“Does writing poetry make you brave? It's a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for… [M]aking something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.”
Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad is Untrue
Yesterday I visited a group of undergrads at Michigan State University who have been reading my book this semester. (If you're an education professor and you assign any of my books to your students, please let me know!) It gave me such an immense feeling of gratitude and hope to see these bright young people embarking on careers in education.
It reminded of that Daniel Nayeri line, that making a thing (like a career, like a lesson) in a world that's hard is a noble act, an act of bravery.
But is teaching really so hard a thing? Is it, to use Nayeri's language, a world of pain?
It sure can be.
I think what's hardest this time of year is that you're carrying around with you this weight of all the weeks and all the days. It's been labor: mental, spiritual, emotional. It's been the labor of keeping the fires of your passion stoked when the debris of daily events keeps encroaching. It's been the labor of discovering once again that there are limits to what you can do but that these limits don't permit you to give up because some of them are illusory, hallucinations of our limiting beliefs. But then, other limits are as real as rocks.
Which is all quite a load to put on one's shoulders each morning with your shirt and your teacher satchel. In the states, we're 7-8 months into this routine. Fatigue, weariness, ennui — they make sense.
But this is the weird thing about hardship: the more you experience it, the more your acts of creation take on the qualities of beauty and bravery.
This is the narrator's point in Nayeri's book. He's talking about his grandmother, and how, despite heartbreak and brutality, she created poems. You and I, we don't experience what Nayeri's grandmother did — at least I hope not. But those hardships I described above — those we do know well, those and many others.
And so to create a lesson, an honest effort at helping a group of young people to get better at something…doing that when under the weight of fatigue or weariness or ennui, that is a remarkable and beautiful thing.
Even more remarkable is this idea: such acts are happening in classrooms all around the world this week. All around the world, in all kinds of schools, there are fatigued or weary or disheartened teachers who are, in the face of these feelings, nonetheless making a true attempt at education today.
That is beautiful — almost beautiful enough to make you smile without trying to, like when you're driving along to work and all of a sudden you see the sunrise break through the clouds and it's so pretty that it startles you.
Best,
DSJR
Leave a Reply