Long before we hear it, we feel it. The treble hum of one boy, then another,
intoning the notes of an a capella that is winding its way down the long
sheeny hall toward us. The confident girls brush the cantors away. They sing
their own rondo: a circle of chatter about girlfriends stealing girlfriends, about
sleepovers, about the sensual unknown of after-school. In a performance
that is part Carol Channing / part Hepburn, the lead boy presses his lips
together and mimics the long, muffled moan of the distant chant. Primping
unruly and invisible curls, he weaves his way among us, until at last he leads
his congregation in singing some of the Ordinary – the Sanctus and the
Agnus Dei.
Of course, he is mocking her. And yet, his insolence requires such study of
her pulse, her every note, it’s difficult to see him as condemned. He takes
us to her like a divining rod. With each approach, softer and softer, we hear
the Sanctus -- or is it the Agnes Dei? – until, with resounding confidence, the
Sanctus reigns. By the time we reach the doorway to her classroom, we know
how her piece goes. At the threshold to 4A, in a pitch that Johnson Public
Elementary School would rightly characterize as religious, we are humming the
right notes.
***
It is our first week of school in the fourth grade. She is the only teacher who
does not escort us from the playground to the classroom. You know your way
back, she will say with a thermal hug, and we know what she means, but not
really. There are terms here, but they are so encoded, apparently too precious
to iterate. It is as if the most perfunctory elements of our lives – leaving and
returning – will now require from us a new vigilance, a wakefulness. Parents
and federal laws aside, coming back will require – oddly enough -- an
exercise of our will.
It is an exercise that we let ourselves fail. With each return, we glance
through the glass-paneled doors of the other classrooms. We envy the other
fourth-grade class whose teacher has so creatively drawn up her rules of
conduct in the form of the Bill of Rights -- a giant, brown, paper scroll, unrolled
for all to read. For a look of authenticity, she has even burned the scroll’s
edges and painted in shimmering gold glitter the numbered Amendments --
laws like the comfortable half-truths of school that we can hardly remember
now.
With each return, there is always this sideways glance, the nostalgia for
dioramas: for the promising cool of oily-blue rivers in shoeboxes, for the tedium
of Colonial-day chores made bearable under sticker-star skies and amidst
towers of Nabisco Shredded Wheat, for the wave of clay resisters bowed by
the weight of their clay berets before they can reach the Bastille.
We long for the cycles of seedlings in Dixie cups, for the classroom door
covered in Christmas paper as if to reveal a perfect package – a Toyland of
busy, smiling learners. We envy their self-containment, their ease with
platitudes.
By contrast, our classroom door is always open, an endless welcome – or,
as we come to imagine it, an endless acquittal for our quiet betrayals. But it is
never an easy acquittal. From the farthest end of the hallway, we can read her
puzzling greeting. Gothic letters trimmed in gold-leaf, letters sized to the width
of our classroom door, and each one filled in with stories and faces and figures
from an Old World. And the message on the classroom door, so alarming:
GO AWAY!
Maps inside
We literally do not know if we are coming or going, except that there are
indeed maps inside -- navigational charts primarily, but also the quaint
Countries and Industries maps with sheep eternally grazing in ranges eternally
lush and green.
On every desk, a compass, and between the rows of desks: atlases,
feathered hats, and rolls of paper spilling from boxes. On the walls above the
blackboard: the faces of adventurers – noble exiles, she calls them.
Columbus, Copernicus, Moses, Galileo, Gauguin, Odysseus. And beneath
Odysseus’s cold, black eyes and his pouting homesick mouth is the
directive:
Be inspired
But, our stomachs are still registering Odysseus’s homesickness, and we
find ourselves standing still as if to discern which is moving – us, or like a
ship leaving port, this room. We stare back at Odysseus in an effort to keep
him at his lonely post, ourselves on land. We steady ourselves. The
groundskeeper putters below and a scent of sulfur stirs the maps on the wall.
We are going away. Or else we are coming home.
**********
There is an enormous dictionary in our classroom – so massive that, on
every turn of the page, it threatens to crush to a glittering dust the folding
card table that supports it. Our teacher has crossed out the word Dictionary
and written instead, in beautiful Palmer script, the word Sanctuary: Websterâ
€™s Sanctuary.
On the floor is a throw carpet charting Marco Polo’s long dream – a
broken line around the tip of Africa. In the same corner, in crushed-velvet reds
and marine blues are overstuffed pillow chairs. In spite of the invitation that
we sense from all the props, we visit the Sanctuary less often than we should â
€“ and not one of us ever looks up the word inspire.
