Backpacks and cyclists

I receive a weekly email from a blog about effective classroom management. A few weeks ago the post was entitled:

How A First-Day-Of-School Lesson Can Improve Classroom Management For The Rest Of The Year

The idea was to model an entrance routine for your students exactly the way you want them to do it, every day of the year. The more highly detailed the routine the better, to allow the students to master something done specifically to standards and practiced to mastery. 

Reading the blog prompted the question - how do I want the students to enter the class? 

"I'd love to have backpacks against the wall, rather than under the desks." I wasn't sure I could introduce this expectation, since it is not the norm at the school. I doubted my twelfth graders' willingness to learn new tricks. 

Today was the first day of school, and I modeled entering the classroom and putting my bag against the wall before gathering my English materials and heading to my assigned seat. There was some eye-rolling, and some students who decided to keep their bags with them the first time we practiced, but by the time we started class all bags were against the wall, and I saw no snacks, no phones, and no unrelated textbooks all class. Tomorrow we'll practice again.

Tomorrow during my HL class I'll introduce this poem by Louis MacNeice:

The Cyclist

Freewheeling down the escarpment past the unpassing horse

Blazoned in chalk the wind he causes in passing

Cools the sweat of his neck, making him one with the sky,

In the heat of the handlebars he grasps the summer

Being a boy and to-day a parenthesis

Between the horizon’s brackets; the main sentence

Is to be picked up later but these five minutes

Are all to-day and summer. The dragonfly

Rises without take-off, horizontal,

Underlining itself in a sliver of peacock light.

And glaring, glaring white

The horse on the down moves within his brackets,

The grass boils with grasshoppers, a pebble

Scutters from under the wheel and all this country

Is spattered white with boys riding their heat-wave,

Feet on a narrow plank and hair thrown back

And a surf of dust beneath them. Summer, summer —

They chase it with butterfly nets or strike it into the deep

In a little red ball or gulp it lathered with cream

Or drink it through closed eyelids; until the bell

Left-right-left gives his forgotten sentence

And reaching the valley the boy must pedal again

Left-right-left but meanwhile

For ten seconds more can move as the horse in the chalk

Moves unbeginningly calmly

Calmly regardless of tenses and final clauses

Calmly unendingly moves.

We are working on commentary writing. I instruct students to discern a) what the poem is about, b) what the feeling of the poem is, c) what stylistic elements are important, and d) what theme I will explore in my commentary.

Here goes:

a) The poem portrays a boy on a bike on a hot summer day as he rides with frenetic energy through the heat and dust of the countryside.

b) the poem conveys the intensity of this boy's independent adventure, where he is at once alone and unsupervised and keenly aware of everything in his environment. Unfettered by parental supervision or school, he "grasps" summer with a determination to test and display his strength. The feeling is that of being momentarily freed from the restraints of boyhood, symbolized in the sentences the boy constructs while seated at school. As a witness to his momentary escape the reader feels his desperation to exert his freedom while he can by stimulating his senses to the fullest extent. 

c) This poem gains its strength from its high impact diction and surprising, sometimes disturbing imagery, which combine to create a sense that this summer bike excursion pulses with the young boy's violent energy which soon enough will be tamed by the classroom, and beyond that, real life. 

d) The poet successfully contrasts the explosive energy of a young boy's bike ride on a summer day and the calm regularity which characterizes life in the "grown-up" realm.

Here's my attempt at a paper 1 written on this poem.

"The Cyclist" paints a high-intensity portrait of a boy's summer bike ride. There is a feeling of escape from parental and societal constrictions. This escape energy fuels a powerful, even violent outburst of activity during which the boy can explore what magnificent actions he is capable of. The poet explores the contrast between this moment of undeniably dynamic life, and the calm normalcy which characterizes the boy's life during the rest of the year, causing the reader to consider how conventional life fails to honor true potential.

