An Optimistic Beginning

You Shall Above All Things
you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you're young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

 --E.E. Cummings

For the first assignment of Duke's MAT graduate program that I begin tomorrow, we have to choose a poem from the book "Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach" that we will later read at orientation Monday night to introduce ourselves and how it represents out commitment to teaching. While this is a delightful assignment, it's not an easy one. I grappled with this decision and the various poems that made a strong impression on me, trying to decide which one is most appropriate to begin my teaching career. I finally went with my old friend E.E. Cummings, and here's why.

In this poem, like in many of his poems, E.E. Cummings simultaneously conveys an exactness of feeling(s) that is communicated amongst and through a series of difficult-to-decipher images. I confess that after having spent several hours with the poem, I am still unsure how to read "negation's dead undoom," and surely have not solved the mystery of "teach[ing] ten thousand stars how not to dance." However, should the meaning of this poem at once unfold itself to me, I would be denied the mystery which Cummings apparently so esteems. Life is not a series of right and wrong answers; truth can most beautifully be unique to the individual. What I take from this poem is a profound sentiment of optimism and self-affirmation. I shall be young and glad, and in doing so I will make my own way which will be right insomuch as I make it myself. I believe Cummings suggests that while along the path one surely will encounter mysteries, they are things to cherish, things that make you awestruck and alive, that make "[your] flesh put space on." He perhaps proposes in the next stanza that in this process lies knowledge, and the greatest doom along the path to enlightenment is negativity. I must be bold in all things, face change courageously, welcome perplexing mysteries and experiences. I must make my own way, for this is the only way.

I'm entering the teaching profession because I love learning, people, and especially people with passion. I love watching the influence a book or poem can have on a human being, as well as a simple conversation. I love being perplexed by life's mysteries and seeking their meaning for myself. E.E. Cummings reminds me that my commitment to teaching is equally one to life-long learning as well as one of influencing and being influenced by people. I hope to welcome life's mysteries from the start of my career through the end of it, even if I don't figure them all out by the end.

 Cheers to the start of a new and exhilarating adventure,
 -S.