily penetrated by others' thereness. Well, grown-ups at least. Children don't frighten me. Children don't scratch at those flimsy, fragile edges of self. Maybe it's because they are equally porous, becoming. I think it's because they listen, pay attention, in ways many of us learn to stop doing, don't have time for, as we get older. Last week my fellow resident and I had our first day alone in the classroom without our mentor teacher there. I imagine it should have been stressful, left alone with the monsters while mom's away, but instead it was the most relaxed and natural I'd felt teaching all month.

Like so much of this experience, survival--maybe even happiness--means holding onto what you can from what you're given, always learning, even on the really bad days. For me, the most important thing to remember will just be this: to listen, always, to never stop listening.