ESPrit de Corps

15 responses so far ↓

• 1 Gen Berretta // Jan 21, 2008 at 6:17 pm

  So true Hawley. When we only measure by tests we fall so short in our measurement of the unique little person who steps into the classroom with so much individuality. We are taught as educators to differentiate our instruction to accomodate all different learning styles, and that’s a great thing, but we still have a test that does not make the same differentiation. It’s all about finding a way in to make a child feel successful and yes…placing an ace in thier pocket so that they always feel like they have the upper hand.

• 2 Angela Earley, Rotunda Gallery teaching artist // Jan 23, 2008 at 1:29 am

  Mr. B had it right.

  My seventh grade Algebra teacher greeted us at his door every first period of every day with threats to spray us with the water mister (spray bottle) in his hand. Mr. B was a math teacher with the attitude of a happy cowboy. Most of us were grouchy, puberty- striken, confused, in love, still sleeping, anxiously late, and a number of other things that seem so monsterous at 8am in seventh grade.

  When the bell rang and class began Mr. B would jump around in the front of the room spraying himself with the water mister and shouting WAKE UP EVERYONE, WAKE UP! ITS ALGEBRA TIME! He wouldn’t stop this ridiculous dance until everyone in the room was laughing, smiling or at least smirking. Sometimes he was quite drenched by the time we all were smiling.

  When the first Algebraic equation went up on the overhead the room felt like a party where the variable X was the mystery guest. Mr. B would call on someone to solve it. There was the occasional I CAN’T answer, but Mr. B would laugh and threaten to spray the I CAN’T culprit with the water mister. Of course, Mr. B said YOU CAN.

  Then he was patient for an answer. The kind of patience that inspires. The kind of patient that earns trust. Mr. B is why I love math.

  Although I’m not about to carry a spray bottle around and perform that water dance for anyone (it’s just not my style, but by all means be inspired!)….I do think about Mr. B’s math class lots when I’m teaching Arts in Education for Rotunda.

  I think to myself:

  You’ve got to get them to smile.

  Let them know that you mean business. That what we are doing is important. That they can do it.

  Remember to wait. Be patient. Everyone has a different pace.

  Let them get the smile and the confidence first. The math and art skills will come.

  Can smiles, confidence and pride be recorded in our templates? Yes, somehow in a gorgeous and immeasurable way.

  Thanks Mr. B because those memories have helped lots and I’ve had some great success stories teaching Arts in Education.

  Had an amazing experience collaborating with Dawn Gunther at IS 71. Will try to write again and tell the student stories and great successes, but had to start with this response to Hawley’s THE ACE IN YOUR POCKET. Brilliant way to put it Hawley!

  Cheers All.

• 3 Jo Anne Kavanagh // Jan 23, 2008 at 11:36 pm

  those teachers that heard the different drum in me and focused the beat in ways that took wing outside of the classroom:

  the third grade teacher in my catholic elementary school that asked me to stay on to paint the faded statues of the saints;

  the sixth grade teacher that arranged for me to paint storefront windows for the holidays;

  the senior high school english teacher who gave me free passes from classes and a room of my own in the school from which to deliver our yearbook.

  The details of how these opportunities were presented to me are lost in the mists of time but these teachers’ amazing actions have put these “aces in my pocket” - faith, fortitude and a deep appreciation of the gentle balance that exists between independent, creative action and personal accountability.

  Thanks, Hawley, for the chance to connect with my past in a way that has present and future meaning for others.

• 4 David // Jan 24, 2008 at 10:32 am

  I am inspired: I want write a play entitled “To turn trash into gold” featuring Ace as a main character… It will be a tale, of course, of transformation and the gift that allowed that transformation to occur.

• 5 Patrick Johnson // Jan 24, 2008 at 10:55 am

  At the jr. high I attended, there was a thirty minute built in study period where students could go back and get help in the subject of their choosing. One day I desperately needed help in Algebra so I made my way to Ms. Abdella’s room. She was known as the meanest teacher on campus; it turns out it was just her association with Algebra. She met me at the door and told me her room was full and to come back the next day. I pleaded with her telling her that I needed help or I would surely flunk the upcoming test. She let me in on my word that I would sit quietly and work problems. I did. The other students got rather unruly and as she was getting their attention she said “Pat Johnson is the only person in this room that is a man of his word. He said that he would work without talking and that is what he has done.” She called me a man and she said I was true to my word. I matured that day. I realized that my word meant something. I have shared this story with Ms. Abdella and she remembers doing this. She realized how much I needed a boost at that time in my life.
  As a teacher I try never to miss this opportunity with any of my students. Everyone needs a cheerleader.

• 6 Hawley Hussey // Jan 24, 2008 at 9:39 pm

  Dear Friends,

  What beautiful responses! Thank you. I think we need to get everyones ACE IN THE POCKET STORY and make an art piece out of it. So inspirational!

• 7 Robert "Bluesman" Ross // Jan 24, 2008 at 10:17 pm

  A PIANO COMES TO BROOKLYN

  The question is often asked, “What inspired you to become a musician?”

  What indeed?

  What possesses a person to devote his life to pursuing a career despite dire warnings from his parents, teachers, and friends7 What possesses that person to persist in this unlikeliest of quests despite the rejections, the short money, and the repeated firings coming fast and furious from all quarters year after year?

  I remember the day they delivered the piano to the apartment we lived in on Winthrop St. in Brooklyn, NY. I was three years old. My 9 year old brother Michael was going to start taking piano lessons.

  My brother taught me, or tried to teach me the names of the white notes based on the shape of the keys. Of course the fact that he was only 9 and I was only 3, didn’t help. I remember thinking at the time (perhaps the very first time I had ever attempted any critical thinking) that some of the notes looked exactly the same. A quick look at that same Acrosonic spinet reveals that the notes A, D, and G look almost identical even now. The notes B and E look identical as well. And the notes C and F likewise. My brother would have been better off basing his lesson on the position of the white notes relative to the black notes. The piano keyboard is arranged so that there is a repeating pattern of 3 black notes and 2 black notes. All the black notes have a white note in between them. The main thing is that the two and three black note pattern is created by two white notes which separate them. You can easily locate any note on the keyboard by its position relative to the 2 or 3 black notes which forms a repetitive pattern across the length of the keyboard.

  Nevertheless I was soon able to identify a few of the notes on the keyboard by considering what the white note looked like, and what note was adjacent to note in question. My first music lesson.

  In a few years Michael got pretty good. I thought that his version of Come Back To Sorrento was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I took an interest in the piano myself and would sit at the piano almost every day and try to pick out the melody of tunes I had heard on the radio. I played with one hand. I had no understanding of chords or harmony.

  I had no interest in being a musician or taking lessons either at the time. I was going to be a baseball player and play for the Brooklyn Dodgers when I grew up.

  We moved to Queens in 1953. Then the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1957.

  Eventually my mother basically forced me to take piano lessons. I had zero interest in it. I was about 12 and all I wanted to do was play ball with the other kids in the street. Mother prevailed and hired a dapper white haired gentleman in a gray suit and an attache case to transform me into the next piano virtuoso.

  The lessons were boring. A lot of reading and finger exercises. They seemed entirely pointless and lacked even a ghost of inspiration or imagination. Now punching a ball in the gutter, THAT was a heroic act of imagination!

  Soon I was given tunes to play that were dull and lifeless nursery rhymes or folk songs. With two hands. I didn’t like the tunes and I didn’t practice them at all. A week later the teacher would show up and ask me to play them and I did. Very badly. Wrong notes. Stopping and starting over. Pathetic.

  Then one day the dapper gray haired man in the gray suit and attache case gave me a tune called Locretia Borgia to practice. It was in a minor key. It had a quality to it which now I would describe as bluesy, and gypsy like. It was fabulous. I played the tune over and over again for hours. I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. Nor did I want to. I loved the sound of it and found it incredible that I was able to play something so wonderful and mysterious.

  A week later, the dapper gray haired man in the gray suit and attache case showed up and asked me to play the tune. I played it perfectly. Perfectly! He was astounded. With eyes wide he asked, “What happened?” Translation: “You’ve been playing like crap for months, what the hell?”

  I said, “I don’t know. I like the tune. Give me more tunes like that and I’ll practice.”

  The lesson ended with another boring bloodless tune. I told my mother I wasn’t interested in piano lessons anymore. I put my foot down. She relented.

• 8 Janet G. Rispoli // Jan 24, 2008 at 11:46 pm

  We were living in Flatbush in 1972 on Brooklyn Avenue in a brick house, my parents’ first home, across from the Catherine McCauley Convent and down the block from the Vanderveer Estates. I was the eldest of five children belonging to an Italian born father and an Irish American mother from Jackson Heights. We lost the second youngest the year before on her way up to Mrs. Gunscher’s kindergarten class at P.S. 198 at the corner of Foster and Farragut due to a suddenly developed allergy to penicillin. It was at that school, that year, at the age of eleven, that I decided I wanted to become a teacher.

  I was a student in Mr. Brandow’s mainstream multicultural fifth grade class that year along with my best friend Susan Quartuccio, Lydia Harry from Trinidad, Lourdes Suarez from British Colombia and Maria Garcia newly arrived from Cuba speaking no English. Anthony Nicoletti was always in trouble and James Scelza was the class clown. Mr. Brandow viewed us as young ladies and gentlemen and addressed us by our last names. Ironically, it was the first time in my life I was to be known as Ms. Rispoli, but it would certainly not be the last. I remember that I won an art contest that year and Mr. Brandow, always so encouraging, suggested to my mother that I should take art classes. My mother smiled and nodded thinking her husband already had two jobs. I remember being annoyed that he never gave back any of my artwork or any of my many reports with fancy hand rendered covers.

  Mr. Brandow made Monday my favorite day of the week. Every Friday, our only homework was a current events assignment where we had to cut out a news photo with a caption and write a paragraph explaining why the news feature was newsworthy. On Monday, from 9 o’clock until lunchtime, each student stood before the class and presented their findings. What made it special were the tangents. There he stood in his blue and white seersucker suit, the part carved in the side of his short dark 1940’s styled hair, interjecting with reminiscences from his childhood. When he spoke you could hear a pin drop. Sometimes he was funny, sometimes he was melancholy and sometimes he assumed the mantle of a preacher. I would come home from school on those afternoons and proceed to tell my mother every one of those stories. She would smile, laugh, and concur as she added some of her own similar remembrances of her childhood and young adulthood. I realize now that they were probably around the same age and coming from a similar upbringing. He had an old fashioned, sort of Mr. Rogers-ish way about him that I loved. I could feel that he really cared about and enjoyed us. I knew that, one day, I wanted to be just like him and do what he did. I was sure it would make me feel very good. I was already playing school with my siblings and neighborhood friends regularly, always insisting on being the teacher, so this gifted teacher just helped to make it official.

  I would not start my teaching career until I was 35 years old. When I graduated from Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island in 1979, teachers were losing their jobs in a mass lay off. My father insisted I be practical and study business in college. I spent thirteen years in middle management in two world famous brokerage houses before feeling completely stagnant and unfulfilled. After my father died in 1992, my mother, seeing my dissatisfaction, suggested I move back home with her to go back to school full time to get my teaching degree.

  I have been teaching English for the last twelve years at Curtis High School, here on Staten Island. It was the best decision my mother ever helped me make. I got a little side tracked by life, but I don’t know that I would have changed anything. Now, on any given day in Room 225, you can find me analyzing and discussing the intricacies of literature and its wonderful, and sometimes disheartening, insight into the human condition. I often feel compelled to offer the stories of my own life and personal experience filled with the joys, the sadnesses, the humor, the disappointment, the frailties, the illness and the undying hope. When I expose myself to my students through these stories about my life, you can hear a pin drop. All I know is that Mr. Brandow stayed with me all those years. He guided me back to what I knew I wanted to do when I was eleven years old. Mr. Brandow was my ace in the hole.

  Ms. Janet G. Rispoli
  English Teacher
  Staten Island, New York
  January 2008

• 9 stanley wrzyszczynski // Jan 25, 2008 at 10:57 am

  Things are as they are- I have no “ace in the pocket” story. Does this mean that I cannot respond? Perhaps considering what this lack implies creates its own story; one that doesn’t involve words. For me, I think of the European bicycle racers and American NASCAR drivers who are slathered in brand names and logos. Perhaps they have no “Ace in their pocket.” Or they have no pockets!

• 10 Iva Hladis // Jan 27, 2008 at 6:36 pm

  My love for art and my desire to create was (I thought) “ace in the pocket”. Wrong. I still remember that day, when the letter arrived at the mail box ,back in the communist Czechoslovakia, telling my father how sorry the teacher’s committee is to arrive to a decision that his daughter has no artistic talent what so ever! And good luck in her life. Well, that meant 4 years of studying chemistry and physics. I was devastated and my life was over. But I kept daydreaming about leaving the country and proving the world, that I do have some talent! During my collage years I started to apply for visa to Yugoslavia (the only country in then Eastern Block you could possibly escape through). After my graduation and fist months working in a lab I have received my visa. My chance to GET OUT! To this day no one understands how single, 20 year old woman got to travel by herself to, so to speak, free Yugoslavia. I did not wait for them to find their mistake, I was gone the next day. And I escaped a few days later to Italy. Free world and not giving up my passion was my “ace in the pocket” to become an artist again. Here I am some 23 years later. Creating art without any formal education and making my living doing so.

• 11 Debbie LeBlanc // Jan 28, 2008 at 3:16 pm

  Grade: 3
  School: Queen of Angels
  Teacher: Sister Terasita

  Lesson: sometimes lessons just aren’t lessons at all.

  Internalscape: Two girls who have been eyeing each other for months, pretending to be - but not to be friends. Early play development at its best.

  Outcome: a team built out of absurdity

  Event: The school bell rings. We line up in the usual alphabetical order. It is a small school and thus the N in my Niichel is followed by the T in Thomsen. T and I have not quite figured each other out, and have been circling each other for months. She is more aggressive in play then I am and thus I was always glancing over my shoulder wondering when and where the next ‘play’ attack will occur. Today Sister Terasita is tardy in retrieving us. She lives and breathes punctuality so we are all in a bit of a stutter. Having the imperfectly perfect attention span of third graders, our line starts to waggle. Conversations are struck up in ‘the forbidden zone’ where silence is the rule. Time ticks by and soon conversations turn to activity. All of this is just enough out of character for unusual interactions to take place. T and I are actually facing each other and sizing each other up. She is not so bad when I can see her, and she actually has friendly question mark to her. Being bored and creative, we begin in a game of ‘trap the foot’ not unlike the hand slap game. Whomever traps the others foot wins. This of course requires a lot of movement and split second stomps. We are so into our game that we do not notice that everyone else has returned to their proper silence and places and are trying to signal us that trouble is imminent. I didn’t see or feel Sister Terasita approach until my ear was snagged. T is a much better squirmer then I, but she too has been caught off guard. We are dragged into the school (by our ears) and made to stand in front of the class. Being a good student this was incomprehensible. Thoughts of my parents anger and detention running through my thoughts. T has a similar look, although I know that she is no stranger to either. Sister Terasita’s face is bright red indicating a state of severe agitation and she has gone to her desk and retrieved her long ruler which she reserves for corporal acts. Both of us are frozen in fear. Not only are we in front of our peers, but we are going to be hit as well.

  This is where the lesson becomes absurdly an ace. Sister Terasita makes me take the ruler and says, “hit your foot and tell it not to kick.”

  It was at this moment that the entirety of the class started to look around with the ‘is this for real’ look. Heads immediately plummet in an attempt to hide peals of laughter and smirks as T and I in turn hit our own feet and talk to them.

  Outcome: T and I remain friends to this day, the glue to this relationship being one extremely absurd moment in which we gained the knowledge that sometimes adults are just plain weird.

  Looking back on this moment, I still laugh. My parents were called and I did get detention…but my (our) parents also found ‘it’ funny and thus detention didn’t feel like detention at all. Today I have the tools to muse about disembodiment and our relationship to our external bodies, but I am pretty sure that was not the lesson being taught.

• 12 Asata N'gonzi // Jan 29, 2008 at 5:59 pm

  I Am Art

  Once upon a time, all the kids in my neighborhood walked, ambled, skipped and ran to the local public elementary school. I remember every brisk summer morning, young, eager music, art and theater teachers pushing and pulling makeshift walls to and fro, creating classroom spaces to accommodate us all. Noisy and teeming with excited energy, we clamored through the halls and poured ourselves into colorful plastic seats awaiting their knowledge.

  These mentors helped me navigate through little black circles that danced over and through thin lines on a white page and translate them into shaky notes that fell out of the back end of my flute. The next session always left me slightly appalled as I blew saliva from a valve in my trumpet, hoping not to catch cooties from my fellow classmates. Sometimes during my lunch period, I would sit all the way in the back of the auditorium watching the older kids rehearse that summer’s theatre production, wishing that I had more control of my vocal chords. But it was in that stuffy, slightly smelly gym that I found my sanctuary. My self.

  Karen Z. was the program’s dance instructor. Each afternoon, she’d drive up to the back door in her Camaro and glide into the space smelling of cigarettes and perfume. She’d take out a record and drop the needle on the vinyl. Music I still love to this day by George Benson, Kool & the Gang and Stevie Wonder carried our seven-year old bodies across the floor. With just a little bit of jazz, we pliéd, jetéd and relevéd. She had us reaching and spinning and expressing our souls to eighties club classics. Her choreography molded our malleable brains and we took great pride in our work after each rehearsal.

  I felt part of a whole. I felt that I belonged and contributed to something. I used my body, my mind and my spirit and it was on that elementary school stage that Karen Z’s dance class touched the emotions of our audience (even if it was mostly comprised of our parents).

  It was in her class that I found my love of dance and my love of self as a physical being. So as a new parent, I say that it is our responsibility to introduce our children to art. It is intrinsically a part of who we are as humans. Love and light to the teacher/artists who are fighting to keep our children alive and active in their innate artistry.

• 13 Hawley Hussey // Jan 31, 2008 at 7:36 pm

  Dear Friends,

  Keep leaving ACE IN YOUR POCKET tales. I am making an art piece for Summer Seminar 2008 with them. It will be interactive.

  Friends and colleagues who contributed. Your voices are safe in my care. I will disperse them as the glittery inspiration that they are.

  So many thanks.

  HH

• 14 Stephanie // Feb 1, 2008 at 2:30 pm

  Goodness. I have been reading each of these tales as they have been posted, and am continuously stunned….each of story is so unique and unexpected. The outcomes have literally given me chills. And so first - A thank-you to the people who have proceeded me in telling their stories, and to Hawley for instigating the telling of them. I hope you will find a small piece of each of you in my story that follows, because I have been inspired by each of you to share mine.

  And so. I have meditated on my own stories. What is the Ace in my pocket?

  Is it the lingering influence of my high-school physics teacher who rather than seeing me as a misfit, like my other teachers who frequently would ask me to leave the room or move my desk to the back of the room, nurtured my unpredictable behavior and invited me to be a leader in his classroom?

  Was it my experiences with my lit teacher who excused me for not writing the essays she assigned on the boring books we were reading, and instead lent me books from her personal collection to read and talk with her about.

  Was the first Ace in my pocket way back in kindergarten when off in my own world and my own corner of the classroom I made a life-size puppet version of a friend, and my teacher seeing what I had done, invited me to lead the rest of my class in creating their own life-size puppets?

  I have so many of these memories - of outstanding teachers or mentors who stand out against a background of life experiences that let me down, or let me off the hook, or considered me a lost cause. I don’t feel like there was a decisive moment in my life that has changed me, has been that one thing I can point to and say, Ah-ha.

  Overall, I do feel like my experiences in public school and college did have a PROFOUND impact on who I am today - years of adults who have told me who I am, what kind of person I am, what kind of person I can be (!); how could it not shape who I am am? There are too many people on the side of the story that gave me trash, and told me if I didn’t want it, too bad, that’s what I get. On the other side of the story there are a precious few who gave me the alchemists abilities, and who were secret alchemists themselves.

  As I look back over the years, and look over both the good and the bad experiences, I can see a few common threads emerge. Teachers who did not see me as weird, or as a disruption; teachers who were not so caught up in their own drama or anxieties that they couldn’t open their eyes to the needs of their students; these were the ones that put that Ace in my pocket. These teachers taught with their eyes open, and with flexibility. Rather than scolding me, or kicking me out of class, they pulled me aside and gave me constructive alternatives that still held me accountable as a student.
  
  I don’t know, because I never had the maturity or the foresight to ask, but I think these teachers must have been more interested in some deeper, more far-reaching goal than the specifics of one very small lesson - whether it was nurturing creativity and leadership, or a love of reading and great literature, or curiosity of the physical world.

  I want to add that as a student in these teachers’ classrooms, my homework grades were always very low (I never did my homework!), but I always had top marks in class participation, and dare I say it, I even TESTED well. Top of the class in most cases. In my other classes I was constantly being written up for disrupting class (and getting terribly low participation grades) and tested just okay. The “risks” my more flexible teachers took definitely paid off, there is clear, hard evidence.

  One final story, because it is very different than the rest, but had the same outcomes.

  Also while in high-school, I had a gym teacher that despised me. She always had her eye on me, waiting for me to goof-off, or perform at some sub-par level. As someone whose gifts do not include athletic prowess, you can imagine that opportunities for her to attack me were many. I felt abused by her, and so in turn, abused her back. I would deliberately provoke her - once to the point where my actions resulted in suspension.

