It's 9:09 AM on Friday, December 18 as I write this, on a plane 35,000 feet above Yerevan, Armenia. My body might think it's 11:09 PM on Thursday night, but I've been served lunch once since we took off at noon in Chicago, and another lunch will be served soon. The night/day was short.
I spent most of the past ten hours grading final projects and exams by students in my Introduction to Poetry and freshman composition classes. Students reflected on what they had learned over the course of the semester; I was moved to read their thoughts about the role of poetry, glad to know that revising their writing made them feel confident.
A poetry student, responding to one of Mary Oliver's poems about poetry in a question on the final exam, wrote that analyzing poetry teaches that "your way of thinking is not the only way someone might approach the text. You are open to new ways of thinking." Another student, who told me she wants to be an engineer, wrote, "I believe that there is poetry in everything, even if it is not visible on the surface."
One composition student wrote, "I learned how to get my voice to come through my writings and not just be another sentence on the page." He also observed, "I even began to enjoy myself while writing a few of these papers. This is something I wouldn't have guessed before." I wanted to cheer.
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It is now 3:35 PM on December 31, 2015, in Bombay (Mumbai), India.
I am ending the year in the city of my birth and childhood, among family members in whose faces I can see myself--the color of their skin, the shapes of their smiles, their inability to speak through helpless laughter mirroring mine. Though this city has been transformed--down the street, a three-story mall houses a multiplex theatre in what used to be a sleepy edge of the city--I am taken back to the seventies as I hear the incessant beeping and honking of traffic and also the cawing and cooing of crows and pigeons.
Last night, thirty-seven years after I left India for the first time, I reconnected by phone with a favorite teacher: Mrs. Mehta, who taught me history and geography in the fifth and sixth standards (grades). Her voice was familiar even after all these decades. "I learned the most when I was teaching," she said. I told her I have the same experience; I am always learning from my students. And, I thought to myself a little later, I learned about teaching from my many enthusiastic, gifted teachers--and that is why, while flying halfway across the world, the cabin lights dim as other passengers slept or watched movies, I was able to find pleasure in discovering what my students had learned. Every now and then, I would turn to Marilyn and say, quoting from an exam or a paper, "This is why I teach."