But, if inspiration means to breathe life into, then it is literally her breathing
that draws us back each day. Swept up in the progress of her own drone
hum, she absently smiles at us as we drift in, then mimes her directions to us:
her arms breast-stroking through an invisible ocean: Make room for song.
Palms down, then open and rising: Raise up your voices.
We know these gestures as phrases because they are tacked to the bulletin
board for DAILY ANNOUNCEMENTS. Where other teachers have posted the
daily news, our teacher has hung a giant poster-board musical staff on which
she strings daily reflections like musical notes. Instead of today’s date and
weather and a calendar of school events hanging on our bulletin board, we
find large thoughts strung across her musical staff like lyrics to songs that we
do not know yet: No man is an island or I think, therefore I am! or To thine
ownself, be true! … and that means you and you and you.
On occasion, as it happens during one Lenten-gray February in A major,
whole months could pass in a single, unwavering scale. For a whole month, we
would look toward the DAILY ANNOUCEMENTS board and see the same
message in the same climbing scale:
_________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________the right notes _______
____________________________________ it helps each of us sing_________________
______________________ at the same time____________________________________
___If we sing the same notes ________________________________________________
It takes us several weeks to recognize that there will be no such thing as
Daily Announcements, and that this will be information that we will have to
gather elsewhere. Thus, during recess, or amidst the thrill of fire drills, we
skulk about like spies among our peers. We become experts at piecing
together the most ordinary bits of information -- Third bell means 4th-grade
recess, right? The fourth-graders are going to the Christmas play today, right?
Report cards come out this week, right? Day by day, the very details that we
have been taught to regard as the most basic and critical parts of our lives
since we entered the public school system will eventually come to be regarded
by us as the most dispensable and inconsequential details of our lives. And
yet, this will not be an easy transformation. As with all of the metamorphoses
that we would experience in Ms. D’s class, we do not give up our learned
habits, our learned values, without resistance.
****
Resistance, for John G. Ashe, would mean requiring a working clock in our
classroom. Since our first day with Ms. D, John G. Ashe has politely informed
her that the clock in our classroom has stopped. Each morning, as we exit the
classroom for outdoor recess, John G Ashe pauses in front of Ms. D and points
to the clock above our classroom door and then demurely informs her, Excuse
me, Ms. D, but our clock is broken. For the first few days, Ms D glances up
where John G Ashe is pointing and then hugs him and thanks him for his â
€œeagle eyeâ€�. Recess after recess, it becomes clear to us that John G.
Ashe is going to continue telling Ms. D that our clock is not working; and recess
after recess it becomes clear that Ms. D has no intention of fixing it. After a
while, John G. Ashe simply points his long, slender finger, or tips his head
toward the silent and inert clock; and each time he does this, Ms. D offers the
same gratitude and delivers the same appreciative hug to him.
Several recesses later, several bright mornings and grey afternoons later,
several weeks of wet leaves and several footpaths through a snowy
playground later, Ms. D would finally lean toward John G. Ashe and toward our
single-file line to announce, Let’s not worry about that, children. I prefer
the ticking of your hearts, over that beast of a clock, don’t you? We are so
surprised by the idea that Ms. D has been apparently keeping time by the
beating of our hearts -- and we are perhaps so oddly flattered by the idea as
well -- that not one of us questions her. Glen Rooney even announces that he
thinks we should get through our math lessons much faster this way, since his
heart has a pretty rapid beat. But for John G. Ashe and for a majority of us
who have come up through our first three grades as stellar students, this is
witchcraft, or voodoo, or bad teaching at best.
We are not like other fourth-graders, and we know this. While our peers
flourish in the transparency of a day’s scheduled tasks, we grow in the cool
shade of musical signature patterns: big ideas tacked onto an oversized
musical staff that tell us -- not how to exit for fire drills, not when to eat our
lunches, not when to end our school day -- but how to live. While others fall
into a kind of communal march through the stages of a school day -- lessons,
recess, and final lessons -- we move from math time to reading time to recess
time by attending to the laws of time in and around us. We tell time according
to the rhythms of our own beating hearts; we tell time according to the slightly
impatient tapping of Ms. D’s hand on her lap as we linger too long over a
word problem; and we tell time according to symphonies of light that penetrate
our row of windows and that transform our classroom.
We feel the shift away from a material world toward an interior world, away
from the secular in favor of the spiritual, away from the literal in favor of
metaphor. And, as if already aware of the casualties that accompany shifts like
this -- and as seasoned offspring of the public education system -- we long for
our old routines, we yearn for an hour hand that moves, and we grieve the
loss of a kind of happy captivity when our days, our goals, our gods were all
concepts drawn up for us by our teacher, or by the Principal, or by our parents
-- by anyone but us.
Winner - 2007 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award
Chapter 1: Right Notes
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