"The whistle of a boat..."

Lost

BY CARL SANDBURG

Desolate and lone

All night long on the lake

Where fog trails and mist creeps,

The whistle of a boat

Calls and cries unendingly,

Like some lost child

In tears and trouble

Hunting the harbor's breast

And the harbor's eyes.

The poem above one of my favorite by Carl Sandburg. How this verse came to introduce this post might be somewhat rambling, but I am going to go with it This is how my mind works: I read an article shared by a colleague on Twitter about the importance of teaching emotion as part of literature study. More on that later. The post made me think of some "emotional moments" in my classes that were particularly meaningful, and sometime painful. The day a young lady burst into tears as we read The Road, a visceral reaction so honest and sincere that she could not control it. The days when leave the lights down for a few moments after the last scene and lines of "To This Day", partly to let the kids mentally swirl the experience before we come together as group, but partly to allow the kids, male and female, to wipe away tears and sniffles that invariably well up during the poem's presentation. It also reminded me of the day this year our son discussed the ending of Of Mice and Men, revealing to his Dad that he had "gotten choked, and kind of cried a little." So, I sat down to compose this post, and as I pondered a title, the line from the poem above, "Like some lost child/In tears and trouble..." came to mind. 

Short story long, the post on emotions in literature study has me thinking. At a recent conference, we discussed particular talking points regarding how Kansas education can move forward in ways that are best for our kids. It was a lively and thoughtful discussion. One point prompted the question "Why do we need to teach four years of English at the HS level?" Two talking points later, we dove into social and emotional growth of our students. I interjected that this is one answer to the previous question. One of the only places that we can address the emotional growth of our students in a variety of ways that are meaningful and safe for those kids is in the study of literature. When Piggy dies and it hurts one student so deeply that she has to leave the room, as happened in the classroom of the author of the above mentioned article, it is a teachable moment vital to that child and the other children in that room, possibly more vital than any other lesson. A student of mine reflected a couple of years ago that studying the spoken poem "To This Day" by Shane Koyczan was more powerful than all of the anti-bullying assemblies she had attended since entering grade school combined, and I realized that sometimes, literature and the conversations it raises are the only place a kid can safely face their demons, or perhaps even the demons of others.  You see, this young lady was not touched because she could relate to the boy in the poem who was bullied or the figurative circus freaks who played solitaire spin the bottle. She reflected that she was a bully, but had never considered, truly, what she was doing. She didn't shove kids into lockers or steal lunch money. She joked, she made fun, she laughed at the little things she saw about other people. It's what she did. For the first time, she could see the other side. In the dimmed room, as the lines of the poem tumbled to her ears, something made sense. 

Every time I read the lines that Sandburg penned decades ago, probably with no image of high school students anywhere in the misty fog of his poetic thoughts, I think of certain kids. So many of our kids send out that whistle that "calls and cries unendingly" as they navigate the fog and mist of their lives. Sometimes, it rolls on the heavy fog of the classroom in the form of nervous laughter or frustrated grumbling. Sometimes, the lonely whistle strings together in tunes that they scratch out on notebook pages or poetic blog posts, or lines of graphite or paint that fill sketchbooks or canvases. Sometimes it is the voice of the kid who lashes out from the back of the room, or the silence of the one who refuses to, seemingly more content to sit with hood up and eyes down than interact with anyone around him. The whistles blow in all pitches and tones, and, unfortunately, sometimes, we do not hear them, or, just as unfortunately, we hear them, but fail to recognize that they are not simply idle and meaningless humming but, instead, are calls for help by the lost and wandering, the pleas and cries of those seeking shelter and warm protect of some harbor, any harbor, as they float on, hoping against hope that they will not crash upon the rocks they know are out there waiting. 

So, we read and write and study and discuss. We do so because, as my students might say, it gives us the feels. And that is a good thing. To quote Three Days Grace "I would rather feel pain than nothing at all." And, if we can feel that pain within a safe harbor, where we can toss one another a towrope, where we can sew together some sort of life jacket to be donned later in life after they have left our harbor, then it will have been worthwhile.