The sticky tape poem

A true story from my first year as a teacher 1970

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

One hot February day in the year 1970, I fronted my first class as a secondary English and History teacher.

Just months before I’d limped through the final months of an honours Arts undergraduate degree. In those days you didn’t need a teaching qualification before getting a job in a school, and I was itching to get stuck into my adult life.

I’d wanted to be a teacher for some time. It was in the blood. My grandfather was a teacher, my uncle too. An aunt was in teacher education, and I’d already spent many hours with her trying to prepare myself for my first weeks in charge of a class.

I remember waking up on that first morning of the school year, lying in bed with the summer sun streaming through my window, and suddenly realising that my feet were tingling.

More than just tingling.

It was like there was a gentle electric current coursing around my feet and lower legs. It’s a sensation I’d never felt before and have never felt since. I lay there, enjoying the sensation and thinking about how, at last, after all those years at school and university, I now had a real job in the real world.

It was a hot morning and my first class was up a long flight of stairs. The heat and my nerves meant that I was sweating by the time I started marking the roll. The sweat was running down my hand and onto the page, smudging my ticks as each boy responded with a ‘present’ or a ‘sir’.

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There was a boy in the class called Nick. Maybe it was already obvious in that first lesson, or maybe this became clear only after a week or so, but Nick had perfected the art of quiet disruption. He had perfect timing. It’s too long ago for me to now remember the specifics - books dropped on the floor? a loud comment on something going on outside? a fart? - but whenever it seemed as though I managed a tentative hold on this particular class’s attention, Nick would do something to disrupt the moment.

At first I just got angry inwardly, and tried to control myself. A couple of times during the first couple of weeks I lost it with Nick, but he'd just look into my eyes as if bemused by my fury. Or he would pretend to be shocked, or would hang his head in a kind of parody of feeling ashamed, or he would shrink back as if frightened I was going to hit him.

The frustration was building. I was losing the battle with Nick, mainly because I just didn't know how to fight it. The rest of the class were seeing me as weak, or that's what I felt, and other kids were starting to misbehave, and even the good kids, the ones who'd been so encouraging and friendly at the beginning of the year, were beginning to avoid my eye.

Then, one day, I decided this had to stop. I knew I had to try something completely different.

I had some books of published student poetry; I have them still 54 years on, with their little blue stickers marking some of the poems I selected to read to the class. I thought that my class would respond to this poetry. And I thought they might write some good stuff too. But I was worried, of course, about Nick.

Before the students arrived, I rearranged the classroom. Usually I had the desks arranged in groups, but I pushed all the desks around so that they were in rows facing the front. Then I went back to the staffroom. In the past, I always made sure I was in the classroom when the kids arrived, but on this day I went back to the staffroom and waited for the bell.

The students were inside waiting. As I opened the classroom door, with what I hoped was a steely and determined expression on my face, I sensed a kind of nervous energy in the room. Like some storm was about to break.

I was carrying my poetry books with me, and I banged them down on my desk. Students flinched. The room deathly silent. By now I was feeling a kind of insane feeling of invincibility. Maybe like I imagine a soldier feels at the beginning of a battle. I don't know. Do soldiers really feel that? Probably not. Anyway, that's how I felt.

Then, into the stunned silence, I began.

'Today we are going to do something different,' I said. 'Today you are going to be different. For the next twenty minutes you're going to sit silent and you're going to listen as I read poems. Poems written by students your age, and younger. You're going to be surprised, and amazed, and impressed. It’s possible you may also be moved and inspired. You will be absolutely silent as I read these poems. Then you're going to write, every one of you. You're each going to write a poem. And it you're sitting there thinking that you don't know how to write a poem, or wondering if the poem has to have a particular form, or has to rhyme, then your questions are going to be answered as you listen to these poems that I'm going to read to you, because you'll discover that poems don't have to rhyme (though some do), they don't have to be any particular length, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. So all you have to do is to write and your poem will take the shape that it has to take. It will just happen.’

I was possessed. On a roll. In the zone!

‘And you will sit there in silence writing your poems, and when you've finished you can go outside and have some free time on the equipment or just sitting in the sun, but no-one, absolutely no-one, is going to leave the room until they've handed in a poem … a short poem or a long poem, a poem that rhymes or a poem that doesn’t rhyme, a poem about something that has happened or that you simply imagine … whatever … no-one leaves until they have written a poem.'

One of the students put his hand up.

'No questions. Here's the first poem.'

Blossom

The school’s pale pink blossom
is a beautiful sight
in spring
it tempts me
to steal
a small branch.

- Pam Campbell (11)

When I am alone
I feel sad and left out
I feel jealous
and wish something magical
would happen to me
But I always end up
playing school
with the logs
of wood.

