From First to Last: A Teacher’s Tale
Enfin: “I want to write!”
For Last Period of a Teacher’s Tale, please see:
There is more to say about this day, one day in the teaching life. When it ends, the bell rings like it does to mark the beginning. The students collect in vibrant masses, excited to return to their homes where their lives seemingly wait for them. And the teachers exit through the same gates. There will come the day when the bell marks the final period of school itself, and the Danielas, Sebastians, Aristiannas, Akhils, Filips, Mayas and Martas will all cross the gates for a final time without looking back. Only the teacher returns again and again to remain in the 7th grade. What life waits for him at home? When will he move on to bigger and brighter things?
But I was not thinking such thoughts as I traveled back home the way I came. On the metro again, in my emptied wagon, I tilted my head back and thought of Anne Frank.
…You must work and do good, not be lazy and gamble, if you wish to earn happiness. Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction…
I nodded my head, daydreaming…
All day I stand before my students, asking them questions that just as well apply to me. Accusing them of insufficiencies that are my own, only more habituated. I’m the one after all, who after returning home from his labor, sits complacently behind a screen waiting for a book to be written or a story, or even a line, but sits transfixed instead to the wrong kind of page. I have no storm troopers encroaching my flat. My days are not being counted. Why granted my unspoiled breath can I not find the will to create?
What’s in my survival kit?
Not a tool nor philosophy, but the tangible condition of survival itself! A squeezed life, coercing breath. At least a mugging, a punch in the neck. Wasn’t that what Artur B was saying?
…Aren’t grownups idiotic and stupid?[…]Aren’t they all stupid!
Yes, the spirit of youth, uncompromised, assessing the old with cold accuracy. Isn’t that why I enjoyed standing before them each day, fielding their rebuttals, setting myself up to be judged, tried and sentenced?
You underestimate yourself Mr. Krasner.
From a peer, the assessment can be brushed off. After all, he is compromised by his own sense of failure. But from a child? The statement shakes at your soul.
She wants to know if your choices reflect inward courage, or more commonly resignation. She wants to hear if your words ring true, or more commonly hollow.
The child pokes holes in the adult’s stolid body. She wants to see if there is substance there, if it bleeds strength and candor. For deep inside, the child is framing a measure for her own shadow. She wants an example! And whether adults like it or not, that’s exactly what they are.
…As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy…
And how often the child proves to be the example! Are their souls not already old? All they lack is the time and circumstance to make decisions of consequence, to taste victories and defeats and to respond to each in kind. Somewhere along the way, their true nature is revealed. And en route, they say the most wonderful things:
But Mr. Krasner, bugs also live in the dirt and we don’t put them in vases.
Mr. Krasner, why should we use our minds when it’s so beautiful?
Mr. Krasner, I think we’ve heard enough about Stefan’s basketballs.
Mr. Krasner, are you saying some children never grow up?
Mr. Krasner, why do you teach?
The child says things that make the fixed earth fluid. My own morning began with a stoned teenager inferring I was wasting my life. It finished with a pubescent girl from 1944 asserting the same thing!
…I want to go on living after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me…
Oh, how I’d like to have you in my classroom Anne Frank! To call on your outstretched hand, prod your deep intuition, chase ahead your mind, bounce off the walls, dinting and denting the icons of our imagination!
The soul in origin is free and loose. And from birth to death is cast into forms. From open to closed, that’s how it goes. Wasn’t that the meaning of Abraham’s first act? Shall we talk about that Anne, shall we discourse over the sacred book?
Here I am.
Why is Abraham called an iconoclast?
Because what’s divine is never the carved stone.
Say more.
Because what’s divine is the hand that holds the mallet with confidence and swings away at the block, making figure, sound and curve.
That’s brilliant.
And finding beauty coming from an inner source, finds there a well of laughter, serenity, revelation and joy!
Yes, yes!
It’s for the flock to collect figurines made by others, worship them, and never to grow.
Aren’t they stupid?
Aren’t we stupid?
My voice is trembling on the rails with your naked voice inside, singing what it knew, living though no longer you. How do you live if not inside me?
Is this you, Anne Frank? Is it me?
Or is it something underneath pronouncing its sound and fury before name can apply meaning? Before conditions of time and space can entrap a spirit in Amsterdam, 1942, amongst edicts against a Jewish race and the mad formations of Hitler’s rise and Europe’s fall?
Do we with our names hung on us like school badges, seated in classrooms amongst bulbs in the Warsaw spring not share the same human want? The same complexities of needing and striving in relative obscurity, stopped by some lock, yet to claim an inner gift? Do our lives not stop where others begin?
My voice breaks off in recognition — time is limited! The urgency of youth is to be everyday lived! To therefore surround myself with blooming kids is not some kind of retirement, but in fact the most compelling way for a grown man to live.
I was near my stop. The doors opened.
So I go on again with fresh courage; I think I shall succeed because — I want to write!
This Filip! This is the answer to your question. And the litany of others posed throughout the day.
I WANT TO WRITE!
Then do it Mr. Krasner…
Filip?
Yea.
Is this you?
Maybe.
Thank you.
For what?
For waking me up this morning.
It’s no problem. A lot of us wake up late.
That’s right. But not too late. It’s never too late, right Filip?
That’s right. Hey, Mr. Krasner?
Yea, it’s me.
Looks like there’s going to be a lot of homework…
