catapult magazine

The Mad Students and Teachers Liberation Front

by Jennifer Monroe

With gratitude to Mr. Berry

You, students, hang your SAT scores around your neck,
Brand your GPAs on your arms,
Write your achievement test scores on your hands,
Tie your perfect preschool attendance records,
Your fifth grade class presidencies, 
Your animal shelter volunteer hours
on your forehead, for these are your law
and these are the window to your mind.
For colleges and universities will sift and strain you
and you must be declared wheat, not chaff
and one good place secures another good place
which secures another good place,
and your future must be secure.
And you, teachers, you must bind
yourselves to state-devised standards:
talk about them as you walk through the halls
as you drink your stale coffee,
as you doze in your professional development meetings.
Remember that your job is constantly in jeopardy,
that what are required of you are Results.
Accept the tyranny of the laminated lesson plan
as The Way It Is.

Or,

Build a school that doesn’t compute.
Accept that spelling tests may teach about tests,
but not always how to spell.
Understand that the earth must not be studied
only, but must also be lived in, worked on, loved. 
Your hands must get dirty.
Expel chicken nuggets and french fries,
flabby pizza and carbonated corn syrup from your lunch menu
and serve instead food you have prepared yourselves
from seeds you have planted and tended and harvested,
for what you learn in a field and in front of a stove
is as important as what you learn in a lab.
Go AWOL from the Prussian army.
Teach an economics that cares as much
about Wall Street as it does about your own street,
as much about supply and demand
as about how to sew on a button or fix a toaster.
Suspend a money-sapping athletic program
in favour of hours and hours of real play.
Care a little about how students look at eighteen,
care more about how they will look at thirty,
care most about how they will raise their own children.
Be rigorous, because rigor is what is required
to defeat the darkness: those semi-colons,
those quadratic equations, those cellular diagrams,
those civil war dates are all shots across the bow
at an enemy who would prefer your ignorance.
Do not allow state secretaries,
or federal departments,
or methodology textbooks
to dictate how your time will be spent,
but instead be satisfied only
with what makes peace, what inspires hope, what summons love.
And in every classroom, in every field, in every office,
in every experiment and discussion,
in every lecture and in every evaluation,
in your singing together, in your Frisbee playing,
in the cultivation of your minds,
of your place, and of your membership,
you must teach each other how
to practice resurrection.