Philosophical musings have usually been most effective either in an actual philosophy class, or lying on the carpet of a friend's off-campus apartment, off-kilter on some medicinal substance at 3am on a Saturday morning. A few weeks ago, however, I had the opportunity to discuss whether clouds rain down on people because they wish to, or because they are slaves to scientific laws.
Conversations like this are what tends to pop up when I volunteer as a creative writing coach at Open Books, a literacy non-profit where I've volunteered for over a year now. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, a class from local schools arrive at the Open Books loft, where a bunch of volunteers attempt to convince 4th-8th graders that writing their stories makes a darned good field trip. And for someone who typically avoids kids, I get a lot from them, including sentient cloud debates that quite frankly blow my mind.
The kids and I, as you can tell, talk about a lot. We don't know each other from Adam, so we discuss their lives, what they've been doing in school, basic small talk. While the field trip leader gives instructions on how to write a good story, we volunteers gently steer the kids toward events in their own lives, events they can transfer onto paper. The resulting stories are illuminating to say the least.
I've lived on the North Side for all eight years of my Chicago stay, and most of the kids bussed to the loft arrive from South Side schools, many of them in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods. I'm not saying I'm ignorant of the crime in Chicago, but some of these students carry with them a perspective far different from my own. They go to funerals for relatives far too young for a casket, and a few actually saw how that relative ended up there. Given, the vast majority of stories are typical kid stories about a grandmother's funeral, going to a Bears game or Six Flags, a prank played on their little brother, or a favorite birthday. A kids falls off a bicycle, goes to the mall, wins a basketball game...all these I can easily identify with. A bullet hitting one's older sister on their porch...well, it's a teaching moment, offered to us by the kids themselves. And those stories stick to the volunteers as indelibly as they do the children. Every child's story, from happy to tragic to comedic, is compiled into a book and given to the kids via their school.
The field trips don't always stick to prose, which was how I ended up chatting about sentient clouds. One of the teaching tools we use to ease the children into writing creatively is reading poetry, at first led by the field trip leader but turned over to the kids, each one reading a strophe out loud. Once we finish the poem, each table (led by creative writing coaches like yours truly) discuss the poem. One of the poems we use is "Being Human," by Naima Penniman, a fine writer (and half of the creative duo Climbing PoeTree). A rap about human nature (at least that's my interpretation), Penniman's poem is perfect reading for older kids getting their creative feet wet. My table got into a discussion about the following strophe:
If the clouds drift off
trying to hold themselves together
make deals with gravity
to loiter a little longer
We spent the next few minutes comparing clouds to humans. Why do clouds do what they do? Is it simply because it's what clouds do? Do clouds have a consciousness, and if so, do they occasionally wish to rebel against the laws of weather, or do they feel comfortable conforming to those laws? The seventh-graders and I really dug into these metaphysical questions, and I'd bet if we had had additional time, we'd have figured out if breath does indeed think about suicide.
"Suicide" ended up being the siren word that jolted the students out of their "oh great, another poem" monotony. All of us agreed that the word didn't break the rhythm of the work, but it was a flashing red light that forced them to pay attention to the remainder of the poem. At the same time, it made me think about how I could take advantage of that it my future work. Finally, the conversation inspired me to rethink my own poetry, of which I have written virtually none in the last six years. I have never been fond of slam poetry, but in Naima's work I think I might have found a middle ground.
So this is what happens when you hang out with 13-year olds. Who would have thunk it?
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