“Dr. Donovan,” Isabel whispers leaning over her desk in between student presentations, “can you tell me which poem I should share at Espresso Self Cafe? I just don’t know which one to present, and we don’t have much time.”
I kneel beside her desk as our student MC calls up the next storyteller and whisper to Isabel, “You should choose, but I am happy to look at your portfolio and give you some suggestions. You wrote so many beautiful poems. Think about which one speaks to the audience. It’s a night to express yourself.”
Isabel smiles. My heart warms.
On May 17th, our school has an event that we call Espresso Self Cafe where student-artists put on display their work, musicians perform, and poets share their poems to celebrate self-expression with coffee and sweets in a cafe atmosphere. I am looking forward to this event, which comes on the heels of our 30Poems challenge, a month long celebration of poetry in honor of National Poetry Month, but I find myself in a state of melancholia at the same time.
30 Days
For thirty days, I wrote a poem and read between twenty to two hundred, written by teens from Illinois to South Carolina. On Sundays in April, instead of writing one post for Ethical ELA about becoming a teacher (after thirteen years, I am still becoming), I wrote seven (one for each day of the upcoming week) hoping to inspire young poets to not only poem but uncover all that poems do for our hearts and minds. And then each day of the week, I would rise early in the morn’ to compose a poem. Throughout the day and evening, instead of checking email and social media, instead of reading my #bookaday, I would read poetry — poetry about our best parts, lists of loves, haiku, lessons learned, super powers, secrets, music, food, family, new perspectives, flaws and strengths, sympathetic joy, how we’d like to be remembered, and any other topic that moved these poets. I would read thoughtful — and I mean thoughtful — comments by poets relating to one another with empathy, sympathy, and respect. For thirty days.
When I first started teaching over a decade ago, I didn’t like poetry in part because I had only ever read poetry from anthologies and had never written poetry. I didn’t know that when you write poetry it changes you and how you perceive words, people, the world. I didn’t know that when you share your poetry, you can impact others, and their responses to your words are responses to you, which is proof that you exists, that people see you, want to understand you. And who doesn’t need that? I do. Certainly, our students do. So, this 30poem challenge on Ethical ELA (as many other people and organizations do elsewhere) was for all of us.
We dedicated 20 of our 41 minutes of reading class every day to 30poems; essentially I made 175 junior high students dive into the possibilities of poetry. Some counted down the minutes and others were enthralled reading, responding, writing.
I knew from the beginning that this project was temporal given the “month” of National Poetry Month. The countdown helped me (and students) pace ourselves for the duration, but I lost sight of the finish line. I became so attached to the aesthetic experience that I didn’t want it to end.
About half way into the thirty days, I started noticing a shift in the way some students were using language to express and connect. I started seeing students on the site all hours of day and night. Like me, some students seemed to be drawn to verse. The aesthetic experience incited by poetry (poets) was so attractive, magnetic, maybe addictive. There is actually research to explain a similar phenomenon: “A recent study shows that recited poetry can spark brain activation patterns that produce emotional responses and engage the body’s reward circuitry”(article). I was feeling this just by reading poetry. Who knows what will happen on May 17th!
Withdrawal
Now, just a week into May, I am experiencing withdrawal. My “reward circuitry” feels neglected (and I wonder if the student-poets are feeling the same). I hesitate to use “withdrawal” to describe my syndrome because we often think of withdrawal in relation to the physical and psychological symptoms that follow a discontinuance of an addicting drug. I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of such (especially given recent events in my school). However, after a day or two post-30Poems, I noticed my mind floundering and my heart seeping into a sort of depression. I miss writing poetry as part of a community; I miss the daily virtual-real connections with students whom I had not known until this thirty-day experience; I miss the comments acknowledging my existence; I miss the comments among other poets showing the potential of humanity to lift up one another.
The daily engagement with words and lives in that virtual space nurtured me psychologically, but it also nourished me kinesthetically — the mental impacted my physical well being with energy. And furthermore, when I saw these poets in the hallways and classroom, I felt alive and connected in being.
As I tried to get back into my #bookdaday the other night, I recognized my symptoms as withdrawal from 30poems. I found myself checking the site for new poems and comments. I sat with my book in one hand and my cell in the other rather lost and unsure what I was supposed to be doing, and in my belly stirred a familiar feeling. I’ve been here before.
The feeling I had at the ending of 30poems is the same feeling I get during summer break.
I have just nine days of class time with our eighth graders, a few more with our seventh graders — and then I will have no reason to get up in the morning. The aesthetic experience of teaching that makes me feel alive, worthy of being alive ends.
Okay, I am overstating this slightly. Like many teachers, I am counting the days. I see posts on social media and emails going around school with the countdown. Everyone knows and accepts and celebrates all that another year of education ending means.
The counting, for me, creates some anxiety about the even more profound withdrawal that I know is coming.
I worry about what happens when I have no one to create for, no one to share the books with (sorry about ending in prepositions). I live in this world where 175 kids are forced to visit h103 every day and spend 41 minutes with each other (and me), but the day comes when they are no longer forced to attend, and therefore don’t. Suddenly, my perceived need expires and that reward circuitry disconnects.
I know this is the nature of our work. There is a beginning and an end every year. Every year I have to figure out how to manage the withdrawal of purpose, the withdrawal of the aesthetic experience. Last year, I took up the #bookaday challenge and read PD books to fill the emptiness. Other years, I worked on a PhD (four years), wrote a book, launched this blog.
Essentially, I fill the emptiness with something — hopefully something healthy. Still, everything I’ve tried has fallen short of satisfying my “reward circuitry.” I am dependent. I am attached. However, my identity is bound up in something that is impermanent, and that is a problem for me.
Accepting Impermanence
I am not Buddhist though I often consider converting because so many doctrines help me as a human. The poem prompt of Sympathetic Joy was inspired by Buddhism, and I turn to Buddhism’s Impermanence now to help reframe my withdrawal and melancholia. Essentially, the doctrine of Impermanence asserts that a condition of our existence is “transient, evanescent, inconstant.”
All physical and mental events, states Buddhism, come into being and dissolve…The Buddha taught that because no physical or mental object is permanent, desires for or attachments to either causes suffering.
In considering Impermanence, I acknowledge that my attachment to the classroom causes me a degree of suffering, e.g., withdrawal, sadness. I am not sure why I hold so tightly to the physical, shared space with students, why the mental work is so enveloping, all-consuming (though the article above helps). I hold on beyond the ending so tightly that I have to think about what else in my life might be missing or, perhaps more productively, accept and celebrate the transient nature of our work and detach with grace.
Closure
I am deliberate about planning closure opportunities for my students: portfolios, class pictures, letters to self that I mail when they are seniors, Espresso Self Cafe; we have a graduation ceremony to reflect on junior high and welcome high school. I sort of thought that these worked as closure for me, too, but I’ve noticed I facilitate rather than engage in these experiences (given I don’t have closure when they leave).
So I need a closure routine just for me. How about this: First, I will share a gratitude poem on May 17th at Espresso Self Cafe. Then, I will write one more blog post reflecting on my year, sign off, and bask in the gift of another year reading alongside other people’s children. Then, I will stop being a teacher (except for two conferences — CEE and nErD camp) and try just being as I swim, bike, run, play, eat, sleep, and love. One of those had to spark the reward circuitry. And when August comes around, I will celebrate my time away and welcome another school year.
How does that sound? Healthy, right? Yeah, because I should want the year to end. It’s a good thing, right? Yeah, I should want to be Sarah, not Dr. Donovan, for at least two months out of the year, right? Yeah, she might be sort of interesting, maybe even fun, right? Yeah. Right.
Let’s see how that goes in five, four, three, two