By Corey Harbaugh
We started our work with best practice. Of course we did. I mean, I had no idea how we would start our work in the Memorial Library Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education, but of course we started with best practice. It’s the National Writing Project way. It’s the way of our gifted facilitators, including Sondra Perl, an educator whose work has long been known to me (and to many others who think writing pedagogy is worth knowing about). So before any information came our way, before we really did anything as students in this “class”, we built something that has to be the foundation of any class that will ever matter or last beyond its last scheduled meeting. We built a community.
I had been asked to bring to New York with me important photos, documents, artifacts, etc., that contain and communicate to myself and others my sense of identity. I knew what we were going to do this, because it had been described in the literature preparing us for this seminar, and it’s how we started learning together. As Sondra Perl described it to us: “we are going to ground what we’re doing (in our study of the Holocaust) in the experience of identity”, so we had to start by looking deeply at who we are, and sharing that in the classroom, and then listening to others share who they have become over the years of their lives. We took our photos, our documents, our artifacts and objects, and affixed them to cardboard box tops, about the size that would contain a pair of my little brother’s shoes (he’s probably a size 11). We made little museum displays of our lives, and then stood up and shared them, and the emotions packed inside each one of them. I found myself talking endlessly about my love for my wife and our blended family. About being a son to wonderful, complicated parents, and now the father of wonderful, complicated kids. I remembered my grandfather and grandmother lovingly, as I do privately, very often, but I remembered them out loud for the first time in a long time, and I heard and felt my colleagues respond when I talked about my people, my places, my things. There were many tears shared across the room, many laughs, and many of the other sounds that humans make when they make connections to one another.
Sondra said to us something we all know but is worth hearing again, perhaps every day we should remind ourselves in the morning routine of pouring some coffee, or picking out socks, or brushing our teeth: “when you hear someone’s story you make it part of your own story. When you hear someone’s story you become witness to it.” We shared stories of identity and became a community so that together we could march forward and better be witness to the stories of victims of the Holocaust. “Our task is a task of imagination,” Sondra told us, because it will require imagination to take in and comprehend the unthinkable, to make meaning of it, and to turn around and share it with our students in the communities we build in our schools come September. As we engage with this content we can expect many more tears, and laughs, many more sighs, but we’ll do it in a caring, intimate community.
I know I don’t need to say this to experienced, effective teachers, but students learn best in a community where they feel connected to one another and the work, where there is safety, but challenge and engagement, where basic needs are met (think William Glasser here), and where the teacher walks through the learning with them every step, as a model and a guide. But I say it again because even though I’ve known it for so long myself I often take it for granted: at some point I hung this knowledge in the back room closet of my mind, and not where it belongs: right at the entrance to my thinking, like the welcome mat, the coat hook, or that first blast of warm air that comforts a visitor to my home on a cold winter night. My students need me to remember this more purposefully.
After our identity box project was finished, we wrote. Also the National Writing Project way. We wrote an “I Am From” poem, prompted by a piece of poetry (Where I’m From, by George Ella Lyon), a prompt I’ve written in response to perhaps six times in the past ten years. When she mentioned the prompt and the piece we would be responding to, I felt that little surge of confidence that comes when one returns to something familiar, in this case a poem I knew well, and a writing task I could do pretty easily. But when the writing started I found my pen moving faster than my mind, and words coming and coming and coming, the images emerging on the page from places long out of mind and memory. I found myself lost in a piece of writing I did not know and never intended, and when Sondra finally called “stop”, I was exhausted by the power of a prompt I had buried under the layers by taking it for granted. Because I returned to it with a fresh mind and the power of engagement, it worked for me like it was supposed to, and, I’ll freely confess, I have never written in response to that prompt so effusively, so personally, and so deeply.
Two days ago as we were being oriented to our classroom in the beautiful Memorial Library on East 79th St in Manhattan, and oriented to one another, I spoke a little with Amy, the other Michigan teacher here from the other Michigan. (Amy teaches ninth grade English at the high school in Negaunee, MI, way up in the Upper Peninsula, literally and figuratively a world away from my Southwest corner). We spoke about The Odyssey and Romeo and Juliet, pieces I love and will teach again this year for the first time in seven years, and pieces that she has taught every year now for many years running. We both love The Odyssey, and we shared knowledge of Louise Gluck and Linda Pastan, contemporary poets who wrote amazing work in response to the story, and our own interpretations: as the wife and daughter of soldiers, Amy responds to the story of Penelope, waiting at her loom for twenty years for the return of her beloved, and as a son and father I respond to the story of Telemechaus, Odysseus’ son who grew up without a father, who tells us at one point that “nobody really knows his own father.”
When conversation turned to Romeo and Juliet, Amy told me she is not looking forward to teaching that classic play again because she’s so tired of it. She said she used to love teaching the play but that love has eroded over time and the many small collisions of resistance that come from students responding to their first Shakespeare, like waves that tear away little chunks of shore. After my experience yesterday of rediscovering the power of a familiar lesson by returning to it with a fresh mind, I am going to bring up Romeo and Juliet again with Amy and see what kind of fresh mind we can create in conversation so she can return to it again with all the love she had for it as a new teacher, and the craft she has as an experienced teacher. It should be a fun conversation.
Many of you will recognize the source of the title of this piece, Déjà vu All Over Again, is Yogi Berra, a famous New Yorker from perhaps the most famous, (or infamous, depending on your burrough) New York organization of all: The New York Yankees. It fits this piece for so many reasons. Yesterday I returned to best practice by returning to my sense of self in images and memories of my childhood, and then shared that self to be part of creating a community in our classroom. I remembered a writing prompt and poem and found their power again because I scraped off the patina of routine and approached them both with the wild rawness of a fresh mind. I remembered stories I taught to ninth graders and have loved, but need to get out again, dust off, polish up, and be surprised by them for my students, like they all just walked in my door together for the very first time.
