From First to Last: A Teacher’s Tale
Second Period: Bring Me a Bug!
For First Period of a Teacher’s Tale, see:
The 6th graders were waiting for me in room 11. They were a squirming bunch: Akhil, a wise-cracking Indian boy, slightly built and quick witted; Adrian and Wojtek, arm wrestling archetypes who made jokes at Akhil’s expense; Aristianna, Maria’s younger sister, equally dark eyed and emotive, with a spark of genius; Pratiksha, always to Aristianna’s side, a modest Indian girl with round head and princely features; and the more rowdy Fatima, a strong willed Pakistani girl. The rest of the class was inhabited by the shadows that make themselves known during roll call.
As I entered the room, they were petting their flower stems. The girls sat in the front row and praised each other’s selections. In the back row, the boys placed their dry pickings on theirs desks and punched each other’s shoulders. I entered without a clear game-plan.
“Mr. Krasner, look!” Aristianna began.
She placed her flower proudly before me.
“I took it from my garden. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It’s lovely,” I said.
“We have all kinds of flowers there. Tulips and marigolds and roses and delphooooniums….
“Delphoowhats?” Pratiksha repeated.
“Delsomethingums,” Aristianna plowed on, “those big plumpy pink balls, and then there are morning glories too, and those tall spiky red and purple ones, like ivy — “
“Iris?” I helped out.
“Iris, and let me see…this is a pansy. Look at it! It’s so purple!”
I looked at the flower.
“But what about mine sir?” Pratiksha said while deflecting any glance towards her. “This also came from our garden.”
She held out her tiny yellow petals with a coquettish smile.
“Oh, I think I like yours better!” Aristianna said sweetly. She took Pratiksha’s flower and stroked it like a beagle’s ear.
“It’s so soft.”
“Be careful, you don’t want to break it!” Pratiksha said.
“Sir,” Fatima jumped in, “you haven’t even looked at mine! I actually searched for my flower, unlike them. I found it while my mother was shopping. My neighborhood is filled with flowers!”
Fatima’s flower was delicate and red. Aristianna immediately reached for it and pretended to be smitten.
“This one is nice, it’s so little. Mr. Krasner, they need water!”
“Yea, they do.”
I was stalling. It seemed like a good idea, the previous day, to assign the task. We had just discussed the Little Prince and his rose. We made a list on the board of all the qualities connected to the rose and flowers in general. The girls had the most to say on the topic. How the flower was a girl, was feminine and soft, was little, was colorful but unnoticed, was love, was ephemeral. The last word was mine. Ephemeral. Here one minute, gone the next. Isn’t that what flowers are? Isn’t this why we appreciate them?
But we don’t appreciate flowers. That was the overwhelming response. So it seemed appropriate at the time to ask them to find one, their own rose, and bring it to class the next day.
“Yes, they need water,” I repeated.
“I can go get some!” Akhil shot up.
“You’ll find a vase? We have eight flowers.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Akhil was off at the first sign of my hesitation. That left me a few minutes to consider my next move.
“I see you guys put a lot of effort into your selections.”
I addressed the four boys remaining in the back row. Each had a sickly yellow dandelion lying flatly on the desk. They shrugged their shoulders.
“You know, I’m not sure these even qualify as flowers. We call them weeds. We pluck them with a different purpose.”
They shrugged their shoulders again.
“Really, you couldn’t look for a flower somewhere around your home? You couldn’t spend five minutes pretending to be someone else?”
They shrugged their shoulders one last time.
“They’re boys Mr. Krasner,” Fatima said. “They’ll never understand flowers.”
“If they want to get married some day, they will. Every boy needs his rose.”
“Maybe they’ll just stay with boys all their lives!” Aristianna piled on.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Adrian dismissed.
“Well, I don’t see how they will ever find a rose.”
“They will Aristianna. It seems impossible, I know, but these are your future princes.”
“No way!”
“Gross,” Pratiksha said.
Akhil broke through the door carrying a lunch tray with eight balanced Dixie cups.
“One flower vase sir!”
“Aha, well done Akhil. It’s like a candelabra. Okay, one cup per flower. We have to care for them. Just like the Little Prince.”
Akhil passed out the cups. The boys decided to put all their dandelions into one. Akhil’s flower did not fit.
“Akhil, you haven’t said anything about your flower.”
“It’s nothing special,” he said. “I asked my mom to choose one. She likes these, what do you call them?”
“I think they’re chameleons. I’m not sure.”
“Whatever they are, she likes them.”
