I feel as if I should start out by letting you in on 2 secrets. 1. I've wanted to be a writer my entire life...actually, I hated every thought of being a teacher...until a certain person changed my attitude. 2. I've never shared my writing with the world before...because I'm semi-terrified.
BUT, because I'm requiring my students to step outside of their comfort zones, I figured I'd also step out of mine. We've read two memoirs this semester, and EVERY semester I do a memoir project with my students. I believe that most students are starved for personal narratives, so it's always something that they enjoy. Let's be honest...who doesn't love talking about themselves? :)
After we read Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Night, we complete a style analysis for both memoirs. I select specific chapters and my students meticulously comb through the text to find how the author creates meaning through DITLS. (Diction, Imagery, Tone, Literary Elements, and Syntax) I tell my students that authors paint pictures with their words and we complete analysis activities like this in their interactive notebooks:
Next, I spend a few days discussing the project + outlining the details. I am the only one who will read their memoir, so I encourage my children to be honest and talk to me about an experience that changed them, continues to haunt them, or had a huge influence on them in some way.
For the first time EVER, I decided to give my students a copy of the memoir I wrote. I didn't tell them it was mine, but they instantly asked if I wrote it. I thought it was kind of sweet that they were so kind and asked me questions about the experience. I'm majorly stepping out of my comfort zone and posting my memoir here - for the world to see. I've changed all names so that my student(s) will remain anonymous, but all information is 100% true.
I am not who I’m supposed to be. I never thought that I would be tragically blessed with the ability to love the unlovable; a gift that I’m proud to hate. I wasn’t supposed to become entangled with a person who inspires and infuriates me, all in the same moment. I was not supposed to turn confusion into a career, and I certainly was not supposed to wait until 22 years of age to find out bad things actually happen to good people. I was naive, yet I was blessed to live blissfully unaware of a world that I was not ready for, and most people will never know about. I was too busy to experience a miracle, and now those wasted years only fester without decaying. It’s a raging virus that an antibiotic just won’t touch.
I always believed that choices make a person who they are. Luck shouldn’t matter, and the choices of other people definitely shouldn’t matter. I was always nourished and comforted by the thought that our lives are completely left to our own intricate design process. I knew that hustle, drive, and perseverance were the first ingredients on the label, and failure was sometimes a step in the process. I thought that we made our own luck and anyone left out on the street, in prison, or just suffering from a lower-than-low socioeconomic status, was a victim of their own dumb design flaw. I thought that I could never accept those who didn’t accept the challenge to rise above adversity. Those who were drowning in the shallow end simply didn’t want to taste success, or, even worse, enjoyed their own apathy. I thought wrong.
I come from a great family and an even greater system of love. My mother and I metaphorically share the same veins of compassion, and I’m so much like my father that I can sometimes taste the same bitter pill of self loathing and fear of failure that he swallows every night. When I served faithfully, both academically and spiritually, at a Christian school for 13 years, I learned how to push myself and expect nothing less than excellence. I was accepted to my first choice for college, and found myself sitting uncomfortably in sophomore math, absolutely clueless as to what I was going to do with my life. I eventually combined my love to write with my mother's need for her child to, “get a useful degree” and found myself right in the heart of where I did not want to be: teaching.
Through a miserable, yet terribly addictive twist of fate, I was spit out into a student teaching experience that left me, for the first time, speechless. By the first day I had learned that sometimes people are not what you expect. Sometimes, we expect too much. Sometimes, who we are and what we experience has nothing to do with us. Mostly, I learned that I have to change to survive. And, most importantly, life has a way of making us spend one too many spins on the Merry-Go-Round. Just when it’s enjoyable, it’s suddenly not.
I couldn’t really decide if this, “inner city”, school left me exhilarated or exhausted. I was excited to teach tenth grade English, but, instead, I was met by an army of defiant suffering. How could I teach Julius Caesar to a group of children who had already accidentally penned their own unique tragedies? I could not believe the willingness of the children to surrender personal information and, sometimes incriminating, details. They were literally starving for affection. Silent screams filled the halls, and I was deafened.
After a while it became like a game to me. It’s the moment while playing PacMan and the ghosts are coming. Defeat is inevitable. But, I keep eating the dots, and searching for a moment to turn the ghosts into the different versions of themselves. The version that is conquerable. Hope continues until time runs out and the red electricity of “Game Over” floods the screen. I kept trying to find a magic connection, something that would bind me to these students who cared (understandably so) more about staying off the street or bailing their parent out of jail, than writing a poem. “Game Over” blinded me.
I found children who never had a parent. I found children who knew their parents chose to abandon them. I found children who had been horribly abused (both physically and mentally), neglected, beaten, or the worst...forgotten. I found children who were afraid to try and those who were afraid to fail, or fail again. I found children who were violent because of the violence they experienced in their own home or head. I found children who needed me. I found children that I needed.
The line quickly became blurred between who needed whom. Most of the time, they didn’t want help, but I kept giving it and they eventually learned to stomach it. But, there’s always one who shines. The white crayon that you never expect to need. He was the shiniest rusty penny I had ever found. He was the loudest, the funniest, and the most uncontrollable. He once wrote a paper that will forever be burned in my brain. It was titled, “My Koolaid Life.” His life could be sweet, but it was almost like someone forgot to add the sugar. He didn’t need any help identifying metaphors, he was a metaphor. His name was Brad.