In the first stanza, the poet establishes both the boy's freedom from outside authority and the intensity of his energy level. He is "freewheeling," away from parents or babysitters, and the wind created by his own swift movement "cools the sweat of his neck." He is "one with the sky," implying that he is as limitless as the celestial dome, almost as if he is, in this moment, god of his own universe. The heat of the sun is matched by the alliterative "heat of the handlebars", generated in friction against his hands, where he "grasps" the summer. The word"grasp" shows his total control and dominance of his environment in this moment, since grasping is a decisive and powerful action. There is a sense, however, that this freedom is an unusual break from the routine. Today the boy's freedom extends to the ends of the earth: he is contained only by the "horizon's brackets". That large domain is often limited by the barriers of home, school and responsibility. This moment of freedom is contained within "parenthesis" which distinguish it from normal life, described in the "sentence" which "waits to be picked up later", presumably when school begins. In this moment of energetic release, the boy's intensity is mirrored in the dragonfly who wastes no time on a fancy take off, but executes a determined and focused "horizontal" "take-off", like the boy does when smoothly exiting the more controlled realms of his life, about to take flight himself.

Intensity builds in the second stanza, as the boy exerts his powerful influence on his environment. Repetition of "glaring" in the first line again implies the high energy contained in this moment. The heat glares, the boy glares, even the "unpassing" horse is prompted to "move within his brackets", as if responding to the boy's glare. The disturbing image of grass boiling with grasshoppers and the sharp diction of "scutters" to describe rocks which shoot from under his tires also contribute to the zinging tension which reflects the boy's desperate release of energy which is usually held in by the brackets of organized life. His self-mastery and likeness to a deity is strengthened by the image of him as one of a group of boys "riding their heat-wave", a fantastical image which makes him larger than life and rather mystical. Here the poet implies that boys all over the country use these hot days to exercise their freedom usually curtailed by normal life; the boy we see is representative of many others like him. His "thrown-back" hair also portrays him as at ease, in control, and most important, far from the influences which usually demand combed tidiness. 

The diction reaches a fever pitch in the third stanza, evoking the summer season and the boys' freedom, before the energy declines steeply as the end of this ride, and the eventual return of school and responsibility, looms near. The boys of summer ride the "surf of dust" which is emphasized as "beneath" them, the word choice reminding us of their emotional and energetic high in this moment. A series of images convey the boys' frenetic attempts to fully experience this wondrous summer: they "chase" it (futilely) with a butterfly net, "strike it into the deep" while playing ball, even try to "gulp" it. The verbs convey the violence and desperation underlying their actions, while at the same time emphasizing their powerlessness to make the summer last. Their desperation seems rooted in their knowledge that this bliss will end, and they savor each sip "with eyes closed" as if willing the (school) "bell" not to sound. The briefly-"forgotten sentence" is reintroduced, and the boy "must pedal again." Suddenly the image is of a laborer, even a slave, rather than a god in the ecstasy of power. The left-right-left motion of his pedaling mimics the bell, just as at school his individualism is forced to mimic someone else's plan. As the final "ten seconds" of summer tick down, the boy's actions slow to an "unbeginningly calmly" pace which seems to imply a pace at which nothing significant can be initiated. That calm, that characterizes student, and later adult, life, moves with a regularity "regardless" of emotions or powerful stimuli, like the freedom of a summer day. The boy's summer adventure will die in a return to calmness which continues regardless of "final clauses," seeming to imply without end.

MacNeice's poem effectively conveys the energy, violent outburst, and self-realization, contained in a boy's summer bike excursion. The reader gets a clear sense, through harsh, high-impact diction and provocative imagery of the contrast between a boy's free existence during the summer and his contained, "punctuated" life under the control of parents and teachers. The contrast is drawn between the boy's true, glorious nature, expressed on the bike, and the dishearteningly calm activity which characterizes the rest of his life to which he must inevitably return. MacNeice uses this snapshot of summer to lament the tragedy that young boys must submit themselves to systems that demand compliance and self-control, rather than the self-actualization available in moments of uninhibited energy, like the boy finds in biking.