“Maybe this is where we learn sensitivity from.”
“Who?”
“Our mothers.”
The flowers were arranged. The girls suddenly looked bored, their diminutive flowers floating bleakly before them. I thought to begin a discussion about flowers and sensitivity and mothers. But then it did not seem compelling to talk about flowers.
“Mr. Krasner,” Aristianna said.
“Yea.”
“We heard that you took your 9th grade class outside today.”
“He did?” Fatima said. “You took another class outside?”
She arrested me with her eyes.
“We had a lesson outside. It’s true.”
“We want to go outside too!” Aristianna pleaded.
“Oh, not again…”
“If you take one, you have to take them all. That’s the rules,” Fatima continued. “How can you do this to us — keeping us locked inside when you take other classes outside?!”
“I didn’t, I mean, every class is different. There are different needs.”
“We need to go outside!” Akhil said while leaning over his elbows. “It’s an absolute must.”
“Consider the flowers sir!” Aristianna continued. “Look at them. They look sad. They miss the sun.”
“They miss the sun,” I repeated, admiring her line of persuasion.
“They miss the grass. They miss the outdoors.”
“They miss the outdoors. I see. Who misses the outdoors?”
“The flowers!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, we killed them sir. You made us kill them and now they’re crying to return home. They’re making wild cries, can’t you hear them? Oooohhh…so sad.”
She bent her ear down to the plastic cup, listening to ocean waves coming from a conch shell.
“Aristianna?”
“Huh.”
“You can’t convince me to take you outside in this manner. You’ve accused me of murder. I will not be emotionally blackmailed.”
She processed this new phrase.
“Can you use the Little Prince in your argument?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Can you use some of the themes we’ve discussed in the Little Prince to convince me that we should have our lesson outside today?”
“Oh! We’re ephemeral sir!” she picked up instantly. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die like tomorrow!”
“Okay, okay…”
“We need to enjoy our last hours!”
“Okay….”
“Sir, we’re dying, we’re dying.…”
Akhil was suffocating in moldy air, sliding out of his chair.
“The sun, the sun has been denied us sir,” Aristianna continued the performance. “This is no way to live our final hours!”
Akhil had passed out on the floor. The rest of the boys remained tongue-tied.
“Well, that’s about the best plea I’ve ever received on behalf of the outdoor lesson. Akhil — get off the floor. Gather your flower, your notebook and a pen. Class — we’re going outside!”
I led the 6th graders through the halls like a hippie regiment, soldiers carrying their orphaned flowers in rifle length arms and carting green backpacks. Once outside, I steered them towards a courtyard where we had a semicircle of benches shaded by a few sickly trees. It emulated a Japanese garden with the small exception that the fountain had dried up years ago and no one actually tended to it.
The boys crowded together on one bench and the girls opposed them, leaving an empty bench in between. Akhil was quickly shoved off his bench and settled on the wedge. I asked everyone to pull themselves closer together. We placed our flowers at our feet and waited. The only thing I could think to do was nothing.
“Let’s just meditate on the flowers,” I said. “Can we do that?”
“Oh, yes sir,” Akhil said and quickly fashioned himself into the lotus position.
“Ohm, ohm…..”
He kept his eyes closed and feigned enlightenment.
Aristianna followed suit. Then Fatima tried to outdo her. Each strained a peaceful expression while bumping knees into the other. The boys whispered their sarcasms.
“Hold on,” I said. “Can we do this correctly? This is not Buddhist meditation but English meditation. I want everyone to get his or her notebook out and lay it on your lap. Like this — ”
They followed my instructions with resistance.
I placed a pen in my left hand and held it in anticipation of words against the blank white sheet. I gazed at the flowers. I smiled.
“We will meditate like this. For five minutes. On flowers.”
The girls were ready to go, but the boys looked like I asked them to cross-dress.
“You want us to do what? I don’t understand,” Adrian said.
“You don’t know how to be quiet?”
“Yes, I do. But why are we looking at these flowers? It’s just, I don’t know.”
“I know you don’t know. Can you just be quiet? Can you be completely quiet for five minutes? Is that possible? I bet you can’t. I bet you can’t sit still and quiet for more than 30 seconds.”
“Sure I can!”
“You want to try?”
I held out my phone and set the stopwatch. All eyes were on Adrian. We watched as he swam in the silence. He dog-paddled. He smirked. He imitated words. He sucked in his breath. He mimed.
“I don’t think — “
“20 seconds!”
“I don’t think this is working,” he finished.
