On the morning of the latest massacre of American schoolchildren

My students and I read “American Cheese,” Jim Daniels’s poem about, well, cheese–as you’d expect from the title. But, we’ve been working all semester on forming interpretations of literary text, and–of course–the poem isn’t just about cheese. “This is about/this is really about” has become our short-hand for moving beyond literal comprehension of the text’s subject (what it is about) to interpretive comprehension of the text’s themes (what it is really about), and my class of nearly all boys is initially stumped by the question of what the poem is really about, have a hard time getting past the seeming triviality of a man’s preferences regarding cheese.

I back them up. “What is the poem saying literally?” I ask, and we establish facts: The speaker attends department parties with fancy cheeses that he’s come to like. As a kid, he ate American cheese, the stuff that comes in individual, plastic-wrapped squares. (“You know, they can’t even call it cheese,” one student offers. “They’re called Kraft Singles because it’s not technically cheese,” he says.) His dad worked in a factory; there were five kids in the family. They ate cheese sandwiches. When he visits home now, he craves American cheese, and his mother is surprised by how he eats it without anything else.

They skip over what I think are the most crucial lines:

...We were sparrows and starlings
still learning how the blue jay stole our eggs,
our nest eggs.... 

I send them into small groups to identify what the poem is really about, and when we gather back together to share ideas they circle round and round above the poem, talking about food, nostalgia, family–never landing on the lines about birds. When they offer their ideas, I ask them to clarify their thoughts, perhaps to extend them, but I don’t direct them to those lines. My goal is to grow independent readers and critical thinkers, not for them to understand the particulars of this poem, which, in the scheme of literary things, is not a particularly important piece of work.

Someone offers an idea about the poem, and I ask: “Does everything in the poem make sense with that idea?”

Finally, someone gets there, asks what those lines about the birds are about, how they fit in. “Think about how we use our background knowledge and own experiences to build understanding of a text,” I suggest. “What do you know about these kinds of birds, and how can that knowledge give you ideas about how these lines contribute to the poem’s meaning?” I ask.

Silence.

I drill down just a bit. “How about sparrows and starlings?” I ask. “What about just those birds? What do you know?”

One student, a boy who regularly wears clothing adorned with American iconography, says, “They’re scrub birds.”

I ask him to explain, as I’m not sure what he means.

“They’re, like, nothing birds,” he says. “No one cares about them.”

I let that idea stand. “And what about blue jays?” I ask. “What do you know about them?”

“They’re cool,” he says.

“Why?”

“They’re big, and blue. They’re beautiful birds.”

“They are,” I say, and I turn back to face the rest of the room. “Here’s a great example of how we can form different interpretations of the same text,” I offer. “One person can see blue jays as better birds than sparrows and starlings, who are small and not very noticeable. Jays are bigger and stronger and much more distinctive–and these facts might influence your interpretation of the poem. But I have different associations and ideas about the birds because of an experience I had,” I say, and I tell them the story of the time I watched a blue jay attack a nest of small birds built in branches outside my bedroom window. I tell them about the sounds of the parent birds as their eggs were destroyed, how they never returned to the nest once they finally left it. “Blue jays are birds that attack other birds,” I say, “and because of my experience, those are more important facts about them to me.”

Now that we have turned the keys of these lines, the poem unlocks. Yes, it is about food, and family, and nostalgia. It’s also about social class, and a declining culture, and pride, and love of country, and community, and hard choices, and survival. What it’s saying about those things is open to interpretation, to different ideas.

We don’t reach strong conclusions about the poem’s meaning as a class. We are a diverse group. I like leaving them with some ambiguity. I want them to figure it out for themselves, to be able to sit with complex and contradictory truths. I know that me telling them what to think or insisting on a particular interpretation won’t meet my goals. They might say what they think I want to hear, but they’re going to think what they think, do what they want to do with their ideas.

As they are gathering their things and heading for the door at the end of class, the boy who shared his ideas about the birds says to me, “I liked class today.” He’s a student I have struggled to engage. We are very different people, he and I. He hasn’t done very well with me, and I know that most days he hasn’t liked my class.

“I’m glad,” I say. “I really appreciated your contributions to our discussion.”

“Thanks,” he says, with feeling, and he smiles at me. I smile back, also with feeling. We have such different views of the world he sometimes astounds me, but I will miss him when this school year ends in just a few short weeks. I am glad to have known him, and I think he might say the same about me. There are things in each of us that the other likes and respects. I want to believe that, anyway.

We have no way of knowing, right then, what the afternoon will bring. I don’t know that after I spend it grading my students’ reading logs–which will prompt me to think hard about purposes and how I might determine if they’ve been met–I will learn, while waiting for the copy machine after school, about the latest shooting in Texas. I don’t know that I will numbly run off copies of another poem for our next class, then go to my empty classroom and sit at my desk and wonder what I should feel and do. I don’t know that I will spend long minutes wondering about the nest I’ve built for us, with its twinkle lights stretched across the ceiling, and posters with art from around the world, and a cart full of window/mirror books, and chart paper with our lists of class norms. I don’t know that I will sit in that space, remembering the day in September we began building those norms as we discussed memes about gun control, or that I will leave memory as I tune into the sounds of students playing ping-pong in the foyer while they wait to be picked up, and that it will be the pock-pock-pock of those balls hitting the paddles that will be the thing that brings me to tears.

This post is about teaching high school students how to read poetry/This post is really about gun violence in the United States

Dots

This Is What Happens When You Live Under Minority Rule

On School Shootings

Monsters Are in Charge, and Nobody Is Coming to Save Us

7 thoughts on “On the morning of the latest massacre of American schoolchildren

    • Rita says:

      Thank you, Ally. I’m guessing that my students won’t connect any dots quite the way I have. But I deeply hope they will be dot connectors. Wish more of us were. I share your sorrow and outrage and questions.

  1. Kate says:

    I hate blue jays and starlings equally, but that’s really beside the point.

    Lately everything seems beside the point.

    This is a powerful post. Sending love.

    • Rita says:

      I am looking for the points, hard. I think I’m starting to see some. Too soon to say much about that, but I’m working on it. I’m working on letting old ideas about the world and how it works and what my role in it needs to be go. They aren’t working any more.

  2. Debs Carey says:

    Thank you for introducing me to this poem, it wasn’t one I’d come across before and it’s so powerful. As is your post. So many writers & bloggers wrote how it was difficult to find any words – yet again. But this poem, your lesson and your students was such a poignant and apt way to write about the subject.

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