After a Too-Short Winter Break
A week ago, I couldn’t imagine
how I could possibly be ready
to walk into a classroom again
already. After 2020 (and 2021),
I told folks that if it were up to me,
I’d give the whole world time
to lie on a beach somewhere,
a month or six to grieve and heal
and soak up sunlight.
The years just keep on coming.
Individual and global tragedies hit
over and over and over and over —
waves knock us down, gravel
rakes across vulnerable backs,
barely time to catch our breaths.
Yet here we are — the semester
starts tomorrow, and I haven’t finished
my syllabi yet, haven’t printed them,
haven’t printed the first day materials
and it’s eight hours to sleep until time
to take the kids to school, plus scheduled
swim — because if I want strength
to keep fighting, I have to train for it.
But I’ve been doing this a long time.
I’ll have two hours before it’s time to go in
and teach, and two hours will be enough
for the first day, to do a good job with it.
I can catch up with the week’s planning
and the semester’s planning; I can give them
the broad strokes of it now, and the rest
is subject to revision. What matters
is that I am finally, in these last hours,
looking forward to going in after all.
Those bright young faces — resistant, reluctant,
half-asleep, already planning to get through
as much of the semester as possible with help
from generative AI — oh, I am eager to meet them.
I will seduce them into loving these stories they read,
the stories they tell. We’ll discover, together,
the joy of finding new stories that make sense
of the mess that we’ve made of this poor world.
I’m tired, students. But you give me strength.
See you tomorrow. We’ll learn so much together.
January 12, 2025
