“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

Week Eight.

 Challenge Writing Tasks.


Drafts above. Slightly less drafty drafts below.



I.
Using Rosenthal's  Encyclopedia of a Life  as mentor texts, my own memoir-driven encyclopedia entries.


Mass (n.) The event every Sunday, except when it’s Saturday, where all the Hayes people I actually know pile into a pew. Our pew (our pew because we sit there, in that back corner of a too-big church, every Sunday, except when it’s Saturday) welcomes us more than the other people sitting in the other pews. Now the Hayes people are split, they are there and I am here, and so our pew is now only their pew and my pew is on Lumpkin street, where the people are more inviting than the traditional wooden seating.

Coffee shop (n.) A location of the most peaceful moments of anxiousness with papers or friends or both. Conversations are made and overheard, dimly lit by dull bulbs overhead and shining with caffeine-riddled enthusiasm.  

Bed (n.) A haven for anxiety-ridden students. They may, like so many college rentals, contain springs that taunt the joints and muscles, or maybe the springs’ teasing touch is muffled by a quality mattress or a quality mattress pad. Covers, like a soft and protective cocoon, are armor and shield against having to do things, pulled up to my nose and over my toes lest anything reach out or some responsibility tickle me.


II.
With Ryan Neumann’s What Had Happened as a mentor text, an excerpt on my first day at the placement middle school.


The mostly bare walls, gently lit from the natural light outside and the artificial light in the hallway, surround desks clustered in sets of six. The kids sitting in these desks are all white, save one. Many of them stare at us intruding university students, encouraging a sense of unbelonging. I want to belong, to be invited into their writing and into their lives.

I intend to earn that invitation.

Isn’t that what so much of teacher-hood, or even life, is about? Earning invitation into the lives of those around us? Even if not, I think this helps me recognize how my “teacher-self” is largely just an extension of who I already am.

Noise in the classroom brings me from my reflection. The mentor teacher echoes my ideas when she asks the students if the classroom hasn’t always been a soft place to fall. The students agree that here is a soft place to fall.

Supportive and gentle, but unyielding in high expectations- me as a person, as a (future) teacher, and my mentor teacher standing here in front of me, capturing my heart as she encourages theirs.

Watching her float around her students, nudging and prodding, the students begrudgingly responding or seeming to, I feel a little bit like a found a home here, a place I may eventually belong.

It’s a little scary and a lot exciting.

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