“Listen class. How often do you sit in silence and remain silent? I know you spend a lot of time behind your screens looking and watching and scrolling. But that’s another way to cut yourself off from what’s around you. Real silence connects you to what’s around you. To the ground, to the trees, the shade or sun. To nature and to flowers. When you’re able to sit like this, you begin to notice things. Small things. And you get smaller too. You start to fit in more with everything around you. You become a part of things. This is what flowers can teach us. If we listen to them.”
I knew what I wanted to do.
“Flowers are not separate from us. Treat them with the same affection the Little Prince had for his rose. We are all after all going through the same world, all small and fragile and ephemeral.”
Aristianna held a deep gaze in my direction.
“Sir,” she said. “I understand you want us to be silent. But why are we meditating with a pen? A pen is for words you know, and words aren’t silent.”
“That’s true Aristianna. But we’re in English class and we have to learn how to use words in a fresh way. So I want you to think a little more about what makes flowers flowers.”
I gathered myself.
“We’re going to sit for five minutes of silence. Five minutes. Treat it like a competition if you have to boys. See if you can do something that makes you uncomfortable. And when we’re done, I want you to answer the question: what makes flowers flowers?”
It began to rain.
“Ohhh…it’s raining!” Fatima shouted.
I looked at my notebook and saw the drops bleeding into my page.
“Perfect,” I said.
“Should we stay sir?”
“Of course we should! We’re meditating on flowers. They love the rain. Why shouldn’t we?”
“Because we are not flowers Mr. Krasner,” Akhil said. “We’re not even seals or whales or fish.”
“Nor frogs or snakes or eels. But we were once.”
“A loooooong time ago!”
“Maybe we were flowers too.”
“Sheesh,” Akhil smirked.
“Just sit. You can even listen to the rain as it dribbles onto your notebook. Sh!!”
I glowered at Adrian’s bench, forcing their gangly participation. They looked terribly out of place. Like fish out of water.
The rain continued, never accelerating into more than a sun-lit drizzle. The flower cups collected the drops. For two minutes the students held their composure. Akhil glanced at his neighbors, smiling and looking for smiles. Adrian and Wojciech grinded their teeth. Aristianna concentrated and Pratiksha looked at her for cues. Fatima formed a question with her big brown eyes and pointed them at me: “aren’t we done by now?”
I held out for another minute. Then without speaking, I picked up my pen, held it high, and began writing. I widened my eyes to suggest the next phase. Reluctantly, they began to write.
In my notebook, I wrote how this was the first time I had ever enjoyed the school courtyard. How I had only seen 4th and 5th grade boys playing cricket around these benches, or hide and seek in the juniper bushes. I drifted from the plastic cups to the sight of my students’ sneakers, the white tips of their Converse All-Stars, which were also popular when I was their age. Then I turned back to the flowers, to their delicate nature, floating in a transitory pool between heaven and earth. I stopped.
“Does anyone want to read?”
They looked unsure. Akhil filled the void.
“I will sir.”
“Go for it.”
He changed his position and cleared his throat for emphasis. In a flamboyant tone, true to his personality, he read aloud:
“Flowers, flowers, flowers. Five flowers, six, seven, eight flowers! Why are we looking at flowers? They came from our homes, from our neighbors. They were stolen from the ground to satisfy a greedy English teacher who wants us to figure out why we stole them. What are the flowers for? I will ask them — flowers? What are you for? To look at. Well, we look at things all day. I look at my computer screen for at least five hours a day. But he wants us to look at these in a different way. There’s nothing to see, no flying monkeys, no race cars, no machine guns. There are just flowers, sitting in water. They don’t do anything! What do we need them for? To make us bored….”
I nodded my head.
“Revealing.”
He punched out his lower lip.
“Flowers reveal how bored you are,” I said. “And you know, flowers were the original video game.”
“What?”
“You know, when the cavemen and cavewomen sent their cavekids outside to play, what do you think the kids did?”
“I don’t know. Throw rocks at squirrels?”
“Yea, maybe you’re right. But nature was their computer screen, and the pixels moving and changing day to day were flowers. Don’t you think?”
“I think they would have preferred Play Station sir.”
I relented further argument.
“Adrian?”
“What?”
“It’s your turn.”
“Oh no sir.”
I waited.
“Please sir.”
He fidgeted and looked for help. None came. Finally, he gave in. He read in the manner of a child who is force fed cough medicine.
“A few flowers we had to pick for homework, they’re not much, they’re very small. Most of them are yellow but one is red and another is purple. Girls like flowers but boys don’t. Girls think flowers are pretty but boys think they’re useless.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Well…”
“Mr. Krasner?” Aristianna could no longer contain herself. “I want to read.”
