Today for my 2nd week of summer, I have puttered around the house, straightening and cleaning, fidgeting mostly, like I have some business to do with school or something I wrote down that I need to remember (but I did all those things earlier). I’ve been thinking a lot about Dido, and many other players in literary words about how life is supposed to work and for whom. I don’t have very many of my original text books, but I do remember reading Book IV of the Aeneid three or four times. And, now, I’m hopeless lost in looking at my translation and notes, delighting and celebrating inside that I wasn’t that kind of student who, piously as Aeneas, took the notes they think they should take…
Anyway, most of my students have never much like Aeneas–more like the unseen, unheard, and unwritten heroes and heroines in any epic. Still, there’s part of me that wants to post pictures of the love notes I’ve found on Cornell notes, close reads, and classroom desks and books from my students (I keep them). You learn a lot from what students (who typically don’t write for assignments) have to say (evidence that they are “writing to learn.”). It’s not very expansive, but there is a certain recognizable pattern from elementary to middle school to high school, and a small evolution happening. Few words start blossoming into more words, and then…
I’m lucky though. I can look at my notes from all three times I read with someone else: the stilted awkward translations sprinkled with small epiphanies of an 17-, 19, and -21 year old. Archaic writing with traces of me in it, next to Dido, in Book IV, in different color ink and handwriting (when did I stop experimenting with how I take notes? what did I mean by MEDEA! ?). The book is falling apart, the binding is coming loose (how many times did I conjugate loose in Greek only to forget now?), there are holes (which seems appropriate as this book is where I learned lacuna–holes and holes)…
It was a rabbit hole that put me here today…a question I posed myself about something that popped up in my head: fama volat. Many things fly, but rumor above all travels and lingers…gets all mixed up in the elements and our emotions. Dido’s downfall, witnessed and carried by Fama, is purely elegiac, but there’s a lot of beauty in that meter. Maybe, if Dido was given a chance to use her own words–Didn’t she build her city after leaving her childhood?–those words might say something like…
Ovid constructed his Fama as the middle of the world, where the sky, sea and earth meet together; she lives in a house on a peak with no doors and 1000 windows. She has feathers to fly, eyes to see everything, ears to hear it all, and a mouth to spit it out into the wind. She is a monster. However, the thing is, with me at least, is that I can’t believe she is actually a monster, no more than I believe in Charybdis and Scylla. When I listen to the news, I can hear all those dusty forgotten monsters speak. What words are valuable to us as society? Does turning women’s power into something otherworldly and frightening to behold or something beautiful and raw and real? As if, in America, we didn’t perpetuate the same injustices on people of color, as well as women. Was this written in the stars…
And the question for my research became this exploration of differences and similarites of then and now. Even my copy of Vergil’s Aeneid is old (first published in 1930–how much has scholarship and reading changed). It’s definitely not the oldest book I own or most unique, but I just love it. The book still smells like college, like the old, asbestos-filled building where the Classics department was located (in the Religion building next to the chapel) near the mens’ dorms (we didn’t even have co-ed dorms). I linger a bit remember all the cozy afternoons with my advisors (husband and wife team) combing through Book IV in their office–but oh! the notes…
Scribbles. Calligraphy. Drawings. English words (jejune is in there!) identifying Latin grammar and precise definitions; there are references to Euripides, the world tree, and the Odyssey…
To quote one of my students, who scribbled in the class read aloud book, Refugee: “this fuckng grate!” As I work on cleaning and ridding myself of stuff today, I wonder if the student who wrote that (I’m pretty sure I know which one) will even remember that book or maybe some theme in the world will set them off down a rabbit hole, even after 10-, 20-, or 30-years…
Who gives birth to all this? You? Your parents? The school system? Your breadth and depth of reading? A teacher? Some of this? All of this? The neuroscience of your physical humanness? Don’t we learn when they experience the struggle, like Dido? We (the teacher “we”) often take the struggle out of reading and school (and most kids never even notice). I could give some examples…
So much experience in institutions come from writing and reading; even rules we teach in school (and life) are written down (in fact, catalogued and curried each school or legistated year–you can thank the Romans for that one). I love that my students ask why, but I have to force myself to remember this (it catches me off guard somewhere in the first hour of my teacher talk). Don’t we all struggle with our rules in society, those words that others use to describe us (most of us don’t even choose our names), the characters we identify with, the resources we carry with us? And, isn’t fucking epic (and great), but filled with potential. It’s scary. In my opinion, it’s COVID-scary. I’ve seen the rabbit holes people go down in the name of public education…
What kind of individual choices would lead Dido to commit suicide? What are we missing? What kind of decisions does a person make in survival mode? That’s how I know it’s not Dido talking; What great woman couldn’t handle herself with pious Aeneas after her brother killed her husband (also not of her choosing) and she fled from the Middle East to Africa? All because Venus placed Cupid in disguise on her lap as Ascanius? Convenient. Love made her do it…
What does that say about Roman Love? Anyway, I never did buy the epic storyline, but I am captivated by it. That’s the point. In the game of civilization, there feels like there’s some chance involved. Is that chance written in the stars, and read and carried by Fama, Herself? or does She hear it from her 1000 windowed house without doors from the ships that set sail from Her shore? are these the men that carried our alphabet and shackled the us to laws about our person, our body, our roles? do those echoes sound the hegemony of today? An idea that the unread, unwritten, unheard characters are powerless (even with words)…
The whole morning has been spent staving off discomfort and gnawing fear (does Fear fly, too, because it sure feels like it?), cleaning up messes I’ve left behind over the year: what to keep, what to throw away, what to use for school, what to move past. Too much stuff. Lots of notes written in lots of books (and I’m only on the school-related shelves right now)…
Just like public school: what to keep? What to rid? What is is necessary for us to feel safe? If we are digital, I think we’ll all feel safer, but it sucks for some of us (it’s a struggle). If it is blended learning, many will have some adjustments to make for the new kind of normal (I’ll be working 1000 hours a week in a room with a 1000 doors and no windows except the ones I make). If it is traditional brick-and-mortar….
A handful of kids over the years have ask to hold this book (it was, just before the end of the year, on my classroom bookshelf with some other really special books). As if magically enchanted, all of the students have asked permission (which never happens in a middle school setting) to look at it. What is this magic of a book, of a teacher, of a classroom, of an institution that begs any question? Is it the action that forms the question or the question that forms the action?
If I could ask for one truth (or wish) for my students (for anyone actually), it would be for them to have the power to see their world as it is, not as someone else paints it or writes it to be. The caveat is if, and if they don’t like what they see, visualize that change. I pose this to classes from time-to-time, but I’m a little afraid I’m not up to the job (professionally, like). It’s good discussion, fertilizer for what might have come, but now…
I’m not writing for them though, but I’ll try to give them tools to see and express themselves, tease it out (that’s best practices). I find it the most rewarding thing about teaching multiple grades and subjects and exceptional ed. Given time (and I mean a lot of time–not mathematical time on some IEP, tied to dollars and services), students will learn to write this for themselves (writing probably being one the hardest ways to express yourself for me). I don’t mind if they write it on a napkin (definitely is epically upsetting to some teachers). I really don’t mind if a kid has to take a nap, go to the nurse, get a drink, cry because they are overwhelmed or really mad (even if they are 220 pounds and 6 foot tall), or eat a snack (they are 220 pounds and 6 foot tall in 7th grade–they need a snack), or go down to the uniform closet (although I probably harped way too many times over the year about it). Mind, not care. I care a lot about their time out of class and the fact they aren’t reading, but until they realize the power of their choice and the magic of books, there won’t be any notes or rabbit holes…