Posts Tagged ‘teaching’
let bread be bread
I have a beautiful life.
The garden in the back, tomatoes filling the spaces between basil and okra, the spiders and hummingbirds keeping things in balance. The compost pile in the corner of the yard has two avocado trees growing as hard as they can before the frost, still just a promise from October. There are raspberries now, after two years of tenderness and waiting, another handful every few days.
Waking up at 8 o’clock with motivation and nothing that has to be done. The floors are swept. The counters smoothed and sprayed down. Eggs and coffee sizzling in their pots and pans. Tip-toe-shuffle back to bed to smell your hair and nestle my face into your neck.
The children, skipping through the halls, smiling, saying they can’t wait for sixth-period when they will see me, opening their ruddy palms for a tootsie roll and smiling, smiling, smiling despite all they have been through, despite all they will have to face without a father, without a mother, without their best friend, a dog named Billy or Goldie or something else they will never forget.
The friends who offer unexpected gifts–jokes in my inbox, a slice of zuchini bread, a text message just because, the updates to their blogs–like honey, like mollasses, slow and sweet, holding things together.
Bread, smooth and fragrant, yielding beneath my fists, rising slowly, teaching me, again, about patience, about the way of things–each of us needs time to rise before we can yield. All this possibility, this beautiful, devastating, hope.
La La Schalooza.
So, I had this idea, right? I thought, let’s write stories–ones that matter. Let’s talk about the questions we have about life, the things that don’t make sense, and use fiction to attempt an answer to those questions, to reach toward a resolution, an understanding, of the “whys” that no one can give us a clear explanation for…
I had my darlings read this, and then asked them to come up with their own BIG questions. Today, I passed around a sheet of paper and told them that if they had some BIG questions they wanted to ask about the world, they could write them anonymously on the paper, and then we’d post them around the classroom so that maybe they could help each other decide what questions to answer in their fiction.
In the order in which it was written, this is what they asked:
