I was teaching English 102—Intro to Lit. The first day is always the easiest. It’s when the students most resemble the ones you were fantasizing when you planned the course, when all they have to do is listen and smile, laugh in the appropriate places, and that’s enough. On the first day of class, since they’d not read anything yet for homework, I decided—Atlas-inspired—to read aloud to them. We did The Lorax. Good literature is good literature after all. We moved the chairs into a circle, and I showed them the pictures and everything. The students started off a little dubious, wondering if I thought they were in kindergarten or what. But soon enough, they settled into being read to, remembered how nice it is to be told a story, how when it’s one you’re familiar with you slip out of the narrative and into the cadence, the lull of the reader’s voice, the waiting with joyous anticipation to be told what you already know and understand more than is written. There’s a reason we read to our kids, and it’s not just because they can’t do it themselves. It’s because there’s a difference between reading yourself and being read to. I was tempted to give my new students a metaphor about sex versus masturbation but not on the first day of class. I sent them home with a dozen poems to read and explicate, beamed at the smiles of relief I saw leaving the room (“She seems nice” and “This won’t be so bad”), and went outside to bask in sunshine.
On the steps, I found Ethan doing the same. “What are you doing on the steps of my building?” I said, sitting down next to him.
“I didn’t realize it was yours,” he said.
I turned and looked at the sign above the door.
“It says ‘English Department,’ ” I pointed out.
“So it does,” Ethan admitted and shrugged. “Summer session. They’re redoing the history building for fall. Removing all the asbestos or something. Makes you feel really good about the last four years you’ve spent in there. In any case, they moved all our summer classes over here.”
“What are you teaching?”
“History 102. You?”
“English 102,” I answered happily, hugging my knees and grinning at him as if this were just an impossible coincidence. I love the first day of class.
“You’re teaching The Lorax?” he asked, seeing it in my hands.
“Just for the first day.”
“Sounds fun.”
“What did you do?”
“Gave a mini-lecture summarizing History 101 in case they forgot or didn’t take it.”
“What’s that take? About an hour?”
“Well, History 101 is roughly the dawn of recorded time to about 1499, but it’s only Western civilization, so it’s pretty doable.”
“Do they seem nice?” I asked.
“So far,” he said. “Yours?”
“Yeah, so far.” We sat quietly and shared the mixed high/relief of the first class, coming down off the adrenaline of nerves and into the calm you get before the first homework assignment comes in when you don’t yet know what you’re in for and have nothing so far to grade.
“Want to have lunch?” he asked finally.
“I’m about to go running today, but I could do it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow it is,” he said. Then, “Are you one of those people who likes to run alone? Because I’d love to run with you too. Not today of course”—he looked down at his khakis and tie—“but another day.”
“What about your ankle?”
“It was only a sprain. It’s healed. Maybe we can run slowly.”
“Sounds great,” I said. I don’t in fact always like running with other people. But in the glow of day one, I could deny him—or anyone—nothing.
“I ran into Ethan,” I reported when I got home. “We’re having lunch tomorrow if you want to join us. And we’re going running Wednesday.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you he’s teaching right upstairs from you,” Katie apologized.
“How was day one?” said Jill.
“Good. They seem nice. Smiley. Participated some.”
“How did they like The Lorax?” Jill asked but seemed distracted by Katie who herself seemed pretty distracted.
“They liked it. They got it. They had interesting ideas about . . .” I trailed off. “What’s with you two?” Jill couldn’t keep her eyes off Katie. Katie looked like she might explode.
“I met a boy,” she shrieked.
I looked at Jill who suppressed, not quite, a smirk then swallowed it. “She thinks this one is different.” She shrugged at me, bemused, eyebrows raised.
“His name is Peter. He just moved here from Utah for college. He’s only twenty-one, but it’s okay. He wants to major in zoology. He’s very cute and nice. He paints. He’s tall. He thinks I’m funny. He’s in charge of food for the youth picnic we’re hosting on Thursday, and since I’m in charge of games, we have to work together—”
“Why?” Jill interrupted.
“What do you mean?”
“Food and games have nothing to do with each other.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Katie. “These are five-year-olds. What do you think happens if you feed them ice cream and then do a sack race? What if he fed them macaroni salad and then I had them playing Marco Polo in the pool?”
“The horror,” agreed Jill.
“So when are you going out?” I asked.
“Oh, he hasn’t asked me out yet. But he will. I can tell. We’re meeting tomorrow morning to discuss the picnic.” And she danced upstairs to try on everything she owned followed by everything I owned and everything Jill owned.
On Tuesday, we tried to define the term “poem.” It was hard. My students knew it needn’t rhyme. They knew it didn’t need to sound pretty. But they didn’t know what it did need to do. At first they asserted that they knew one when they saw it, but I gave them some Robert Hass, and then they had no idea. It looks like prose. It sounds like prose. I assured them it was considered poetry and sent them home to write a response paper supporting that position or explaining why it was crap, whichever they liked.
Ethan and I carried lunch out of the sandwich place and sat under a tree on the quad and ate it. I told him about class, gave him a copy of Hass’s “A Story About the Body.”
“It’s prose. It’s totally prose,” he said, laughing. “That’s the wrong answer, isn’t it?”
“Officially? There is no wrong answer.”
“Actually?”
“Actually, it’s a poem. Stark, visual, lyrical, opaque. Robert Hass is a poet. What did you do?”
“We started religion in Renaissance Europe. At this stage, it’s mostly lecture, but it’s really exciting. Telling them what happened and why and what it led to, this long chain of interconnected events . . . What?” I was smirking.
“It’s make-believe,” I said. “Storytelling. Fun with narrative.”
“Oh, you’re one of those.” He rolled his eyes. “Why don’t English majors believe in history?”
“Because it’s all so much more complicated and suspect and full of half-truths and warped and incomplete than you’re telling them . . .”