Terry’s Ode to June

It’s June, and warm at last with a warmth you can trust.

Maybe in May the air stays cool to prolong the lilac, each drooping blossom a pale cone of tiny Xs; or to protect the wee parasols of the new leaves, for weeks still bearing the packing-wrinkles of all the newly-born.

But now it is June, with a warmth you can hang your hat on.

The dogs and cats relax with a deeper abandon. They sleep comically balanced on their backs, paws curled under their chins or flung wide, tummies up to catch the faintest stir of air.

We humans fling open windows and find last year’s flies, dangling from the gallows of last year’s spiders. Big-hipped bees barge in and buzz the houseplants, roaring past like schoolyard bullies.

Time seems to slow in June, and almost turn back on itself; and I think of other Junes when I taught secondary school English, high in a corner classroom in a turn-of the-century red brick schoolhouse.

There we did things differently come June, as the air softened with summer’s approach.

On sunny days, we opened the big wood-frame windows wide, and the curtains I’d made for them danced out over the treetops, and the papers tacked to the bulletin boards snapped and lifted like sails.

On days that were black with clouds, we turned off the lights and held class in near-whispers, as the moist air stirred our hair, charged as it was with the coming thunder.

Early in my seven years teaching, I had asked if I might keep a small rug for the kids to sit on sometimes in the classroom’s center. But it seemed a rug violated fire laws, so instead I kept a broom. On special days, I would ask one student to get it out and sweep that old floor clean. Then we’d push the desks back and hold class in a circle, sitting on the floor.

We did this in June especially, when the beauty outside just seemed to call for it.

And it changed everything in the classroom dynamic. When we sat in that circle, suddenly it was not just my responsibility to make it a good class, but everyone’s.

Often we would begin with a quick exercise in self discovery; play "Twenty Things You Love to Do," for example, where you privately draw up a list of such items and then review them, asking certain questions: when did you last actually "do" the three favorites? Which are solo activities and which cost money? Which make you feel proud after? And what does all this tell you?

A jokey kid would say something racy. The class would laugh and then get past it. A brave kid would say something true, and we’d be on our way.

Because the true and real thing always made a bridge back into the day’s lesson: Macbeth’s lust for power, or Huck’s nose for the phony or poor Jay Gatsby’s fatal blunder, letting his own carefully constructed version of an old love blind him to the qualities of the actual woman.

We would talk then about what each of us knew of love and greed and hypocrisy, subjects about which most kids know a fair amount. And nobody ever whispered while someone else spoke. And nobody ever mocked another’s ideas.

Because by June, in a classroom, the kids feel safe, since often the people we work beside become the people we trust.

Kids need to trust in the belief that life offers love, and meaning, and a thousand opportunities for valor. Day after day, teachers help them build that trust.

So thank a teacher, for the hard and daily job of building trust in a new generation.

Then thank June for the tummies-up nap and the rest, however brief, from all our labors.

E-mail: tmarotta@mediaone.net

Web page: http://people.ne.mediaone.net/ tmarotta/index.html