Id like to suggest a thread for the lazy days of summer, crawling by until the
start of school (HA!). What poem do you turn to and reread to comfort,
refresh, or sustain your professional life? Would you share it with us? When
in need of consoling after a particularly trying day or week in the classroom,
I turn to the copy of On Children by Kahlil Gibran above my computer. Now,
heres the backstory for this thread suggestion:
While dining at the Bossa Nova Café last night, our dinner companions presented
me with a book that I think my Middle Talk and Literary Workshop colleagues
would appreciate, too. My friends, who are not school teachers, listen to me
talk often at our weekly dinner meetings about my work and how hard it is to
remain optimistic and passionate about teaching. They gave me the book to help
me do just that. The book is __Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the
Courage to Teach__, edited by Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner. From the title,
one knows Parker Palmer is somehow involved, and he wrote the introduction.
The editors asked teachers to send them the poems they cherish for the
companionship, solace, and wisdom the poems bring. 88 poems, accompanied by
the teachers narrative, make up the book. The final entry is an essay,
Tending the Fire: The Utility of Poetry in a Teachers Life, that
highlights the many practical ways teachers use poetry in their life and work.
In my slow, measured reading of this book, for it is not one to be gobbled,
Ive been moved by the stories and poems. Here is one submitted by a retired
Michigan Middle School teacher, Marianne Houston (I hope the email program
keeps the blank lines between the stanzas.):
Two Kinds of Intelligence
By Jellaludin Rumi
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
a spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. Its fluid,
and it doesnt move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
--
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough
people to make it worthwhile." --Herm Alvright, writer.
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