Poem of the week: On First Knowing You’re a Teacher by Peter Kahn

On First Knowing You’re a Teacher

Robert’s not coming in, my boss tells me.
I’m sitting sweating in a windowless office,
a stack of résumés eye-balling me, stinking
up the desk – I’m first screener and sleepy
in this stuffy box. Would you be able to lead
a workshop on résumé writing? I’m 22
and my own résumé got me the most boring
gig at Jobs for Youth-Chicago. Some of the “youth”
I’d be teaching are nearly my age, but there are
windows, and people, in that classroom
so I nearly yell, yes! 30 students look at me
and 45 minutes later look to me and I’m hooked.
And I’m floating and anchored at the same time.
For the first time. And I’m whole and broken
open. And I’m spinning and stunned still.

There have been many teacher-poets, but not many who have written about teaching with a sense of the poetry-like qualities of the experience. The conventional view is that writing is the vocation, teaching the paid chore that supports the real work. As Dorothea Laskey put it: “Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else … / Like making love or writing a poem / Or drinking wine on a tropical island.” Occasionally, teaching can be a unique source of struggle and agony, as it seems to have become for Gerard Manley Hopkins, described by Simon Edge as “a terrible teacher with no ability to control his unruly students”.

Peter Kahn started out as a social worker, and began teaching in 1994. Besides running innovative university courses and community poetry activities on both sides of the Atlantic, he directs a thriving poetry class at Oak Park and River Forest high school, Chicago. Raymond Antrobus has described it as “one of the most powerful creative youth communities I have seen anywhere in the world”.

So it seems more than likely that the experience recounted in On First Knowing You’re a Teacher has personal significance for Peter Kahn. It’s from his recently launched first collection, Little Kings, in which there’s a focus on the autobiographical, a wish to revisit, observe and honour the family members, friends and colleagues who were the young writer’s own informal educators. To some extent, On First Knowing You’re a Teacher is a coming-of-age poem. It marks a moment of transition, a joyful, life-changing self-discovery.

Thanks to the poem I learnt the difference between a CV and a résumé. In the latter, the applicant needs to specify the aptness of their qualification to the post they’re seeking: perhaps there’s more of an art in it than the listing of qualifications required by the CV, but it’s a dubious art, self-centred and self-advertising. Maybe résumé-reading it has a little in common with poetry reading, also requiring a subtle blend of conscious judgment and rash intuition. But there would be thick clouds of cliches to work through, in a genre that by its nature must exclude originality of approach.

The language of Kahn’s speaker is initially raw, colloquial, overheated, depicting the unread résumés as though they were dangerous aliens or animals, “eyeballing me, stinking / up the desks”. His mental suffocation is underlined by the physical environment, a windowless office which, as an image, connects more generally to the box-ticking required from both the job applicant and the “first screener” measuring them against the recruitment criteria. Irony registers in the observation that it was the speaker’s own résumé that landed him the hated job. It’s a nice indication of the fallibility of recruitment protocols set up to match worker to position.

The opportunity to be a stand-in tutor is presented at first as physical and psychological release. It’s the windows and the people that galvanise the speaker’s enthusiasm. Kahn’s diction intensifies but continues to emphasise the physical. “Hooked” is ordinarily colloquial: “floating” and “anchored” extend the poem into sea-flavoured metaphor. To be anchored while floating is similar to the experience of creative artists: freedom and randomness are controlled by the medium.

The poem records an exchange of transformation. The students change in relation to the speaker, and he changes in relation to them. His dramatic declaration links that remembered experience to the present moment of writing: “And I’m whole and broken / open. And I’m spinning and stunned still.” Linked three times by “And”, the short sentences emphasise the excitement and justify the large claim, that the 30 students who first merely look at their tutor now look to him. He has earned their trust. And his own certainties are shaken, his responses widened beyond anything expected. Teaching is not about “thinking inside the box” but taking risks, being “broken / open” and breaking out. It can be separated from pleasure in the subject being taught: pedagogical pleasure belongs to complex psychological processes that include learning with and from the students.