Brad fed my insatiable hunger for stories. He stemmed from a confusing, weeping willow, of a family tree. It was the first time I was punched in the stomach by the fact that children don’t, and can’t, raise themselves. Although his life was a giant missing puzzle piece, he knew everything about everyone and loved to make us laugh. I had the particular joy of having him twice in a row during my student teaching experience. I could always count on him to be the first one in class and the last one to tell me goodbye. I never doubted his heart, and I prayed for a son just like him one day.
Perhaps the most valuable thing that I learned during my student teaching experience is that everything eventually has to end. There will always be a “last day” and there will always be a “last good time”. My last time came too quickly and I attempted to close the book and begin a new chapter at graduate school. I hated being a teacher. It wasn’t fun. It was hard, emotionally, when I saw children coming to school wrapped in blankets because their families couldn’t afford a coat. It was hard on my conscious when I went home to a warm meal when half my students saved things from their lunch tray so they could eat over the weekend. It was hard to see such powerful potential ruined by poor parenting. It was hard to see children who had never known a better life, expect so little out of themselves. I’ll never understand how such bad families can birth such good hearts.
As the school year ended and summer began, I spent three months trying to convince myself that I hated being a teacher. I also spent three months wondering about Brad. I tried to reach him through social media and I tried to reach him by phone. He was silent, and my world stopped. I wondered how I could care so much about a child that wasn’t even my own. Why did I care what he thought, did, or didn’t do? It was the pull of compassion that made my experience like a fresh tattoo on my right hand. A constant, scarred reminder of what I once had.
Out of spite, curiosity, and a stupid game of chance, I applied to teach at that same school where I had completed my practice teaching. By a miracle that I considered both bad luck and a sign from God, my amazing mentor teacher was switching schools after almost a decade...leaving the job wide open for me. I was terrified and tempted all at the same time. I was running back into the arms of tragedy. In a way, I was an addict of the worst kind. I was living off my constant need to love those who had been labeled as unlovable. I needed to be needed again. I needed to know what happened to the child that told me his life, invited me in, invented who I was, then cut the rope to which I clung.
Brad was the first one at my door my first day on the job. His silence was explained through a series of tearful confessions: multiple felony and misdemeanor charges. A summer of change for the both of us, apparently. I spent the next year and a half trying to control the damage. I shadowed over him at school, I meticulously kept up with him, I tried to be his mother. But, unfortunately, there’s no amount of “try” that can stop desperation. Almost two years and two more felonies later, I had to learn the hard way that I am too small to be a life preserver. I can’t help a boy who is anchored to disaster by the weight of his own heart.
I think that I am constantly “becoming” a teacher. Learning has, in a way, leapt upon me, crucified me, and left me with an exposed carcass of nothing but tortured memories I would love to forget. The problem with people, is that they don’t make themselves. They are made through circumstance, the love they are accidentally given, and the neglect they identify as love. I was wrong about what I knew. I was wrong about the lives I thought people chose for themselves. Being wrong was, and continues to be, painful. Once you know the truth, you can never forgive yourself for the lies you have always believed. A million is just a million, until you meet one.
Teachers won’t tell you that you’re wrong, because they wish they didn’t know. I wish that I didn’t know how many of my children are both mother and father to their younger siblings. I wish I didn’t know that mothers crush pills for their children. I wish I didn’t know that misery loves company, and no one is exempt. I wish I didn’t know that children break into houses, their hope of finding a full pantry outweighing the chance of prison. I wish I didn’t know that children live in their cars. I wish I didn’t know the silence of an omnipotent God as I lay in a puddle of my own tears and questions each night. I wish I wasn’t good at this job.
Today, I am learning one of the most valuable lessons a little too late. Love is not enough. When you never knew the owner of the sperm who made you, and your mother is a dead horse you hate to love beating, you really don’t have a chance. Today, as I see Brad’s face, behind bars, I see my own failure. I can’t help but wonder who he would be if he was my child. Who would he be if he could strain the real him out of the holes in his life? Who would he be if he had the chances that I had? The answer boomerangs: Who would I be without him?
I also give my students copies of memoirs written by previous students (with the names removed, of course + permission from those students.) We then take time to color code (I LOVE TO COLOR CODE TO MAKE ELEMENTS POP OFF THE PAGE! It really works - I promise. The students remember almost everything in color.) We use this to label my memoir + another memoir of their choice.
Our next step is creating a timeline and writing the first paragraph. I give them this guide to making their 1st section hook readers:
They are working on their first paragraphs and timelines over the weekend, but I can't wait to read the stories that will come rolling in to me! It's a wonderful way for me to learn more about my students. Sometimes it's very eye opening. This project always ends up bringing my students and I a little closer - which always makes for a better classroom environment!
I'm working on compiling my memoir unit into a concise package. I'll be posting it in my TPT store within the next week.
How do ya'll handle personal narratives in your classroom? With English II being so concentrated on literary analysis, it's sometimes hard to sneak in writing that can use the usually prohibited "I" or "me"!