- Nanette Dodgshun (11)

I hate water -
sea-weedy water.
When you walk in it
it feels like slippery eels
wrapping around your legs.

I hate spiders
with button bodies and fern legs;
and creepy-crawly shadows
that slide across your wall.

And mud.
Oozy mud.
It slides through your toes
like long brown worms

-Garry Muntz (11)

Occasionally I’d make a comment or explain a phrase. But mainly I just read the poems. Being possessed and encouraged by the receptive silence that gripped the room, I know I read them really well. And I could feel the students being drawn into the atmosphere of each of the poems.

Fascination

Step onto the board
three steps forward
be ready to leap.
Below me I see a huge mass of
univiting, savage sea-dragons.
On the board I stand
into that mass
I plunge

As I reach the water’s surface
I take a deep breath
And under I go.
Swirling, twirling bubbles
Meet my cold nose.
Deeper and deeper I glide,
At last I stop
Strain my eyes open
Only to see
Tiny mischievous bubbles
Racing to the surface.

Now I rise
Like a new-born rocket
High into that maze
Above me,
Streaming up through
The ice-cold water -
fighting now
harder and harder
A sudden light shines
But where is the top?

More bubbles
Join the procession.

At last I pop to the top,
All fear is gone.

‘Clear the water’
Shouts the teacher.

The dragons are left in peace.

- Sandra Cannings (11)

AFTER A SPRING RAIN

How fresh a spring rain
Smells while walking barefoot through
Rows of sprouting corn.

- Daniel Sell (Forsythe Junior High)

To Julian Bream (guitarist)

I have watched you play your lute
And bring the centuries back from invisible graves
within us.
You sit alone on the stage
Pouring out your music that scatters
Like coloured beads spilled on the floor.

You begin another piece:
The thoughts scurry down your nerves like
Excited squirrels on telephone wires
And release from your strong thick fingers
The sounds that are waiting to escape.

- Edward Myers (South Denver High)

Brian Swanson

One clean-sponge May
I cut a dead, damp cocoon
from a soft redwood fence
for Bad Brian Swanson,
who once beat up my brother
and threw a baseball
through Carlson’s picture window.

Every time he sees me, Brian boasts cockily
that his parents are still paying for
the broken window; but, softer, almost shyly,
he always whispers that
the cocoon just hatched yesterday
and turned into a beautiful moth
with purple wings that shine in the dark.

- David Thompson (Theodore Roosevelt High School)

Then we had our twenty minutes silence. I walked up and down the rows in the classroom while the kids wrote. I refused to answer any questions.

Every time I got near Nick's desk, he bent over and made it impossible for me to see if he was writing anything. I didn't care. The others were writing, and he wasn't stopping them. He could hand in a blank page for all I cared. Things were different.

The class had turned a corner.

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At the end of the twenty minutes, I stood by the door, collecting the poems as the kids, one by one, left their seats and handed me their poems as they left. I looked through the poems as I waited for the last few kids - Nick among them - to finish.

The poems were really good! Authentic. Experimental. Fresh. Exciting. I couldn't wait to type them up and then share them with the class.

Nick's voice sort of jolted me out of my reverie.

'Sir, have you got any sticky tape?'

I pointed to the sticky tape dispenser on my desk, and Nick spent the next 10 minutes folding his piece of paper in half, taping the edges, scribbling something on the top, folding it in half again, taping the edges, scribbling something, and so on until, when he came up to my desk (all the other kids had long gone) he dropped this tiny brick onto my desk. And left.

I sat at my desk in the empty classroom and read his first instruction. ‘For Mr. Shann’s eyes only!’ I took off the first strip of sticky tape to reveal the second level. ‘Beware!!’ he’d written. Then, at the next level ‘Keep out!’, then ‘Danger!’ then ‘Poison’. And so on, until I had the creased sheet spread out in front of me and I could read Nick’s poem.

It’s over 50 years ago now, but I remember, vividly, the moment and I remember, exactly, the words:

People come
and people go
and no-one stops
to have a small chat,
That's what I call loneliness.

I’m guessing this was a significant moment for Nick. I told him later how much I loved his poem, how well he’d written about a big feeling. I don’t remember him responding, and he continued, over the course of the time I had him in my class, to cause disruptions and to make those around him laugh. Perhaps there was less of an edge to it, perhaps not. He continued to be something of a loner. It’s quite possible that the bigger impact was on me. On my confidence as a beginning teacher, but also on the beginnings of a sense that the English classroom could be a place where significant insights and experiences, to do with what is unseen or otherwise unexpressed, has a place.