TABULA RASA

The following stories were originally written for an audience of one. They are part of a personal journal I’ve been keeping for nearly twenty years. In high school I had an English teacher who required all of her students to keep a journal, and while I resented this intrusion into my private life, I reluctantly did what she asked. But instead of using the assignment as an opportunity for quiet reflection and introspection as she had intended, I used it to keep track of my latest successes at the local pool hall and the box score of bases stolen on the weekends with my high school sweetheart.
The journal was a joke to me and would have most likely continued to remain a joke for the rest of the semester except that was the year that my father died. It seemed school didn’t matter to me anymore so I began to skip classes. My friends couldn’t relate to my experience, my girlfriend couldn’t either and I gradually began to withdraw from everyone. Over the course of the next several months I went into a tailspin until something happened. Slowly, gradually I began to express myself in the journal - not the superficial adolescent bullshit that I’d written earlier but my real feelings. Eventually I was able to put my thoughts into words, to write in earnest, pour out my anguish, and experience the catharsis that real writing can bring. Perhaps my old English teacher was on to something.
In the spring of 1999 I took a giant leap of faith and decided to become a teacher myself. I’ve been teaching ever since and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do. Classrooms are fueled by laughter and curiosity and when things are going well there is no greater job in the world. But at the end of the day when that fuel is burned off and I have a chance to reflect on the day’s events I often find myself returning to the catharsis of the journal, because while working with children can be uplifting, it can also be a heavy burden. They tell you things. Through tears and smiles their stories come to you and they are not simply students, pupils anymore. They are children in your care and they need you - sometimes desperately. You glimpse into the lives of these little people and often regret what you see. You harbor secrets about their homes, their families, their futures. If you’re a good teacher you don’t dwell on the secrets, but a great teacher must lose sleep over them occasionally.
When a friend asked her why she writes, the nature essayist Terry Tempest Williams responded with a veritable laundry list of reasons. Williams said that she writes to “make peace” with the things that she cannot control, because writing can “create a path through darkness.” “I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams . . . I write out of my anger and into my passion . . . because then I do not have to speak . . . I write to reveal how vulnerable we are.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. As for me I write to remember. As the seasons blend into years the details are obscured but these verbal snapshots remain as a testament to what I’ve seen and done during my short stay here. Our words are like bread crumbs that can help us find our way back to who we once were.
Not all teachers write, but they should. Our experiences bind us in an elite fraternity. We are the shapers of the next generation whether or not we like to admit it. Some of us take that responsibility lightly, while others bear the weight like Atlas. I don’t know which is the correct approach to take, but I think that opening up the dialogue about what it means to teach in the 21st century is at least a step in the direction of finding the right answer. So my audience of one has expanded. If you teach you may find comfort in the following pages - we’re all bound together in more ways than we know.
I have a ritual that I practice at the end of each school day. After all the children have gone and silence settles in the classroom like chalk dust I fill a bucket with warm water then slowly, methodically begin to wash the blackboard and reflect on the day’s events. Tabula rasa - the blank slate. But not everything is so easily cleansed. The board may be clean but the memory remains. These are just a few of the stories that the sponge wouldn’t wash away.