Your One Wild and Precious Life...

Students have been asked to get a composition book or journal (with binding that is NOT spiral, please) that will be PRIVATE. I ask that parents do not pry or ask to read the journals; I have promised to not look inside the journals as well. It’s an “on your honor” system in which my kids will record their thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, secrets—anything and everything that is going on in their world at this age. They may write poetry, draw pictures, write stories, use it as a diary, make lists, and more. My hope is that they delve deep into their souls to write from the heart and put their honest and true emotions on the page. In the journal, students are asked to contemplate the prompt from the last two lines of the following poem from Mary Oliver. 

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself
  out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out
  of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and
  forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her
  enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and
  thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open,
  and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
  how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down
  in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how
  to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

As you can see, the prompt is: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

At the end of the year, each journal will be placed into a large manila envelope with each student’s name on the outside. The journals are meant to be a gift to their future selves because I intend to do my best to track down each student and mail them their journals in 20 years. (I realize this will be difficult, but I will do my best to find them.) By then they’ll be in their 30s—an age that seems so distant to them right now, so implausible. It’ll also be a time in their lives when they have experienced much more than they have now, and I’d like for them to be able to look back at what they were like at THIS age and see if they have fulfilled their dreams, broken barriers that they thought they couldn’t overcome, and I want them to have a better understanding of how the paths they’ve chosen in life have led them to where they’re at. When we make choices, we don’t know the consequences of the path that we are choosing until after we’ve traveled down that road, just like in Robert Frost’s poem, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. 

As a sad but necessary side-note, if I suffer an untimely demise, I’ll have instructions for the journals on the box in which they’re stored. The box of “secrets” will go to someone from this class (or a student’s parent) who can promise not to open any of the envelopes and then to mail them out in 20 years from when they were given to me.

I’m really excited about this project and hope that my kids write about their desires and dreams and what they’re like at this age. I must confess that the idea is not my own, but something that a teacher did in a recent YA novel that I read; therefore I must give credit to Jessi Kirby and her novel GOLDEN for inspiring me to do what Mr. Kinney did for his students during their senior year of high school. 

The prompt goes along with our Essential Question: Who is the Future Me? As we are working on this project, students have been creating Life Maps and imagining themselves anywhere from age 40 – 110 (though they aren’t allowed to be senile). They’ve worked on their Life Maps in class for quite some time and they’ll be expected to present them to the class on Tuesday, February 4. 

They’re also going to create a Portrait Project and do a bit of self-examination, exploring their past, present, and future selves. I took photographs (much to their dismay, ha!!!) and they’ll be displayed with their writing. If you’d like to see the work of some Harvard graduate students who did something similar, you can go to www.bhs.edu/portraitproject and see what those people have written. Obviously my kids won’t be quite so philosophical, but for parents who are questioning what the project might look like, I encourage you to check out the URL.  

We’re nearly at the mid-term of third quarter, so everyone needs to make certain that they’re keeping up with their work and still striving to do their best each and every day. The time that remains for us as a class is waning, and I want us to continue working toward meeting individual goals and being successful.

As always, I appreciate the help and support from my kids’ families; I’ve got a wonderful group and I’m so fortunate to get to know my kids in the time that we share. We’ve become something of a small family of our own here in our classroom.

Warmly,

Mrs. Gott