Life cycle of a teacher

9.15.10 By Kellyanne Mahoney

English teachers have the peculiar luxury of frequently being asked to define words. There is no greater joy than when this happens. In fact, we have actually dreamed about this opportunity since we were small children, sitting cross-legged on the floor while thumbing through musty, unabridged dictionaries. (Depending on the decade, Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” might be piping in from a nearby tape deck.) We even secretly liked it when our elementary school teachers would punish the whole class by assigning us to transcribe entire pages of dictionary definitions onto reams of grainy yellow, lined paper while the other classes got to go outside for recess. Or maybe this was just me?

When I was a Boston Teacher Resident, one of our assignments asked us to define “culture.” My definition ended with this: “Culture is an ideological starting point, which one can transcend. Those capable of transcending their culture are destined to return to it and will affect its evolution.” Ah, BTR. Many of my papers from that timeframe similarly read like a rich, sometimes indecipherable stew of sleep deprivation, Herculean reading binges, optimistic bravado and immensely good intentions. I do remember that I had been especially zealous about the writings of Paulo Freire at that moment and, in particular, this quote: “Immersed in the reality of their small world, they were unable to see it. By taking some distance, they emerged and were thus able to see it as they had never before. To study is to uncover; it is to gain a more exact comprehension of an object; it is to realize its relationships to other objects.” My return home to Dorchester from college, then back to middle school and away from my work as a newspaper reporter, often felt like an odyssey to me—a chance to enculturate those who had grown up like me about the larger world outside the city, while instilling within them an awareness of the special capital of forever having roots in this place.

My very specific definition of the word “odyssey” is derived from one of my favorite high school English teachers. He defined it as a great journey a hero takes, a departure on one’s own, outside of one’s safety zone, in which the hero encounters many challenges, learns many lessons along the way, and in the end, intentionally or not, winds up back where the hero first set out—destined to share the knowledge gleaned from such a voyage, words that are tragically prone to fall upon the unreceptive ears of those who have never been afforded the same chance to travel. I have never read of the concept defined so precisely by any other source, but his definition always resonated with me in a very profound way—and I will always regard him as a trusted authority. Great English teachers have a talent for threading their students with the beginnings of epic storylines that have yet to be written. This tragic hero has often meandered through my imagination since—most recently as I embark upon my sixth year teaching seventh-grade English at Boston Latin Academy, my alma mater.

Each school year seems to play out like a monumental journey that inevitably ends with me back on the first day of school in September, by myself again, with a whole new crop of dewy-eyed charges. On the second day of school, for example, I was in the corridor between classes, awkwardly comforting my new student who had suddenly erupted into tears over the summer reading assignment. In the background I saw sailing by a menagerie of former students who would be indelibly capable of explaining why my favorite animal is a pigeon; demonstrating a few steps of the “diagramming sentences dance;” penning an “abstract noun poem;” or performing an original musical composition she had written, perhaps a rap inspired by Gonzalo’s “Commonwealth speech” from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The beat even plays in my head: “Gon-zalo-Gon-Gon-Zalo. Gon-zalo, whatcha wanna do now?” I try to remind myself that all of my former students had presented themselves as similar puddles of nervous and weepy mush in the first few weeks of school—an observation that seems more surreal this year as my very first seventh graders are now returning as seniors.

In the hallway last year I gently chided the juniors about considering Northeastern or BC for college. “Get out of Boston!” I’d holler. And I delighted in bringing the freshmen to sit in as an audience for our end-of-the-year “Seventh Grade Symposium,” where students presented their final projects. I even playfully drafted a “woo-hoo!” sign on a sheet of notebook paper for one of them sitting next to me—an invention I had devised as a solution to her seventh-grade class’s inability to suppress its incessant urge to squeal approvingly and ear-piercingly throughout our classroom debates.

This year we added Homer’s “Odyssey” to our seventh-grade book rotation. One thing I am looking forward to is sharing my personal definition with them. Even more so, I am eager to help them discover theirs.