“Please do.”
She read with a nuanced intonation, peaking and dipping with her questions and their answers.
“What makes flowers flowers? Only God knows. And if God knows, is he going to tell little old me? These flowers are homework. They’re some kind of lesson, only we don’t know what it is. Why do we pick flowers? Why do we buy them in flower shops? My mother likes to buy flowers. She places them in a glass vase and thinks they put more life in the room. That’s what she says — “it’s more full!” It seems to be such a simple thing, but how come we don’t spend more time noticing other things living their weak life? Because we don’t want to see that life is short? It seems to last forever, but it doesn’t. Flowers are passing. Flowers are different. This one is like me, and that one like you. Oh, I know — flowers are mirrors! I look into mine and see me. You look into yours and see you. I hear my flower speaking to me, hurry up! Hurry, your flower is dying! Hurry up and notice, because I’m also in a cup, a little flower floating. Oh, poor little weak me!”
She fell into Pratiksha’s arms.
“What is she talking about sir?” Akhil asked.
Aristianna was busy being embraced.
“You didn’t get that?” I questioned.
“We’re not flowers sir.”
“Maybe not. But we have a lot more in common with them then you think. Just like Aristianna said, we are little weak things living in cups, and we need water. We need someone to water us. We depend on each other.”
“On flowers?”
“Sure, why not?”
“But Mr. Krasner,” Akhil continued, “you know bugs are also small and live only a short time but we don’t put them in vases.”
“Bugs! How true. And so many of them crawling amongst us now.”
“Where?!” Pratiksha said frightened.
“Everywhere. They’re too small to even see. They’re in the dirt, in the mulch. In the cracks of the bricks.”
The girls shot up their legs.
“Maybe we can learn something from them.”
They sensed my next move.
“Uh-oh.…”
“Are you ready for the next assignment?”
“No sir, please.…”
“Bring me a bug!!”
“Noooooo!”
“A bug?” Aristianna gulped.
“A bug. Akhil said it. They are also small, fragile, weak, short lived, and if you notice them, beautiful. Especially if you notice their wings, their legs, their strange designs and patterns. All creations, all equal in sun and water.”
“But bugs live in the dirt Mr. Krasner!”
“So do flowers!”
“Aha!” Akhil affirmed. “See?”
Suddenly the boys grew excited about the task and the girls took on their conditioned discomfort.
“You saw Adrian struggling to pick a dandelion before class. He did it even though for him it was gross. So now you have a boy’s task. Find me a bug. An ornate and fragile bug! And don’t kill him. Don’t crush him with your feet. Take care of him — “
“BRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!!!!
The students rose from the benches before I could finish my speech, carried forth by the confusion of the sudden bell, an English assignment to collect an insect, and a valiant attempt to meditate in the rain. Akhil proudly repeated the line “bring me a bug!” amongst a sullen set of lamp-lighters. Adrian was quick to lead his cohorts to the football pitch. The girls feigned further dismay, Aristianna with theatrics, Fatima defiance, and Pratiksha lady-like offence.
“Really sir, we have to?” she asked.
“You have to.”
“But we might get bitten sir!” Fatima said. “What if we’re bitten and poisoned?”
“I’m not asking you to bring me a snake.”
She produced a lovely exasperated grimace.
“Maybe he will tomorrow,” Aristianna whispered in her ear. “Come on, let’s go before he gets more ideas.”
The girls carried on in exuberance towards the door, which was now swinging in both directions with students. The clouds had vanished and the sun was again calling the children to milk every minute of break time.
At the doorway, Aristianna stopped as if shot in the back. She turned around and raced towards me. I was sitting alone on my bench with a perplexed expression.
“Oops! We almost forgot!”
She bent down to the circle of cups and placed all the girls’ flowers into one.
“What should we do with them now?”
“What do you want to do with them?”
“Take them back to the room?”
“If you think it will be more full.”
She smiled.
“They won’t last a day sir,” Pratiksha said.
They nudged their way back through a crowd, Aristianna placing her elbows out like a power forward protecting a rebound. That left me alone with the dandelions and Akhil’s chameleon. I dutifully placed them in one cup, strapped my bag over the shoulder, and rose while balancing both distinct weights.
In the hallway, I passed Daniela and her friends. She mouthed a surprised remark.
“Don’t ask,” I said before she could speak it.
For Third Period of A Teacher’s Tale, please see:
