bulletin board

today i walked home in the dark. well, not really the dark dark. here's what happened. i am bad. i know i am bad because i got a letter in my mailbox today (the teacher mailbox i have at school) saying i'd neglected to put up my monthly bulletin board. now, i hadn't neglected it at all. i had no intention of putting it up. i work in a high school and the idea of being forced to put student work up on the walls and act all excited about it nauseates me. bulletin boards at my school are shared between two teachers and a schedule is set down for the teachers to follow, alternating monthly so each teacher puts up a new display every two months. i know what you're thinking, but even if you only got your period six times a year, you'd still resent the cramps and bloating. you would.

every year i drag my heels and pretend to be doing work and i scrape by generally with one bulletin board. it's usually a good one and it's usually in the spring. then i go back to doing nothing. but this year the bulletin board police have nabbed me and although the teacher i share the space with was more than happy to put up work she'd been wanting to display, the space was left blank for me to stare at. the problem here is that by some miracle of complete idiocy my bulletin board is nowhere near my class. i live on the fourth floor at the back of the building. my board is on the second floor, near the front where i am able to ingore it with dignity and grace.

until today. it always works like this. i've bragged about how i'm not about to do the stupid bulletin board (yes, this is how i spend my time), how it will sit there empty like an old parking lot. barren. ugly. a menace inviting grafitti and shame. this is where the ninth graders came in. today we're working on memoirs and every year there's a lesson on writing a memory chain that i hate and the kids hate and as a result it's always a big, fat failure. this year i chucked it and made them write poems. they hate poems. let me rephrase that. they HATE poems. whatever. they always say that and they're always confused about what "poem" means. because to ninth graders poem means a pile of syrupy rhyming words about love written by a dead guy.

but we do this assignment where they have to write about a place from their childhoods (we're working on setting). they do not have places. they do not have memories. i tell them about my own memories, show them a poem i wrote and tell them it's easy. i will never understand why this works. it is not easy at all to write a good poem but i act like it is and force them to make these image lists, which they hold up for scrutiny. then they are encouraged to "flesh things out" and make the images into sentences. the transformation that happens is fantastic.

one boy brings me his poem couplet by couplet to admire. it is about a trip to six flags. another writes about playing ball with his siblings at evening, catching good food smells coming out the open back door of the house. one mentions the slight breeze in late afternoon. he actually uses the word "slight". these are suddenly children who notice things. i want everyone to see these poems. i want them hanging on the wall outside my door so i can look at them and be proud of them and protect them from idiot vandals. i am resentful of my second floor bulletin board but i want it to be perfect, so perfect other kids will be sad they don't have poems to put up there. in a matter of seconds i have become a monster, drooling, obsessing over black bulletin board border.

which brings us back to the beginning. i am leaving school late (3:45- not that late) and wandering through a world the color of slate, being pelted by a nasty, sharp rain. i walk along bay parkway hoping to find a paper store that's open, that has black bulletin board border. there is no such place. as i walk toward the f train and the cemetery, the sky lowers and darkens. not quite night but not something you can see in. this part of my walk is never pleasant as it is some sort of long haul trucker parking and also where the sheriff brings towed vehicles. i don't know why. but as often as not i'm able to see, if i'm so inclined, one of the truck drivers having a bathroom break on the sidewalk. today is my lucky day. evidently i startle the grown man peeing on a city sidewalk at 4:30 on a weekday and he swings around, nearly peeing on a passing car as he stumbles out into traffic. i want to think that things like this happen to everyone but nobody else seems to see guys like this one.

i am only mildly aware of anything that is not black bulletin board border and want to tell him, let him know i wasn't paying attention to him, but it is getting very dark and having a conversation on a dark sidewalk by a cemetery in the rain with a man whose pants are unfastened seems like poor judgment and i trudge on. there is no black border to be had. none. i will not be defeated. i have black tissue paper in the classroom. we will fashion our own border. we will create boxes fastened with buttons and when a brave soul walks up to the bulletin board and opens one of these boxes he or she will be rewarded with the gift of one of these wonderful poems.

even if the only people opening the boxes are the authors, that's just fine. i want my kids to see how beautiful their words are. i want them to see total strangers standing in front of their work, reading it, nodding, smiling. they should feel that. and if i have to put up a stupid bulletin board to get what i want, i'll do it.