This is my tribe

Between classes today I was sitting in the department office looking for solace. I'd just finished a horrible class, the kind of class session that makes me wonder what ever made me think I could teach, and I said to a passing colleague, "I'm counting on my next class to restore my faith in humanity."

"If you need a class to restore your faith in humanity," he said, "Maybe you should take up a different line of work."

Somehow, that didn't make my day....but my students did. 

They read to me.

Poetry. Lots of it. About basketball.

We were working on developing thesis statements for literary analysis essays, and I broke the task up into two parts: list elements of form, and then make a claim about what those elements suggest about meaning. We started off working all together on Sherman Alexie's poem "Why We Play Basketball," and I'm trying to get them in the habit of listening to the rhythms and sounds of the language so I was planning to read the whole thing to them out loud until one of my students said, "Let us read it!"

And so I did. They took turns reading sections of the poem aloud, and then we discussed the form of the poem (five sections, each containing five stanzas, each containing five lines, each containing five syllables!), the repeated words and images (love, hate, war, tribe), and the conclusions we could draw from these elements (basketball creates tribal unity).

And then I broke them up into groups and gave each group another basketball poem. List elements of form. Draw conclusions about meaning. But first....read it out loud.

Every group struggled with the analytical part of the exercise, but I don't believe I've ever enjoyed a poetry-reading more. Before the end of the hour, nearly every student had read a poem or a part of a poem out loud, and they read with grace, passion, and skill. About basketball!

This, I told myself, is why I teach: because one day a bunch of literature-hating lunkheads will suddenly find a poem that speaks their passions, and they will turn a room full of disparate people into a community--or, as Alexie suggests, a tribe:  

These hands hold the ball.
These hands hold the tribe.
These hands build fires.
We are a small tribe.
We build small fires.