The Big Things & The Little Things

I had an English literature professor circa 2003 who wrecked poetry for me. He turned poems inside out until they were mostly unrecognizable and almost always not suitable for work, even ones about red wheelbarrows and chickens.

Another sent me running from Shakespeare with dry, three hour lectures which I’m sure would horrify the playwright himself. (These were also often not suitable for work, although I blame William for this and not my professor.)

In a pre-Smartphone era, I made it through these lectures sipping a large Tim Horton’s Earl Grey tea with milk and counting down the minutes until class was over. I filed these hours into a neglected corner of my brain and breathed a sigh of relief once the credits appeared on my transcript.

When I started teaching high school English, years later, a funny thing happened: I learned to love these things again. 

I stacked newspapers on a table at the front of my classroom alongside glue sticks and scissors for found poems. I handed out colourful cue cards and decorated my tiny portable with six word memoirs. 

Shakespeare’s plays took on new meaning when I was the one at the front of the room too. I assigned students who wanted to perform characters for each day’s reading and we read the play aloud together. I paraphrased and summarized when they couldn’t make sense of the words dancing on the page. They caught onto the universal truths about humanity hidden in each of the acts and even giggled occasionally. 

These things come to life when you let them.

But, I suspect, as students snuck text messages and dreamed of the bell that would bring them to lunch, their time in my class checked off a box labelled “unimportant” somewhere in their adolescent brains and they mostly just wanted to make it to summer.

Now, a decade between me and my last teaching job, I find myself pulling dusty anthologies from my university days out of the basement and adding Shakespeare plays to the piles of books beside my couch I’m waiting to read.

These days, my students also can’t wait to make it to lunch but instead of sending them to the cafeteria, I make their lunch and do their laundry myself. In our little homeschool, I’m almost as likely to hand out reminders to end sentences with periods and capitalize proper nouns as I was when teaching tenth grade, but Minecraft writing prompts, phonics instruction, math manipulatives, and nature study have taken Shakespeare’s place. 

As I remember my days as both a student and a teacher, I wonder what my daughters are filing away as “unimportant” as they prioritize mud pies over reading and count down their school days before summer break (often beginning the evening of the first day of school).

I can usually count on science making the short list of things they find captivating, though. We studied botany this year and I watched as the world of flora came to life for us. We hunted for sporacytes and liverwort, learned to identify herbaceous stems and dissected beans and peas during dinner to count their cotyledons.

Getting outside and experiencing nature has been both educational and life giving this year. It seemed fitting, then, for a hike to be the first activity on our summer schedule. 

Carrying their own water bottles this time, everyone was happy to be in the forest again. After skipping along for a kilometre or so, the four year old was asking to be carried and it was as good a time as any for a snack beak. We ate under a canopy of green with a lingering smell of everything but the city and a friendly chorus of birds as our only companions. It was lovely (and it didn’t last long).

As I readied us to leave, scanning the forest floor for stray water bottles and snack wrappers, I glanced down at the log that had just served as a bench. There it was: a tiny, vulnerable pine tree seedling growing out of the trunk of a fallen conifer. It’s needles were thin and delicate, but it was alive, growing out of a cleft in the fallen trunk of an ancestor. I took a quick photo and brought it to everyone’s attention.

Despite their usual love for all things science, no one was particularly interested. It was significant for me—a symbol of my reflections on life and priorities and growing children—but not for them. They humoured me with an, “Oh that’s cool, Mommy,” before skipping down the pine needle covered path.

I never really know when something will catch their attention and when something will be tedious and uninteresting. Did my students feel the same way about the things I thought I was bringing to life for them? Did my professors think they were bringing things to life for me?

I follow my daughters down the path that will bring us to the car, watching them point out things we’ve been learning about in science this year, listening to them discussing the Minecraft stories they’ve been writing that will (fingers crossed) have them willing to write even in the summer. The big things.

I pick up my four year old, hand out a few warnings about not running too far ahead, swat away a few mosquitos, and consider this seedling.

So much depends

upon

the little things

becoming

the big things

and then

the little things

once again*

*inspired by William Carlos Williams's “The Red Wheelbarrow”

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This post is part of a blog hope with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in this series "Minutiae."