Mixed Poetry Contest--I Came to Teach
In 1994 I was at a crossroads in my life. I felt desperate-desperate for a job and for work that impassioned me; desperate to change my routine and surroundings; desperate for adventure; desperate to do the uncomfortable and to risk what is safe for the uncertain; and, for once in my life, run away from sensible advice. So in a hasty moment in mid-August (1994), I resigned from a comfortable college teaching position; moved across the entire state of Texas; and found myself inside my first high school classroom teaching freshman English and British Literature. The poem that follows is one I wrote at the end of that first year.
“Let the beauty of what you love, be what you do.” Rumi
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I came to teach,
to see what I could find
inside my students’ deeper selves.
I came to try and open minds
before they were sewn shut.
I came to channel passages,
hoping to connect hearts to heads
and hands.
I came to entreat,
to coax ennobled thoughts,
ideals, and love of self and others.
I thought that this must come from inside out
into the essence of their beings,
into relationships,
as connections to words and deeds,
and pedagogic styles.
I came to probe,
and sometimes poke,
to make them think,
and laugh
at small and narrowed views.
I wanted them to see
with their own eyes,
beyond the limitations of closed perceptions
into the beauty and the pain of others’ views.
I came to teach,
but learned instead
that they had just as much
to say to me.
Their lessons were often raw,
sometimes uninformed and yet complex.
I came to give and yet was given,
for through their gifts, I saw anew
that I must learn to guard against complacency, conclusions,
and the allure that ends too soon.
I came to grow,
unknowingly
to shed my false, scholarly skin
and metamorphose
into to something new and strange –
something far beyond the shadows of my old instructive self.
I came to teach but was changed in other ways,
and now remember that life is still a two-way street.
These were lessons I needed to learn.
Perhaps it is enough to say,
I came to teach but learned instead.
Copyright ©
Sara Etgen-Baker
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