  Finally, totally frustrated with me and my “wild behavior,” she pulled me out of class one day and said, “Pereira, what’s wrong with you?” I looked at her and with out smiling or anger or any of the many attitudes I usually adopted in one of our confrontations, said, “M, what’s wrong with you?” I then proceeded to detail for her how I perceived her behavior toward me over the four years she had been my gym teacher. After I was done, and fighting back tears, she was silent. Finally she said, “You are right. Let’s start over.”

  There was something so surreal in this moment, of this perceived beast of a woman turned ally. I don’t remember how we ended it (though in my mind’s eye we did something cinematicaly appropriate and shook hands or something). In this moment my teacher was flexible and open-minded. She surprised me by treating me as a human being, and like all my heroic teachers, gave me a new opportunity to be accountable for my actions, even as she took that same opportunity herself.

  yikes, how we can go on!
  to the future, Stephanie

• 15 Gen Berretta // Feb 3, 2008 at 5:48 pm

  I track the pathways of inspiration. I watch for it. I document it. As a teacher, I am a scientist. I observe behaviour. I can see an inspired young face and know, that a poem or a well written story or letter, will unfold as a result of some event, or story or song or poem or speech or question, I asked the children to consider.

  It is amazing to know that as an educator, I travel down the pathway of inspiration and I have influenced inspired moments in my students. These moments yield incredible results that propel our students further down the path with an ace up their sleeve. They’re going somewhere and perhaps something I brought to the teaching table nudged them along a little further. I do try.

  Just the other day, one of my students handed me two poems on looseleaf paper. On the looseleaf it said: To Mrs. Berretta, my inspiring teacher. Just those two words make me cry. To think that I could inspire a child and a child recognizes that I did, is a big deal cognitively speaking. I was so touched and the poems (which follow) were incredible. I asked Sarah, what inspred her to write the poems? Why did she consider me inspiring? I was curious because I scheduled two of my forner students to visit her class to share their poetry (audience), and I had a hunch (remember I’m a scientist) that my former students inspired her. She opened her mouth to tell me and I said: “Write it down.” And so she sat down at her desk and wrote the following narrative about her moment of inspiration. The narrative is a piece of poetry as well.

  As I suspected, she was inspired by Annissa and Camera and decided to write the poems featured below. Please read her story and poems and know that we are the aces up their sleeves. Keep bringing to the children your passion, zeal, unending patience, and the very best that art and literature has to offer–it makes a huge difference. Enjoy the story and the poems.

  The Pathways of Inspiration

  Written by: Sarah

  When Annissa came and read her poems, it opened up a new world inside of me. I started to realize”WOW! This is the real stuff, Mrs. Berretta is teaching us. Stuff that is really important. It’s not a small thing…it a HUGE thing. What she is doing is so amazing. I never realized it like this.

  So on that day that Annissa came, January 24th, 2008, I came home and I wrote one small poem. I showed it to my parents. They said silently and speechless: “You are really…you’re really talented.”

  The next day I came to school. Camera read a poem called: “Her Majesty Wears a Black Veil.” The poem was so beautiful, I was speechless. My mouth dropped. That day I came home and I realized I should write a poem about the world. But then I wrote down a poem about a person who can make a change, who’s smart, who’s positive, who’s…me. The poem was called “Wise Person.”

  I Am One
  Written by: Sarah

  Only me
  Is what I’ll be
  Reachin’ for chances
  Doing my own special dances
  To make the world a better place
  Is my goal
  Ain’t gonna change
  Peer pressure will try to come to me
  But that’s not gonna stop me from
  being who I wanna be
  And people can ask me why
  And I’ll answer them and say:
  “Cause I AM…
  One

  A Wise Person
  Written by: Sarah

  A wise person can be anybody
  But that anybody has to have knowledge
  Has to have understanding
  Has to have…wisdom
  Got to do the positive, not the negative
  Got to do the best of, not the worst of
  I know someone who’s wise
  She’s learning from time to time
  STAYING away from the bad,
  trying to find the good
  She is me, which is I

  Oh I wrote a poem too inspired by a student’s comment that Annissa and I were “one big mushed up ball”. Annissa traveled with me teaching for two days while she was on her regents break and she has inspired a slew of poets. Please find below my poem inspired by Tania’s comment about Annissa and my relationship as teacher and student.

  One big ball
  > mushed up together
  > That’s what we are
  That’s what we become
  > That’s what we became
  > When teacher
  > influences student
  > and
  > student goes on to…
  > inspire the world

  There are more poems to follow on this particular path and I am documenting Annissa and Camera’s influece (and mine) on the poetry that ensued post their visit.

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