Dream Teaching- taken fm Tok Workshop Handbook 2002

I am first in line for coffee
and the copier is not broken yet.
This is how dream begins in teaching high school.

First period the boy who usually carves skulls
into his desk raises his hand instead
to ask about Macbeth and for the first time,
I see his eyes are blue as melting ice.
Then those girls in the back
stop passing notes and start taking them
and I want to marvel at tiny miracles
but still another hand goes up
and Butch the drag racer says he's found the meaning
in the Act III soliloquy. Then more hands join the air
that is now rich with wondering and they moan
at the bell that ends our class and I ask myself,
"How could I thought of calling in sick today?"

I open my eyes for the next class and no one's late,
not even Ernie who owns his own time zone
and they all have done their homework
that they wave in the air
because everyone wants to go to the board
to underline nouns and each time I turn around



they're looking at me as if I know something they want
and steady as sunrise, they're doing it all right.

At lunch the serpentine food lady discovers smilling
and sneak me an extra meatball. In the teachers' room
we eat like family and for twenty-two minutes
not one of us bitches about anything.



Then the afternoon continues the happiness of hands
wiggling with answers and I feel such spark

when spike-haired Cindy in the satanic tee shirt
picks up the right pronoun and glows like a saint.
And me, I'm up and down the room now, cheering,
cajoling, heating them up like a revival crowd.
I'm living only in exclamatory sentences. They want it all
and I'm thinking, "What drugs are we on here?"
Just a crusher Granorski screams, "Predicate nominatives
are awesome!" the principal walks in
with my check and I almost say, "That's okay,
you can keep it" When the bell sounds
they stand, raise lighted matches
and chant , "Adverbs! Adverbs!"
I drive home petting my plan book.

At night I check the weather without wishing for blizzard
then sleep in the sweet maze of dreams
where I see every student from years of school days:
boys and girls, sons and daughters who're almost mine,
thousand of them stretches like dominoes into the night
and I call the roll and they sing, "We are all here, Mr. Romond!"
When I pick up my chalk they open their books,
look up and with eager eyes , ask me to teach them.

-Edwin Romond-


I encountered this poem in one of those handbooks given out at one of the teacher conferences that I attended. Everytime I read this poem, never without fail, I will have a lump in my throat as I get to the last stanza and eyes all welled up at the line "...sons and daughters who're almost mine". So, I thought, okay, shall put this up as my first entry, coz it will alwiz remind me, harassed as I claimed to be, deep down inside, I know, this, teaching, is home, this is where perhaps I want to be.