Dear Students, Don't Listen To Me

Dear Students, Don't Listen To Me

Dear Students, Don’t Listen To Me

Your whole life, your mothers, fathers, pastors, teachers say -

“Listen to me.”

Once, I too, sat right there,

reaching for greatness, striving for the ‘A’-list.

Now I stand on the other side of these old desks -

a paper-shuffling, opinion-rustling, shaper of

minds and souls and lives am I.

But,

somewhere along the path I lost my way.

One day,

a conversation:

“Do we have to read this?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice like ice.

“Why?”

“Because the curriculum says so.”

I heard myself say it.

And I believed it.

I believed the facts, statistics, and professors

sitting in blood-colored buildings, ivy-clad

shaking their heads and muttering gravely one to another:

“Oh, what shall we do? What shall we say of kids today?”

I believed that their wisdom

must dictate every word,

every choice,

every decision

in my classroom.

My fires burned out,

leaving hollow places, spaces for

doubts and regrets and “why’s”

I heard my mouth start spewing lies:

“Tests and work. Work and tests.

I’m preparing you to be the best.

Do all this, you will succeed.”

But I never told you where it leads -

that the world still measures success in greed,

that all you learn boils down to what you’ll earn,

that education is a business,

the point of no return.

The god of green is all we serve -

the writhing snake in the learning curve.

Shall I beat myself bloody like a battering ram

against the immovable indifference of

an irrelevant exam?

Shall I wait and pray

for someone else to give a damn?

And as I choked on the ashes of

answerless questions,

my gasping spirit, nearing defeat,

stirred with the memory of

the first time I learned to create fire.

I saw myself,

a pure child of light

and I remember the day I discovered

that walking through a library

is to walk among the flames,

like a dauntless dragon,

unflinching and sure,

letting the words of the fire-makers

sear my soul. I swallowed the embers whole,

fearless,

and felt the sweet singe of illuminated intellect

and the inspiration in creation.

The sparks would spread

and smolder

until the ends of my fingers glowed and reached

for the tools to create my own fires

and as I remembered a smaller version of myself,

ablaze with joy and passion

for the craft that brought me to a classroom

full of eyes and souls and lives,

I felt my furnaces roar to life.

And I realized that I do not have to fly

helpless and alone, tumbling through a tornado

of dispassionate data and cold, clinical congressmen,

cycling endlessly in a funnel of fatalistic falsehoods,

because I remembered that the inferno inside of me

burns in every one of you.

We are not defenseless, doomed to digest dust

force-fed to us by the men in blood-colored buildings.

No,

we are fire-makers

we are dragons, waiting to be awoken,

hungry for the food that fuels our passions.

And so, my prayer today is not that the bodies in the chairs

would be statistic-changers and test-masters,

but fire-makers,

ever hungry, ever-burning

for the food that fuels your passions.

Your mothers, fathers, pastors, teachers say

“Listen to me.”

But take it from a full-time fire-maker,

from a recently roused dragon

that the mighty almost slew:

Dear students, don’t listen to me -

Listen to you.