How Can I Still Love Teaching You Ask?

How can I still be in a classroom, and still love teaching, even this year, you might ask? Well it isn’t necessarily due to anything particularly done by the greater public or certainly not all the ups and down of working around COVID protocols. There is just something that happens when, text in hand, I sit among readers and writers, and we talk complex characters or plot twists or even a last word, that just fuels me. We are in need of some hope, and whether plodding though Shakespeare’s Hamlet or being somewhat horrified by Shelley’s Frankenstein, or discovering the images and poetry generated during the short life of Basquiat, my student’s visions and imagery and words grant a faith in mankind I might not have found without them.

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Light Show

On those lucky afternoons when I can skip out the door before the sky goes back to black I climb the hill and catch the light show. Pink is everything mid-January. Deliciously fresh, a promising kiss reminding us of all that will return in a few months. If there is enough daylight I’ll descend through the open field and in and out of the small woods where I saw a bear last summer.

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